More Nights Than Days is a unique exploration of the experience of children who survived the Holocaust—including Roma and Sinti victims—and the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. Children are among the principal victims of armed conflicts and slaughters; nonetheless, they perceive events through the prism of their unique perspective and have a range of coping techniques adults don't possess.
This overview of writings of ninety-one child survivors bears evidence from a wide range of human ruthlessness. The author presents little-known texts along with famous memoirs and autobiographical fiction, with abundant quotations. Many of these are not only compelling as historical testimony, but poetic and stirringly expressive. Yudit Kiss has not written a historical study or literary criticism of the children’s books. She explores, instead, what the authors went through and what they felt and understood about their experience. An accessible and captivating reading, this volume presents a close-up, human size dimension of the destruction. The books written by child survivors also describe the resources and means that helped them to remain human even in the deepest well of inhumanity, offering precious lessons about resistance and resilience.M
Yudit Kiss is an independent economic researcher and author. She was born and educated in Budapest, Hungary and is currently based in Geneva, Switzerland. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from the Karl Marx University of Economics (at present Corvinus University of Budapest) and has worked in Hungary, Mexico, the United Kingdom and Switzerland.
1. The Children’s Books
Birds’ land
Yet another book about the Holocaust?!
The context
The selection
Reception
The books
The trials of writing
Why did they write?
Tombs made of words
Traces of a lost world
The workings of memory
Memories engraved in the body
Writing
Life and literature
Creating distance
The regard of the children
Through their eyes
Sensory world
Reality of uncertain contours
Magical worldview
Interpreting the world
Knowing without knowing
2. Persecution
Exclusion
Everyday racism
Social inequalities
The road to mass murder
Facing persecution: denial
Families in the eye of the storm
Conflicts
When families fail
Children becoming parents
Stolen childhood
Identity
Hiding identities
God—Faithlessness
Sacrifice
Visions of apocalypse
Hostile nature
Stranger to oneself
Space and time out of joint
Final deprivation
3. Coping: Refuges and Escape Routes
Imagination as a refuge
Refuges: The magic of words
Literature
Writing
Music and other forms of art
Escape routes: Nature
Memory as a refuge
Escape routes: Solidarity
The Righteous ones
Resistance
The courage of despair
Refuges: Friendship and love
Sexuality
Escape routes: Laughter
The theatre of the absurd
Playing
4. The Aftermath: Surviving Survival
Return to what used to be home
Return to “normal”
Lingering racism
Silence
Coping with the loss
From persecution to opposition
Exile
Exiled to a new language
Out of time in a no-man’s land
The war is not over
Marked for life
Return to life: rediscovering the beauty of nature
Feeling human again
Becoming an adult—love and sex
Rediscovering arts and books and creativity
Breaking the silence—writing
5. The Next Generation
Never again?
Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia
The next generation
The prism of senses
A genocide in the making—discrimination and persecution
Sinister forebodings
The collapse of a world
Unreal reality
Exclusion
Poisonous language
Confiscated time
Erasing the past
The end of childhood
Lost trust
....
