Children in Crisis

Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s groundbreaking and heartbreaking Last Witnesses, first published in Moscow in 1985 and translated for the first time into English this year by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, is an oral history of children’s experiences in World War II. Tale after tale in the book reveals the daily and cumulative effects of the war and the trauma inflicted on the lives of the children, rived suddenly and unexpectedly away from their families and in many cases orphaned. The collection of horror stories compiled here is further evidence of what Hannah Arendt referred to as “the banality of evil.” 

In her review in the New York Times from August of Last Witnesses, Sana Krasnikov wrote, 

“Of the myriad horrors that befell these children—starvation, witnessing ghastly violence—none are as damaging, in this book’s portrayal, as being wrenched away from a parent. The parent is a pillow between the child and the horrors of the world. And it is here that Alexievich makes a case for why children bear war’s greatest burden. The loss of a parent is not merely the loss of a caretaker. Those, the stories suggest, can be replaced. For a child the loss of a parent is the loss of memory itself. Tell me about the day I was born, a child asks. Tell me about when I was little. Parents are our witnesses, our record, to those years that are otherwise lost to the amnesia of early childhood."

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," wrote Santayana. The words would seem to apply to our current administration and its heartless policy of separating migrant children from their families on the southern border of the United States. 

The Washington Post on October 29 ran an editorial, "Only now do we understand the true cruelty of Trump’s family separation" (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/only-now-do-we-understand-the-true-cruelty-of-trumps-family-separation/2019/10/29/8294ef9e-f9cf-11e9-ac8c-8eced29ca6ef_story.html). 

"Imagine, if you can," reads the editorial, "the suffering visited upon [at least 5,460 children, including more than 500 of whom were 5 years old or younger] … by the administration’s cavalier brutality and incompetence — the anguish of little girls and boys removed from their parents for weeks or months because of a president lacking a conscience and a government whose data systems were not suited to the task of reunification. Those wounds won’t heal easily, or ever.”

The editorial in the Post adds, "Only now, 16 months after a federal judge ordered migrant families reunified, has the scale of the administration’s cruelty become understood. Most Americans thought the policy detestable. It was far worse than they imagined ... Incredibly, having shattered so many families, the administration threw up its hands and declared the task of reuniting them beyond its capabilities." 

The Post called the policy "a stain on Mr. Trump, on the government he leads, and on America."