Life After Death

Laurence Rees recommends a moving and often surprising examination of the difficulties faced by children rebuilding their lives after surviving the Holocaust

- Laurence Rees

Rebecca Clifford has written a wonderful and important book. It’s wonderful because she is a gifted historian who writes with immense clarity – and important because it corrects so many false perceptions about what it was like to survive the Holocaust as a Jewish child.

She reveals, for example, that it simply isn’t necessarily the case that the most horrendous period of these children’s lives was the years during the Second World War. In fact, for many children – protected and hidden by non-Jews – this was often a time when they felt secure. Even more counterintuitive is the fact that, as Clifford says, in some instances it was possible that “daily life in a Nazi camp could be relatively stable for a small child”.