Early Postwar Accounts on Jewish Orphans from Transnistria

In: Holocaust and genocide studies, Band 36, Heft 3, S. 353-371

Abstract

ABSTRACT
This article focuses on the emotional and social challenges that Romanian Holocaust survivors, particularly children who became orphans, faced in the early postwar period. The author shows how the accounts of Jewish orphans from Transnistria did not initially come from experts, but from published booklets of Jewish survivors and journalists, and Jewish and non-Jewish Romanian press accounts, all of which had divergent agendas. Soon after the War, assessments by psychologists and physicians also appeared. The most important Jewish-Romanian figure to connect these diverse accounts to the psychological state of Romanian-Jewish orphans at the end of the Second World War was Dr. Theodor Loewenstein. In tracking and analyzing these narratives, the author seeks to understand the different representations of Jewish orphans from Transnistria in early postwar Romania.