Educating Traumatized Teenagers: The Extraordinary Story of a Swedish International School

After World War II, Sweden absorbed and provided medical treatment for thousands of sick survivors. What to do about those who were teenagers, who had missed years of study on account of the war?  In September 1945, the Swedish government issued an order for schooling to be offered to those under the age of 18. In this presentation, Dr. Bernice Lerner will describe the complex process of recruiting wary adolescents, the challenges of teaching homeless, orphaned, and “environmentally damaged” teenagers, and instructors’ goals and methods at the most experimental of sites—the “Internat” school her mother attended. Dr. Bernice Lerner is the author of All the Horrors of War: A Jewish Girl, a British Doctor, and the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, and other writings on the Holocaust and on virtue ethics. She is the former dean of adult learning at Hebrew College, former lecturer on the Holocaust at Boston University, and a senior scholar at Boston University’s Center for Character and Social Responsibility. Gerald S. Kaplan Endowed Lecture.