Yes; They Were Kids

Anne Frank, Amsterdam

My favorite scenes in the powerful movie Gainsbourg: Vie Heroique, directed by the deliriously talented Joann Sfar, who also created The Rabbi's Cat, are those where young Lucien Ginsburg (Serge's original pre-fame name) is seen peeking across time and space at the exploits/shenanigans of his adult alter-ego. Lucien, a jewish adolescent in France during the Vichy régime, is played by a prepubertal actor, yellow star wearing and...already chain smoking.  The scenes evoke much more than the mind wandering back to earlier times in a "who would have thought...given where I was then" circuit: they literally depict the child neurologically existing inside the man.

An important consideration for a child psychiatrist. I have been thinking about this even more than usual after a recent visit to the Paris Hotel de Ville (City Hall) for the "C'étaient des enfants" exhibit: http://www.paris.fr/accueil/culture/c-etaient-des-enfants-une-expo-sur-les-enfants-de-la-shoah-a-l-hotel-de-ville/rub_9652_actu_115847_port_24330 This is a commemorative exhibit; to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1942  Vel d'Hiv roundup, where over 13,000 French jews were arrested en masse and rounded up in the velodrome (a sort of stadium for winter cycling).

To be truthful, I avoided the exhibit until the last possible moment: the story is too close to be uncomfortably, as opposed to excruciatingly, unpleasant and,  I know much of it well already.

Or so I thought.

In fact, like many children of survivors, I only know a factual story but the personal transmitted emotional narrative, by nature of trauma, is only as tangible as a smoke ring.  The visit assembled itself into a fact-transcending emotional narrative that I could understand as a child psychiatrist. 

The facts are simple: about twenty percent of jewish children did not survive WWII. The others were luckier. They were luckier and...if they were too little, did not understand why they were separated from their parents or why, for those even luckier, who were not orphaned (another 10% or so were), parents that they no longer remembered years later took them away at some point from the only homes they knew.

Many of them behaved exactly like kids do when they are seriously upset: they cried, they screamed, they refused to comply with this or that. This was the 1940s, so such carrying on was handled without mercy: screams and blows. Unforgiving blows. Some of the children wrote poems (of being dead inside), or painted self portraits (of their 50 year old feeling and looking teenage selves).  

Yes; They were kids.

Even when they were no longer kids, the children they had been and the experiences they had had, contributed magic and havoc to the rest of their lives. A little more havoc than usual.

Till Later,

Anne