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Clifford shows how they understood very well that some adults might write them off if they were honest about what the experience of an early childhood spent this way had meant to them. The survivors knew their emotions made people uncomfortable. All of this is deeply uncomfortable, threatening our picture of children who will always, always prefer their birth parents over others. One girl sent letter after letter to her birth family, begging them to relinquish their claim on her, so that she could stay with her foster family in Canada. Clifford finds stunning stories about siblings who actively conspired with one another to hide evidence that their parents were still alive from placement agencies, since children who had living parents could not be adopted. Some of these kids were so alienated from their parents that the bond could not be repaired. “My war began in 1945, not in 1940,” one such survivor said. But after liberation, as well-meaning adults did everything they could to bring the kids back together with their surviving family members, or to find them places in Jewish homes, many of the separated survivors were profoundly destabilized. “Children are adept at treating the exceptional as normal, and because they had no other life to compare it with, the years of persecution did not necessarily feel dangerous, fraught, or chaotic to young survivors,” Clifford writes. In the group of survivors in Clifford’s history, there are kids who were sent to live with host families, who hid them until the war was over kids incarcerated in different labor camps from their parents kids who wandered the forests alone, tended only by older siblings.Īsking the historical record, and the grown-up survivors she interviewed, how this period of separation had affected the children’s lives in the long term, Clifford found things that she described as “not only unexpected, but shocking.” One such finding was the fact that for many of the kids, the war years were fine it was liberation that was traumatic. But it’s also fundamentally concerned with the human consequences of children’s separations from parents. Survivors is, of course, about a group of children whose lives were marked by the Nazi regime, not about children fleeing violence in Central America, who were then separated from their families by Border Patrol agents.