This paper analyzes how the 1948 Yiddish-Polish film Unzere Kinder directed by Natan Gross and Shaul Goskind anticipates much later debates of the 1980s and 1990s on how the Holocaust ought to be represented and how these representations might enable a healing from the trauma of the Holocaust for both survivors and subsequent generations. I argue that the film not only shows how adults can learn about coping with trauma by listening to child survivors. It also grounds its pedagogy of coming to terms with the experience of the Holocaust in the work of Janusz Korczak whose portrait appears in the Helenowek Colony orphanage in Llodz which housed Jewish children who survived the Holocaust. Drawing on Freud's concepts of acting out and working through I demonstrate how the children's playacting of their different roles in the ghetto-as smuggler, pickpocket, decoy to distract guards-as well as their subsequent playful restaging of Sholem Aleichem's Kasrilevke Brent lays the foundation for a future-oriented coming to terms with trauma. In contrast to Aleichem's play and its farcical staging of the characters' inability to put out the fire, the children in the film are shown to be able to put out the fire that consumed the fictitious shtetl in their playacting. This can be interpreted as the articulation of new generational approach to address the inherited traumas of Yiddish-Polish culture-albeit a mostly a mostly aspirational one-since directors, actors and the children in the film were forced into exile by the repressive anti-semitic post-World War II Communist government. My paper will focus on the intersections of this new generational approach with current approaches in trauma theory (Cathy Caruth) and ongoing debates about the conflicting roles of documentary versus fictional representations of the Holocaust.
