The War After

Anne Karpf's Polish-born parents survived the Nazi Holocaust. When they came to Britain they told their stories to their children, who came to feel responsible for their parents' well being. The need to protect and nourish her parents took precedence over almost every other impulse, stunting her development until finally, with the return of rampaging childhood eczema in her early thirties, her skin began to articulate some of the buried distress and anger. With the help of psychoanalysis, she explored the ways in which her experiences had been coloured by those of her parents, met other children of Holocaust survivors and eventually, with the birth of her own child, began to accept, understand and be proud of her heritage. Entwining Karpf's odyssey with the accounts of her parents survival, this book examines the history of British attitudes to Jews and to the Holocaust as well as the growing international literature on the children of Holocaust survivors, and turns an often wry comic eye on the parent-child struggle.