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Sophia Richman - A Wolf in the Attic: The Legacy of a Hidden Child of the Holocaust

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A Wolf in the Attic: The Legacy of a Hidden Child of the Holocaust: summary, description and annotation

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A Wolf in the Attic:Even though she was only two, the little girl knew she must never go into the attic. Strange noises came from there. Mama said there was a wolf upstairs, a hungry, dangerous wolf . . . but the truth was far more dangerous than that. Much too dangerous to tell a Jewish child marked for death.
One cannot mourn what one doesnt acknowledge, and one cannot heal if one does not mourn . . .
A Wolf in the Attic is a powerful memoir written by a psychoanalyst who was a hidden child in Poland during World War II. Her story, in addition to its immediate impact, illustrates her struggle to come to terms with the powerful yet sometimes subtle impact of childhood trauma.
In the authors words: As a very young child I experienced the Holocaust in a way that made it almost impossible to integrate and make sense of the experience. For me, there was no life before the war, no secure early childhood to hold in mind, no context in which to place what was happening to me and around me. The Holocaust was in the air that I breathed daily for the first four years of my life. I took it in deeply without awareness or critical judgment. I ingested it with the milk I drank from my mothers breast. It had the taste of fear and despair.
Born during the Holocaust in what was once a part of Poland, Sophia Richman spent her early years in hiding in a small village near Lww, the city where she was born. Hidden in plain sight, both she and her mother passed as Christian Poles. Later, her father, who escaped from a concentration camp, found them and hid in their attic until the liberation.
The story of the miraculous survival of this Jewish family is only the beginning of their long journey out of the Holocaust. The war years are followed by migration and displacement as the refugees search for a new homeland. They move from Ukraine to Poland to France and eventually settle in America. A Wolf in the Attic traces the effects of the authors experiences on her role as an American teen, a wife, a mother, and eventually, a psychoanalyst.
A Wolf in the Attic explores the impact of early childhood trauma on the authors:
  • education
  • career choices
  • attitudes toward therapy, both as patient and therapist
  • social interactions
  • love/family relationships
  • parenting style and decisions regarding her daughter
  • religious orientation
Repeatedly told by her parents that she was too young to remember the war years, Sophia spent much of her life trying to remember to forget what she did indeed remember. A Wolf in the Attic follows her life as she gradually becomes able to reclaim her past, to understand its impact on her life and the choices she has made, and finally, to heal a part of herself that she had been so long taught to deny.

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A Wolf in the Attic
The Legacy of a Hidden Child of the Holocaust
A Wolf in the Attic
The Legacy of a Hidden Child of the Holocaust
Sophia Richman
A Wolf in the Attic The Legacy of a Hidden Child of the Holocaust - image 2
2002 by Sophia Richman. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
First published by:
The Haworth Press, Inc., 10 Alice Street, Binghamton, NY 139041580
This edition published 2011 by Routledge:
RoutledgeRoutledge
Taylor & Francis GroupTaylor & Francis Group
711 Third Avenue2 Park Square, Milton Park
New York, NY 10017Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Authors note: Some family members names have been changed to protect their privacy.
Ritsos, Yannis; Healing. (Translated from Greek by Edmund Keeley.) Copyright 1991 by PUP.
Cover design by Marylouise Doyle.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Richman, Sophia, 1941-
A wolf in the attic : the legacy of a hidden child of the Holocaust / Sophia Richman.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-7890-1549-8 (alk. paper)ISBN 0-7890-1550-1 (alk. paper)
1. Richman, Sophia, 1941- 2. Jewish children in the HolocaustUkraineLvBiography. 3. Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)UkraineLvPersonal narratives. 4. Holocaust survivorsUnited StatesBiography. 5. Lv (Ukraine)Biography. 6. United StatesBiography. I. Title.
DS135.U43R537 2002
940.5318092dc21
2001024337
In memory of the thirty-five members of my extended family who perished in the Holocaust.
With gratitude to those who rescued me from the same fate.
In appreciation for the chance to restore life
to the broken branches of my family tree.
I dedicate this book to my husband Spyros,
whose unwavering love has sustained me,
and my daughter Lina,
whose courage has been my inspiration.
CONTENTS
Foreword
I thought I knew the story. I had visited the camps, read the history, seen the documentaries, and listened to the music. As a very young boy, I absorbed my mothers description of how inhabitants of Ereikousa, her small island on the Ionian Sea, had hidden four Greek Jews during the war. Knowing and loving Sophia for close to three decades, I heard fragments of the story often. In reality, I knew little of the story.
Sophia would share her fragments of memory with me especially when we traveled. Geographical transitions often bring out our hidden anxieties. At first, her memory fragments were like faint murmurs from far away; then, over the years, the murmurs became audible. The memories always spoke in a compelling manner, yet they would stop abruptly, as if some sharp psychic door had slammed. Over time, the stories emerged with greater frequency and detail. They became textured and tragic. But still, they were unintegrated, like musical phrases without a melodic line, without rhythm, harmony, or bridges. I did not know that her memories had been frozen. I did not know that her lack of clarity was protective. Ironically, it was after a tragedy had turned our world upside down that Sophia began to write. She wrote in a burst of creative integration that lasted close to a year.
Each day of that year, and often at night, Sophia could be found upstairs writing on her Macintosh computer. At times, I wondered if she preferred writing to other interestsincluding me. She actually loved the process of writing. She hated not writing. I think I envied her driven self-analysis. Following the completion of the first chapter, I expected her to lose enthusiasm. I was wrong; no creative blocks occurred. True, she was sometimes insecure about revealing a certain family secretshe did not want to hurt others. Yet her internal muse insisted on remembering, integrating, and writing.
We know that writing about traumatic experiences has been found to be beneficial in some instances. Written expression about traumatic or stressful events seems to benefit both somatic and psychological health; the research on this is clear. The theory behind the research findings proposes that writing encourages the creation of a structured narrative out of previously unstructured sensory fragments. It is as if writing about emotions forces the encoding of traumatic memory into narrative language. The American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan once explained that the goal of psychotherapy is to organize ones experience. I believe that writing organized Sophias emotional and cognitive experiences and has been therapeutic for her. This is not surprising for most. What is of interest, however, is that the writing followed formal psychotherapy and psychoanalysis for Sophia. I am not suggesting that the writing cure be substituted for the talking cure. I believe that writing helped Sophia integrate new understanding with prior self- and worldviews. No doubt, a complex relationship exists between writing and healing. Dangers are inherent in any expressive writing activity or self-analysis. The isolation of this exercise may allow for aspects of the story to be ignored, denied, or discarded if they do not fit the conscious frame of the writer. I sense that Sophia navigated these dangers with the courage and the skill of the seasoned psychoanalytic voyager that she is.
A psychoanalytic treatment is never complete. It may have a profound effect on ones life, but it is never a final product. At best, it is a process of inquiry, of reflection, and of learning. Sophia learned her lessons wellsometimes lessons that her teachers (her analysts) were probably not even aware of. As the words cascaded from her open heart, found their way to her feminine hands and onto the keyboard, and subsequently were transformed via computer binary system onto the printed page, the memory fragments emerged in a single eloquent voice. It is a voice, I am ashamed to admit, I did not know she possessed.
This memoir is the crystallization of a conscious and unconscious undertaking. Sophia has probably been working on this since she was a toddler. She has found her mode of expression. Perhaps the reader will be impressed, as I was, with her narrative tone. Narrative tone is more than a matter of personal style and particular language. In Sophias case, it is an all-encompassing sensibility that is honest, forthright, and ironic. No longer a frightened little girl, Sophias tone is mature. She knows what her search has been about. It is about her memory speaking, and it is about the choices she made and continues to make. It is about concretizing the catastrophic and the particular.
Sophias voice tells the story of what happens when a hidden child of the Holocaust grows up. This is an account we rarely see in the Holocaust literature. It is about the aftereffects of trauma. It is about the personal difficulties of a young woman fighting to forge an identity in the midst of a world that wants to forget. It is about a clinical psychoanalyst with unusual tact and talent. It is about a wife and a mother. It is about integrating memories in our fragmented and unforgiving information society. It is not about a victim.
Holocaust derives from the Greek
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