Feeling Familial Separation: Emotions, Agency, and Holocaust Refugee Youths

Abstract

Abstract: During the years of the Nazi regime, well over 1,000 European Jewish youths migrated to the United States in organized unaccompanied child migration schemes. These youths left an abundant, and largely untapped, trove of sources in which they constructed narratives of their lives and emotions to their parents in letters, to their social workers in their various interactions, and to themselves in their diaries. Though refugee youths undeniably felt a range of emotions, in this article I suggest that emotional expression tells us less about the emotional inner lives of youths than the attempt to exert and subvert control and power in a topsy-turvy world. By drawing attention to the language of emotions, their inherent power dynamics, and the potential gulf between emotions and experience, this article opens a conversation about our capacity to document children's agency and to study emotions to explain decision-making and experience.