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In Ghosts of Home (2010), Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer recount their 1998 return to Czernowitz with Marianne Hirsch's parents, first-generation adult survivors of the Holocaust. Hoping to gain insight into the latter's life before the time of persecutions and deportations, they visit the home where Marianne's mother, Lotte, spent her first twenty-seven years of life and where the authors observe her ambiguous reactions to two enduring objects that she still finds there: two tile stoves. The stoves possess ambivalent symbolism. While they represent everyday, positive prewar life—a “childhood sense world of familial warmth and safety, of privacy and interiority” (Hirsch & Spitzer, 2010, p. 295)—at the same time they recall the abnormal, negative experience of wartime, when the two stoves were no longer used for heating but for cooking and baking. Thus does the first-generation adult survivor recover her own personal sense of the past as a contradictory mixture of nostalgic and painful feelings toward the small pleasures that ensured or accompanied survival.
This essay begins by asking whether the equivalent of the homely pleasures of pre-Holocaust existence can be found in the case of child survivors, and, if not, with what implications for the survivor. Serious research into the lives and experiences of child survivors has derived importantly from the work of Judith S. Kestenberg, the founder of the International Study of the Organized Persecution of Children and the psychoanalyst