Brotherhood After Birkenau: Jewish Child Survivors, Homosocial Bonding, and Everyday Life After Liberation

This article examines the experiences of the self-titled “Birkenau Boys,” a group of eighty-nine children from the Theresienstadt Family Camp, half of whom survived the war, as they faced the challenges of liberation and its immediate aftermath. Drawing on the extensive forms of testimony provided by the group throughout the postwar era, I argue for understanding the centrality of homosocial bonding to the Birkenau Boys’ attempts to reconstruct their lives following the violent end of the Holocaust. This essay begins with a discussion of liberation itself and the ways in which the boys’ memories challenge notions of liberation as a moment of complete rupture. I continue to follow the boys’ social relationships as they traverse Europe, with many spending time in makeshift Allied hospitals and Czech convalescent homes. The article concludes with a discussion of emigration considerations and of the ways in which the story of the Birkenau Boys can shift our understandings of Jewish children's lives during the momentous changes wrought by the end of the Holocaust.