Family Hierarchies, Family Separation: Refugee Youth, European Families, and the Holocaust

• In Event: Transnational Refugee Experiences and Networks

Abstract

This paper will document the experience of family separation, and the meaning of the family unit to Nazi era Jews. In so doing, it harnesses family correspondences between Nazi era refugee youth housed in the United States and their kin still trapped in continental Europe. These sources reveal how different family members either attempted to assert or subvert the family’s stability and hierarchy. For some, grasping onto a sense of normality and stability—in the context of a highly uncertain time—meant attempting to exert traditional familial power relations. Parents articulated anxiety about the increasing linguistic and geographical gap between them and their children and attempted to grasp as much control and knowledge as possible over their children’s lives. Youth for their part, routinely attempted to take control of family matters, with parents turning to them for assistance and guidance in navigating the vexing matter of security visas. For others, the inversion of the family hierarchy felt empowering or, conversely, highly destabilizing.

Either way, the reconfigured roles experienced by far flung family members and the expression of emotions speaks to not just an alteration of responsibilities—as previous scholarship has amply documented— but how Nazi era Jews negotiated power and control within the family. This presentation thereby augments the scholarship on family and the Holocaust which has largely focused on survival strategies, biographical studies of fate of individual families, and the role of gender and women. In sum, it continues the turn of Holocaust Studies towards the “familial lens” by focusing on the family unit as a web of contested power relations and reveals the emotional coping strategies developed by Jews during the twin experience of persecution and familial separation.

Author

• Daniella Doron, Colgate University