Conclusions
Spatial trauma is simultaneously a transcultural, contextual, and subjective phenomenon. War childhood leaves marks on people. Oral history recollections illustrate that war children felt a sense of placelessness not only during the evacuation but sometimes also several years and decades afterward.
Spatial trauma refers to drastic psychophysical experiences resulting from forced displacement which the individual tries to, but cannot quite, come to terms with. As illustrated in this chapter, several war children developed spatial trauma. The nationally contextual factors of World War II and several displacements and adjustment attempts created conditions for spatial trauma among the war children. It is concluded here that the depth and the duration of spatial trauma depended at least on four factors: (1) support from familial co-travelers and the chance to uphold some social relations, (2) the child's own abilities to develop emotive-spatial coping strategies, (3) the child's age and social and linguistic skills, and (4) possible dysfunctions in neuropsychological memory structures due to the traumatic event of being forcibly displaced. While the latter is only indicated in the psychological literature cited in this chapter, it is credibly present in many oral accounts used in this research.The multidisciplinary approach employed in this chapter creates new understanding of war children's fragmented and partly effaced autobiographical memories. This directs attention to long-standing effects of forced displacement among children. Utilizing the concept of trauma enabled the nuanced analysis of the dynamics of remembering, forgetting, and involuntary recalling. Further, analysis of war children's experiences clearly verifies that the existential ties between self and place do matter not only in people's personal life course but have implications on the sociocultural and communal level. It is therefore suggested here that more attention should urgently be paid to emotive-spatial memories and coping strategies used by people in contemporary forced displacement. This, however, needs to be done by acknowledging the particularities of autobiographical memories of forcibly displaced people. Rather than looking for coherent narratives, research and psychological interventions should focus on the fragments and disjunctions, which seem to be ontologically and epistemologically crucial indicators of spatial trauma.