Survivors: Children’s Lives after the Holocaust

"Its title gives the book away. It’s an investigation, looking at a set of particular children who went through the Holocaust experience in concentration camps , and somehow came out the other side. It seems a very straightforward and simple idea to do that. Frankly, when I approached the book, I thought, ‘Oh, no, here’s another Holocaust book , another concentration camp book .’ But I was completely won over because of the original angle, which is listening to these children, whose very early experiences were formed in a bewilderingly irrational and hostile world, and yet, who lived for decades afterwards, became adults, and could now reflect on their experience. It’s an extraordinarily clever thing to do to get these voices. “What was delightful about this list, as with all our recent lists, is the sheer variety of good history around” It raises all the problems of oral history, and actually seizes on them and says, ‘This is what these people remember. Let’s think about how they’ve adapted these stories in order to avoid insanity or breakdown or sheer bitterness. But listen to the resourcefulness that these children had and the memory they present of that.’ That’s what captivated me and, I think, my fellow judges about this book. There are, of course, diversities, and they are as diverse as the ways in which human beings manage to cope with atrocity. But a common theme does emerge. There is a very longstanding myth that people didn’t talk about the Holocaust after the Second World War for a very long time. And the memories of these children show that they did. Reflection has been different over the accumulating decades, but it’s been constant."