
Survivors: Children's Lives After the Holocaust
Rebecca Clifford
Survivors: Children's Lives After the Holocaust was shortlisted for the 2021 Wolfson History Prize, was a finalist for the 2021 Cundill History Prize, and was named a best history book of 2020 by the Daily Telegraph. How can we make sense of our lives when we do not know where we come from? This was a pressing question for the youngest survivors of the Holocaust, whose prewar memories were vague or nonexistent. In this beautifully written account, Rebecca Clifford follows the lives of one hundred Jewish children out of the ruins of conflict through their adulthood and into old age. Drawing on archives and interviews, Clifford charts the experiences of these child survivors and those who cared for them—as well as those who studied them, such as Anna Freud. Survivors explores the aftermath of the Holocaust in the long term, and reveals how these children—often branded "the lucky ones"—had to struggle to be able to call themselves "survivors" at all. Challenging our assumptions about trauma, Clifford's powerful and surprising narrative helps us understand what it was like living after, and living with, childhoods marked by rupture and loss.
Buy this book at Amazon- Publisher
- Yale.ORIM
- Year
- 2020
- ISBN-13
- 9780300255850
- Genre
- History
- Topics
- Holocaust survivorsChildhood traumaJewish history
Awards
- Cundill History PrizeShortlisted(2021)
- Wolfson History PrizeShortlisted(2021)
If you liked Survivors: Children's Lives After the Holocaust, you could also like these

Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice
Mary Fulbrook
1 win · 11 score
A Hidden Childhood: A Jewish Girl's Sanctuary in a French Convent, 1942–1945
Frida Scheps Weinstein
0 wins · 4 score

Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945–1955
Harald Jähner
0 wins · 7 score

Survivors: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the Atlantic Slave Trade
Hannah Durkin
1 win · 8 score

Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning
Timothy Snyder
0 wins · 2 score

Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima
Robert Jay Lifton
1 win · 12 score

Asperger's Children
Edith Sheffer
0 wins · 2 score

The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945
Saul Friedländer
1 win · 13 score

Children of Crisis: A Study of Courage and Fear
Robert Coles
1 win · 5 score

All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days: The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of the German Resistance to Hitler
Rebecca Donner
1 win · 10 score

Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning
Peter Beinart
0 wins · 3 score

Resistance: The Underground War in Europe 1939-1945
Halik Kochanski
1 win · 8 score

The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care
Nina Bernstein
0 wins · 8 score

Children of Crisis, Volumes II and III
Robert Coles
1 win · 12 score

A Past in Hiding: Memory and Survival in Nazi Germany
Mark Roseman
1 win · 5 score
Similar Topics

European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 1550–1750
Jonathan Israel
1 win · 8 score
Jewish history
A History of the Jews, Revised Edition
Abram L. Sachar
1 win · 5 score
Jewish history
Nazis in Skokie: Freedom, Community and the First Amendment
Donald Alexander Downs
1 win · 5 score
Holocaust survivors
Belonging: The Story of the Jews, 1492–1900
Simon Schama
0 wins · 4 score
Jewish history