Reshaping Memory: Counter-Narratives in Kindertransport Literature

This study examines the literary narratives (both non-fictional and fictional) of child Holocaust survivors who were evacuated on one of the Kindertransports to Britain focusing in particular on the writing of Karen Gershon, Ruth Barnett, and Josef Eisinger. My focus is on the Kinder's numerous retellings of their experience across different genres. I demonstrate that by transposing their story from one genre to the next the Kinder's narratives make observable the constructive process of memory and its mediated character. I argue that by continuously rewriting their Kindertransport experience, Gershon, Barnett, and Eisinger shed light on generally silenced elements of their evacuation. Their retellings challenge the British celebratory narrative, and reshape discourses around the history and memory of this rescue operation. Together, Gershon, Barnett, and Eisinger's accounts provide alternative perspectives on the Kindertransport based on their age, gender, emigration, and postwar relationships with surviving parents and relatives. Each of their corpuses encourages new dialogues in Kindertransport studies and introduces different literary genres to Kindertransport literature. Gershon's publications, ranging from her poems on the Jewish condition to her novels on the estrangement of German Jewish refugees in Britain, complicates perceptions of the redemptive celebratory narrative by complicating Britain's hospitable image. Barnett's corpus, which began with her academic publications in the field of psychology and eventually came to include an autobiography and a play, challenges the selective celebratory narrative around the Kinder's survival and adaptation in Britain by describing the after-effects of the partitioning of families on the Kinder. Eisinger's memoir, Flight and Refuge, composed of his wartime diary entries and retrospective commentary on these entries, exposes the power dynamics at stake in the deportation of older male Kinder from Britain to Canada. His narrative addresses the transnational character of this operation and the Kindertransport memory of Britain's former colonies, despite the centrality of Britain in the memorialization of the Kindertransport. In addition to introducing new paradigms in Kindertransport studies, my analysis of Gershon, Barnett, and Eisinger's respective corpuses confirms the importance of literary representations of the Kindertransport in preventing its narrative from remaining an oversimplified and solely celebratory one.