The Raw Memory of War in Yad Vashem Studies, Volume 37:1

The Raw Memory of War: Early Postwar Testimonies of Children in Dom Dziecka in Otwock

The article discusses samples of individual histories of Jewish child survivors who after the war inhabited the Jewish Children’s Home in Otwock, near Warsaw. The discussion is based on the children’s early postwar testimonies, as well as on later oral histories and interviews. The main argument is that the analysis of the children’s early postwar testimonies and other so-called subjective data could be considered a micro study of many historical problems. This data constitute invaluable documentation that allows historians to gain a deeper understanding of the key characteristics of the process of survival among Jewish children and to identify various groups of child survivors. This documentation also allows historians to fully reconstruct the rich and varied mosaic of relations between Jewish children and the members of the Christian Polish environment during and immediately after the war. Some of this documentation also sheds light on the daily life of the children in the Children’s Home in the early postwar period.