Journal of War & Culture Studies

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The Picture of (Mental) Health: Images of Jewish

‘Unaccompanied Children’ in the Aftermath of the
Second World War

Rebecca Clifford

To cite this article: Rebecca Clifford (2022) The Picture of (Mental) Health: Images of Jewish
‘Unaccompanied Children’ in the Aftermath of the Second World War, Journal of War & Culture
Studies, 15:2, 133-156, DOI: 10.1080/17526272.2022.2065123

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journal of war & culture studies, Vol. 15 No. 2, May 2022, 133–156

The Picture of (Mental) Health: Images

of Jewish ‘Unaccompanied Children’ in
the Aftermath of the Second World War
Rebecca Clifford
Durham University

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-con-
scious 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 under-
stood 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 psychoanaly-
sis and issues of child development.

keywords Photography, Second World War, Holocaust, children, psychol-

ogy, psychoanalysis

Introduction
The Second World War left an unprecedented number of orphaned children and
separated families in its wake, and images of ‘unaccompanied children’ (in the par-
lance of the time) improving in health were found frequently in newspapers and
newsmagazines in the early post-war years, in Europe and beyond. The post-war
rehabilitation of ‘unaccompanied children’ focused not only on restoring physical
health, but also on the normalization of children’s psychological and emotional
worlds – and photographs both reflected this process of psychic reconstruction,
and marked it out as a priority for humanitarian aid organisations. At the same
© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDeriva-
tives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in
any way. DOI 10.1080/17526272.2022.2065123
134 REBECCA CLIFFORD

time, fears of ‘wolf children’ as carriers of destructive forces informed these photo-
graphs, and these images situated children as symbols of renewal and redemption,
but also reflected wider anxieties concerning the instability of European societies in
the immediate aftermath of war. This paper explores how viewers likely interpreted
and responded to images of ‘unaccompanied children’ in the early postwar years,
but also how the authors and the users of these images – the print press and the
aid organisations responsible for the children’s care – deployed these photographs
to intervene in a broader postwar debate about what constituted a ‘normal’ child-
hood. It argues that these images provide compelling evidence that those concerned
with the welfare of children after the war saw their chief task as the reconstruction
of children’s (purportedly) damaged minds, rather than their physical bodies – and
the photographs they used helped viewers to re-imagine what childhood should
look like in the wake of a conflict that was uniquely devastating and deadly to
children.
This paper focuses on photographs of a specific small group of children: young
Jewish survivors of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and wartimes in hiding who found
themselves in a dedicated care home for ‘children from the camps’, Weir Court-
ney, in Lingfield, Surrey in 1945. The ‘Lingfield children’, as they were often
called, received considerable coverage in the British print press in the years
after the war, and as such were a uniquely recognisable group of ‘unaccompanied
children’, at least for British audiences. The adults who created and circulated
these images – largely anonymous press photographers and photographers
working for aid organisations – sought to impart a redemptive message about
the psychological and emotional rehabilitation of the children, and we can use
these images to unpick the shifting ways in which conceptions of ‘normal’ child-
hood, as defined by a newly empowered cohort of professional child psycholo-
gists and psychoanalysts, were being reworked after the war.1 These images
remind us that the process of post-war reconstruction was as much about
minds and psyches as it was about buildings and bodies, and they suggest that
we might gain fresh insights into the period by exploring the intersection of
worlds that are usually studied and understood discreetly: postwar fears about
the psychological health of future citizens, which informed fears about ‘healthy’
democracies; understandings of the function of humanitarian aid in the aftermath
of war; early collective understanding of the legacies of the conflict and the Holo-
caust; and growing public interest in psychoanalytically-informed ideas about
child development.

1
The images of the Lingfield children used in both the press and in fundraising literature are overwhelmingly uncre-
dited. Some of the photographs used by the Central British Fund in their pamphlets may have been taken by Erica
Marks, a German Jewish refugee who arrived in Britain in 1936. Marks often visited Weir Courtney after the war
to photograph the children, and many of the Lingfield children have Marks’s photos in their personal collections.
See her obituary in the AJR Journal (June 2010), 15. Otherwise, we know little indeed about those who stood on
the other side of the lens.
 THE PICTURE OF (MENTAL) HEALTH 135

The Lingfield children were a small group — fewer than thirty children spent time
in the care home during the years of its existence — but to their carers and benefac-
tors they represented a monumental problem. The International Red Cross esti-
mated that thirteen million children in Europe had lost at least one parent during
the war. An estimated fifteen million children remained homeless in 1946 (Gigliotti,
2018:154; Zahra, 2011: ix-x). An entire generation of continental Europeans had
had their childhoods devastated by the war, and statistics were even more alarming
for those who were Jewish. Of an estimated pre-war population of 1.5 million, only
180,000 European Jewish children were alive at the war’s end (Dwork, 1991:xii;
Clifford, 2020:6). They had survived in hiding with non-Jewish families or religious
organisations, or had been interned in ghettos and deported to concentration
camps; roughly 30,000 had survived by fleeing to the Soviet Union, and an
unknown number managed to escape into neutral zones such as Switzerland, but
the vast majority were murdered. Of those who survived, most were adolescents.
The Lingfield children, all of whom were younger than eleven when they were
brought to Britain, were so heavily photographed in large part because they rep-
resented an unusual group: pre-adolescent concentration camp survivors were rela-
tively few in number. Jewish children who lived to 1945 managed to reunite with
members of their birth families more often than we might expect: for example, of
the 120,000 Jewish children who received aid funding through the American
Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (the JDC), the most important of the
postwar Jewish humanitarian aid organisations, only 32,000 were in JDC-funded
care homes. The rest lived with surviving members of their families of origin, but
often in extremely precarious circumstances (and those in care homes were not
necessarily orphans; many surviving parents were too destitute, too exhausted or
too ill to care for their children).2 The postwar situation for Europe’s children
broadly, and for Europe’s Jewish children specifically, was thus a very troubling
one, and images of the Lingfield children spoke to the broader anxieties around
the question of what would become of this war-damaged generation.
The Lingfield children had a particular and powerful connection both to British
Jewish philanthropic and humanitarian aid organisations, and to the increasingly
influential transnational circle of child psychoanalysts in the orbit of Anna
Freud, who was the daughter of Sigmund Freud and one of the founders of the
field of child psychoanalysis. The matron of Weir Courtney, Alice Goldberger,
was a childcare expert and lay psychoanalyst who had trained in German child-care
centres before the war, and had then served as superintendent of Anna Freud’s
Hampstead War Nurseries during the war (the Hampstead War Nurseries were
set up to care for children made homeless by bombing, or whose mothers had to
work in the war industries)(Jones, 2020:103-6; Shapira, 2013: 66-77). In the
summer of 1945, the Central British Fund (CBF), an established Jewish aid organ-
isation that had co-ordinated the earlier transport of Jewish child refugees to Britain

2
JDC figures given in New York Times, 11 February 1947.
136 REBECCA CLIFFORD

on the Kindertransport scheme, petitioned the Home Office to allow ‘one thousand
concentration camp orphans’ to be brought to Britain for rehabilitation. On Anna
Freud’s request, Goldberger was appointed as one of the wardens at the reception
centre near Windermere that was opened to temporarily house the first children to
arrive on this scheme. In August 1945, three hundred children found in or near the
liberated ghetto-camp of Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia were brought to this
reception centre. Of this group, fewer than twenty were pre-adolescent. There
were six three-year-old toddlers, who were quickly sent on to a special facility in
Sussex, and a handful of children between the ages of 4 and 10. Goldberger
worked to secure a home for this group, persuading Sir Benjamin Drage, a
Jewish philanthropist who owned a chain of furniture stores, to donate part of
his country estate Weir Courtney in Lingfield as a temporary home for the children
(Moskovitz, 1983).3 Goldberger volunteered to act as matron for this new care
home, and she, her staff and nine child survivors of Theresienstadt ghetto-camp
moved in in December 1945. They were joined in 1946 by five children who had
survived Auschwitz, and a small handful of children who had survived the war in
hiding or in orphanages. Other children trickled into the care home over the
years, some of whom with mothers who had managed to come to Britain on a
special immigration scheme for domestic workers, but there were never more
than thirty children who spent part or all of their postwar childhoods under
Alice Goldberger’s care in Weir Courtney.4 What they lacked in size they made
up for in influence: because of their importance both to British Jewish aid organis-
ations and to Anna Freud’s circle, the Lingfield children were one of the most
photographed, studied and discussed groups of child Holocaust survivors of the
early postwar period. The anonymous photographers who trained their lens on
the children did so at the behest of newspapers or of aid agencies, and this paper
examines the ways in which these images were composed, edited and distributed
with two distinct audiences in mind: readers of the British print press, and
donors to British and international aid schemes.5
Photographs of the Lingfield children likely had a distorting effect on public
understanding of what child survivors of Nazi persecution looked like, because
the vast majority of the children who were brought to Britain on the CBF’s
scheme were male adolescents. In focusing on these particular young children,

3
The six ‘toddlers’ joined the slightly older children at Weir Courtney after a year, although five of the six then quickly
moved on into private homes where they were eventually adopted. Despite entering Britain on temporary visas, many of
the older children remained with Alice Goldberger at Weir Courtney until 1949, and then moved to a second care home,
Lingfield House in Isleworth, where Goldberger remained the matron. These children stayed with Goldberger until they
aged out of care.
4
On the scheme for domestic workers, see London, 2000: 266.
5
This paper draws on a sample of a dozen articles on the Lingfield children from national British newspapers and news
magazines, and roughly a dozen mentions of the children in aid agency pamphlets. This represents only a fraction of the
total, however. There was considerable coverage of the children in local and regional papers in Britain, and a portion of
the relevant aid agency material has been lost. We know, for example, that the Foster Parents’ Plan used images of the
Lingfield children in their fundraising literature (some of these images are preserved in the Alice Goldberger collection
at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum), but none of this literature is to be found in the organisation’s
archives, held in a special collection at the University of Rhode Island.
 THE PICTURE OF (MENTAL) HEALTH 137

media and aid organisation photographers made a very deliberate choice, tapping
into an emerging visual aesthetic that embraced the idea that the sufficiently
young could be redeemed of the suspected taint of Nazi sadism (while at the
same time hinting at the widespread belief that this was more troubling and ambig-
uous for older survivors). These images hinged on a self-conscious performance
both of psychological healing and of ‘normal’ middle-class childhood, in a
postwar moment marked by a dramatic re-definition of what such a childhood
should look like. In these images, children were deployed as symbolic and moral
figures, with a newly-accumulated host of meanings that spoke to the particular
anxieties of the immediate postwar period. They contributed to the creation of a
visual language that focused on psychological renewal, that addressed and
refuted fears of moral contagion, and that reminds us that the very concept of
what constituted a ‘normal’ Western childhood was not immutable, but was
rapidly changing in the postwar moment.

What (and how) audiences saw

If we want to consider what viewers at the time saw and understood when they
looked at these images, we need first to evaluate the photographic literacy of
these audiences, and weigh how their gaze was historically constructed (Clark,
2018). There were four key factors that shaped this photographic literacy for audi-
ences in Britain in the early postwar years: 1. The visual aesthetics around how
‘unaccompanied children’ were portrayed in photographs at the war’s end; 2. the
powerful influence that images of liberated concentration camps (and especially
Bergen-Belsen) had on viewers; 3. the growth in popular understanding of child
psychoanalysis; and 4. the new ways in which humanitarian aid photography pre-
sented children after the conflict.
The early postwar moment was one of a radical symbolic rethinking of child-
hood and children, and this is reflected in images of children from the time. As
historian Tara Zahra reminds us, the war years unleashed an unprecedented
wave of violence against Europe’s children, but also gave rise to new humanitar-
ian movements aimed at protecting children. After the conflict ended, children
found themselves at the centre of heated political and ideological battles over
the health of European civilisation, and (at least in Western nations) the nature
of European democracy. The issue of so-called ‘lost children’ or ‘wolf children’,
which could refer to anything from children removed from their families for
Nazi Aryanization programmes through to children made orphaned and homeless
by Allied bombing campaigns and living in the streets, had a powerful grip on the
postwar imagination. In symbolic terms, children — and images of children —
were harnessed to reflect the uncertainties of the postwar moment: they evoked
both wartime destruction and postwar renewal, both the possibilities inherent
in rebuilding and the lingering presence of destructive forces in European
societies. In other words, images of children from the time suggested that they
138 REBECCA CLIFFORD

were both victims and threats, both corrupted and redeemable: they could be
pitied, but they could equally be feared (Zahra, 2011: 3).
Pervasive in the writing of many postwar commentators, and reflected in accom-
panying images, was the fear that an entire generation had passed through crucial
childhood years without moral training. Aid and youth workers, journalists and
other observers of children were consumed with anxieties about a presumed
wave of juvenile delinquency that would come when the peace had settled. Ameri-
can journalist Rebecca West, writing in the New York Times in October 1943,
worried that children who had lost their parents to Nazi brutality would become
‘little horrors, meat for the psychological clinic. Many of them will have forgotten
the meaning of cleanliness and decency, some of them will have been infected with
the sadism of the Nazi faith, all of them will be nerve-shattered.’6 Irish writer
Dorothy Macardle, who wrote a widely-read 1949 book on the situation of
Europe’s children, argued that the psychologists in her confidence were convinced
that ‘a great portion of the rising generation of Europe [is] doomed to grow up cut
off from normal, hopeful living, ignorant of the gentler values of life, and unhappy
as the day is long.’ (Macardle, 1949: 13). Here photography played an essential role
in constructing a trope of ‘unaccompanied children’ as objects of fear and pity at
one and the same time. Popular books on the plight of children after the war
were typically illustrated with images such as the one in Figure 1, from Otto
Zoff’s They Shall Inherit the Earth, published in English in 1943 and widely read.
The boys in this photo, with their impassive, troubled faces and dishevelled
clothing, were clearly meant to evoke pity in readers, but the caption pointed
to a more complex interpretation of the image. Caught between ‘starving’ and
‘robbing’, between desperate need and criminal behaviour, children in this and
similar images raised fears in viewers of a pervasive loss of control over
Europe’s youngest citizens.7 This fear of children as the ongoing carriers of the
war’s destructive forces paralleled broader anxieties about the process of
postwar reconstruction at the level of societies: if a generation had been lost
from ‘normal, hopeful living’, could European civilisation be returned to such a
state? The fact that the feared wave of juvenile delinquency never quite materia-
lised did little to quell such pervasive anxieties.
At the same time, images of ‘unaccompanied’ children from the postwar years
often emphasised the recuperability of the very young, suggesting that young chil-
dren were capable of healing and forgetting quickly, where (it was often assumed)
older survivors, refugees and Displaced Persons (D.P.s) were not (Berkowitz and
Brown-Fleming, 2010; Salvatici, 2015: 218). Here, too, photography played a
key role in constructing the notion of the salvageable child, emphasising young

6
New York Times, 24 October 1943.
7
Other books in a similar vein include Thérèse Bonney’s Europe’s Children, 1933–1943 (1943), Anne Barley’s Patrick
Calls Me Mother (1948), and Robert Collis’s The Lost and Found: The Story of Eva and Laszlo, Two Children of
War-Torn Europe (1953). On the success of Bonney’s work, a book of images that became an exhibition that travelled
to forty American cities, see Fehrenbach, 2015: 186-7.
 THE PICTURE OF (MENTAL) HEALTH 139

figure 1 Illustration from Otto Zoff’s popular 1943 book They Shall Inherit the Earth, which
examined the situation of children in the war.

children’s presumed ability not only to regain physical health quickly, but to return
swiftly to a mental and emotional state of normalcy. Alongside rather anodyne
images of children happily going about their daily business, captions often set
out the assumption that the very young were blessed with an imperfect capacity
to remember – and as such would be able to forget their war experiences quickly
and move forwards. We see an example in Figure 2, a photo from the August
1945 issue of the news magazine Cadran, produced by the British government
for a post-liberation French audience. The photo shows Jewish child survivors of
Bergen-Belsen (hereafter Belsen) looking well-fed and well-groomed while
reading in their classroom.
The image itself tells us little about these children, but the lengthy accompanying
caption asked readers to consider ‘why this photo is extraordinary’:
140 REBECCA CLIFFORD

figure 2 An image of Jewish children in liberated Bergen-Belsen, from the

French-language news magazine Cadran, August 1945.

Our readers must be wondering why we have published this charming but
unremarkable photo. It simply appears to be well-dressed children in a tidy
and disciplined classroom. Do you know who these children are? Do you
know where they are? They are the children of the Belsen concentration
camp, those who could not be repatriated and who were cared for by British
relief institutions. Do you remember those horrific images of the hellish
scene that surrounded them? Happily memory is short at this age, and the
urge to live is intense. Do they have the feeling that they have now entered a
sort of ‘wonderland’, or simply that they have lived through an indistinct
nightmare whose memory is beginning to fade?

These two images – of the ‘lost children’ of Paris, and the rescued children of Belsen
– suggest a gendered practice of inclusion in such images: photographers were more
likely to train their lenses on boys where addressing audiences’ anxieties about chil-
dren who had drifted beyond adult control, and more likely to focus on girls where
 THE PICTURE OF (MENTAL) HEALTH 141

suggesting the redemptive aspects of good care and quick forgetting (Jinks, 2018).
Missing overwhelmingly from both categories were images of adolescent children
(who constituted the majority of ‘unaccompanied children’): this reflected wide-
spread assumptions that adolescents would be less likely to forget and thus shed
the taint of their experiences of Nazi persecution, and less likely to evoke in
viewers the pity that was the emotional underbelly of ‘lost children’ or ‘wolf chil-
dren’ images. Whether children were represented as lost or saved, understanding
the creation and the widespread distribution of such visual aesthetics is integral
to gauging how audiences viewed photographs of the Lingfield children.
Another essential element that shaped postwar British audiences’ photographic
literacy was the sudden, explosive and shocking emergence, in April 1945, of
images of liberated Belsen, Buchenwald and Dachau. These images retrained con-
temporary viewers’ modes of visualising and understanding Nazi persecution in
profound ways, with lasting effects. Photography critic Susan Sontag later wrote
about her childhood encounter with these images, and how the experience
changed her way of seeing utterly:

Nothing I have seen—in photographs or in real life—ever cut me as sharply,

deeply, instantaneously. Indeed, it seems plausible to me to divide my life
into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was twelve) and after,
though it was several years before I understood fully what they were about.
[…] When I looked at those photographs, something broke. Some limit had
been reached, and not only that of horror; I felt irrevocably grieved,
wounded, but a part of my feelings started to tighten; something went dead;
something is still crying.8

Audiences in Britain had a familiarity with images of Belsen, liberated by British

troops on 15 April 1945, the second concentration camp to be freed by the
Western Allies (the first was Buchenwald, reached by American troops on 11
April), and the only large intact camp to be liberated by the British Army. Many
other concentration camps were largely empty by the time that liberating forces
reached them, but in Belsen the British Army discovered an estimated 60,000 star-
ving and desperately ill people crowded into five typhus-riddled compounds, with
an estimated 10,000 corpses laying inside the huts and around the grounds (Reilly,
1998: 11, 25). Still images and film footage of this nightmarish scene, captured by
the British Army No. 5 Film and Photographic Unit, quickly made their way into
public consciousness via newspapers, newsreels, public photographic exhibitions
and wireless broadcasts. Mass Observation reports from the moment suggested
that the shocking images of Belsen left British audiences feeling ‘deeply horrified’
(Kushner, 1991: 357). Letters to the editor urged that ‘more pictures of the
camps should be shown, as the British are too soft and easily forget.’9 The word
8
Sontag quoted in Liss, 1998: 4.
9
Daily Mirror, 30 April 1945.
142 REBECCA CLIFFORD

‘Belsen’ itself entered contemporary British parlance as shorthand for an abomin-

able and shocking situation.10
For audiences accustomed to treating the anti-German propaganda from both
world wars with scepticism, the circulation of the Belsen images offered an
intense moment of re-education. Those old enough to remember the atrocity
stories of the First World War knew that many of those accounts had been fake.
Thus the British media faced particular obstacles in persuading civilians that
accounts from the liberated camp were true. Broadcaster Richard Dimbleby was
enraged when the BBC in London treated his report from freshly-liberated Belsen
with disbelief, and hesitated to air it without additional verification — but the
sheer volume of reportage, aided by letters sent home by British troops, shifted
public opinion relatively quickly (Reilly, 1998: 30). A diarist for Mass Observation
recorded that by the end of April 1945, photographs of the ‘Belsen atrocity camp’
had deeply shaken even the ‘confirmed sceptics’ who were hesitant to believe stories
of Nazi atrocities.11 If some of the initial shock over these images had settled by the
summer of 1945, it was revivified by the start of the trial of the former Belsen
guards in September; the Film and Photographic Unit’s footage served as key evi-
dence in the trial, and the proceedings — as well as the executions in December
of several of those found guilty — were extensively covered by the press.
Accepting that the images from Belsen were real did not necessarily equate to
sympathy for the survivors, however. Initial accounts from British soldiers and
doctors in the camp detailed fears that liberated inmates would be incapable of
ever returning to ‘normal’ society. Medical students recruited to help in the camp
recalled fearing that their efforts were wasted, because even if their patients sur-
vived, they would never again be ‘useful member[s] of the community’, and had suf-
fered the ‘loss of normal moral standards’ (Reilly, 1998: 41). Those anxious about
the prospects for adult survivors often looked to the children’s camp, where early
reports suggested that the malnourished children were nonetheless ‘laughing and
smiling’, and ‘seemed to show none of the terror symptoms so evident in the
adults in Belsen.’ (Reilly, 1998: 47). So pervasive was the connection between
‘Belsen’ and concentration camp survival in the early postwar British mindset
that the Lingfield children were regularly referred to as having come from Belsen,
even though none of them had. Even the aid workers and philanthropists who
helped with their care, and who knew well that the youngest members of the
group had in fact survived Theresienstadt, referred to them as the ‘Belsen babies’.12

10
The situation was so extreme at Belsen largely because it had become a reception camp after other camps in the East
began shutting down as the Red Army approached in the winter of 1945. The resulting overcrowding led to severe out-
breaks of typhus, dysentery and other diseases, and thousands of deaths from starvation.
11
MO diarist 5270, April 1945, Archive of Mass Observation, University of Sussex Special Collections.
12
Dann Family Papers, 1070/5/2/3, Wiener Holocaust Library Collections. It is worth noting that this fascination with
the horror at Belsen did not equate with a widespread consciousness of what we now call the Holocaust. There was little
recognition in media coverage of Belsen’s liberation or in accompanying images that the camp’s victims and survivors
were overwhelmingly Jewish. Interestingly, however, almost all the newspaper and newsmagazine coverage of the Ling-
field children between 1945–49 did recognise that the children were Jewish.
 THE PICTURE OF (MENTAL) HEALTH 143

The fact that this visual trope of ‘redeemable’ children emphasised normative
psychological states as much as physical health is important, for the very concept
of what constituted a ‘normal’ childhood was itself being re-imagined in the early
postwar period. This was a period of unprecedented influence for child psychoana-
lysts, and this was truer in Britain than anywhere else, because Nazi persecution had
brought the world’s leading experts in this field together in London. Interwar
Jewish emigres such as Anna Freud and Melanie Klein worked alongside home-
grown experts John Bowlby, Donald Winnicott and others, and their wartime
and postwar work radically re-imagined the nature of children’s psyches and the
repercussions of war. As historian Michal Shapira has argued, despite their (often
very public) disagreements, this cohort of child psychoanalysts were united in
framing children as both vulnerable and as ‘anxious, aggressive subjects requiring
control’ (Shapira, 2013: 1). Their work had a wide impact on public opinion and
social policy, and informed emerging ideas about the links between the control of
aggressive impulses in young people, and the health of a new postwar model of
democracy that privileged the individual citizen’s rational control of destructive
emotions (Shapira, 2013).
Images of the Lingfield children were strongly informed by such radical new
notions about what constituted a ‘normal’ childhood, and how children who had
survived concentration camps might be returned to ‘healthy’ psychological states
– which is unsurprising given Anna Freud’s connection to the children. Indeed,
what unified the Lingfield photos — and what perhaps makes them appear banal
to contemporary eyes — is their overt performance of childhood ‘normality’
through portrayals of non-aggressive gendered play (girls with dolls and art
supplies, boys doing woodworking or wearing Scouts uniforms), happy and easy
social interactions, and relaxed contemplation. Looking through the eyes of
postwar audiences, we might see this fascination with psychoanalytically-informed
notions of healthy childhood emotions and behaviours as the contrasting side of
fears about juvenile delinquency and wartime dislocation. In this, British viewers
had a particular set of concerns, for many worried about the lasting effects of
wartime evacuations on a generation of British children. This was not simply
because so many British children had been evacuated from major cities during
the war, but because Anna Freud and her colleague Dorothy Burlingham wrote
two widely-read wartime books that argued that although evacuation protected
children from the physical harm of bombing, it caused so much psychological
harm that the risks did not outweigh the benefits (Freud and Burlingham, 1943;
Freud and Burlingham, 1944). The British gaze was thus an anxious one, and audi-
ences would likely have interpreted the Lingfield photos through this lens. These
images played a role in assuaging fears around the psychological harm done to chil-
dren by war, and suggesting that there were pathways back to ‘normal’ attitudes
even for children who had lived through the most extreme of wartime conditions.
The visual language of humanitarian aid photography also shaped how audiences
viewed images of the Lingfield children. Like psychoanalysis, the world of
144 REBECCA CLIFFORD

humanitarian aid experienced a golden age of professionalisation and extended

reach in the aftermath of the Second World War. Transnational bodies like the
United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and the Amer-
ican Joint Jewish Distribution Committee (JDC) played a central role in helping
‘unaccompanied children’ after the war, and their work helped to define a new
approach to humanitarian aid that was secular, institutional, professionalized
and unabashedly modern, particularly in the use of newly-developed social work
tools such as the casework approach (Clifford, 2020: 54). As historians Heide Feh-
renbach and Davide Rodogno argue, aid organisations actively deployed photogra-
phy in this period to help viewers to re-think the category of ‘civilian’, and
particularly the notion of the child as civilian. Photography helped to forge
emotional communities around the depoliticised figure of the innocent child, and
trained viewers to understand aid work as a moral necessity underpinning recon-
struction efforts more broadly (Fehrenbach and Rodogno, 2016: 1124, 1145).
Aid photography featuring children was certainly not new in this period, but it
was used to new purposes in the postwar moment. Young children had been a
focus of aid literature and photography as far back as the 1860s, and viewers in
the late 1940s would have been familiar with the trope of the before-and-after
photo, a strategy used in some of the images of the Lingfield children, and one
with deep roots. In the Victorian period, before-and-after photos had been used
for such purposes as raising funds for Dr. Barnardo homes in London, by
showing street children redeemed by aid and made productive. During the First
World War and the interwar period, this visual trope was used by aid organisations
such as the organisation Save the Children, but the emphasis was generally on the
physical body of the child: before-and-after images showed children’s transition
from starving, malnourished or wounded through to a return to physical health
via the help of aid groups. Indeed, as Heide Fehrenbach argues, humanitarian aid
photography had trained audiences to recognise the particular visual signs of
hunger in a child, such as jutting ribs and bloated stomachs (Fehrenbach, 2015:
168). However, the before-and-after visual trope was employed in radically differ-
ent ways in the postwar period, for the emphasis was no longer on children’s bodies,
but on their minds. Where aid photography showed children playing, smiling and
laughing, or happily absorbed in their daily activities, the visual emphasis was not
on their return to physical health, but rather on their return to normative childhood
behaviours. We can thus see the interplay between psychoanalytically-informed
ideas of what constituted ‘normal’ conduct in children, and the visual language
used by a newly-empowered aid sector. We can also see that this visual language
was a response to adult anxieties about juvenile delinquency and the psychological
harm done to children by conflict. It set out an aesthetics of how health in children
could be imagined after war, not through productivity or nourishment, but through
behaviours (play and calm concentration) and emotions (smiles and laughter) that
promised a future citizen for the era: cognisant of their individual worth, controlled
in their emotional responses, and with the stain of destructive impulses expunged.
 THE PICTURE OF (MENTAL) HEALTH 145

Let us now turn to the images of the Lingfield children to explore how these
visual tropes were used in practice. If we can discern in these images a performance
of ‘normal’ childhood behaviours and emotions, what audiences was this perform-
ance for, and what goals did it serve?

The Lingfield children in the print press

The Lingfield children received a good deal of coverage in the British print press (via
national, regional and local newspapers and news magazines) in the years between
1945 and 1949, and most of this coverage included photographs. These images thus
reached a wide audience. There were many overlapping factors that marshalled and
then sustained public interest in stories about ‘unaccompanied children’ in the early
postwar years, and piqued curiosity about this group of children in particular.
Because the children were (wrongly) associated with Belsen concentration camp,
the trial of the Belsen guards, which took place between September and November
1945 (and ended with the execution of eleven of the defendants in December 1945),
kept public interest in Britain’s ‘concentration camp orphans’ alive. This was
equally true for the Nuremberg trials, which began just as the Belsen trials were
ending, and ran through to October 1946. In the same period, the influx of refugees
into the European D.P. camps raised public concern over what would become of
D.P.s; they were judged with considerable prejudice by the press in Britain and else-
where, and were often presented as black marketeers and scroungers (Marrus,
2002: 333). British attitudes were complicated by the question of admitting
Jewish D.P.s to mandate Palestine, and newspaper readers would have been well
aware through this period of the pressure placed by the Truman administration
on the British government in this regard, of the threats of Arab leaders that they
would ‘shoot to kill’ Jewish refugees arriving illegally, and of the British navy’s
work in diverting ships carrying refugees to Cyprus.13 To a British reading public
anxious about the issue of European refugees and Britain’s responsibility towards
them in an era of waning imperial power, images such as those of the Lingfield chil-
dren acted as a counterweight, presenting survivor children as salvageable and apo-
litical where adult survivors were not.
If British audiences saw the Lingfield photos at least in part through the optics of
such foreign policy issues, their gaze was equally shaped by domestic concerns.
Readers frustrated by the grind of postwar British life, or concerned about what
psychological harm evacuation might have done to their children, or desiring to
hold onto a certain wartime vision of British resilience (which was fading in an
13
These issues were widely discussed in the press in the period from 1945 to 1947; not discussed was the fact that these
refugees were then interned in British-controlled camps on Cyprus. See for example the Daily Herald from 29 Septem-
ber 1947, which noted that as Britain prepared to withdraw from Palestine, ‘the world may now face the far wider
tragedy of European refugees and displaced persons … which has become so unhappily linked in the public mind
with the special problem of Palestine.’ Illustrated newspapers and newsmagazines such as The Sphere documented
these events in photographs for both domestic and expatriate audiences; see for example The Sphere, 31 August
1946, p. 265, for images of British naval vessels accompanying refugee ships to Cyprus.
146 REBECCA CLIFFORD

figure 3 Article on children from the ‘Belsen horror camp’, illustrated with photographs of
the Lingfield children. ‘They came in agony from Belsen … to Forget’, Sunday Pictorial, 24
February 1946.

uneasy postwar consensus with continued privations and rationing), embraced repor-
tage which portrayed children psychologically wounded by war as redeemable,
especially in a British context. A February 1946 article about the Lingfield children
in the pictorial supplement of the Sunday Mirror, entitled ‘They came in agony
from Belsen … to forget’, not only stated that all the children had come from the
‘Belsen horror camp’ (none had), but suggested that if their early beginnings on the
continent had deprived them of nearly everything, it was British ‘freedom of spirit’
and the act of ‘learning to live again, learning to live our way in freedom’ that
made the children’s return to good psychological health possible. Accompanied by
a photo (Figure 3) showing the children holding hands and smiling while they ran
across their schoolyard, the article sought to convince readers of the healing
powers of the British landscape in ‘a lovely Surrey village’, and strained to emphasize
that the children’s immersion in British democratic culture would form a natural
inoculation against the memory of Nazi persecution.14

14
‘They came in agony from Belsen … to forget’, Sunday Pictorial, 24 Feb 1946, 6-7. One wonders how far the heavy
emphasis on British ‘freedom’ was meant to address concerns about the treatment of West Germany in the Nuremberg
trials, as Cold War pressures began to change the relationship between Britain and its former enemy.
 THE PICTURE OF (MENTAL) HEALTH 147

Coverage of the Lingfield children also served to underscore the value of emer-
ging approaches to child psychoanalysis for British audiences. This coverage
sought to mitigate fears of what the war had done to children’s mental health,
and the images in these articles were deployed to suggest psychologically healthy
future pathways for the children. A 1948 article in the news magazine John Bull
stated that Alice Goldberger and her team had done an enormous amount to reha-
bilitate the Lingfield children during the three years since their arrival in Britain,
and the key to the success of this programme had been a Freudian-style talking
therapy:

There was a tendency for [the children] to hide their problems and appear
‘cured’ out of gratitude or to win praise. Miss Goldberger knew that the
rapid physical improvement was no proof that they had mended equally
well underneath. Unless their neurotic troubles could be detected and treated
in childhood, they might suffer untold miseries in later life. So, no matter
how tragic their memories, the children were encouraged to face their past
and put their feelings about it into words.15

In keeping with idea of rehabilitation through the active remembrance of the

wartime past, the accompanying images in this article pointed both to troubled
pasts and to healthier presents and futures. One image showed some of the children
having a play boxing match while laughing. The caption read ‘Three years ago these
children fought each other for scraps of food. Now they have all the food they need
and the ‘fight’ is only for fun.’16 Both image and caption alluded to a transform-
ation from ‘abnormal’ to ‘normal’ behaviours, with aggressive emotions brought
under control. This suggested the effectiveness of the Lingfield staff’s
psychoanalytically-informed approach, and held the promise that the children
could be redeemed from an (assumed) state of mental and moral compromise.17
Images in newspaper articles frequently employed the before-and-after trope to
suggest the children’s return to good mental health. In a 1949 article in the Illus-
trated, former Liberal politician Betty Morgan declared that ‘virtually every one
of these children [is] on the path to a healthy, happy life’, helped by sound psycho-
logical treatment to lose their ‘pathological craving for mother-love’. The accompa-
nying images each showed a child on arrival in Britain on one side, and the child in
the present on the other, usually at play with another child. In Figure 4, for example,
15
Howard Byrne and G. F. Szabo, ‘They learn to be children again’, John Bull, 9 October 1948, 12-13.
16
The paper version of this article held by the British Library is unfortunately in too poor condition to copy, so the
image is not included here.
17
The real situation at Weir Courtney was naturally more complex. It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss the
children’s actual behaviour or the staff’s concerns about it. In this instance, the reporter for John Bull exaggerated: the
children had never fought each other for food to anyone’s knowledge, but had hidden food or taken more food than
they could eat when they first arrived in Britain. The desire here to paint the children as more aggressive than they
had ever been is noteworthy, as it underscores just how important was the idea that they had been ‘cured’ of this aggres-
sion. On adult carers’ concerns about ‘abnormal’ emotions and behaviours in child Holocaust survivors after the war,
see Clifford, 2020: 38-57.
148 REBECCA CLIFFORD

figure 4 Images of Fritz F. and other Lingfield children, ‘Four Years After the Belsen Story’,
Illustrated, 10 September 1949.

we see Fritz F. on arrival in Britain, and later playing Monopoly with another of the
Lingfield children.
What is interesting in this montage is that the ‘before’ version of Fritz (and indeed
of each of the children) looks in no way physically deprived, although his hair is
short and his expression is opaque. His return to psychological health is suggested
both by the caption, which points to a transformation from ‘a cowed child victim of
Nazism’ to a child with ‘a bright future ahead’, but also by the juxtaposition of his
isolation in the first image with his return to the world of children’s social play in
the second image. Images like these offered readers hope that children damaged
in their social capacities by the war (whether by the extreme experience of Nazi per-
secution or by the more pedestrian one of evacuation) could be returned to the
 THE PICTURE OF (MENTAL) HEALTH 149

world of ‘normal’ social interaction and responsibility.18 Indeed, it is telling that

photographs of the Lingfield children largely disappeared from circulation in the
press by the end of the 1940s, as the children began to enter their adolescent
years. As they grew older, it was more difficult to fit images of them into an aesthetic
that privileged younger children’s activities and emotions – and presumably more
difficult to pull readers’ heartstrings as cherubic faces gave way to the
sometimes-awkward contours of puberty.

The Lingfield children in aid literature

The Weir Courtney care home was maintained by funds from three key sources: the
Central British Fund for Jewish Relief and Rehabilitation (CBF, now World Jewish
Relief), the American Foster Parents’ Plan for War Children (FPP, now Plan Inter-
national), and the parishioners of the West London Synagogue. The CBF,
founded in 1933 as the Central British Fund for German Jewry, was the leading
British relief organisation caring for Holocaust survivors after the war, both on
the continent and in Britain (Kirsh, 2012; Baumel-Schwartz, 2012). Working
with UNRRA, the JDC, and other transnational aid bodies, they were responsible
for organising the Lingfield children’s transport to Britain, and the initial stages of
their care. They brokered a special arrangement with the West London Synagogue,
which meant that after an initial settling-in period, the bulk of the funds needed for
the daily running of the care home came from covenants promised annually by
members of the synagogue community (which represented both a financial and a
moral obligation). The FPP’s involvement with the Weir Courtney home was
arranged by Anna Freud, who had a longstanding relationship with the organis-
ation: they had funded the three sites of her Hampstead War Nurseries during
the war, and were invested in her vision of psychoanalytically-informed care for
children. All three groups made extensive and well-crafted use of photographs in
their fundraising materials, using images of the Lingfield children at play not
only to raise funds for the home, but to promote their activities broadly.19
These photographs were shaped by the anxieties and aspirations both of these
organisations and of their donors. Donors to these three organisations represented
distinct constituencies, but all were Jewish. Parishioners of the West London Syna-
gogue were Jewish residents of the capital, generally (although not exclusively)
middle class, and generally from well-established British–Jewish families (rather
than recent emigres). Donations to the CBF came from British Jewish communities
more broadly; indeed, the organisation relied almost exclusively on funds from
18
The work of Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham did much to increase British anxieties about evacuation and chil-
dren’s social development, and it is interesting to note that in other countries where the mass evacuation of children
took place during the war, such anxieties were minimal. On the case of France, for example, see Lee Downs, 2005:
49-66.
19
The FPP’s involvement and interest in Anna Freud’s work is explained by its executive chairperson Edna Blue in her
forward to Freud and Burlingham’s War and children; Blue notes that Freud’s Hampstead War Nurseries were funded
entirely by the FPP as a ‘living war-time laboratory’.
150 REBECCA CLIFFORD

British Jewish private citizens to run. And although American donors to the FPP
were not necessarily Jewish, donors to the Lingfield project were almost exclusively
so, and many were also linked to American psychoanalytic networks, or were them-
selves practicing psychoanalysts.20
To understand the gaze of these organisations and their supporters in the histori-
cal context of the late 1940s, we need to consider what concerns and what hopes
informed their horizons. As the CBF set out in their 1946 annual report, the
urgency of their work was shaped by three factors: the restrictions placed by the
British government on immigration to mandate Palestine; the continued anti-
Semitic pogroms in Poland, which pushed more and more Holocaust survivors
into D.P. camps in Germany and Austria; and the fact that survivors had few
other options for immigration, particularly because of limited entry quotas into
the United States.21 Both the CBF and its donors walked a difficult line around
questions of migration. It was easy enough to be distressed about continuing
violent anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, or to wring hands about the intransigence
of the United States around the issue of accepting D.P.s for immigration, but the
CBF relied on a level of cooperation with the Home Office (which had agreed to
two-year transit visas for the ‘concentration camp orphans’ brought to Britain in
1945-46, not to their remaining permanent residents or becoming British citizens),
and were reluctant to challenge the government on the issue of Palestine.22 Donors,
for their part, worried that if Britain were to accept larger numbers of D.P.s, the very
foreignness of these refugees would awaken anti-Semitic sentiments in Britain
(Kushner, 1989: 109). Aid organisations thus addressed their Jewish donors in
very measured terms: they focused on the immigration of a small group of ‘concen-
tration camp orphans’, and they stressed that these children would be psychologi-
cally redeemable and, in any case, would move on into further emigration. The
images they deployed reflected these assumptions.
Aid organisations such as the CBF often used the same images as the print press,
but to somewhat different ends. As we have seen, newspapers and newsmagazines
used before-and-after images of the Lingfield children to suggest their psychological
rehabilitation. Aid organisations used the same images both to suggest that the chil-
dren were psychologically redeemable — an important point of which to convince
funders, for who wants to give money to a lost cause? — and to suggest that donors
had a duty to return the children to the fold of the middle-class Jewish family. We
see an example in the images of Fritz F. (Figure 5) used in a CBF fundraising pamph-
let from 1947, which were partially the same images used in the 1949 Illustrated
article. After noting that the ‘after’ image of Fritz ‘surely needs no further
comment’, the CBF opined that ‘with more money … we could give [the children

20
Lotte Marcuse to Moses Leavitt, 22 June 1945, folder ‘Foster Parents’ Plan for War Children’, NY AR194554/2/4/
1625, JDC Archives.
21
Central British Fund, pamphlet ‘Towards the Future’ (1947), 1, HA1-3/13/H/12, Central British Fund collection,
Wiener Holocaust Library Collections.
22
Many of the ‘children from the camps’ stayed in Britain anyway, and became naturalised citizens in the mid-1950s.
 THE PICTURE OF (MENTAL) HEALTH 151

figure 5 Images of Fritz F. used to illustrate the Central British Fund’s 1947 pamphlet
‘Europe’s children call to you’ (credit: Wiener Holocaust Library Collections).

from the concentration camps] some of those amenities and pleasures which, if
they were our own children, we should regard as their due.’23 British Jewish
audiences of the early postwar period would have been only too aware of
how close they had come to sharing the fate of their continental brethren, and
aid agencies did not hesitate to draw on donors’ sense of duty and guilt to
loosen their purse strings.
Many of the images used by the CBF evoked the photographic conventions of
middle-class families in this period (showing birthdays, holidays, outings, or
smiling group shots), which carried the moral and political message, for donor
audiences, that these children were like their own children — and, indeed,
could have been their own children. These images suggested that the Lingfield
children merited a particular type of rehabilitation that went beyond merely
feeding and clothing bodies, and was expensive. For these audiences, the
images served as proof that funds donated were well spent, sending a visual
message of the success of rehabilitation efforts that was more convincing than
text alone.
Just as was the case for images in the print press, the photos used by aid organ-
isations were informed by fears about what the war had done to children broadly. If
newspaper readers of the period might have worried in a general sense about the
repercussions of evacuation on British children, or about the threat of juvenile

23
Central British Fund pamphlet ‘Europe’s children call to you’ (1947), 10, HA1-3/5/C, Central British Fund collection,
Wiener Holocaust Library Collections.
152 REBECCA CLIFFORD

figure 6 Image of three Weir Courtney children used to illustrate the Central British Fund’s
1946 annual report, ‘Towards the Future’ (credit: Wiener Holocaust Library Collections).

delinquency, Jewish donors had more specific anxieties about the future of an entire
generation of European Jewry. Aid organisations tread carefully on this issue,
because there were clear financial implications: if Europe’s Jewish children had
indeed been reduced to an animal-like state by their war experiences, aid groups
could only convince donors to fund their care by promising that the children
would have a future value to the community as Jewish citizens, if not British citi-
zens.24 In fundraising pamphlets, while the text often acknowledged that child sur-
vivors of Nazi persecution were ‘sick in mind and body’, images served to suggest
healthy future pathways. The CBF’s annual report for 1946, titled ‘Towards the
Future’, informed readers that ‘to fit these children from the camps into a normal
life must be an uphill task. […] It is impossible to eradicate completely the defensive
methods adopted by every hunted and cornered animal.’ Here the accompanying
images, such as this image of three young Lingfield girls admiring a bed of
flowers (Figure 6), did the moral labour of alleviating these ‘wolf children’ fears
and suggesting positive outcomes.

Conclusion
Who were the real protagonists of these photos, and why have these images now
largely disappeared from our visual lexicon of the Holocaust and its aftermath?
With regards to the first question, if we see the images of the Lingfield children
as self-consciously performing a certain type of psychological healing, one that
had specific meanings in its historical time and place, we can see that their crea-
tors and distributors had a specific humanitarian strategy in mind. The children
24
The CBF’s pamphlets generally expressed the hope that the children would eventually emigrate to Palestine.
 THE PICTURE OF (MENTAL) HEALTH 153

here were not the subjects of these images but their objects.25 The implied sub-
jects were the healers, not the healed: the staff who used the cutting-edge tools of
child psychoanalysis and postwar aid practices to transform child survivors of
Nazi persecution from ‘hunted animals’ to ‘fit and useful citizens of the
future’, in the words of the CBF.26 The images harnessed to this purpose
helped to forge a new visual genre around the mental hygiene of the child-citizen.
Yet even as they used these images to promote their work to the world, staff at
care homes such as Weir Courtney knew that the situation was far more
complex. Records from Weir Courtney reveal that staff remained worried
about the children’s psychological development long after the media had lost
interest in the children by the late 1940s, and funds from donations and
annual covenants had begun to dry up.27 The children themselves, of course,
had their own concerns that were often very different from those of their
carers, and might have pictured their situation quite differently had they been
the ones holding the camera.
In addition, we might ask why these photos appear at once so unfamiliar and so
banal to our contemporary eyes. It took historians a long time to develop an interest
in Holocaust photography; the best early work in this field was largely done by
photojournalists.28 This has changed over the last decade, with Holocaust histor-
ians now taking a sustained critical interest in photographs as compelling
primary source material.29 However, almost entirely missing from this new body
of work is an exploration of post-Holocaust photography.30 Visual sources could
tell us such a great deal about the genocide’s aftermath, letting us explore both
how the world saw survivors, and how survivors saw their postwar worlds. If we
look at the holdings of any of the large archives that collect documents relating
to the genocide, we will find a wealth of postwar photography, most of it untouched
by historians. Why have these vast collections disappeared from our collective gaze
on the Holocaust?
The answer is likely because we find these images trite or even kitschy, slightly
embarrassing in their performance of postwar health and happiness, masking a
darker and more complex reality. This reflects our contemporary way of seeing,

25
Silvia Salvatici makes a similar point in her article ‘Sights of Benevolence’, concluding that postwar images of D.P.s
used by the UNRRA depicted ‘the story of the women and men in the camps, the real protagonist was UNRRA itself.’
See Salvatici, 2015: 216.
26
Central British Fund, pamphlet ‘Towards the Future’ (1947), 10, HA1-3/13/H/12, Central British Fund collection,
Wiener Holocaust Library Collections.
27
These concerns were documented by the Lingfield After Care Committee, the charitable branch of the West London
Synagogue Committee that organised the funds for the Lingfield children’s care. See for example the notes in box MS
140, A2049, West London Synagogue archives, Hartley Library, University of Southampton. These issues will be
explored in detail in my forthcoming book on the Lingfield children.
28
Two notable early contributions to this field came from photojournalists Barbie Zelizer (Zelizer, 1998) and Janina
Struk (Struk, 2004). The field was not entirely untouched by historians: Sybil Milton was one of the first to use photo-
graphs as key sources for writing the history of the Holocaust. See Milton, 1986: 193-216.
29
Important works here include Crew, 2006; Farmer, 2010: 115-122; Hirsch, 2000: 214-246; and Shneer, 2010: 28-52.
30
An exception is Marianne Hirsch’s remarkable Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (1997).
Hirsch is a literary scholar, but her work has had a profound influence on many historians of the postwar period.
154 REBECCA CLIFFORD

but not perhaps the gaze of the time. Historian Susan Crane has written of her con-
cerns about showing graphic and disturbing Holocaust images to her students,
arguing that her students’ reactions offer ‘chilling insight into what viewers want
from viewing atrocity images: safe titillation, and redemption.’ (Crane, 2008:
315). If this is true of the way that audiences view Holocaust imagery in the twenty-
first century, we might ask if postwar audiences had a similar response when
looking at photos such as those of the Lingfield children. No welcome redemption
could come from seeing images of Nazi concentration camps in the late 1940s – but
images of persecuted children returning to the ‘normal’ social realm potentially
offered this. It is high time that historians made a concerted effort to engage with
post-Holocaust photographs, both to understand the particular gaze of the
postwar world, and to come to know what has been lost from our way of seeing
in the intervening decades.

Acknowledgements
Research for this project was funded by a British Academy Small Grant, a Lever-
hulme Trust Research Fellowship, and a Sharon Abramson Research Grant (Holo-
caust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University), and the author
acknowledges the generous and vital contributions of these bodies. She would
also like to thank the editors of this special issue, and the anonymous reader
whose comments were so insightful.

Funding
This work was supported by British Academy; Leverhulme Trust.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor
Rebecca Clifford is Professor of European Transnational History at Durham Uni-
versity. Her most recent book, Survivors: Children’s Lives After the Holocaust
(Yale, 2020) explores the postwar lives and memories of child Holocaust survivors.
It was a finalist for the Cundill History Prize, shortlisted for the Wolfson History
Prize, and winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Awards Scholarship Prize
among other accolades, and named a Book of the Year by the Telegraph (2020)
and the Globe and Mail (Canada; 2021). She is currently working on a book on
the Lingfield children and their relationship with postwar psychoanalysis. Email:
rebecca.clifford@durham.ac.uk
 THE PICTURE OF (MENTAL) HEALTH 155

ORCID
Rebecca Clifford http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7869-2519

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