Traumatic echoes of memories in child survivors' narratives of the Holocaust: the Polish experiences of Michał Głowiński and Henryk Grynberg

Drawing upon the important contribution brought by literary testimonies to humanitarian work delineated by Susan Rubin Suleiman (2002) and Leigh Gilmore (2011), this paper analyses two Polish Jewish authors' autobiographical narratives, Micha? G?owiński's The Black Seasons (1999) and Henryk Grynberg's The Jewish War (1965) and Victory (1993), as instances of literary child-witnessing the Holocaust. The two authors' narratives represent two different cases of child survivors' testimonies given their situation during the Second World War: G?owiński being encamped in the Warsaw Ghetto, Grynberg living in hiding. The author argues that their narratives present the case of child survivors whose Holocaust experiences and aftermath memories in Communist Poland spring from their primarily scattered and painful memories foregrounding the importance of vulnerable lenses. In light of this, the main question the author addresses is: to what degree do these children's war memories take specific stances as a function of the age they were during the Holocaust and their location (either being encamped or living in hiding)? The main contention of the paper is that Second World War children's literary testimonies contribute to present-day scholarship by their complex understanding of the multi-faceted character of humans whose specific bulwarks are the simultaneous exposing and acknowledgement of individual occlusions, ambivalences, limitations or randomness.     

A vision of Ireland, 1967: John Montague’s aisling ghéar

More than fifty years after its publication as a broadsheet ballad, John Montague’s “The Rape of the Aisling” (1967) retains its satirical force. Whilst not the first instance in Irish writing to acknowledge sexual abuse of young people by priests (two years earlier John McGahern’s The Dark had been banned partly on the grounds of its rendering of clerical malfeasance), Montague’s rough ballad nonetheless places sexual abuse at the very heart of its assault on the Catholic Church’s baleful influence on a society on the cusp of dramatic social change. By adopting, and radically adapting, that most malleable of literary forms – the aisling or dream-vision poem – Montague seems to suggest that in mid-twentieth-century Ireland it is not the “Saxon occupier” who poses a risk to Republican ideals. Now, it is members of a home-grown patriarchy, the “access-all-areas men in black” who abuse and rape children and young people in their care, who seek to compromise the Proclamation’s promise to cherish “all of the children of the nation equally”.     

War Trauma and Alcoholism in the Early Writings of Charlotte and Branwell Brontë

During and after the Napoleonic Wars, there was an outpouring of military-based biographical writing never before seen in British history. Over 200 military memoirs were published either as standalone entities or in periodicals such as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and The United Service Journal. As a result, the experiences of ordinary soldiers were brought to the forefront of Britain’s public consciousness. Although many of these memoirs glorified war, a number revealed the psychological damage war inflicted on the British male population and explicitly exposed the horrors of combat to a domestic readership. Furthermore, this explosion of life writing also exposed a connection between suffering and alcoholism, consolidating trauma as a post-war, national problem. The Brontës, typically recognized as canonical, Victorian authors, first participated in this military-based literary movement. This article attempts to reposition and establish two of the siblings – Charlotte and Branwell – as significant post-war commentators. By focussing on their military reading, it will become clear how they vicariously processed and reimagined war trauma and addiction through their Glass Town and Angrian sagas. Not only will this article argue that the introduction of military biography into British society generated wide-scale recognition of war trauma, despite its absence within contemporary medical discourse, but it will also argue that the young Brontës’ literature is an important historical source for understanding and re-evaluating the public response to post-war military masculinity.     

The Nanjing Massacre and the traumatic memory of Nanjing residents

ABSTRACT

The Nanjing Massacre of 1937 is a historical tragedy that is hard to erase from the collective memory of Nanjing residents. Since 1982, the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall and other monuments have been established as a Chinese response to the Japanese revision of their high school history textbooks, and these facilities have opened a mnemonic channel for the Nanjing people to link history to reality. In the Nanjing people’s traumatic memory, the historical facts of the Nanjing Massacre of the contemporary nationalistic sentiments are entangled and symbiotic. Many survivors have profound factual memory of the massacre, yet they have shown tolerance and forgiveness to the victimizers. While their memory has transcended the primitive stage of retaliation, the traumatic memory of mankind should be transformed into invaluable resource of the human endeavor to pursue peace.     

TRAUMA,HISTORY, MEMORY,IDENTITY: WHAT REMAINS?

Despite the considerable amount of work already devoted to the topic, the nexus of trauma, history, memory, and identity is still of widespread interest, and much remains to be investigated on both empirical and theoretical levels. The ongoing challenge is to approach the topic without opposing history and memory in a binary fashion but instead by inquiring into more complex and challenging relations between them, including the role of trauma and its effects. This account attempts to set out a research agenda that is multifaceted but with components that are conceptually interrelated and that call for further research and thought. In a necessarily selective manner that does not downplay the value and importance of archival research, it treats both the role of traumatic memory and memory (or memory work) that counteracts post‐traumatic effects and supplements, at times serving as a corrective to, written sources. It argues for the relevance to history of a critical but nondismissive approach to the study of trauma, memory, and identity‐formation, discussing significant new work as well as indicating the continued pertinence of somewhat older work in the field. One of the under‐investigated issues it addresses is the role of the so‐called transgenerational transmission of trauma to descendants and intimates of both survivors and perpetrators. It concludes by making explicit an issue that is fundamental to the problem of identity and identity‐formation and concerning which a great deal remains to be done: the issue of critical animal studies and its historical and ethical significance. Addressing this issue would require extending one's purview beyond humans and attending to the importance of the relations between humans and other animals.     

Buggery and Parliament, 1533–2017

Over nearly five centuries the UK parliament, and its earlier incarnations, frequently legislated to ensure the regulation and punishment of buggery, a form of sexual conduct once generally accepted to constitute one of the most serious criminal offences known to law. In the early 21st century, parliament abolished the offence of buggery and, subsequently, granted pardons to certain individuals previously convicted of it. While some aspects of the history of parliament's approach to buggery are well known – particularly in respect of homosexual law reform – much of this history remains obscure. This article provides an in‐depth consideration of the making of statute law in parliament relating to buggery that reveals the dramatically changing attitudes of legislators towards this aspect of sexual conduct and highlights the significance and importance of the pardons granted to those convicted of the offence.     

Values and assumptions underpinning policy for children and young people in England

This paper provides an account of current ideas about English childhood that seem to underpin policies ‘for’ children. New Labour values the future adulthood of children more than their childhoods, and stresses children's responsibilities over their rights. Generally, child protection and provision for children has higher status than children's participation. Children are excluded from participation in social life. Traditional psychological formulations remain powerful in their stress on childhood as a preparatory stage of life, where children are socialised into conformity with the norms of social life. However, the last 15 years have seen greater respect for children's own views and experiences, for their rights and for the idea that childhood is socially constructed. But the idea that children are contributors to society is still rarely recognised and they continue to suffer from low social status accordingly.     

The Impact of Childhood Migration on Educational Attainment: Evidence from rural–urban migrants in Indonesia

This paper estimates the effect of migrating permanently as a child from a rural area to an urban area; focusing on long-term educational attainment in Indonesia. We conduct a household survey specifically tailored to collect data on urban–rural migrants in four major migrant destination cities in Indonesia, and merge the data with a nationally representative survey to create a dataset that contains migrants in urban areas and non-migrants in rural areas who were born in the same rural districts. We find that individuals who migrated to the city as children attained three more years of education, compared to observably similar individuals who remained in rural areas. We find no gender differences in the benefit of childhood migration. Finally, age at migration and the size of network in the city do not significantly affect the educational attainment of childhood migrants.