The Children of Victim-Survivors:
The Next Generation
What effect has our parents’ need to forget produced on our lives?
For years it lay in an iron box buried so deep inside me that I was never sure just what it was. I knew I carried slippery, combustible things more secret than secret and more dangerous than any shadow or ghost. Ghosts had shape and name. What lay inside my iron box had none. Whatever lived inside me was so potent that words crumbled before they could describe. Sometimes I thought I carried a terrible bomb.
....Sometimes I felt my iron box contained a tomb.
....I built my iron box carefully, the way we were taught in school that nuclear reactors were built. I conceived lead walls around the dangerous parts, concentric circles of water channels and air ducts that would soften and contain any kind of explosion. I enclosed it all with metal casing and buried the box far away from my brain towards the small of my back, in the part of my body that seem least alive. (H. Epstein, p. 9-13)[1]
To begin with a quote from Helen Epstein has a special significance. Epstein is an independent journalist who, at the age of 29, undertook a project that was at first an investigative report on children of victim-survivors of the Shoah based on a selection of interviews. It was a revolutionary enterprise in 1977; at the time, the topic, as such, hardly existed.
The following is an excerpt from the beginning of the second chapter:
I had talked with other children of survivors before. Three of my closest childhood friends belonged to that quiet, invisible community, that peer group without a sign. After school, my friend Evelyn and I will often take our homework into Central Park and study Latin together, bound by a tacit affinity that we did not understand. Evelyn´s parents, like mine, had insisted that she study Latin. They spoke English with thick accents. They had fled Vienna just as my parents had fled Prague. They read the newspapers as avidly as my own parents. Seemingly innocuous headline could plunge them into an hour-long debate. Like me, Evelyn did not have grandparents or any family besides her mother and father. Like my friend Jimmy, whose family had also fled Vienna, Evelyn never spoke about family or history or how her parents came to be living in New York City. But when I visited them, I felt at home. There was an intensity there, a kind of fierceness about living that was absent from the more casual, easy going atmosphere of other homes. There was mystery of great consequence.
At my friend Mary´s house, that mystery was sharpened by sadness. Her parents came from Poland and when they were alone they spoke Iddish instead of German. They owned the small house in which they lived on West End Ave and they rarely left it. Once Mary told me that they were afraid it would burn down or be looted if they left. I accepted that without question, as if it were a natural consideration. Neither did I wonder why they had given their only child a Christian name. All of our parents, the ones who had come to America after the war, were eccentric in my eyes. They were not like Americans and we children were not like other American children. The fact was so obvious it did not require discussion and Mary, like Jimmy and Evelyn, never ventured to speculate on why that should be so. Friends, like family, are quick to shield each other from pain and although we all knew that a great deal of pain pervaded the households in which we were raised, we never addressed it by name.
At twenty nine, I had decided to address it. (p.15-16)[2]
In nineteen chapters, she relates her own life-story, the stories of her mother and father, how they lived through the Shoah and later arrived in the United States, as well as her own child’s-eye-view as link between two geographies, two lives and two cultures (Dina Wardi had still not proposed her metaphor of “memorial candles,” which I will comment on below). Epstein interviews children of victim-survivors in the United States, Canada, and Israel and, as she says, discovers herself reflected repeatedly as if in different mirrors, with different facets, but always with the same melody in the background. This is also what happens to those of us who have read her book. Published in 1979, the book was the genesis for meetings of children of victim-survivors, at the time, the so-called “second generation of the Holocaust.”
The publication of “Children of the Holocaust” produced and – for children of victim-survivors who read the book today – it still produces, two basic results.
On one hand, it established a community; suddenly one felt and thought: “It happens to them also? It wasn’t only me?” and one could insert the infinite experiences of one’s own history and childhood into a new context offering reassurance and understanding. Reassurance because we can recognize ourselves in others and we can ascribe to our own experiences, sentiments and difficulties a certain degree of normality: if these things do not only happen to us, then there is something that transcends us and in which we can find a sense of community and belonging.
On the other hand, Helen Epstein cast light on a portion of our reality that had been cloaked in darkness, she researched it and gave it a name so that, from that moment on, it existed. Like so many “obvious” things (gender differences in sexuality, for instance, or gender differences in viewing the world, or the concept of the unconscious – until Freud pointed it out – which are all evident examples of our blindness before the obvious), the category of “children of victim-survivors” did not exist as such. The “obvious” can produce blind-spots (one does not see that one does not see); the obvious is invisible. Helen Epstein brought it out into visibility.
Together, with the contributions made by so many others over the years, I hope we can open the iron box and see what is inside and what effects have been produced in the lives of the children of victim-survivors.
The childhood of children of the appeared.
It is very difficult to retrieve the thoughts we had as children. Knowledge we acquire later as adults obscures those memories. What dreams and fantasies did we entertain? What were the questions, the hypotheses, the explanations? To shed some light upon these issues, I refer to the talents of a writer who has successfully “returned” through his imagination to that world which, for many of us, is lost.
David Grossman[3] elegantly recreates the manner in which Momik, the 9-year-old only-child of a married couple of victim-survivors, tries to understand the things he hears, the “secret code of There.” He feels compelled to include these things in his account of his experiences and life in Israel.
When we examine the screaming in the light of day, it turns out to be quite simple. It was like this, there was a war in that kingdom, and Papa was the Emperor and also the chief warrior, a commando fighter. One of his friends (his lieutenant?) was called Sondar. This strange name may have been his name in the underground, like in the days of the Etzel and Lehi. They all lived in a big camp with a complicated name. There they were trained to go on daring missions, which were so secret even today you have to keep mum about them. Also there were some trains around, but that part isn´t so clear. May be those trains are like the ones his secret brother Bill tell him about, the trains attacked by savage Indians. Everything is so mixed up. And there were also these big campaigns in Papa´s kingdom called Aktions, and sometimes (probably to make the people fell proud) they would have really incredible parades, like we have on Independence Day. Left, right, left, right, Papa screams in his sleep, Links recht, he screams in the German language Bella will positively not translate to Momik, till he practically shouts at her and she gets angry and tells him it means left, right, to the left, to the right. Is that it, Momik wonders, then why didn´t she want to translate it? Mama wakes up at night from Papa´s screaming and she pokes him and shakes him, and cries, Un, Tuvia, sha, be still, the child can hear you, Over There is gone, it´s the middle of the night, a klag zal im trefin, you´ll wake the boy, Tuvia! ( p 28)
Dina Wardi, Italian psychotherapist, survivor/appeared of the Shoah, lives in Israel today. She speaks about those of us who were born after the war[4]:
.....One and a half
million children were murdered during the Holocaust. After
the liberation, the birth of new children became the symbol of victory.
The generation of 1946 reached this world half-alive and half-dead, born of
parents filled with confusion and internal contradictions. The babies that
were born had the power to shine some light through the chaos... Perhaps
they could give meaning to their parents' empty lives. They would be the
compensation and the substitutes for the beloved family members who had
died.
And then she adds:
... The children have clear views of the special role for which they were
designated, even before they were born... I call this role, "memorial
candles." It includes the personal history of the parents during the
Holocaust, as well as their attempts to mend the broken ties with their
extended families and communities... The parent-survivors speak very little
with their children about what happened to them... Without providing them
with the necessary information, they bestow upon their "memorial
candles" the task of filling the void of their hearts and mending the broken
(hidden) pieces of the family mosaic...
Candles symbolize both life and death, they are a metaphor for our experiences: our hopes and anxieties, the losses and discoveries in our lives, the lights and shadows.
Categories of families of the appeared
Yail Danieli[5], co-founder and director of the Group Project for Holocaust Survivors and Their Children, worked with 75 survivors whose ages varied from 37 to 74 years old, and close to 300 children of survivors from 17 to 33 years old. She proposes four family categories:
1) “Victim” families. That is, those appeared who see themselves submitted to a state of victimization, impotence and the inability to react. The family environment is characterized by depression, distrust, and fear of the outside world, all of which establishes a strong symbiotic relationship between parents and children. Issues of money and success are central, as well as not permitting oneself to be seen as a target, that is, keeping a low profile. These are families that prohibit defensive or aggressive behavior toward the outside world. The parents, especially the mothers, tend to harbor exaggerated fears concerning their children and hence are overprotective. They are almost compulsively preoccupied with physical survival: food is a central issue in their lives. Another feature is extreme anxiety over the safety of both people and possessions; this may lead to compulsive behavior, such as frequent opening and closing of doors. Total distrust of anyone who does not pertain to the immediate family is a message that is communicated to the children.
One of the most serious problems confronted by members of this type of family involves confronting feelings of aggression and rage. As a survival tactic, parents learned during the Shoah to suppress expressions of this kind, which, at that time, not only endangered one’s own life but also the lives of those nearby.
In these families, the habitual repression of anger is complemented by eruptions of violence that are difficult to control, often directed at the children when they “misbehave.” Certain stock phrases are often used by parents in these families, such as “You act like Hitler,” “You’re worse than the Nazis,” or “Even Eichmann was better than you.”
Children in these families develop a strong identification with the suffering and pain of their parents and acquire a special sensitivity toward other individuals and society in general. Many choose to be involved in activities related to the protection or provision of aid to needy people and, generally, their performance is exemplary: children from families that see themselves as “victims” are very capable of confronting the challenge of helping others, so long as the challenge does not include helping themselves.
2) “Fighter” families. These are families in which the parents were involved in some kind of organized resistance to the Nazis and who, after the war, maintained attitudes very contrary to those of the “victim” Jews. Not only those who fought are included in this group, but all those who took responsibility for themselves and for others in the ghettos as well as in the camps. They see themselves as active and able to make decisions. This characteristic saved many of them, but we should not forget that many others perished due to bad luck and arbitrariness. In spite of what “fighters” may believe, their style of behavior was not a guarantee of survival during the Shoah.
The home atmosphere is very different from that of “victim” families. Hospitality and cheerfulness are rules of the household. Everything must be in order. Everyone must behave pleasantly. Depression, sadness and weakness are firmly discouraged. Achievement and constant activity are stimulated and promoted, pride and self-determination are considered the pillars of daily life. Making an effort and accepting challenges are behaviors that are rewarded, half-heartedness, apathy and indifference are punished. Aggressive behavior toward the outside world is applauded and the children are prepared to fight against all threats and aggressors. Their slogans could very well be along the lines of, “Stand on your own two feet and win!” “Frighten your opponents if you wish but never let them know that you yourself are afraid!” and “Never give in and never give up, no matter what!”
Problems are not tolerated and must be resolved quickly and efficiently. Everyone must maintain absolute control over their lives. Honor and courage are most important: “Humiliation and oppression - never!”
Everything was always okey. Both Father and Mother worked. They were both very active and ambitious. Father achieved a very important public position. Many people would come to him to ask for advice or support. But I really don´t remember any expressions of feeling in our house. No one shouted, no one got angry, no one cried, we did not kiss or hug each other, everything was simply okay. I can´t remember crying in front of my parents or at all. Even when we came home after my father´s funeral, the first thing my mother said was, “The last thing I need is that you should start crying now”, So obviously I didn´t cry. She didn´t cry, and neither did I.
In school I was always very active, always on committees, always responsible and organizing. When I was seven I was chosen to recite something at an Independence Day ceremony in front of the whole school. I remember that I felt very excited and afraid inside, but no one say this. I didn´t say anything to my mother or father, as they would not have understood. They took it for granted that I had to stand there on the platform, in front of everyone, and do what I had been asked in the best possible way. I realize now that I also took it for granted.
All those years I was always outstanding. In class I always had to be the best pupil. In the officers´ course (in the army) I felt under pressure to reach first place, to be the outstanding cadet. At the university – a brilliant student, and now responsible public work. Again I´m in the limelight. I never let myself stop and examine what I am doing to see if it´s really what I want, or to find out what I really feel about all sorts of pressure driving me, or some sort of drive, that decided everything for me. But I´m not at all sure if this power is my own. I never felt that I really had the opportunity to choose or to consider different courses of action. (p.128)[6]
“Fighter” parents present their children with an impossible image to emulate, one that is highly idealized and mythical. Most of the children know very little about what really happened to their parents during the Shoah, what they actually did to save themselves and others.
3) “Numb” families are often those in which both parents were the sole survivors of their individual families, which, prior to the war, may have included a wife/husband and children. The unspoken rule in these families is “don’t make waves.” The parents seem to be in a perpetual state of shock and resignation. What happened during the Shoah is rarely mentioned. They are protective families, the parents protect each other and their children, and vice versa, in a climate characterized by pervasive indifference and estrangement. These families are similar to “victim” families but they are more apathetic, with feelings and reactions that are so deeply buried that they seem unable to respond to even minimal stimulation. They are frequently very isolated from social and community contact. It is probably within this group that the greatest quantity of persons suffering from physical symptoms of varying degrees of severity may be found.
4) Families of “those who made it” are those in which survivors have decided that their own successful lives will be the definitive proof of victory over the Nazis. This is the group that is most adapted to the reality of their new country, whose members are highly ambitious and often achieve great social and political status, fame, and/or wealth. In these families, where a primary objective is to gain recognition for the family name, at least one of the children has been stimulated to follow this same path. Some members of this group have dedicated much of their careers, fortunes and political status to the objective of commemorating and recognizing the Jewish experience during the Shoah.
Children of the appeared who are most active in the effort to rediscover their history pertain, in large measure, to the first two groups, the “victims” and the “fighters.” Those from “numb” families, due to their extreme isolation and disaffection, appear indifferent to the issue of the Shoah. This may also be observed in members of families “who made it,” albeit for different reasons. In these families, it is not necessary to confront the issue of the Shoah, it is an experience that has been overcome, their lives are proof of the triumph over the Nazis.
It seems reasonable to suppose that the type of life one was exposed to during the Shoah determines, to a high degree, pertinence to one of these categories. For example, members of the “fighter” families had generally been partisans or members of some resistance group, whereas members of “victim” or “numb” families had generally been in the camps.
These categories, established by Danieli, illustrate the difficulty we face in trying to identify some kind of syndrome for children of victim-survivors. The same observations that were made of the appeared are now pertinent to their children. As children of the appeared, what we seem to have in common is precisely the fact that we are children of the appeared. Which confers upon us certain characteristics that do not constitute a syndrome.
There are many additional differences to consider.
The age of our parents during the Shoah. Their social backgrounds. Their social and family structures. Whether they lived in rural or urban areas. Whether they belonged to Jewish communities that were integrated into the social fabric of their origin countries or whether they maintained a more closed cultural identity. Whether they were political militants or had cultural interests. In this context, Raoul Hillberg[7] has said:
Yet survival was not altogether random, and survivors who describe themselves as the few are not a sample of the many who died. In sheer physical terms, the veterans of camps, hideouts, and partisan units had two attributes. They were relatively young, concentrated in the age group from the teens to the thirties, and that is to say that those who were middle-aged were even fewer. They also had to be in good health at the start of the ordeal. Ghettos, let alone camps, marshes, and woods, were all prescriptions for illness, and anyone who was already burdened with a malady or disability usually had an insurmountable problem.
Social characteristics, although not as determinative as one´s physical condition, were also important. The same advantages that favored people in ghettos, hiding or escape, also furthered ultimate survival. “We were scraping the bottom of our dwindling resources”, states a survivor who was still in hiding in a Polish town during 1944. He did not have to add that he had some resources to begin with. The Jewish physicians and carpenters were similarly able to prolong their existence, if not in freedom, then in a ghetto, and if not in a ghetto, then in a camp.
Most critical, however, was the psychological profile of the survivors. In this respect, they differed completely from the great mass of their fellow victims. The contrast may be glimpsed in three important traits: realism, rapid decision making, and tenacious holding on to life.
It was not common in the Jewish community to be realistic to the extent of observing one´s environment soberly and drawing one´s conclusions independently. It was not usual to be suspicious of explanations or assurances that demanded absolute trust in authority. Rudolf Vrba, who had already escaped from an internment camp in Slovakia and had been caught at the border of Hungary, was on a deportation train with Jewish families who had been promised “re-settlement”. When the train halted at Maydanek-Lublin, where he was pulled off with men aged sixteen to forty-five, he decided that from this moment, he would “trust nobody”. The realistic person did not rationalize steps into the unknown as benign. During a roundup in the Kaunas Ghetto in 1944, a woman, Liuba Daniel, “forbade” her husband to report. He did anyway and died. She survived.
Presence of mind, coupled with the ability to make decisions instantly, was another rare characteristic. One woman, Mitzi Abeles, repeatedly escaped from pursuers who were within yards of her, at one point jumping in a nightshirt from a window in Zagreb, Croatia. Errikos Sevillias, the Greek Jew in Auschwitz who ascribed his survival to incomprehensible fate, recalls a barracks selection in which he gave himself a poor chance of survival, because he had become emaciated. “In the instant”, he writes, that “I saw the guard look elsewhere, I jumped and landed on the other side of the barrier” where the strong had already been separated from the weak. The decision makers always took risks. Not always were their actions prompted by the appearance of a danger; sometimes they responded to an opportunity. When the teenager Isaac Rudnicki in the Swienciany Ghetto was assigned to work in a German weapons room, he removed two firearms and hid them in the ghetto. His family was petrified. He eventually became a partisan and after his liberation fought in Israel´s wars, rising in rank to Brigadier General with a new name: Yitzhad Arad.
The third component of the survivor´s personality pattern was an absolute determination to live. One aspect of this tenacity was adaptability to the inflictions of indignity, pain, cold, heat and hunger. When Rudolf Vrba was transferred from Lublin to Auschwitz, he met two Poles, both of whom suggested laughingly that he should run for the wire –the guard would shoot and end things quickly. Vrba angry, answered: “I´ll be alive when you two are dead!” They died in fact a month later of typhus. Vrba, resolute, ate everything, “even if the bread contained sawdust, and the tea looked like sewer water”. Sevillias, much older than Vrba, was already over forty. His stamina was nevertheless exceptional. When the Soviet army liberated him, he weighed thirty-two kilograms, or seventy pounds. But he was alive.
Sevillias, Vrba, Abeles, Daniel, and Arad are unusual people even among survivors. They epitomize the qualities that make survival possible in the most extreme situations. At the same time, they personify most clearly an essential truth that applied to everyone who surmounted the odds. They were lucky after they had tried to save themselves. (p188 to 191)
In this attempt to somehow categorize the appeared, I think it is useful to recall the different categories already proposed in the previous chapter, “The Categories of Suffering,” with respect to where and how victims survived the Shoah:
- Those who experienced the camps: whether or not they were in the camps, what kinds of camps, performing what kinds of activities, were they part of some kind of Sonderkommando, did they have a protector, were they part of a death march.
- Those who hid: in forests, in private homes, in barns, etc.
- Those who changed their identities.
- Those who escaped to Russia.
Within any of these categories, we should consider that they may have been compelled at some moment to serve the Nazis in some way, to trade with them, prostitute themselves, any of a number of actions that may have left an indelible stain on the memory. Esther P[8]., a Hungarian victim-survivor, says:
My cousin, Dotti, was a beauty. She had Aryan documents. She worked as a waitress in a bar. A Nazi officer fell in love with her and promised to save her. He took her to his apartment, a tiny small place with a living room and one bedroom in the center of Budapest. Dotti never told him that she was married. She and her husband built a hiding place for him beneath the bed, the only place where there was enough space. It wasn’t a matter of many years, only a few months until the end of the war, but that’s how they got through it, with her on top of the bed with her Nazi lover, and him underneath the bed, listening. They had a daughter to whom Dotti could never bring herself to tell the truth. After Dotti’s death, the daughter began to ask questions about how things were, how they had survived, and I told her. Dotti died without knowing not only that her daughter didn’t accuse her of anything, but that she admired her more than ever, as well as her father, for their strength and determination to live.
I do not know how life has been after the war for former members of the Judenräte, the Jewish police, or the Kapos in the camps – or their families. I suppose it must be very difficult for them and their children to come to terms with the past. The Canadian film-maker, Irene Lilienheim Angelico[9], made a video in which she explores her condition as a daughter of victim-survivors, beginning with her becoming conscious of her condition and culminating with the making of the video; there are interviews with other children of victim-survivors, a trip to Israel in 1981 for the first of several meetings, a trip to Germany, where both her parents were born, and a visit to Dachau, where her father was a prisoner. There are also interviews with children of perpetrators; in one of these interviews, a son of a Nazi officer who was active in the camp at Birkenau camp tells us:
For you, this quest, this investigation, unites you and your parents in the past, you reconstruct family continuity. For us it is the exact opposite, to know the things that my father did distances me from him, I cannot reconcile the image I have of the man I love so much with the monster he was during the war, it is a rift that cannot be resolved.
It is clear that we are confronted by a conglomeration of people and situations that is impossible to catalogue as a whole. When we speak of the appeared, or their children, and all of these categories, we should also wonder about: who they were before, what their interests were, how old they were during the Shoah, where and how they lived through it, how many members of their family survived, if they witnessed the death of any family members, if they carried out any actions of which they might possibly be proud, or, conversely, if they can only recall humiliating situations... all in all, I would say that Danieli’s proposal of only four categories is insufficient.
Nonetheless, there are certain characteristics that children of the appeared have in common.
Nathalie Zajde[10], a French psychotherapist, says:
Children of survivors generally have the sharp sensation of an accidental, almost mythological origin to their lives. They all believe that they could very well not have been born or that the constitution of their families could have been very different. Like all people who have lived through the emigration experience at an early age, the basis of their existence has not acquired the level of certainty familiar to a person for whom the external world corresponds to the interior world. In a recurrent manner, they imagine another family: they cannot avoid imagining how life might have been if the Shoah had never happened. They pore over aged photographs and dream of the faces of family members they never knew; they pronounce ancient names, Hebrew and Yiddish names, strangers from among the numerous phantasmagoric members of bygone families. The children of survivors born after the war are profoundly convinced that they are “miracles.” They desperately search for meaning in their history, a reason for their existence.
(Enfant de survivants. La transmission du traumatisme chez les enfants des Juifs survivantes de l´extermination nazie, Edition Odile Jacob, Paris, 1995)
This notion of accidental birth is not always noted or expressed in those words, but it is supported by the solid proof of the Shoah. Just as the appeared generally attribute their survival to chance and continue to this day wondering about how and why, it is a logical consequence that their children also feel that their very existence was a matter of chance: if events had followed a more logical path, they would not have been born. Logic leads to two conclusions: one, that the Shoah should never have happened, in which case their parents would not be who they are and, two, that because the Shoah did, in fact, happen, their parents had no way to survive, their destiny, given the circumstances, was sure death. In neither of these cases would we, the children, be here today.
In broad terms, of course, this sentiment might be felt by all humanity. Most everyone will recognize that, in a way, there is something random about their having been born. If we were to consider the thousands of alternatives that led up to the birth of any one of us, the cumulus of accidents and coincidences that finally converged on our individual lives so that we could be who we are today. But this sentiment that is common to all of us acquires a malignant character, a toxic nature if you wish, for children of the appeared. Chance occurrences in the lives of the average person are the chances of life, foreseeable in a sense, that are part of the normal flow of life. The experience of the Jews during the Shoah was a profound alteration in the normal flow of life, a radical subversion of the norms of social and family co-habitation, a “gap” in the existential logic, something irrational and without a name. For children of the appeared, the idea of what “could have been” acquires a sinister and prohibited aura, the thought itself carries the threat of reviving horrific ghosts.
Apart from Dina Wardi’s apt metaphor to unify us and gives us purpose, “memorial candles,” there are not many common characteristics to be found among us, the children of the appeared. There are many differences. We seem to follow similar parameters to those followed by our parents who never actually formed a social “collective” of so-called survivors. Still, that is how they were seen by the rest of the community, especially at the start of the immigration. Nonetheless, little by little, thanks in large part to the efforts they made to lead normal lives, to live like everyone else, they began to forget about their condition.
Nor did they want to identify themselves, to see themselves as victim-survivors, such that the subject was not central to social engagements; except when they were with other victim-survivors, there was a prevailing decision to remain silent, to pretend to have forgotten.
They entered social groups in pursuit of specific professional interests, communities of shared origin (from the same village, the same country), political ideologies, socio-economic levels. Among the appeared there emerged a myriad of differences, personal differences of origin, class, interests, all of which prevented the formation of a social collective. The condition of being a victim-survivor was simply insufficient.
Perhaps it is difficult for us also, the children, to establish a social collective. Our pertinence to this group, “children of victim-survivors,” albeit concrete, does not seem sufficient to dissolve the multitude of individual differences among us (cultural, social, economic, ideological, political, etc.). Nonetheless, we have been able to identify some points of concurrence in the observable data, some of which, especially the first, correspond to all immigrants.
Countries and languages. The majority of the appeared came from central Europe, from what was then Poland, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Romania and, to a lesser degree, France, Belgium, Italy, Yugoslavia and others. For the vast majority, then, Yiddish was one of the languages the families spoke at home, although many families spoke the language of the origin country (due to the wave of secularization imposed on Jewish communities in Central Europe between the two world wars particularly in Poland, Hungary and Germany). In other homes, in the homes of our schoolmates, the language of the host country was spoken.
Many of us have been the linguistic link between our parents and this new place. Translators, interpreters, adapters to a new reality, couriers of a culture.
Eva Hoffman[11], a Polish writer born in 1946 and daughter of victim-survivors, immigrated with her family to Canada in 1959. Her lucid and stirring book relates her emergence from a deep culture shock and what she learned from it. Here, on page 120, she says:
For my birthday, Penny gives me a diary, complete with a little lock and key to keep what I write from the eye of all intruders. It is that little lock –the visible symbol of the privacy in which the diary is meant to exist- that creates my dilemma. If I am indeed to write something entirely for myself, in what language do I write? Several times, I open the diary and close it again. I can´t decide. Writing in Polish at this point would be a little like resorting to Latin or ancient Greek –an eccentric thing to do in a diary, in which you´re supposed to set down your most immediate experiences and unpremeditated thoughts in the most unmediated language. Polish is becoming a dead language, the language of the untranslatable past. But writing for nobody´s eyes in English? That´s like doing a school exercise, or performing in front of yourself, a slightly perverse act of self-voyeurism.
Because I have to choose something, I finally choose English. If I´m to write about the present, I have to write in the language of the present, even if it´s not the language of the self. As a result, the diary becomes surely one of the more impersonal exercises of that sort produced by an adolescent girl. These are no sentimental effusions of rejected love, eruptions of familial anger, or consoling broodings about death. English is not the language of such emotions. Instead, I set down my reflections on the ugliness of wrestling; on the elegance of Mozart, and on how Dostoyevsky puts me in mind of El Greco. I write down thoughts. I Write.
There is a certain pathos to this naïve snobbery, for the diary is an earnest attempt to create a part of my persona that I imagine I would have grown into in Polish. In the solitude of this most private act, I write, in my public language, in order to update what might have been my other self. The diary is about me and not about me at all. But on one level, it allows me to make the first jump. I learn English through writing, and, in turn, writing gives me a written self. Refracted through the double distance of English and writing, this self –my English self- becomes oddly objective; more than anything, it perceives. It exists mores easily in the abstract sphere of thoughts and observations than in the world. For a while, this impersonal self, this cultural negative capability, becomes the truest thing about me. When I write, I have a real existence that is proper to the activity of writing –an existence that takes place midway between me and the sphere of artifice, art, pure language. This language is beginning to invent another me. However, I discover something odd. It seems that when I write (or, for that matter, think) in English, I am unable to use the word “I”. I do not go so far as the schizophrenic “she” –but I am driven, as by a compulsion, to the double, the siamese-twin you”. ( p120-1)
Our parents could scarcely share in our schooling. They could not help us with our homework or even be sure that we had done it well. They did not know anything about local History heroes (like, in Argentina, Sarmiento, San Martín or Belgrano) and they learned the national anthem along with their children but, even that, only with great difficulty, hardly understanding the speeches the Principal gave at patriotic assemblies. For some of us, it was embarrassing to have foreign parents, for others, it was something to boast about. No one was indifferent about it.
- The food. Not only in language but also in other areas were there differences that set our families apart, such as in music and food. Although everyone brought with them recipes from their countries of origin, there was a shared lack of knowledge concerning the foods of this new land. In our homes, initially at least, we did not buy such things as dulce de batata (candied sweet potato), dulce de membrillo (candied quince), dulce de leche (a kind of caramel syrup), nor did we know the local way to prepare barbecue-style beef, sausages, and organ meats; we didn’t drink mate tea, prepare empanadas or eat shellfish. Many of us remember the ceremony of drinking tea in a glass with a lump of sugar or a candy under the tongue and the commentaries our mothers would make, marveling over the sundry meats, fish, vegetables and fruits displayed in the markets.
Which was the Homeland? There was (is?) a certain sense of statelessness, or of pertaining to more than one country, which, in the end was all the same thing.
Many of the appeared renounced their birthplace, their village or city of origin[12]. They denied having come from that place. Nonetheless, their memories, their nostalgia, the images that leapt to mind, whether summoned or not, all were linked to that other land.
Later came nationalization in the new country, Argentine citizenship, the procedures, witnesses, notaries public, lawyers, hearings and, finally, the Argentine national document and passport which replaced temporary papers stamped “special for foreigners.”
There was always the possibility of soliciting Israeli citizenship simply by deciding to live in Israel, thanks to the “Law of Return.”
Which was the homeland? Which place was considered home? How could this place be reconciled with history, with the memories, with the experiences, with all that determines the sentiment we call “homeland?” This was a common retort of the anti-Semites: “Go to Israel.” Nonetheless, for many, even when the existence of the State of Israel was recognized as essential, it still wasn’t part of their experience to call Israel their homeland, particularly without knowing for certain what this term meant: was it their country of origin? Was it Argentina? Was it Israel? Did it have to be one or another? Could it be one and another?
Previous life. Many of us know very little about our parents’ and their families’ lives prior to their immigration; the education and activities of our grandparents, names of members of the family, birth dates, distant relatives, mysterious family ties. For many, it has never been clear how the family used to be, how many there were, what their names were, where they lived, the different generations, the good times and the bad. The life that preceded the gap tends to remain cloaked in a kind of darkness with actors who evade the light, who can not be distinguished or differentiated. Some of our mothers and fathers had other families before the Shoah, another wife or husband, other children; some shared this knowledge with their families after the Shoah, others have carefully guarded the painful secret they believe it better not to remember. One consequence of all this, for example, has been that few of us know the medical history of our ancestors: diabetes, arthritis, alcoholism, cardiovascular diseases, arteriosclerosis, dementia, rheumatism, obesity, etc.
- Photographs. There can be found photographs of the past in few homes of the appeared. The majority were unable to keep such testimonies of what once was, of the people they once were, their families, their homes, their dreams, their childhood. Most of us have learned to live without those photographs of the past as if it were something natural, without asking questions, knowing without having been told that to ask about the lost photographs could only open wounds that might never close. Loose threads always dangled as if from the rafters of the past, working their way through the unchecked cracks of nostalgia and, then, something would be mentioned, a disparate fragment, loose often incomprehensible pieces of a puzzle. With neither photographs nor objects that spoke to us of the past, we grew accustomed to filling in these shadowy spaces with the ghosts of our imagination. The existence or absence of photographs, like all objects that one carries along through life, is just one element that differentiates us from other immigrants who, in general, are able to carry such things with them, “things” that speak to them, as well as to their descendants, of “that other time and place.”
Yoel is about forty, the son of two survivor parents. His mother lost her husband and her two daughters and her entire extended family in the Holocaust. In most of the group sessions Yoel sat silent and closed. In one session he related the following in a flat, choked voice:
“In the picture album we had in our house since I was a child there were pictures of two little girls, about eight and ten years old, I think they were my mother´s children. I never asked her explicitly and she never told me anything. Forty years... Even now I´m not sure that I want to, or can, really talk to her about it... I don´t know anything, not their names or what happened to them. She never mentions them at all...” (Wardi. P. 101)[13]
Caring. In conversations with children of the appeared, the issue of responsibility for our parents often comes up. Not always recognized when we were children, today as adults we understand that we felt a certain need to care for our parents, to respect what we perceived as a tense fragility on their part that we weren’t supposed to disturb (this could very well be a characteristic specific to children of survivors of the Shoah). This care was provided by not asking questions, by not bringing up those topics that we knew to be sensitive and painful, by not pressuring them to open doors they had decided to keep shut, by not confronting them with sorrows, with those memories they had made such an effort to leave behind, with the losses they needed to forget in order to live again as human beings. We were unwitting accomplices in a game of amnesia.
Grossman[14] says of Momik (page 18):
.... and he´s the only one in the whole wide world who can do it, because who else can save Mama and Papa from their fears and silences and krechtzes, and the curse, which was even worse after Grandfather Anshel turned up and made them remember all the things they were trying so hard to forget and not tell anyone.
....and suddenly Momik felt strangely sad, and he got up and went over to old Grandfather, and hugged him tight, and felt how warm he was, like an oven, and Grandfather stopped talking to himself, and for maybe half a minute he was quiet, and kept his face and hands still, and sort of listened to what was going on inside, but he could never stop talking for very long.
In addition, a form of caring could involve the idea that our parents depended on us to somehow provide restitution for their losses. I defer again to the words Grossman composes for Momik (pages 23-24):
... Momik has to use imaginary things and hints and hunches and the talking that stops the minute he walks into the room, that´s how it was when Mama and Papa sat talking with Idka and Shimmik about the compensation money from Germany, and Papa said angrili, Take a man like me, for instance, who lost a child Over There, which is why Momik isn´t so sure it´s only imaginary, and sometimes when he´s really feeling low, it makes him so happy just to think how glad they´ll be the day the can finally tell Mama and Papa that he´s the boy they gave away to the hunter, it will be exactly like Joseph and his brothers. But sometimes he imagines it a different way, that he´s the boy who lost his twin brother, because Momik has this feeling that he used to have a Siamese twin, and when they were born, they were cut in two like in Believe It or Not: “300 astonishing cases that shook the world”, and maybe someday they´ll meet and be joined together again (if they want).
Another form of caring was the effort we made to respect the unspoken expectation that we should be normal and happy, just like all the other children, proof that the attempt at returning to normal life had been successful, that this time they had done things well, that they needed not accuse themselves of anything nor seek forgiveness.
Thus David Grossman describes the sentiments of the children:
Sometimes they come into the room at night and stand next to his bed. They just want to take one last look at him before they start with the nightmares. That´s when Momik strains every muscle to look as if he´s asleep, to look like a healthy, happy boy, just as cheerful as he can be, always smiling, even in his sleep, ai-li-liu-luli, we have the most hilarious dreams around here, and sometimes he has a really Einsteiny idea, like when he pretends to be talking in his sleep and says, Kick it to me, Joe, we´re going to win this game Danny, and thinks like that to make them happy and once on a really horrible day when grandfather wanted to go outside after supper and they have had to lock him up in this room and he started hollering and Mama cried, well, that horrible day Momik pretended to be asleep and he sang then the national anthem and got so carried away he wet his bed and all to make them understand they didn´t have to get so upset, they didn´t have to waste their fears on him or anything, they ought to be saving their strength for the really important things like supper, and their dreams and all the silences, and then just as he was finally falling asleep he heard as if in the distance or maybe he was dreaming already, Hanna Zeitrin calling God to come already, and also the quiet yowling of the cat who was going crazy in the cellar, and Momik promised to try even harder from now on. (p.51)
I believe that the following issues go beyond the common experience of immigrants and describe essential aspects of our lives as children of victim-survivors of the Shoah.
- Guilt. During our childhood, there was a vague sensation, which today we call guilt, that things were not quite right, that our parents had suffered something terrible, that they had lived through unmentionable experiences, that they had been submitted to privations that went beyond what was humanly tolerable or imaginable. What were insignificant commentaries in other families could inspire mute terror in our´s. “Don’t leave food on your plate, you have no idea what hunger really is,” were words that raised the lids on Pandora’s boxes that few of us were inclined to peer into but which, nonetheless, inspired feelings of guilt due to abundance, due to living well, as if we were thus indebted to someone for something. “What are you complaining about? You have everything!” were comments that left us paralyzed: to complain, to want, were sentiments that were prohibited to us. We were supposed to be content, to eat everything, to be excellent students, to be healthy and, above all, not to cause problems and to be thankful at all times for the gift of life, of having our parents near us, our beds, a roof over our heads, food and clothing.
In the testimony of Deborah Schwartz, daughter of survivors, told to Helen Epstein[15], she says:
When I did something bad, my mother would say, “How can you dare not respect me? How can you talk back? I wish I had my mother here”. Whenever she reprimanded us, she brought it up to give extra force to what she was saying, to impress it upon us. And you know something –it made an impression on me. What can you answer? There´s nothing to say. If I wanted to spend the night at a girl friend´s house and my mother didn´t want me to, or if I wanted to go to the movies and she said no, I felt I had no right to object. The degree of your suffering has no relation to the degree of suffering that she experienced. I don´t think she did it to make me feel guilty. I think she really believed: “How can you consider this thing so important that you´re willing to talk back to me?” you know?
I knew. Of course I knew. Almost every child of survivors I had spoken to had described the same pattern of behavior that was superimposed on family arguments. Whether the dispute concerned dinner, new shoes, a sleepover date, college, marriage or travel, talk would shift from the question at hand and become a question of relative suffering. “How can you cause me pain?” our parents asked, implicitly or explicitly. “How can you add to our suffering?” Some children of survivors I spoke with were simply baffled by this logic. “I didn´t know what to think” one young doctor told me. “I mean, I hadn´t done anything to them. I wasn´t a German”. Other children responded with an anger that grew until they could barely talk to their parents. “It was emotional blackmail –pure and simple”, said a young dance company manager. “Everything they did, their bad temper, their nerves, their judgments –everything was justifiable because of the war. I was always accused of being ungrateful. I always felt that they wanted me to feel guilty and I refused to. Why should I feel guilty or ungrateful?” (p. 309-310)