Community

This chapter examines the development of survivor communities in Britain and contextualises this with events in postwar Britain occurring concurrently. These communities do not develop in a vacuum and convey the growing desire for survivors to keep in touch, support each other, undertake charity fundraising and promote Holocaust education and commemoration nationwide. Many survivors stay in touch in smaller groups but formal organisations/charities representing the survivor community are a later phenomenon. This chapter considers the differing developments of the ‘45 Aid Society as a formal organisation in the 1960s and the Child Survivors’ Association of Great Britain, formed in the mid-1990s. The dynamics of these groups are complex, with the acceptance or rejection of individual experiences based on definitions of survivorship, leading some survivors to feel more closely connected than others. Overall, this chapter considers challenges to belonging in the survivor community as well as the bond that can develop between survivors as experiential kin.