Seventy-five years after the Holocaust, those who survived as children now form the majority of survivors still alive and able to speak about their experiences. Over the last two decades, their accounts have gained recognition as valuable tools for historical reconstruction. Scholars such as Debórah Dwork (Children with a Star [1991]), Nicholas Stargardt (Witnesses of War [2005]), and Lynn Nicholas (Cruel World [2006]) were among the first to gesture in that direction.

Rebecca Clifford's book makes a distinctive contribution to the growing literature on child survivors as it uncovers the postwar lives of the very youngest survivors who had the slimmest chance of survival of any age group during the Holocaust. Survivors focus on the stories of one hundred Jewish children born between 1935 and 1944, who lived through the Nazi atrocities in camps and ghettos, in hiding or in flight. “Who am I and how can I make sense of my life when I don't know where I come from?” (3) These were pressing questions for those very young survivors in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Turning to a wealth of original material—archival documents, aid organization records and care home reports, indemnity claims, interviews with child survivors, foster parents, social workers, and psychotherapists—Clifford explores the legacy of the Holocaust in the long term, revealing the complexities of the interplay between trauma, memory, and identity in the survivors' lives.

Early postwar estimates provided by international aid organizations suggest that 150,000 of Europe's Jewish children survived the Holocaust, out of a prewar population of 1.5 million. Yet such figures are complicated by questions about the accepted boundaries of childhood at the time, the nature of survival, and the visibility of child survivors to aid agencies after the war. In her discussion of methodology, Clifford pays due consideration to the complexities of the child survivors' situation as well as the significance of names as a marker of identity: While archival policies often enforce confidentiality and anonymity, for child survivors whose names were concealed, changed, or simply lost during the Holocaust, preserving identity becomes a sensitive issue. Clifford ably navigates the situation by using the children's first name and the initial of their surname at birth unless they requested anonymity.

The book follows a broadly chronological approach, charting the children's wartime experiences and the different trajectories their lives took as they grew into adulthood and old age. Special emphasis is placed on the early life of child survivors and their immediate postwar experience. As many child survivors lacked clear memories of prewar life, liberation did not always bring closure to their wartime experience. Numerous children who survived in hiding found themselves torn away from what were often loving host families. Repeated separation from caregivers and frequent displacement could be just as unsettling as reunions with surviving parents, siblings, or other relatives, who were no longer familiar to the children or able to tend to their emotional needs. The adults’ silencing of the children's questions, their insistence on living by forgetting and accepting that they were the “lucky ones” further tore the social fabric of children's memory. Postwar care homes run by Holocaust survivors were often better equipped to support the uprooted children as they developed a new and complex identity based on their shared experience of war. Clifford's findings suggest that many children preferred communal living with other young survivors to living in the fragile, post-Holocaust family—a realization that challenges value judgments about family reunifications and happy endings for survivor children.

Of course, families were not alone in crafting momentous turning points in the children's postwar experience. Clifford deftly shines a light on the wide array of actors involved in postwar child aid. Her evaluation of the so-called war orphan schemes coordinated after 1945 by Jewish emigration agencies and international relief organizations corroborates the findings of Tara Zahra (The Lost Children [2011]): competing claims were placed on children as remnants and symbols by nations, families, and religions, and strategic considerations played an important part in the resettlement schemes. Children were chosen according to their expected ability to integrate into the new environment, and orphan care was a foremost priority. However, Clifford argues that young survivors were often able to subvert aid organization agendas, even if that meant concealing information and misleading adults.

Child survivor agency in negotiating identity and life trajectories is a major theme in the book and carries into the final section, which provides a broad overview of how individuals understand their adult life in relationship to the past, how they narrate their experience in interviews, and how they fit into survivor networks. Clifford's survey of the development of memory agency since the 1970s is particularly insightful for understanding the difficulties arising for child survivors both from the testimonial framework and the rhetoric of legacies used by certain oral history projects. The construction of well-composed accounts aligned to set expectations of linear, coherent narratives with a redemptive message inevitably involves stylizing experiences and suppressing the sense of uncertainty, rupture, and loss inherent to child survivor stories. Some interviewees try to meet such audience expectations, while others choose to maintain the authenticity of their fragmented stories.

In analyzing key experiences of child survivors such as the immediate postwar resettlement in pan-European and global locations, the restitution process started with the West German Federal Indemnification Law of 1953, and the late recognition of the specific child survivor status in the 1990s, Clifford impressively balances the “telling” of the story from the children's perspectives with interludes focused on the visions and expectations of the adults. There is sometimes a slight tendency to amplify the aspect of child agency and the female voice. However, this should not detract from the fact that Rebecca Clifford has assembled a rich and timely examination of the long-term experiential drama of child Holocaust survivors that challenges in many ways commonplace assumptions about children, trauma, and victimhood.