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In her comments on "Grief and Mourning" by John Bowlby, Anna Freud (1960) refers to analyses of young concentration-camp victims who have undergone repeated traumatic separations from birth and infancy onward, and to the expectation that these cases will supply more detailed information concerning the links between early separation and later pathology. The paper which follows is based on the analysis of one of these children and represents an attempt to trace the difficulties of personality development as they occur under the impact of such fateful constellations.
Elizabeth's early known history consists of a small number of isolated data pieced together gradually from some information obtained from children in her group or their relatives. She herself had no memory whatsoever of the time before she came to England, with the exception of very few unconnected images. She and her elder sister, Helen, are presumed to have been born in Czechoslovakia and to have been taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp without parents. At least the names of both children were entered in the books of the camp without those of mother, father, or other relatives. The children had no camp documents, except for numbers tattooed on their arms.
In Auschwitz they formed part of a group of eight children kept alive for unknown purposes. The eldest among them, Charlie, played