Distraction

This chapter focuses on how life processes and moving forwarded distracted survivors from their traumatic experiences and memories of their perished families. This can be considered ‘putting trauma on the backburner’, through pursuing success in the world of work, dating and marriage and forging identities outside of their survivorship. A central argument of this chapter is that survivors from these cohorts, despite many being aged 17 and older, settled down much later than those who survived the Holocaust as adults. Reasons for this differ but include their formative years being damaged by trauma and the desire to continue learning and recapture a lost adolescence before committing to marriage and family life. Overall, this chapter considers how forging a new and stable life distracted survivors from their memories, including themes of work ethic, the importance of material success and mostly marrying outside of the survivor community. It will consider how some survivors within the wider cohort stayed in touch throughout this period, attending each other’s weddings.