Authenticity, Trauma and the Child's View: Martha Blend’s A Child Alone, Vera Gissing’s Pearls of Childhood and Ruth L. David’s Ein Kind unserer Zeit

This article analyses memory texts by three women Kindertransportees written and published in the 1990s as a creative reflection on specific childhood experiences which inevitably included sadness and loss. The article investigates issues of gender, the genre of Holocaust literature and autobiography. Examining both the normality and extraordinary situations of former Kindertransportees' childhoods, certain ruptures are identified, which are shown to be interlinked with the tension between narrated child self and narrating adult self. This has a defamilarizing effect, which challenges the readership's preconceptions about memory, trauma and rescue associated with the Kindertransport experience.