A Kindred Response to a New Annotated Bibliography about CODAs

On the Edge of Deaf Culture: Hearing Children/Deaf Parents, by Thomas Bull (Alexandria, Va.: DFR Press, 345 pp., paper, $30.00)

In 1973 I asked a fellow graduate student in the sociolinguistics program at Georgetown University where she was from. Like me and most students in the program, she was in her mid-thirties, and like me, she spoke English fluently, without an accent, yet with a difficult-to-identify foreign intonation. Her response was somewhat vague and disconcerting: “France . . . Switzerland. Where are you from?” For me, the answer to this question depends on the context and who is asking it. By the age of thirteen, I had lived in three different countries and three more by the time of this encounter. Usually I would answer simply “Seattle,” but I hesitated while figuring out how much I was willing to reveal. Before I could decide, her next statement caught me off guard: “You don’t have to say anything . . . I understand.” Although no information had been exchanged, not even our names, we knew we had just shared a secret about our childhood.

Many years later, I helped organize a group in the Washington/ Baltimore area that has been meeting monthly for the past fifteen years. Spontaneously, other groups such as ours sprang up in other cities in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, and Israel. We called ourselves Child Survivors of the Holocaust. Within a year we held our first national conference, which later became annual and international. Though we came from almost every Nazi-occupied country and our stories are very different from each other—some lived in hiding, some passed for Christians, some were shipped in children’s transports to England in 1939 never to see their parents again, others lived on their own in forests, and still others survived ghettoes and concentration camps—among ourselves we don’t have to explain ourselves.

Our meetings and conferences have had a profound effect on our lives. We became aware that our childhood experiences—both during the war and afterward as immigrants in new countries—contributed to making us who we are and explained in part the choices and decisions we have made. By sharing our personal experiences and painful memories (most of us for the first time in our lives), we realized that we were not unique. Others like us could understand us and the deep feelings that we had hidden for a lifetime. We discussed issues such as identity (Why do we feel like outsiders everywhere? Why do we feel so alone, even when we are married and have families?), anger (We were robbed of our childhood. The usual parent-child relationship was permanently damaged by the Holocaust), resentment (Our parents didn’t protect us against the outside world . . . or they gave us away to strangers), role reversals (Those of us lucky enough to have one or both parents alive after the war found that they used us to face the outside world because as children we acquired the languages and the cultures of the countries in which we lived), and embarrassment (Because of our parents’ foreign ways and limited linguistic ability—they may have known several languages, but that did not count since they were not fluent in the languages of the countries where we lived—we rarely invited our friends to our homes).

Participation in this group, for some more than others, has been a liberating experience, enabling us to acknowledge buried memories (“You were too young to remember. Just get on with your life!”). The process of discovering our identities seems endless. One positive aspect is that we feel like brothers and sisters with all the sibling rivalries and conflicts that entails. Recently, upon reading the introduction to Thomas Bull’s exciting new annotated bibliography of materials about hearing children of deaf adults (On the Edge of Deaf Culture: Hearing Children/Deaf Parents), I...