The primary goal of this project consisted in the long term study of the life stories of Jewish Hidden Child Survivors of the Holocaust in order to understand Protective Factors that later enabled them to develop and grow and that can be used by social practitioners working with vulnerable children and families, in order to foster similar resilient responses. Looking from an Ecological perspective the trajectories of life of people who despite having experienced one or more traumatic events during the Holocaust (separation, hiding, parents’ deportation) and precarious situation after the war (children home, adoption, life with traumatized parents, financial and social instability), developed resilience, could be relevant to increase the educational knowledge about human development.
The qualitative analysis of the stories of life of people has been carried out assuming a Long Term approach focused on the whole trajectories of life to comprehend the developmental outcome in a life time perspective, getting elements that we would not have been able to understand if we had focused just on a short term oriented perspective.
The units of study consisted in textual narrative material about the life stories of child survivors which has been collected using a qualitative approach (narrative and autobiographic method) through:
• semi-structured face-to-face in depth interviews to 19 Hidden Child Survivors (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington D.C. and Yad Vashem, Jerusalem);
• published and unpublished biographies;
• material from documentaries, archives, manuscripts (U.S.H.M.M.).
The presentation will focus particularly on the results concerning the topics of relationship with resilience tutors and belonging to community (family, school and social context).
