The effects of parents' deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan have been frequent topics on blogs and in news reporting over the last several years. There is no question that children can be seriously affected by separations from parents, by a parent's death, and -- perhaps not least-- by life with a returned parent who has been physically or mentally damaged by war experiences.
Thinking about children's responses in the present day, I was reminded of an account written decades ago by Anna Freud about a small group of preschool children who came under her care at the end of World War II. These children, who were described in an article by Freud and Sophie Dann in 1951, had all been separated from their German Jewish mothers when the mothers were sent to death camps. At least one of the children was less than a year old at the time of the separation. By the time they came to Anna Freud, the children were between 3 and 4 years of age. They were probably the most carefully studied of all children who have been impacted by war.
The group of 6 young children had been sent to Theresienstadt, a "model" concentration camp that was presented as providing a humane environment. There, the children were subjected to limited and inappropriate diets, rampant disease and lack of medical care, vermin, and of course an anxious existence among frightened adults who did what they could for the young ones. There were many children of different ages at Theresienstadt, and at the end of the war in 1945 most of them were transported to Britain, where many were adopted or fostered by volunteer families.
The six preschoolers, who had been together as long as they could remember, were kept together for the time being, and a country house was loaned to Anna Freud so she could set up an appropriate care situation for the children. This house, "Bulldogs Bank", was their home for a year, at the end of which most were adopted into different families. At Bulldogs Bank, the children were cared for by a concerned staff, and efforts were made to introduce them gradually to a normal way of life which they had never before experienced.
As we might expect, the Bulldogs Bank children were somewhat different in behavior and development than children who had lived in a family. They had some language-- including swear words and insults-but of course did not know English. Their language ability developed rapidly over that first year and included a transition to the English language spoken around them. They quickly adapted to going outdoors, to cars (which were unfamiliar to them), and to neighbors they would meet on daily walks. Not surprisingly, they remained terrified of dogs.
But what was most noticeable about this group of preschoolers was their devotion to each other and frequent hostility to other people. As Freud and Dann reported, the children would be very concerned if a member of the group was not with them (if sick in bed, for example), and made sure that every child got his or her share of treats like sweets. This apparent empathy and eagerness to share were far beyond what we would expect of children of this age who had lived normal lives. The other children in the group were the only human beings who had been consistently and reliably present for each one, and the resulting relationship appears to have been much like the emotional attachment of a child to a parent. (And this is interesting, because obviously the other young children could not protect, feed, or provide realistic security, so the motivation for this kind of attachment could hardly be anything except the need for consistent social responsiveness from another person.) In the first months, this empathy did not extend to adult staff members, who were sometimes fought wildly by individual children.
The Bulldogs Bank children were eventually adopted into separate families. Little was recorded of their early responses to adoption, which one would think must have been intensely negative because of the separation from their "psychological siblings". Of course, they took the names of their adoptive families, so it has not been easy to keep track of them. However, they are only in their late 60s today, so it is possible that more may be learned about their memories. In 1983, Sarah Moskowitz interviewed some of the Bulldogs Bank survivors and reported their comments in her book "Love Despite Hate" (New York: Schocken). Although she described one of the interviewees as somewhat emotionally disturbed, and another as obviously experiencing painful memories, she found that on the whole they had recovered and experienced successful lives. One interesting point mentioned by Moskowitz was that only one of the survivors expressed an interest in knowing what happened to the other children; this fact might be interpreted to mean that the separation from the group did have an impact equivalent to the loss of a parent, with despair and detachment occurring as a result.
