Family Separation During the Holocaust

Family Separation During the Holocaust

This article relates to The Yellow Bird Sings

In Jennifer Rosner's The Yellow Bird Sings, which takes place in Poland during WWII, Róza and her daughter Shira are forced to hide from the Nazis. After already losing other family members, Róza must decide whether or not to send Shira into hiding on her own in order to protect her. While members of Jewish families were often separated forcibly from one another after being arrested by German forces during this time, many parents also felt compelled to separate themselves from their children in order to better the children's chances of survival.

In some cases, separations would occur on the spur of the moment when a family was in imminent danger of being caught in a raid or roundup. Children whose parents were taken into custody were sometimes able to hide or escape and seek help from other adults. According to Yad Vashem, Shlomo F. Shenkar, at the age of six, was encouraged to run away by his mother when the rest of his family was arrested in their Paris apartment. He was taken in by Joseph Migneret, a school headmaster, and Shlomo subsequently survived while the rest of his family was murdered. In other situations, children were able to go into hiding with at least one parent or adult relative even if different family members were captured.

In some cases, parents would anticipate being captured and attempt to find a safe place for their children while they were still able to do so. Underground resistance groups and organizations worked to transfer Jewish children to secure areas, sometimes hiding them in orphanages or in Christian homes with forged documents. Although some children were protected, they clearly still suffered in myriad ways—for example, from the trauma of being taken away from their parents (and often siblings), and having to adjust to a secret life with new guardians.

Relationships between children in hiding and their rescuers came with their own complications. Some adults who rescued children considered themselves to be the children's adoptive parents, and were reluctant to part ways with them later on. Even when this wasn't the case, children would often form bonds with their rescuers and then suffered a second trauma of separation if they were later reunited with their family.

In 2018, family separation during the Holocaust received a resurgence of attention in the American media due to parallels drawn to the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" immigration policy, which forcibly separated thousands of parents from their children. During this time, some Holocaust survivors felt compelled to speak out about the significant trauma of having been separated from their parents as children, even if they didn't think their experience bore much other similarity to that of migrant children today. Siblings Leon Malmed and Rachel Epstein, for example, who were left with their Christian neighbors in France while their parents were forced out of their home by police, felt that it was important to share their story even though Epstein, a Trump supporter, did not wish to draw a direct comparison between the two situations. Other survivors, such as Ruth Pagirsky, were more comfortable with such a comparison. Pagirsky, who was separated from her father and brother after the Nazis invaded Poland and went into hiding with her mother, said, "There is too much going on that is reminiscent to me of how it all started in Europe."

In a 2018 article for The Hechinger Report, Jennifer Rich shared the results of her research into the long-term effects of family separation on Holocaust survivors. She found that separation from their parents hadn't only been traumatic for the surviving children themselves, but also continued to cause second-hand trauma in their own children and grandchildren decades later. Rich pointed out that regardless of any political dissimilarities between the Holocaust and the Trump administration's policy, children separated from their parents experience trauma, and the effects are lasting. Subjects she interviewed recounted being affected by the experiences of parents or grandparents who were survivors, sometimes inheriting mental health issues their family members suffered, including difficulty sleeping and trusting others. However, Rich found that descendants of survivors who were able to stay with at least one parent throughout the war had a much better chance of having inherited positive traits and "messages," such as resilience and a tendency towards kindness and optimism in discouraging situations.

A group of orphaned Holocaust survivors at a reception camp in Atlit in 1944, from Government Press Office (Israel) (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Filed under People, Eras & Events

This "beyond the book article" relates to The Yellow Bird Sings. It originally ran in March 2020 and has been updated for the March 2021 paperback edition. Go to magazine.

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