In December 1945, a small group of children arrived at a country estate in Lingfield, Surrey. They were all survivors of Theresienstadt, the Nazi ghetto-camp not far from Prague where they had spent most of their short childhoods.
What they did not know was that, from the moment they crossed the threshold, they would become the subjects of one of the most remarkable studies of childhood ever undertaken.
Overseen by Anna Freud and her circle of pioneering child psychoanalysts who had moved to Britain fleeing war, this community became both a refuge and an experiment. While the children rebuilt their lives, their games, dreams and nightmares were carefully recorded in the hope of answering one the most urgent questions of the postwar period: what is the impact of growing up without a mother?
This study transformed psychology, and its influence can still be found today in everything from attachment theory to modern ideas about trauma. Yet the children themselves were never told the true extent to which their lives had been observed.
Drawing on archives across the world and the voices of the survivors themselves, historian Rebecca Clifford skilfully reconstructs the intertwined lives of the children and the women who cared for them. As it sheds new light on one of the most compelling untold stories of the postwar period, The Lingfield Children offers a gripping story of memory, the Holocaust and the limits of psychology.