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Reaching retirement, war children — those who were children during the Second World War — have begun to look back and are now finally trying to work through their experiences. A large number of associations devoted to war children all over Europe bear witness to this phenomenon. Many of them seek understanding and recognition of their harsh experiences, whereas others want to be able to forget.
On the initiative of the Shoa Foundation, the Jewish children who came to Sweden from various camps, ghettos or hiding places after the war have been interviewed as adults. Suzanne Kaplan was engaged in this task at an early stage and in 2002 collected her conclusions in her doctoral dissertation, “Child survivors in the holocaust”. She has now expanded her thoughts in a new book, Children in genocide, published 2008 by the International Psychoanalysis Library, a fact that must be seen as an important acknowledgement of her scientific work.
To some extent, the two volumes cover the same material, but in the present published book, her ideas and original hypotheses have grown into a theory about trauma and affect regulation. The book also contains new material primarily from Kaplan's encounters with children after the recent genocide in Rwanda and a description of the historical background to the conflict between Hutus and Tutsis. In her report from her interviews with young boys who survived this war, she has been able to elucidate how they have dealt with their frightful experiences.
In her dissertation, Kaplan analyzed her interview material qualitatively, applying the methodology of Grounded theory. She emphasized the importance of being open, avoiding the use of ready-made hypotheses. Although her starting point was psychoanalytical, she endeavored to avoid ready-made concepts or a psychoanalytical vocabulary. She tried to find her own terms for the common factors she found in the children's experiences. There, she introduced the concepts of generational collapse versus gene