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6. “They Were Out of Their Minds”: When One Parent Returned
- University of California Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
The focus of this chapter will be on hidden children who lost one parent during the war and who were reunited with their remaining parent afterward. Although the families of children with one surviving parent fall into the same category as the families described in the previous chapter—that is, they are defined as a nuclear family—there are sufficient differences between the two groups to merit separate chapters. The hidden children featured in this chapter had to confront not only the death of a parent, but also, for many, the addition of a new stepparent and sometimes a blended family, with stepsiblings and/or half-siblings. All this added yet another layer of complexity to an already problematic family context. These specific differences constitute my focus in this chapter. Gender also plays an important role in the analysis of this group, but for different reasons than it did in the previous chapter’s examination of those with two parents. Gender ideologies regarding parenting deter6 “They Were Out of Their Minds” WHEN ONE PARENT RETURNED 203 mined whether or not a hidden Jewish child could and would go home with his or her parent. Widowed fathers on their own were not considered “proper parents” and would not usually take their child unless and until they remarried. Even if they wanted to take their child, others let them know that doing so would be inappropriate. If they did not remarry , their children usually did not live with them, and the family unit basically dissolved. In other words, younger children with a surviving father were seen and treated as orphans. In contrast, there was never any question about the ability of mothers to care for their children on their own. And, as the narratives unfold, it will become obvious that assumptions about parenting abilities based solely on gender can be very wrong. In my sample, seventeen of the seventy former hidden children interviewed had one living parent after the war. In this group ten mothers and five fathers survived the war, in addition to one non-Jewish mother and one non-Jewish father, both of whom had been married to Jewish spouses. It is no coincidence that more mothers survived than fathers. Nazi policies at first aimed at deporting able-bodied Jewish men, although eventually every Jew, regardless of gender or age, was sought. Four of the five Jewish fathers who survived were in hiding. The fifth father was a German Jew and was picked up in Germany right after Kristallnacht in 1939 and sent to Buchenwald. He was released and fled to England. One hidden child’s father had committed suicide in 1936, before the war. Of the seventeen surviving parents in this group, four women and three men remarried. Thus, seven children, about 40 percent in this category, had to cope with and adjust to living with a stepparent. So it seems natural to ask, Did the loss of one parent create a stronger bond between the remaining parent and his or her child compared with the parent-child bonds discussed in the previous chapter? Generally, the pattern discerned in the last chapter in which postwar relationships with mothers in particular were poor, tends to be replicated in this group. Most of those with surviving mothers did not have good relationships with them after the war. Although some hidden children featured in the last chapter had better relationships with their fathers, none of those 204 w h e n o n e pa r e n t r e t u r n e d [18.207.161.212] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:44 GMT) with surviving fathers in this group established good relationships with them after the war. And this being the case, did the addition of a new stepparent then provide a viable adult with whom the former hidden children might more successfully bond? Unfortunately, relationships between stepparents and stepchildren did not tend to fare very well. Hidden children’s reunions with a single parent did not differ considerably from those discussed in the previous chapter, in that the younger the children, the less they recognized their parent after the war. What differed was that on top of reuniting with a parent they may or may not have recognized, these children also had to contend with the death of their other parent. In some cases, the news of that parent’s death came early, and in others, the remaining family waited hopefully as Jewish war survivors...