the other side of the abyss: a psychodynamic approach to working with groups of people who came to...

The Other Side of the Abyss: A Psychodynamic Approach toWorking with Groups of People Who Came to England as

Children on the Kindertransporte

Ruth Barnett

ABSTRACT. This paper focuses on the psychological experience of children who were separated fromtheir parents because they sent them to England to save their lives from the impending Holocaust incontinental Europe. The parents of these children expressed their love and concern to ensure theiroffspring's survival through the self-sacrificial act of parting with them. What they could not preventwere the traumatic effects of this separation and its sequellae. Drawing on clinical material of formerKindertransportees as adults from her private practice and group work with a colleague, Ruth Barnettoffers an understanding of the psychic journey that was imposed on these children by the deliberatelyinflicted atrocities to which their families and communities were subjected in the name of genocide andfor the purpose of 'ethnic cleansing'. She hopes this may be of some value to therapists working with thevictims of similar attempts at 'ethnic cleansing' such as perpetrated in Rwanda and Bosnia.

Introduction

The human condition is to be vulnerable to the ever-present potential threats in theenvironment, human and non-human, and the structure of the human mind is designed todevelop defences against intolerable anxiety evoked by such threats. The study of thesedefences, how they operate and how they may become counterproductive when traumaticexperience cannot be accommodated, is part of the 'bread and butter' of our work aspsychotherapists. There is a substantial literature (see references in Bergman & Jucovy 1982,Gampel 1992, Keilson 1992 and Kestenberg 1992) on the effects of trauma and traumaticloss on the human psyche which shows that deliberately inflicted atrocities are even harder todeal with in terms of the internal world than damage caused by natural catastrophes or humanignorance and neglect. One such deliberate atrocity was the attempted genocide of the Jewsby the Nazis. Approximately 6,000,000 Jews and people from other minorities wereslaughtered in the Holocaust between 1938 and 1945 because the Nazis considered them tobe 'undesirable'. Kestenberg (1992) describes in great detail the psychological effects ofphysically surviving the Holocaust on the 1,200 children whom her research teaminterviewed as adults. Keilson (1992) examines the age-specific traumatization of Jewish warorphans in the Netherlands.

In Moses and Monotheism, Freud (1937) describes trauma as 'those impressions,

Based on two years working together with groups of former Kindertransportees, the forerunner of thispaper was produced and given jointly by Ruth Barnett and Judith Elkan to two clinical seminars at theLincoln and LCP respectively. The work was done under the auspices of LINK Psychotherapy Centre,many of whose members are working with first and second generation Holocaust survivors. Ruth Barnettis a full member of the LCP and Lincoln and works in private practice. Address for correspondence: 73Fortune Green Road, London NW6 1DR. Judith Elkan is a full member of the Association of ChildPsychotherapists and the Lincoln and works in private practice. Address for correspondence: 31Coleridge Walk, London NW11 6AT.

British Journal of Psychotherapy, Vol 12(2), 1995© The author

Ruth Barnett 179

experienced early and later forgotten' and as òne or more powerful impressions in theseearly times - impressions which have escaped being dealt with normally' and goes on to saythat'. .. in every case it is an excess in demand that is responsible for an experience evokingunusual pathological reaction. ..'. The pathological reactions he refers to focus aroundrepression and he is talking about ìmpressions of a sexual and aggressive nature' and èarlyinjuries to the ego (narcissistic mortifications)' in the first five years of life. He argues thatthese are the aetiological factors of adult neuroses. The clinical material to be presentedshows that many of the children had suffered such early traumas pre-dating theKindertransport separation. Work with some of these people as adults suggests that the earlytraumas were in some cases re-evoked and exacerbated in the traumatic events of theKindertransport experience which then became internally unmanageable and hence aspectsof it, and in some cases most of it, were repressed. In group work, such elements of theoriginal Kindertransport experience that had remained ùndigested' in their need to 'get onwith their lives' were re-enacted, often pulling the leaders into the process.

With such a small sample and very distinctive circumstances, there is necessarily aproblem of confidentiality. Some alterations have been made in the clinical materialpresented to disguise identities and protect the confidentiality of the subjects withoutsacrificing the essential meanings. The names used are not the real ones.

Historical Background

Almost 10,000 children, from babies to 16-year-olds, were brought over to England on trainsthat were called the Kindertransporte. Some were billeted temporarily or permanently inhostels, some were placed with foster families and some sent on to destinations abroad suchas Canada, Palestine and Australia. These children were saved physically but at the very highpsychological cost of splitting up families. The intentions of those people who organized thisventure were noble and most, but by no means all, of the adults caring for the children inEngland were kindly. However, the trauma the families were going through was littleunderstood by anyone at the time. The disintegration of the environment beforehand, due tovicious persecution that created havoc and panic in their families, the journey itself under farfrom ideal conditions and the often bewildering and frightening sequence of events inEngland on arrival compounded the trauma these children were subjected to, sometimesreviving anxiety belonging to much earlier problems in their infancy, that might otherwisehave been resolved if their families had remained stable.

An example of how previous infantile anxieties could be re-cathected by the trauma ofthe Kindertransport experience is illustrated clearly by Solly who came to England aged 12.He fared reasonably well in his fostering but was haunted by his fears about what washappening to his parents. He sought individual help in his sixties because he felt his life had `gone all wrong' and he wanted to understand why he had been unable to achieve the marriageand children he had always wanted although he had had many opportunities with womenwho wanted to marry. He had some very early memories of loneliness and rage at hisparents' focus on each other and unavailability to him. One memory, in particular, as a verysmall child, of being unable to tolerate his parents' affectionate embrace and literally pushinghis way between them and getting their attention away from each other onto himself, wasaccompanied by affects of terrible foreboding. After the war Solly had learned that his fatherhad been shot while

180 British Journal of Psychotherapy (1995) 12(2)

escaping from a train bound for a concentration camp. His mother who had escaped acrossthe border to safety, on hearing this terrible news, had killed herself. For Solly, his oedipalphantasies of separating and triumphing over the powerful parents had been actualized bythe painful reality in which his family were caught up. Solly had a breakdown in his lateteens but had not been able to use the treatment he had received then to work through thisgross disturbance of boundaries between phantasy and reality. It seemed as if he lived hislife in dread of the murdered parents returning as vengeful monsters to torment him.Unconsciously, marriage meant vulnerability to this revenge.

Greater understanding of the nature of cumulative trauma under such severe conditionswas gained by workers in the field, well after this period, in the late 1940s and 1950s.Particularly the work of Bowlby (1980) and the Robertsons (1971) on separation and loss,that is so well known to us now, was not available to those in a position to help the childrenwho came on these trains. That good intentions were not understood and, at a deeper level,were misunderstood is highlighted in multiple ways in the play Kindertransport. In thisprofoundly moving drama, based on her research which included interviewing formerKindertransportees, the playwright, Diane Samuels (1992) demonstrates deep insight into theterrible conflicts created both internally and between three generations externally. Thetransporting of children out of their families, home-country, culture and language, albeit forhumanitarian reasons, saved them from almost certain death and the possible extinction oftheir race but created a profusion of psychic disturbance across generations. Outwardly, mostof these children were unusually cooperative and industrious, many going on to verysuccessful careers and social lives, but at a very high `psychic cost'.

The Idea of Therapeutic Groups

My colleague, Judith Elkan, had been moved by the response of a member of theaudience, a former Kindertransportee, to a paper she gave on loss and bereavement. Thisresonated with my own experience attending the 50th anniversary reunion ofKindertransporte organized in 1989 by Bertha Leverton in London. Over 1,000 peopleparticipated in this remarkable event. Many shared their stories that they had never voicedbefore and in some cases not even allowed into their thoughts in the intervening 50 years.All sorts of memories, ideas and feelings were emerging at that reunion that we thought somepeople might like to explore in a group. We knew from our professional work that the depthof feeling evoked by early separation trauma often cannot be dealt with at the time, andtherefore memories and their concomitant affects would have been suppressed or repressedto enable these children to focus on rebuilding their shattered lives, developing careers andraising their own families. Perhaps 50 years on, a stage would have been reached in whichlife and continuity had been affirmed and issues that had been put aside could be thoughtabout and reappraised as the natural end of life approached. In a group they might share theirunique experiences of the profound loss common to them all. The task was daunting in viewof the range of experiences, from those whose parents both survived to those who foundthemselves to be the only surviving member of their extended family. There was thepossibility of breakdown. In our countertransference we picked up a communication of `don'ttouch!' that has come to be known as common among Holocaust-affected people; and therewas a `don't touch' part of ourselves that

Ruth Barnett 181

resonated with the horror of much of the material we were working with. We were trapped ina conflict between knowing the usefulness of working in depth and the risk of disturbingessential defences. We were uncertain whether the participants in the group would be able todiscern how much disturbance they could manage without breakdown. These feelings oftrepidation could be seen as part of the group process in which so many of the anxieties of theoriginal experience were re-enacted.

The work, organized under the auspices of LINK Psychotherapy Centre, consisted ofthree groups each meeting weekly for 10 consecutive weeks between January 1991 andMarch 1992 in London and a day-workshop in Sheffield in April 1992 in which the time wasdivided between a large group and three simultaneous small groups. The groups were co-ledby the author and Judith Elkan, who were joined in the workshop by Bernard Barnett.Meetings of the leaders between sessions proved essential for working through the oftenintensely painful material that we were left holding after each session.

The Psychological Nature of the Kindertransport Experience

The children of the Kindertransporte left their homes and all their known world, mostunaccompanied by parents, to go to unknown destinations. They experienced the trauma ofuntimely and difficult-to-explain separation which is related to separation experiences ingeneral and can be looked at in this context. There is an additional factor to be recognizedwhich is that these children knew that something terrifying was going on, and whether thiswas clear or not depended to some extent on the child's age and the quality of life in theirfamily before the separation. They also knew they were being saved from a threat, but thatparents and/or siblings and other relatives whom they were leaving behind remained indanger. Nor was the new environment they came into entirely without the threat of potentialdangers. Many children, their self-esteem already undermined by experiences of persecutionin their home-country and only too well aware that they were not wanted there, weresubjected to both antisemitic and anti-German humiliation in their new homes. What is more,most of this could not be thought about or verbalized because it was so horrific. Theemotional burden was often excessive, the external dangers real, and the knowledge about thekind of emotional support needed was not yet available to caretakers, well-meaning orotherwise. Our findings show that, for these reasons, the children were exposed to and cameto bear an amalgamation of complex and contradictory emotions which were often confusingand difficult to sort out and therefore overwhelming. For example, feelings of impotence atbeing unable to save their parents, as many of the older children tried very hard to do, wereaccompanied by feelings of despair about holding onto their internal 'good object'. Becauseof their longings and their inevitable sense of being rejected, sometimes they came toexperience a 'bad object' that had to be got rid of in place of the 'good object'. In this way theylost their parents internally as well as externally. Bion (1962) describes this as the absentgood object becoming the present bad object. As a means of dealing with overwhelming andintolerable emotions of anxiety and guilt these children had to mobilize a variety of defences,necessary if they were to survive, but often limiting or incapacitating their lives and, in somecases, those of their children.

Gampel (1992), in 'I was a Shoah child', shows how children caught up in the Holocaustwere subjected to the narcissistic injury of what she calls 'extreme deviations from a realitythey had previously known' and, as she puts it, 'were forced in


an instant to go through emotional maturational processes that normally take a lifetime'. Inour sample, we found that some had experienced a total loss of their former reality, and thatthese fared less well psychologically than those who had been able to maintain some linkwith the past through sharing the experience with a sibling or former schoolmate. In hernovel Latecomers (1988), two of Brookner's main characters are Kindertransportees whomeet for the first time in the English boarding school to which they are both sent. Although ofdiametrically opposed temperaments, for both of them this chance meeting enables them tosurvive, if only at the level of `damage limitation', for, as the story unfolds, they marry andlive in adjacent flats, so unthinkable is the idea of ever parting again. We also found thephenomenon described by Gampel (1992) thus: `Through the creation of a "false self 'thesechildren were able to function as adults, in the bodies of children, thereby enabling theirsurvival'. Many described how it felt too dangerous to express any negative feelings orexhibit any behaviours that might make them appear visibly as `different' as they felt.Through developing this kind of precocious-adult false self they were not only able to survivebut often very successfully from external appearances. However, we got glimpses, in thematerial of the groups, of how parts of their internal world had become arrested at oedipaland preoedipal levels. Examples of this were the many ways in which their parents' lastinstructions, or what they imagined their parents had wanted of them and would approve ordisapprove, still restricted their current adult behaviour.

The Group Work in London and Sheffield

At the beginning some members of the first group (in London) had difficulty acceptingour way of working. They found our time boundaries starting and ending the sessionspuzzling and irksome and challenged them in various ways. They wanted us, the groupleaders, to reveal more about ourselves. They questioned what we were doing and were veryunsure about what they had expected and wanted out of it. Some extra disturbance wascaused in this first group by an application from a young researcher to join the group as anobserver. This was vetoed and the discussion arising out of it served to gel the group andgive it an identity. At first they compared specific details, such as their ages at the time of theseparation, whom they came with and where they spent the war years. Then they decided totell each other their `stories'. This was a painful process of looking back after 50 years at thelosses, the abrupt cut-off of so many things, struggling with gaps in knowledge and memorythat aroused considerable anxiety in the group. Sessions were hard for us to end as theyclearly wanted to go on beyond the allotted time. In fact they continued outside the time andvenue but were able to bring this back into the group and, to some extent, we were able toexplore with them the themes of exclusion and rejection that this had aroused.

The second and third groups had less difficulty with the framework of sessions as eachtime there were members who had been in a previous group. New members told their `stories' and the others retold theirs and were able to experience remembering more anddifferent details. In all three groups we made it clear from the beginning that towards the endof the 10 sessions we would consider with them whether they would want further groups.Although there was much ambivalence we felt clear that a second and third group werewanted. The members were aware well before the end of the third group that we wereoffering a workshop in Sheffield. Although this workshop was open to them, the knowledgethat we were already planning and engaging with others

Ruth Barnett 183

may have evoked painful feelings about their parents giving attention to others after sendingthem off on the trains. They could have joined the Sheffield day-workshop but perhaps fearthat `the milk would not be enough to go round' held them back.

For the workshop a university hall of residence in Sheffield was chosen so that thosecoming from further afield would have the option of staying overnight. In fact only three didso. Some already knew each other before coming, but most were meeting each other for thefirst time, a situation very similar to the meeting of the children and parents on the platformfor the Kindertransporte. The day was planned to allow plentiful time for talking informallyover eating and drinking as well as the more formal groups. There were two plenary groups atthe start and ending of the day and two small groups either side of a generous lunch-break. 28participants booked for this event, 14 men and 14 women. One participant was a British-bornspouse wanting to understand her husband's experience. Nine members lived in Sheffield, thereason for the choice of venue, and the others came from Glasgow, Sunderland, Manchester,East Sussex, Yorkshire, Birmingham, Derby, Liverpool and London.

Puzzlement was voiced in the first plenary about why we were all gathered, what wasgoing to happen and what did it mean? When the three leaders met to confer over lunch, allfelt moved by the urgency of members to talk and the painfulness of much of the materialthey brought. Perhaps some had 'opened up' too much and too fast. Much of the time severalhad all wanted to talk at once. They were hungry to hear each other's stories and tell theirown experiences at the same time. It had been hard to handle and there was something of thetension and chaos there would have been at an arrival platform or hostel. Perhaps they werelooking for lost siblings or trying to replace them, searching for some loss, however small,that could be retrieved. It was hard to end the first small group session. They made variousbids to not let it end. Through lunch they came to know each other more and so were calmerin the second small group session. They had something to compare with and orientthemselves. Interpretations about roots being severed and difficulties in letting go were takenup in the form of `How do you grow new roots? Can you abandon the old roots? Are they stillthere? Can you seal off and forget the past?' They were reflective and felt more adult as theywere giving each other space. There was more room too for the leaders to make somehopefully useful interventions.

Themes That Recurred in the GroupsSeparation and loss

The scene of the separation was usually not remembered and several members were verytroubled by this. Focusing on events leading up to the separation brought up painful questionsabout the motives and feelings of the loved ones who were `left behind' but who also had `sent them away'. There was the massive `unthinkable' loss of everything familiar, for some acomplete `cut-off , for others a desperate clinging to something or someone who representeda link with the former life. Some parents had kept in touch with letters that then came to anabrupt end. One member had saved these letters but had never read them. It was not clear tous whether he had actually not read them or had erased the memory of reading them as helater lost the facility to read them when he replaced his first language with English.

Age at the time of separation and hostel versus foster-family placement were importantfactors in how the separation was experienced but we came to understand


that the quality of family life before the separation was more vital. Some had experiencedextremes of humiliation and family disruption by the persecution while others had enjoyed amore stable foundation of family life. All had been disoriented and often humiliated as `strangers' and `foreigners' in their new country, but those who had witnessed the humiliationof their elders before they left had already suffered the damage or loss of the internal `goodobject' that could protect them and provide them with inner resources.

Although loss was palpably there in the background always, and it could beacknowledged frequently, only rarely was some working through possible. An example ofthis was initiated by the absence from a session of one of the leaders. This was dealt with inthe group by devaluing her role and idealizing the leader who was present. Thus, by denyingthe importance of the absent leader, the group attempted to avoid the pain of loss andfeelings of abandonment. Resistance to accepting this idea and linking it to their own pastexperiences, such as when family members had disappeared overnight, was considerable.The leader who was present stayed with the issue and a shift took place in the group. Thiswas manifest in the next session when the group reported back to the leader who had beenabsent the gist of the work that had been done, thus reinstating her, the absent parent, in herrole.

Survival

Pride in having survived was evident but mostly suppressed as any hint of triumph wasassociated with intolerable guilt, the unspoken immense pain, always hovering in the groupmind, of those who had not survived. This could be taken up to some extent through thegroups' anxieties about the smallness of their numbers: why had not more people comeforward for groups? Where were all the others? What had stopped them from coming?

Several told of their drive to be more than usually successful to fulfil their parents' hopes.Many placed great emphasis on their successes in their `new lives'. Marriage, children andgrandchildren were much-prized evidence that the Nazis had not succeeded in perpetratinggenocide. Pines (1993) says, `Babies for these women were an important concretemanifestation of the restoration of normality from a psychotic world and the re-establishmentof family life that had been destroyed.' Survival and birth of the third generation engenderedrecollections of their grandparents and relationships that had been cut off in their prime. Asgrandparents themselves they were able to confront and mourn this loss. It led on to therealization that the loss of their parents had meant that their own children had lost thepossibilities of relationships with grandparents. An important new dimension emerged andwas painfully addressed. An example was a group member describing how she had neverspoken of the past or her parents to her children. In burying the trauma of her parents' murderin the camps, they had become lost to her internally and this had led to her depriving herchildren of their grandparents whose memory she might have shared with them. Eva'sdaughter, in the play, accuses her mother bitterly, `Why did you deny me my grandparents?'The work in the group on this theme enabled one member to reveal, with great pain, herexperience of being cheated of a normal adolescence, both by the acute awareness of thedegradation she was made to experience before she left and then by the callous treatment shereceived in England. She reflected on the bitterness she felt when she compared heradolescence with that of her children, and realized that this had interfered with her goodrelationship with them.

Ruth Barnett 185

Defences

There was a tendency to prefer intellectual themes and to shy away from saying theunspeakable and staying with the pain when it was put into words, but many did sharepainful thoughts and feelings. One group distanced themselves from their own pain bybecoming very concerned to do something to rescue currently suffering children by foundinga charity or trust. Another group explored in great depth the conflict between the `Englishparts of themselves' and their roots. At times all the groups enabled individual members toaddress deeply personal issues. One member had never known her father before theseparation and this hurt was so profound that `nothing could ever put it right'. Anothermember came to the realization that she had denied the need and `right' to therapeutic helpby marrying a concentration camp survivor who was much `needier' but who refused help,thereby protecting both of them from the pain of acknowledging need and accepting help.Another had been `betrayed' in early infancy by her parents giving her over to Granny to lookafter. She survived the Kindertransport experience at the cost of being unable to risk furtherdeep attachments. Her desire for but compulsion to avoid engagement was expressed in amemory of her Granny summing her up as 'Gluecklich schon aber nicht zu frieden'. This is areversal of a German cliche: Zu frieden schon aber nicht Gluecklich (satisfied but nothappy).

Rage

Feelings of rage at the emotional hurts they had suffered were very difficult to access. Asleaders we were often palpably aware of their anger through our countertransference,especially after sessions, but could not reach it during sessions. For example, the leader whowas absent for a session could be reinstated and the pain and abandonment her absence hadsignified could be verbalized, but anger at her absence could not.

Resentment at having to be good and grateful in a hated situation was articulatedrepeatedly, but to express anger openly and directly in the groups, as in the original refugeeexperience, was too frightening. When angry feelings were stirred up in a particular sessionfor one member, she absented herself from the next session. For the Kinder, who had beengiven asylum by their foster-parents, to express their grumbles and discontent was to bite thehand that fed them and kept them alive. To survive they believed that they had to be `nice'and compliant. Indeed, for many this had been an urgent instruction from their real parents:to `be good' and `not make any trouble'. For many this led to an oppressive feeling that theywere never able to be quite themselves or, as one member described it, `living a facade'. Thenovelist, Anita Brookner, many of whose characters are immigrants, has an apt term for thisphenomenon which she uses to describe Edith Hope in Hotel du Lac (1985), namely thatEdith felt herself to be `nearly English', implying a non-English part that has to remainhidden. This phenomenon was expressed most clearly in the Reunion of Kindertransporte inwhich many participants told of their anxieties about being perceived as `different'. Manyhad been instructed by their parents not to let their religion or other aspects of theirJewishness be visible.

In general, resentment of the leaders as transferential `parents' was displaced by thegroups who would grumble about the inconveniences and inadequacies of the setting and theoutside world that obstructed or limited their benefit from the group. In these


instances transference interpretations were strongly denied, so that for a time it seemedpointless to pursue them, so strong was their conviction that it was not safe to be angry withus, the foster-parents, who would surely send them away if they dared to express negativefeelings. After all, at some level they had interpreted the whole Kindertransport experience asa rejection due to their having been `bad children', and for many of them this `badness' hadbeen confirmed by denigrating experiences on their arrival in England and subsequently. 13-year-old Eva, in the play Kindertransport, says to her foster-mother, `Will you love me evenif I am naughty?' For some, earlier threats of being sent away if they were not good had beenactualized by the separation.

Dissatisfaction was shown when group members felt themselves in the position ofchildren not let in on what the leaders, the grown-ups in the transference, were up to. Theyshowed mistrust and irritation in various ways, questioning whether the leaders knew whatthey were doing or were, perhaps, playing sadistic games with them. Profound dissatisfactionwas expressed in the final plenary at Sheffield. There were criticisms of the venue and howthe day was organized. The leaders had not given them enough freedom and had not exertedenough control, especially over one particularly disturbed and disturbing participant. Therehad not been enough information or explanations. They felt let down and had expected muchmore. Thinking about what they had expected presented a threat. Some thought they werebeing assessed and feared that the leaders would pronounce on their mental state.

Resistance

In each of the groups there was a member so damaged internally as to get little if anybenefit from the experience. One woman regressed to reliving her experience of separation atage 4 when she had not yet separated out from her twin. Denying any pain or sadness shecame late to each session, sat on the floor, brought her bottle of orange to suck through astraw and a spare woolly jumper to cuddle. Many times she laughed shrilly in a bizarre wayand her communication was inhibited by fragmented images. The group was remarkablytolerant of her behaviour and the time and attention she drew onto herself but little if anygrowth seemed possible. Another regressed to infantile behaviour but remained in the groupand, a year later, had some individual sessions. A third was so deprived internally that shefelt unable to pay even a nominal fee while coming immaculately dressed with plentifuljewellery. One came only to a first session to disparage and then spurn the group. The effecton the group of losing this potential member, especially in such an abrupt and negative way,was profound and in some ways echoed the loss incurred by those who declined, at the lastmoment, to send their children. There was evidence to suggest that all these people hadsuffered damaged or seriously disturbed relationships in their families that predated theKindertransport experience. We understood this as their being so ill-equipped psychically forthe original journey that they could not now, as then, engage with it; or put another way, theywere too low in emotional resources within themselves to be able to risk giving anything outto the group.

When it came to discussing further groups there was massive resistance which weunderstood as a recoil from the possibility of getting `out of their depth'. When another yearwas offered to the London group, one member defended with laughter, another mobilized astoical attitude, and a third, who had begun to talk about her aggression, `withdrew her horns'. In Sheffield, although we had introduced some ideas about the possibility of more groupevents in the introduction and brought this back in the final

Ruth Barnett 187

plenary, it was not taken up. There was a strong theme of having well survived and notwanting to disturb deeper layers. This came out very clearly in the nine feedback sheets thatwere mailed to us. The other 18 made an even stronger statement in not returning thestamped addressed envelopes we had given each member at the close of the workshop. Thethird London group, more so than the previous two, was moving towards exploring how theirown trauma had affected their children. We felt the anxiety about confronting anger andfacing depression. Their loss of vivacity would need to be connected to the massive lossesthey had suffered. For some this was too threatening while others began to contemplateindividual therapy for themselves. One member wanted to continue the group but the groupcould neither agree to continue nor were they able to separate and say `Good-bye'. They didnot want to let go but they did not want to delve deeper. In the end the leaders had to gowithout a proper good-bye having been possible. Both leaders and participants were left withthe burden of there having been no proper `holding' of the parting. We understood this as are-creation of the original parting which had been intolerable both for children and parents.The pull into this enactment was very powerful. We did not realize what we had been doinguntil afterwards - representing what may have been the parents' experience of full realizationnot dawning on them until the train had pulled out of the station.

Re-enactment

Many times in our work with these groups we were not aware at the time of the powerfulphenomenon, which Freud (1920) describes as a `daemonic force', that pulled us into eithertaking part in or witnessing a recreation of some aspect of the original Kindertransportexperience. We could only process the experiences we had undergone in the groups in ourmeetings afterwards. Before the Sheffield workshop was due to begin and the leaders weresetting out chairs, participants started to arrive almost an hour early for the pre-plenarycoffee. They represented those anxious to let no obstacle prevent their arrival at the platformin time for the train. We were unable to meet adequately their anxious questions about whatwas going on at the same time as making the necessary preparations and a confusion ensuedthat seemed to us afterwards to recreate the confusion on the platform where anxious parentswere sending their children into the unknown. We learned later that the one person on theSheffield list who had not appeared had completely forgotten. She represented those childrendue to go on the trains who never made it because the unbearable separation was avoided byforgetting. One man arrived late, just when the first plenary was about to start (the train aboutto move off), carrying an old suitcase that looked like, and may well have been, the one hebrought with him to England on that original journey. A recently bereaved widow suddenlyappeared in one of the London groups at the fourth session with no previous introduction.She had seen the advertising leaflet and phoned the venue, not one of the leaders, and wastold to come. She enacted the disarray of the systems for getting the children out. Some hadjust turned up on the platform and were squeezed into the train. The endings of sessions whenthey had hardly had time to begin repeated the Kindertransport separation when life hadhardly begun.

Discussion

The main transference in the groups onto the leaders, and the most difficult to bear andprocess, was that of the foster-parents who took the Kinder into their homes or


looked after them in hostels. We were hated as the unsatisfactory substitutes for the parentsthey really wanted back. Unconsciously they saw us as usurpers and blamed us for takingthem away. But they were little able to organize or express this anger, even non-verbally, asthey were compelled to be over-polite and cooperative in order not to lose the unsatisfactorylittle available to them that we represented. At times we also felt put in the position of thereal parents for whom it had been impossible to prepare their children for what was to comeor make it feel any less harsh. Several times in the work we had the experience that we onlycaught the full significance of something after the group had disbanded, like the parents whocould only grasp the full meaning of what they were caught up in `the minute after the trainhad left'. This was most poignantly manifest at the end of the third London group when, as inthe original experience, no proper leave-taking was possible, leaving both the groupmembers and the leaders (children and parents) with the burden of a reality that had been toointolerable to accept yet could not be avoided. Both as parents and as foster-parents we werethe parent figures who were trying to help the children in the face of unbearable pain andirreversible events. This often meant that all we could do as therapists was to know about itwith them. The experience of ending was probably more difficult for this third groupbecause we had been able to work with them more in the transference and at a deeper levelthan in the previous two groups. Perhaps hopes and expectations had been invested in usthat we would prove to be the ideal parents who would rewrite the agenda and not allowseparation to take place.

In Moses and Monotheism, Freud (1937) describes some aspects of the effects of traumathat make for difficulties in treatment:

The effects of trauma are of two kinds, positive and negative, the former are attempts to bring thetrauma into operation once again - that is to remember the forgotten experience or, better still, tomake it real, to experience a repetition of it anew, or, even if it was only an early emotionalrelationship, to revive it in an analogous relationship with someone else. We summarize theseefforts under the name of `fixations' to the trauma and as a `compulsion to repeat' . . . The negativereactions follow the opposite aim: that nothing of the forgotten traumas shall be remembered andnothing repeated. We can summarize them as 'defensive reaction'. Their principal expression arewhat are called 'avoidances' which may be intensified into 'inhibitions' and 'phobias' ...Fundamentally they are just as much fixations to the trauma as their opposites, except that they arefixations with a contrary purpose.

In our groups, it would seem that the negative aspect, the need not to know, rivalled inpsychic intensity the positive compulsion to repeat so that, although the leaders were able toexperience and process some of the repetitions that were re-enacted, what the participantswere able to introject as useful and good was severely limited. This in itself might be seen asa repetition of the situation in which some of the Kinder were able to make only little use ofwhat was available to them emotionally in the original Kindertransport experience. Indeed,we are aware that our sample did not, and could not, include those formerKindertransportees in residential care who did not survive psychically and hence were notable to function in the community. Even in our sample, all of whom functioned normally, atleast at some level, the need not to know was so strong that some had gone to great lengths,unconsciously motivated, to avoid being in contact with relatives who could give themfactual information. For example, Rachel, a Kindertransportee, both of whose parentssurvived the Holocaust, one in hiding and the other through fleeing abroad, postponed thepersonal therapy that she knew much earlier that she wanted, until both parents had died.

Ruth Barnett 189

The conflict over acceptance or rejection of the substitute parents and the newenvironment emerged in the work. One example is of a man who came from a basicallystable, supportive family but had to endure the absences of his mother because of her careercommitments. Fostered in a warm family, he was able to develop well in school and in hisprofession. He was cultured in a general way but was himself puzzled at his lack of interestin music, especially as playing music together was his foster-parents' great love. Although heoften expressed the wish to understand this and other blocks to his development, he felt thatindividual therapy was `not allowed' by his wife who was much more damaged by theHolocaust than himself. We came to understand that this man had married someone whowould `carry' the problems for him so that he could appear to be `the well person'. In thegroup he was able to come to the painful recognition that all was far from well and thatconflicts and problems with his children were connected to his own as well as his wife'sdifficulties. This awareness spurred him to urge his reluctant wife to seek help for herself,and this released him to embark on the individual therapy he had long wanted for himself.

The sense of depletion of something vital was ever present in the members' feelingsabout themselves and expressed most often by the idea of some potential never realized,whether in career or marriage or relations with children. In one member's words, `Life issatisfactory enough but something is missing'. In part this represented the losses suffered,the real people and possessions that were missing, but also the split-off and repressedmemories and feelings of rage and the energy used up keeping them sealed off in order tocontinue life. The adult Eva, in the play Kindertransport, puts all her mementos from herformer life with her original parents in a box in the attic. She cannot throw them away. Forevery former Kindertransportee, their roots are still there, in the attics of their minds. ForEva, discarding her past in the attic is the only way she can get release from the pain of herloss. She can then move on to lead a successful life as a responsible professional woman, butat the cost of losing contact with her good internal mother. As the play develops we see Evaas a mother who can only make partial contact emotionally with her daughter. The barrierbetween them comes down as the box in the attic is opened and its contents recovered.Through thinking about and writing this paper I became deeply aware of just how dauntingit was for those who took part in the groups to step into their attics and explore their long-avoided past.

In the play it is the daughter's move to leave home which acts as the `life crisis' or triggerthat leads to her mother going up into the attic for things to give her daughter. In the groupswe heard about children leaving home and distancing themselves in spite of all the materialcare and good intentions lavished on them by often somewhat overprotective parents. In thefilm Mina Tannenbaum (Dugowson 1993), Mina's Holocausttraumatized mother goes onTV in a group who complain bitterly that they gave their children all the materialopportunities they themselves didn't have and yet their children were not getting on withtheir lives successfully. Clearly the effects of the trauma her mother had not been able tometabolize internally had been passed on to Mina and affected her life. This phenomenonshowed in several group members who were parents and had been left with a sense ofterrible bleakness. They had distanced themselves from internal parents and now somethingwas interfering with their own children's relationship with them. Awareness of this sad stateof affairs had contributed to some members deciding to join the group.

Perhaps the image of the abyss from the play Kindertransport (Samuels 1992) expresses


best the indescribable states of conflict and anguish into which the Kindertransportees werethrown. In the play, the legendary Pied Piper of Hamelin (the Ratcatcher in German) appearsas a sinister background figure who leads all the children away to the abyss, and innocentlythey follow. The young Eva, still in the protective nest of her home, does not know themeaning of `abyss' in her book and asks her mother. As the play unfolds we see that she issaved from the abyss of the concentration camp that swallows up her father, only to betrapped in the abyss of emotional torture, as she strives but fails to save her parents in theexternal world, and then faces the pain of surviving with feelings of guilt, helplessness andconflict as she feels that she has been abandoned by the mother who had promised she wouldbe coming soon. Although there was a tendency to do so, not all difficulties experienced bythe group members could be blamed on the separation trauma they had suffered. The task ofthinking about experiences that preceded the separation was difficult since for many theKindertransport separation was compounded and complicated by earlier separations. In thecourse of the work it was clear that often parents could neither be mourned nor given up.What remained unconsciously, against all reason, was a sinister picture persistently hauntingthem that their parents did not love them and had sent them away to punish them. Suchparents at the worst were perceived internally as malign and persecuting and had to be putaway and buried in the recesses of the mind. This most terrible burden was sometimestentatively approached in the work of the groups. The conflict of working out whether theirparents, who saved their lives with this punishment, were good or bad in sending them awaywas probably the most acute and sad burden the Kindertransport children had to strugglewith.

Conclusion

In any consideration of the Holocaust we need to take into account that the deeds that wereperpetrated represented the worst of nightmares and persecuting phantasies as implementedin reality. This included Genocide, the attempt to eradicate totally a whole group of people sothat not one would remain alive to continue the line, no future descendants from that geneticgroup. This resonates with the deeply unconscious image of the annihilation of all mother'sand father's babies, no single live baby left in mother's womb, a form of aggression whichleaves the deepest and greatest guilt and which, for this reason, is usually deeply buried.Elements of such aggression and cruelty or the potential for it exist in the unconscious life ofall of us and have to be kept out of our consciousness to protect us from unbearablepersecutary guilt. The degree of repression, splitting and projection that has had to beharnessed in this service is often found to be most intense and rigid when some event in theexternal world confirms the inner world wishful phantasies, and when too extreme leads to adepletion of the personality and loss of creative energy. As Bion (1962) has described, if theburden of awareness would be intolerable, the very apparatus of thinking is attacked. In eachof the groups and the workshop there was one member in which this phenomenon hadresulted in depletion, distortion or fragmentation of thought processes. It is doubtful whetherthese people derived any benefit from being in the groups. Others had been able to deal withtheir experiences with less extreme measures, often at least outwardly very effectively asthey had been able to rebuild their lives and become useful and even highly respectedcitizens in their new country.

In hindsight, was any effective preparation of the Kinder possible? Child developmentand child psychology were not as advanced then as they are today. The

Ruth Barnett 191

needs of children are better understood now, but how much of this knowledge could havebeen put to use had it been available to those adults, parents and substitute parents, in chargeof the Kindertransporte children? The children themselves, their families and communitieshad already suffered severe persecution and disruption of normal life before the separation,and their arrival in England was at a time of tension and impending war. Today we havemore knowledge and could think out better support systems. How far we are actually able toprovide them is questionable in the light of the treatment current refugee immigrants arereceiving in this country. Those working with refugees and attempting to provide therapyrather than just material subsistence, such as the Refugee Support Centre in Vauxhall, haveto contend with not just the difficulties of procuring finances but also the feelings ofanimosity and threat engendered in colleagues in allied professions, especially `theauthorities', by the refugees' very presence.

The benefit of addressing unspoken fears rather than leaving children to deal with themon their own, as were most of the Kindertransportees, is now well known. That being so, weasked ourselves how far a group experience so many years later could provide a safe placewhere those fears could at last be voiced and thought about. Those who came to the groupsand the workshop selected to come and clearly came because of some inner impetus.Something was creating a pressure, urging them to look for some better resolution of whathad been shelved for so long. Having achieved success in building their careers and families,as most had, they were faced, like all of us, with surveying the past and looking at whatneeded to be sorted out before the end of life could be accepted. For people whose lives hadbeen more than ordinarily threatened this might be even more important psychic work thanfor most. `Dead' and `buried' parts would need to be integrated into the whole. For some thiswas precipitated by their children departing into adult independence. Others felt disturbed byseeing their grown-up children in a troubled state and became aware that something wentwrong, that unwittingly they had handed on to their children something that was a burden.Pines (1993) writes, `It was as if their adaptation to life after the war had collapsed with theirchildren's separation from them and the parting of the secure world of mother and child.'

But what about a more unconscious dimension of fears, for example, the anger andaggression towards the parents for what was experienced as rejection while knowing it to beto save their lives? Especially when there had been previous separations, reacted to in variousways, this could be expected to affect the separation experience of the Kindertransport.Children who live their lives with parents present can get a perspective of their parents whichcorrects ideas of rejection as they get opportunities to repair actual aggression andunconscious destructive wishes. Such exchanges and interactions are the stuff of livingtogether; but when parents are absent, and therefore are experienced as not having survivedthe phantasied attacks, the possibilities for reparation are cut off. The person then may ormay not find satisfactory substitutes according to circumstances and the bent of theirpersonality to use, or not be able to use, what is available to them. Furthermore, we foundthat the trauma of the Kindertransport experience, when superimposed on underlying earlierdeprivations and separations, caused anxiety of an acute nature to surface. Some of oursubjects voiced their anxiety about how threatening it would be to get in touch with whatwere unbearable experiences, what it might be safe to verbalize and what might lead tobreakdown.


Some who came to the groups were able to reveal and share a small part of their painfulexperiences, but then retreated from further disclosure and awareness, expressing the view,as one participant put it, `Better to let sleeping dogs lie', or to accept damage limitation ratherthan go further. In the course of the groups, memories were allowed to come into a sharedarena, some of which had been kept out of mind for 50 years and more. Personal stories wererevised and sometimes greatly enriched through telling, exploring and retelling. Somemourning work was done on the losses that, at the time, were not and could not be known orunderstood when the allabsorbing business of surviving had to take precedence. At times, inthe groups, joy was experienced, such as when grandchildren were felt to be very precious asaffirmation of the defeat of the persecutors' purpose. Some of their experiences wereevidently of considerable importance for the group members although, paralleling theoriginal Kindertransport experience, they might be more likely to remember it overall aspainful and disturbing.

Out of almost 10,000 children who came to England in 1938-9 less than 1,000 took partin the 50th year reunion in 1989. The theme of `where were the others' was manifest then.Including those who made contact with us but did not join a group, 38 formerKindertransportees participated in the LINK project out of several hundred for whom it couldhave been relevant. Perhaps the idea of remembering, repossessing and reassessing theKindertransport experience was too daunting for many who preferred not to disturb buriedmemories. A parallel might be drawn here with families who found intolerable the idea ofparting from their children even though it would physically save them as they sensed thatsuch a drastic separation might be at too high a psychological and emotional cost. This issueis poignantly presented in the play, Kindertransport, which poses the question whether 9-year-old Eva would have preferred to remain in her family and share its fate rather than tocarry the burden of survival on her own. David (1989) makes this point about the 100children she interviewed for their wartime experiences: `While physical deprivations likecold and hunger left them relatively indifferent, their main fear had been of being separatedfrom their parents. The majority had not been afraid of bombings; most children had evenbeen fascinated by them.'

A few general conclusions could be attempted. Although the Kinder who were youngestat the time of separation tended to be more profoundly affected by the experience than thosewho had been older, a more important factor seemed to be the degree of stability of thefamily beforehand. Being able to maintain a link with siblings or some important person fromthe pre-separation life was found to be an important aid to psychic growth and developmentin the new life. Experiencing and expressing negative feelings were found to be a profoundproblem in our sample. Some negativity and aggression towards us, the group leaders, wereexpressed, but mainly through various forms of displacement and inaction. For example, onlya third of the Sheffield workshop members returned their feedback sheets. We can speculatethat the nonreturn of questionnaires may indicate an overall indifference or even contemptfor the work, a disappointment at failure of expectations or anxiety about disturbing thestatus quo that led to feelings of wanting no more contact with the group or the facilitators.The original experience as refugees in England and the circumstances of separation, even forthose who were reasonably well treated in England, was perhaps too hurtful for them to beable to experience what we could offer to them as good or useful. This was repeated in theLondon groups where some members could find little

Ruth Barnett 193

if anything that they could feel was useful to them, while others could experience somebenefit.

Resistance to owning the need or wish for help, even in the face of severe suffering, iswell known. From the growing Holocaust-related literature, as with our own findings, itwould appear that these `first generation' people, who were immigrants under traumaticcircumstances, are not on the whole as open to using psychotherapeutic opportunities astheir `second generation' offspring who were born in this country and have grown up in aclimate in society in which psychotherapy is becoming increasingly less threatening andmore acceptable. Some former Kindertransportees have been able to use earlier opportunitiesfor therapy and some have found other ways of making meaning out of their experiences.One of these is through `taking histories', whereby people tell and record their life-stories forarchives that can be stored for posterity and future research. The last decade has witnessed aplethora of books by former Kindertransportees and others writing about them. Some recentexamples of these are Bader Whiteman (1993), Darke (1994), Leverton and Lowensohn (1990), Levi (1995) and Turner (1990).

What is not so well known or documented is the resistance of those, including membersof the caring professions, in contact with people who have suffered trauma. Many peoplewho are in a position to inform and encourage those who might benefit from psychotherapyare set against it, and this often operates unconsciously rather than deliberately. An exampleof this is an organization which promised to put information about our groups in itsnewsletter and twice failed to do so. There seems to be a pervasive idea among thoseprofessionals working with them that, for Holocaust survivors, psychotherapy is `negative' incomparison with what they see as `positive' activities like `giving witness', socializing andgenerally confirming their success in surviving. As Freud (1920) says, in Beyond thePleasure Principle,`... When people unfamiliar with analysis feel an obscure fear - a dread ofrousing something that, so they feel, is better left sleeping - what they are afraid of at bottomis the emergence of this compulsion with its hint of possession by some "daemonic" power'.Their aversion to allowing repetition compulsion to take place compels them to side with thesufferers' negative effects of trauma, that is, the compulsion not to know, and this could beregarded as a marshalling of manic defence against depression. We found that working withthese groups means being willing to tolerate being seen as the sadistic oppressor in thetransference and bear with projections containing intense elements of pain, guilt anddepression that can at times feel quite overwhelming.

References

Bader Whiteman, D. (1993) The Uprooted:: A Hitler Legacy. New York: Insight Books.Bergman, M.S. & Jucovy, M.E. (Eds.) (1982) Generations of the Holocaust. Basic Books.Bion, W.R. (1962) Learning from Experience. London; Heinemann.Bowlby, J. (1980) Attachment and Loss. London: Hogarth Press.Brookner, A. (1985) Hotel du Lac. London: Jonathan Cape.Brookner, A. (1988) Latecomers. Jonathan Cape Ltd.Darke, D.M. (1994) The Leaves Have Lost Their Trees. University of Bradford MA dissertation.David, K. (1989) A Child's War: World War 17 Through the Eyes of Children. New York: Avon Books.Dugowson, M. (1993) Director of French film Mina Tannenbaum.Freud, S. (1920) Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In Standard Edition 18, pp. 35-6.Freud, S. (1937) Moses and Monotheism. In Standard Edition 23, pp. 72-6.


Gampel, Y. (1992) I was a Shoah Child. In British Journal of Psychotherapy 8(4): 391-400.Keilson, H. (1992) Sequential Traumatisation in Children. The Hebrew University, Jerusalem: Magnes

Press.Kestenberg, J.S. (1992) Children under the Nazi yoke. In British Journal of Psychotherapy 8(4): 374-

90.Leverton, B. & Lowensohn, S. (Eds.) (1990)1 Came Alone: The Stories of the Kindertransports. The

Book Guild Ltd.Levi, T. (1995) A Cat Called Adolf. Valentine Mitchell.Pines, D. (1993) A Woman's Unconscious Use of her Body. London: Virago Press.Robertson, J. & Robertson, J. (1971) Young children in brief separation: a fresh look. In Psychoanalytic

Study of the Child 26: 264-315.Samuels, D. (1992) Kindertransport. Verity Bargate Award winner, staged by Abigail Morris at the

Cockpit Theatre, April-May 1993.Turner, B. (1990) `... And the Policeman Smiled.. 10,000 Children Escape from Nazi Europe. London:

Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd.

the other side of the abyss: a psychodynamic approach to working with groups of people who came to...

Documents