The Picture of (Mental) Health: Images of Jewish ‘Unaccompanied Children’ in the Aftermath of the Second World War

Abstract

This article uses photographs of a group of child Holocaust survivors – the so-called ‘Lingfield children’ from the Weir Courtney care home in Lingfield, Surrey – to explore how images of survivor children were deployed in the early postwar period. It argues that these images responded to broader anxieties about a generation of ‘war-damaged’ European children, and in their self-conscious portrayal of happy and settled survivor children, they intervened in postwar debates about the parameters of a ‘normal’ childhood. These images suggest that processes of reconstruction after the war were understood to be as much about psychological as physical healing, and that images of children recovering in mental health spoke to a number of postwar concerns: fears about the stability of postwar democracies, new understandings of the role of humanitarian aid, early understanding of the genocide of Europe’s Jews, and growing public interest in child psychoanalysis and issues of child development.