Tag Archives: second generation

August 13, 2012 · 8:41 am

Memories Lost and Found

by Donna Swarthout (Berlin, Germany)

The stamp of German Jewish culture left its imprint on me as a child growing up in New Jersey in the 1960s. My nanas, papas, and tantes spoke German and Yiddish and served kuchen instead of cookies. They dressed up a lot more than ordinary Americans and seemed very refined. They were still immigrants in a new country whose dependence on each other deepened the bonds within our extended family.

Decades later as an adult living in California and Montana, there were only rare moments to connect with my cultural heritage. I often tried to reach back and touch the memories from my childhood, to bring them closer and feel their presence in my daily life. But how could I grasp these vague shapes from the past as they receded further into the distance? My memories were no longer solid or extensive enough to offer more than a footnote to my identity. I was floating through life in the vast ocean that is America without an anchor, without a strong enough sense of home.

Most of my relatives who were born in Germany are gone now, so the only way to reclaim my past was to come back to the land from which they fled. I took this step two years ago and have wandered since then without a map or plan into the rooms of a place that is both new and familiar. The events that my parents closed the door on are here for me to discover and the memories from my childhood seem closer at hand. I’ve picked up the thread of family history that was broken in 1938 and am stitching it back into the fabric of a changed Germany.

Like a time traveler, I have stepped into the past and present, trying to understand the extent to which Germany lays a claim on me. I’ve opened myself to the pain of a genocide that cannot be understood and the joys of finding my place in the vibrant landscape of Jewish life in Berlin. I came here to experience the culture that captivated my senses as a child, but I never expected to find anything that would shed light on my own family history. I never suspected that my family kept secrets.

When my father’s family closed the door on their homeland, they locked my great-aunt Meta into a past that would remain hidden from the next generation. Meta was the Holocaust victim who my family never spoke about. My father was eight when he left Germany so he would have remembered Meta. But he inherited the silence of his parents, and chose not to share the story of his aunt who was left behind.

My father only wanted his two daughters to hear about how the family escaped to America, struggled as poor immigrants, and successfully pursued the American dream. He protected us from having to grieve over a loss that he had no control over. But the descendants of those who escaped and survived should not be spared from knowledge or grief; we have a collective responsibility to learn our stories and remember them.

It would have been easier not to dig up the past, to put aside my determination to fill in the gap in my family history. I could have avoided the awkward discussions with my aunt, the charges of tainted motives from one of my cousins, and the countless hours spent searching for records that had been destroyed. But the injustice of a lost memory loomed so much larger than the tensions caused by confronting my family’s silence.

More than seven decades of silence about a forgotten Holocaust victim have now ended. On July 2, 2012 we placed a stolperstein for Meta in front of the former Adler residence in Altwiedermus. We restored Meta to her place in our family and her village. This small stone is tangible evidence of a lost life; like a gravestone it marks a place to honor the dead. Meta’s stone is a permanent link to the past for our family and a town that has had no Jewish population since 1938.

Meta’s memorial ceremony was the culmination of more than a year of effort to reconcile an omission in my family history. I did not come to Germany to be a family researcher or Holocaust historian. I never expected to experience the kind of pain and grief that I felt about Meta. But my need to account for the past placed me on the path of a single victim, and brought a depth of sorrow that I had been shielded from as the daughter of German Jewish parents.

As I stood on the steps of my father’s childhood home before the small crowd gathered on a rainy Monday morning for Meta’s memorial ceremony, I could barely retain the composure necessary to speak for Meta. But with the support of my sister and my son, who raised the money for Meta’s stolperstein as part of his bar mtizvah in Berlin, I gave voice to the life of a woman who was forgotten. This is one of the most powerful things I have ever done in my life.

I’ve made other discoveries about my family since coming to Germany, discoveries from the lost and found of a land that holds many fragments of a dark past. Each discovery strengthens my sense of self and helps me to find my footing as a Jewish woman in Germany today. I don’t want to lose myself in the past, but to touch and preserve a part of what was left behind, to carry the reclaimed memories with me into the future. I feel more free to live in the present now and ready to fill the pages of a new chapter in my family’s German Jewish history.

Donna Swarthout writes about being Jewish in Germany on her blog Full Circle http://dswartho.wordpress.com/. Her recent work has appeared on The Jewish Writing Project and in Tablet Magazine. This piece first appeared on AVIVA-Berlin.de and is reprinted here with the kind permission of the publisher and author. To read Swarthout’s earlier piece about her great-aunt Meta, visit:  https://jewishwritingproject.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/metas-untold-story/

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August 6, 2012 · 7:24 am

The First Family

by Sheldon P. Hersh (Lawrence, NY)

There were a number of subjects that were always considered taboo and simply not open to discussion.  No matter how hard I tried, my parents were adamant about not revealing certain details of the firestorm that had taken the lives of their extended families. Not one other family member apart from my parents had been spared. I was particularly interested in certain events and personal experiences relating to the Holocaust but was rebuffed at every turn whenever I touched upon a topic that was deemed off limits. The wrong question would bring about an instant change in behavior, a change that became only too apparent when looking at their somber faces. But it was their eyes that gave it all away; their eyes were truly windows to an inner compartment awash in anguish and distress. Sad and dejected, my mother’s glistening eyes would stare off into space and flicker in concert with a gush of tears. And from my father, a piercing silent stare that brought an immediate end to my innocent if not foolish curiosity. I never saw him cry. It was as though he had already gone through his lifetime allotment of tears and the cisterns were now dry and empty for all time. Both had already shed oceans of tears, and though my mother’s supply was somehow replenished, my father’s tears had simply vanished. But there were things that I wanted to know and so I continued to poke and prod hoping to find answers by attempting to enter a world that was forbidden to outsiders. Whenever I crossed the line and sought out matters that were not meant to be discussed, my mother was always quick to intervene.

“Don’t antagonize your father. He’s a broken man,” she would plead in barely audible whispers. “He’s suffered enough already. You are very young but one day you will understand. I promise you, my son, one day you will understand.”

One such topic dealt with my father’s first family, a wife and three children, four innocents who perished during the Holocaust while imprisoned in the Lodz ghetto. Along with thousands of ghetto residents, they had succumbed to starvation, exhaustion and illness while the lives of countless others were cruelly extinguished in nearby killing centers. The story of this first family was a chapter in a book that was destined to remain closed and unread.  From my earliest recollection, I sensed that this was a subject that remained strictly off limits, and, though my interest was quite naturally piqued, I refrained from asking too many questions. My father, generally open and talkative, remained resolute and silent in matters relating to this phantom first family. There were no details of how they lived or any information as to how they died. Talk of their appearance, likes, dislikes, mannerisms and personalities was never forthcoming and remained under constant lock and key in my father’s secure memory bank. My mother, perhaps fearful of unpleasant repercussions and not wanting to open old wounds, tactfully avoided any subject that was certain to unsettle my father. “He has suffered enough,” she would often say. “There are things you should not ask. Your father is nervous enough.” The first family was clearly one such subject and she wisely stayed clear of any discussion relating to this most sensitive matter.  She would, however, occasionally forget herself and release a snippet or two of information about the first family but quickly regained her footing and dared go no further. What had appeared so promising at the outset was suddenly withdrawn and I was left guessing once again. It was akin to a pinhole in a drawn window shade that yielded little, if any, illumination and insight.

The first family’s names were never mentioned and their faces never graced the pages of our once emaciated photo album. I would occasionally think about this mysterious first family, for, after all, these children were my very own siblings.  My ever-fanciful imagination endeavored to bring each of the lost members back into the fold by assigning names and concrete features to faceless individuals who, in spite of my best efforts, continued to reside in some far off unreachable planet. There were times when, emboldened by a jolt of overpowering curiosity, I approached my father with questions relating to his first family. “Foolish child,” he would quickly reply. “How could you ever possibly understand?” And just as with other Holocaust era questions that left him at a loss for words, the conversation would abruptly end with his use of this very short refrain.

While visiting with my parents a number of years ago, I was determined to be a bit more assertive in my desire to learn of this first family. Whether it had been the presence of my own children or the appreciation that I could no longer be put off, my father had softened somewhat and appeared a bit more receptive to the idea of introducing his first family into our daily conversations. As the sole survivor of his extended family, he was the only one who could provide needed information about those who had not survived. No photographs, letters or mementos of their existence had ever surfaced after the war, making my father’s recollections all the more critical. I was well aware of his pain and sensitivity, and, at my mother’s urging, I suggested that we proceed at a pace of his own choosing.

Within the little time that remained during that last visit, my father began speaking of life in the ghetto, and, with some reservation, introduced me to his young daughter and two infant sons. Though details were meager, a milestone had been reached that, I hoped, would facilitate further discussion.  The first and most difficult hurdle had been overcome and it was as if a sprinkle of clarity was added to a distant blur. Visions of faint images were beginning to inch forward with the promise of additional clarity if only time would allow the process to continue. Sadly it had not. My father died unexpectedly shortly after our initial breakthrough.  This small first step had barely scratched the surface and now there  was no one left to ask and nowhere else to turn.

Years later, I came upon a speech given to a large crowd in the Lodz ghetto by Chaim Rumkowski, chairman of the ghetto Jewish council. An order had been received from German officials that 20,000 Jews were to be deported and that the Jewish council was to decide which Jews were to be chosen for certain death. It had been decided to place the “unproductive elements” of the ghetto, the elderly, the sick and children below the age of ten, on the list for deportation. In a speech, titled ‘Give Me your Children,’ Rumkowski stunned a grief stricken crowd that was soon to be left in a state of unimaginable terror.  “I never imagined I would be forced to deliver this sacrifice to the altar with my own hands. In my own old age I must stretch out my hands and beg: Brothers and sisters, hand them over to me! Fathers and mothers give me your children…I must perform this difficult and bloody operation. I must cut off the limbs in order to save the body itself.”

Josef Zelkowicz, a witness to these horrific events, writes In Those Terrible Days: Writings from the Lodz Ghetto “Hours have passed since these woes, these agonies, were inflicted on those wretched people, but the situation has not calmed down one bit. Mothers have not yet tired of shrieking, fathers’ wellsprings of tears have not yet sealed, and the silence of the night amplifies the reverberations of the screaming and sobbing. No sound reaches your ears, man, but that bitter wailing; no thought occurs to you but death; and your heart ponders, nothing but devastation.”

I will likely never know what became of this first family, but I am now able to appreciate why it was my father could not relive a time that drove so many to madness and exile from the human condition. His common refrain — “Foolish child! How could you ever possibly understand?” — has taken on a clarity of its own. He was absolutely right. I could not then, nor ever in the future, understand what had transpired. He succeeded in keeping his secret well hidden, and I sense that his intention to do so was not only to maintain his own emotional and physical equilibrium but to keep us, his current children and loved ones, safe from harm.

Sheldon P. Hersh, an Ear, Nose and Throat Physician with a practice in the New York metropolitan area, is the co-author of The Bugs Are Burning, a book on the Holocaust. For more information about his work, visit:  http://tinyurl.com/86u3ous

 

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March 26, 2012 · 8:05 am

The Mystery My Mother Left Behind

by Lev Raphael (Okemos, MI)

My late mother loved the New York Times crossword and she loved reading mysteries. Born in Poland, she said the puzzle helped her perfect her English; she never explained the specific appeal of crime novels, but she was a huge fan of Agatha Christie, John Creasey, Frances and Richard Lockridge, and Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. I read almost all the mystery library books she brought home; they were always better than the books assigned in school. On my own, I discovered the comic mysteries of Phoebe Atwood Taylor. While my mother enjoyed a good joke and had an Imogene Coca kind of laugh, those books weren’t serious enough for her.

It wasn’t until after my mother died in 1999 that I discovered profound and unsettling mysteries in her own life that I’m still trying to unravel. My mother was a Holocaust survivor. She lost her family, her home, her freedom — and would have lost her life if the war had lasted any longer than it did. She spoke about those war years sparingly, and when she did, I was too young or too overwhelmed to ask the right questions that would have yielded more information.

Going through her things after the funeral, I found something shocking in her closet. My mother had kept the concentration camp uniform she was wearing when she was liberated by the Americans in April 1945. You’ve probably seen “dresses” like these in movies and documentaries: thin, crudely sewn, it was gray with purplish stripes (though the colors may have changed over the decades). My father told me she’d washed it after the war, but he couldn’t say why she had kept this reminder of her horrible brutalization and the nightmare of seeing her world ground to dust.

I knew the names of the camps my mother had been in and contacted one via email but nobody could find records for her. This was troubling, since I knew that despite bombings and German attempts to destroy files, records existed for many camps. And then I tried again, this time using the number on her uniform.

A world of mysteries opened up to me. For at least part of the war, my mother, Helena Klaczko, was listed in several Nazi records as Lidja Garbel. How do I know this Garbel and my mother were the same woman? Because the insanely detailed prisoner card for my mother at Buchenwald lists her parents’ name, her street address in Poland, her education and her birth date. All the information matches what I know to be fact. Whatever her name, the woman with that number on her camp dress was the woman listed on the card and indisputably my mother.

But why did she have another name? The mystery deepened when I discovered that in a transport from one camp to another, there was a woman whose number was right before my mother’s and whose last name was also Garbel. So somehow, for some reason, my mother took this other woman’s last name as hers. But why? And why Lidja? Was it possible there had been an actual Lidja Garbel whose name my mother had assumed for some reason? The sister of this Frida Garbel?

My father had no idea what the answers were or what any of it could mean. And when I told him that this same Buchenwald prisoner card said my mother was married to a Mikhail Garbel, whereabouts “unknown,” he scoffed. “People said all kinds of things during the war.”

I had written a handful of Nick Hoffman mysteries by this point, and even been reviewed in the New York Times my mother revered. Sadly, my mother never got to read any of them because she was so sick when they started coming. But nothing in any of them matched these real-life mysteries whose solutions I have pursued in many directions, without answer. Sometimes I wonder if there really was a Mikhail Garbel or even a Lidja Garbel, if both were completely invented. Sometimes I think, what if my mother was married before she met my father? Sometimes I think, “There’s a book in this, if only I can find it.” And I wonder if my mother read mysteries not just as a fan, but as someone who had turned her own life into something mysterious.

Lev Raphael is a prize-winning pioneer in American-Jewish literature, and has been publishing fiction and nonfiction about the Second Generation since 1978. The author of twenty-two books which have been translated into almost a dozen languages, he has spoken about his work in hundreds of venues on three continents. His fiction and creative non-fiction are widely taught at American colleges and universities, and his work has been the subject of numerous academic articles, papers, and books. A former public radio book show host and newspaper columnist, he can be found on the web at http://www.levraphael.com.  He blogs on books for The Huffington Post and reviews for the on-line literary magazine Bibliobuffet.com.

You can check out his latest book, the Jewish historical novel Rosedale in Love, at http://www.levraphael.com/rosedale.html

This piece first appeared on The Huffington Post, and it’s reprinted here with the kind permission of the author.

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March 12, 2012 · 8:06 am

Meta’s Untold Story

by Donna Swarthout (Berlin, Germany)

The few stories that were passed down to my sister and I were about survival, escape, new beginnings in America. These stories always drew a clear line between the tragic background of the Holocaust and the fate of our family. We never knew. No one told us. My grandfather’s sister, my great aunt Meta Adler, was left behind. Five siblings escaped to the U.S., Israel, and South Africa. Meta vanished from sight and memory.

No one in our family kept Meta ’s memory alive. We have to look back and construct a memory of her life. So we can keep her with us. Some people discover a living relative who they never knew about, a sibling who was given up for adoption or a parent who was long absent. We discovered Meta, an unwed country woman who worked as a maid and failed to pass the U.S. immigration examination because she was too shy or scared to answer the questions.

The silence was broken last year on a sunny April afternoon in Altwiedermus, the village where Meta and the rest of my father’s family trace their roots. We had traveled to the rural enclave, forty-five kilometers northeast of Frankfurt, to see the old Adler house and meet with Gisele, the woman who had spent years researching the fate of the twenty-seven Jewish residents of the village in 1933. I had almost canceled the trip due to a sense of unease about what might lie ahead. Instead, we drove into the past and the vague contours of my German Jewish family history were abruptly reshaped in a darker hue.

It was Gisele, someone I had just met, who told us about Meta as we sat at her dining room table and thumbed through an enormous album of her historical notes, photos, and clippings. Meta stared at us from the past with a direct gaze that ended the decades of erasure from our family tree. As Gisele patiently related further details about the thirteen Jews who perished, I was too stunned to concentrate and can’t recall much of what she said.

How could I not have known about Meta ? Was I told about her as a child, but the story hadn’t lodged in my memory beside the other vignettes with the happy endings that were passed down to me? In the following months I queried key family members about our family history narrative. It was through these conversations that I slowly became aware of the collective family silence about Meta. This knowledge brought deep sorrow, but there would be ample time to grieve for Meta. I felt a much more urgent need to honor her memory and restore her to our family.

That fall I met a Jewish woman whose family had fled to the U.S. even later than mine. “It was because my grandfather would not leave until all family members had permission to emigrate,” she said. “Not my grandfather,” I had to tell her. The silence about Meta was a thin cover for the guilt that must have haunted my grandparents. Couldn’t they have done more to help her escape?

Reclaiming Meta ’s place in our family has not been easy. Only the faintest traces of her life have survived. Many people in Germany, from government archivists to self-designated Holocaust historians like Gisele, have shared clues about her fate. Months of research after our trip to Altwiedermus yielded little more than a set of financial records that the Nazis used to assess whether she could keep her meager Reichsmarks earnings. The trail runs cold on a bare sheet of paper dated May 9, 1942, four years after my father’s family fled to the U.S. The document notes that she was “evakuiert.”

Nine hundred and thirty-eight people were deported from Frankfurt on May 8, 1942. The records from this transport were destroyed, but Meta was likely among the deportees. We think they went east, possibly to the Izbica concentration camp in Poland. The date and location of her death are among many of the unknowns in her story.

The German government has placed Meta’s name among the Holocaust victims at two memorial sites in Frankfurt. Our family of survivors has so far done nothing. My father and his sister inherited the silence of their parents. They had a living memory of Meta, but could not reach back to embrace her. It is left to the “second generation” to look back from a greater distance and tell her story. My move to Germany in 2010 was the first step that made this possible.

My aunt has now broken her silence about Meta and supports our efforts to reclaim her memory. She remembers Meta as a woman in the shadows, perhaps someone who lacked a valued place in the family even before they left Germany. She also recalls that my grandfather, Meta’s brother, left the problem of what to do about Meta to my grandmother.

As a child I yearned to know more about my parents’ lives in Germany and the events surrounding their escape. Decades later I’ve uncovered a hidden truth about my family history: we closed the door on someone we lost. I will now pass down to my children a different Holocaust story than the one I heard as a child. Our efforts to confront the past, while living as Jews in Germany today, have become a new chapter in our family narrative.

This summer we will lay a stolperstein (brass stumbling stone) in the ground for Meta Adler. So she can be remembered, in the village of her birth and within our family. Meta’s stone will join the thousands of cobblestone memorials to individual Holocaust victims throughout Germany.

Donna Swarthout writes about being Jewish in Germany on her blog Full Circle http://dswartho.wordpress.com/. Her recent work has appeared on The Jewish Writing Project and in Tablet Magazine.

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October 17, 2011 · 7:49 am

The Tapestry of Self

by Donna Swarthout (Berlin, Germany)

The tapestry of my life has always had loose threads, strands that stick out in different directions and seem unlikely candidates for a fine woven print. Sometimes I tuck one of those threads away and get a pass on explaining who I am to the world.  Why share that I am Jewish if I feel more secular than religious? Why tell others that I am a German American Jew who in some ways feels more German than Jewish?  I’ve been living in Berlin, Germany for the past year where my mind has been feverishly at work trying to solve the puzzle of my identity.

The part of me that has always felt German now revels in the daily opportunity for self expression. Each step towards language fluency makes me feel more whole and I am exhilarated on the rare occasions when I meet someone who does not speak English. My taste buds crave a daily käese stange (breaded cheese twist) or kürbiskern brezel (giant soft pretzel with pumpkin seeds) and although I do not eat much meat, I love hearing my kids say “schnitzel!” as a substitute for “shit.” I come close to feeling at home in Germany while sitting for hours at the Rüdisheimer Platz wine garden enjoying the company of family and friends over a picnic dinner.

But there is a deeper significance to my German residency than the opportunities to speak a language I love, enjoy the food, and experience the rich and diverse cultural life of Berlin.  I am coming full circle, returning to the birth place of both my German Jewish parents so that I can integrate the past into the life of my family in a way that the first generation of Holocaust survivors and escapees could not.  This cannot be done from America; one has to be on German soil to experience the past and to grasp that there is a new landscape for Jewish life in Germany today.  Stepping into that landscape and seeing how it feels is a powerful way to pick up some of the loose threads of self that make up my identity.

Our son Avery turned thirteen this year and decided he wanted to become a bar mitzvah in the birthplace of his ancestors.  Our family is not clearly affiliated with any branch of Judaism so it was a bit daunting to find a place for ourselves amongst Berlin ‘s population of approximately 20,000 Jews and nearly a dozen congregations.  We’ve attended Reform, Masorti and Renewal services and are still getting used to reading Hebrew that has been transliterated for Germans (bar mitzwa instead of bar mitzvah) and a host of unfamiliar approaches to songs and rituals.

We will fully experience being Jewish in Germany when Avery becomes a bar mitzvah this October with Ohel Hachidusch, Berlin’s very small Renewal congregation.  The bar mitzvah will take place at the Jüdisches Waisenhaus Berlin (Jewish Orphanage of Berlin). The former orphanage is a historic building that was devoted to the welfare of Jewish children from 1913 to 1940.  After Kristallnacht many of the children were brought to safety via Kindertransport. The Nazis closed the building in 1942 and deported the remaining residents to concentration camps.  This will be the first bar mitzvah held in the Waisenhaus since it was restored and reopened in 2001.  As part of his coming of age, Avery is helping with a memorial project for my Great Aunt Meta Adler who was a Holocaust victim.

In the midst of a generally upbeat year of growth and discovery, I have also had some low moments. I never feel isolated but I do at times feel alienated in Germany, especially after encounters with government bureaucrats. It has been well over a year since I applied to have my German citizenship restored and I am still waiting despite the fact that I provided complete records of my German Jewish ancestry to the federal government. My constantly simmering anger at the indifference of the bureaucracy to my meritorious application is matched by my determination to see this process through to a successful conclusion, even if I have to hire an attorney. ( I’ve written about Reclaiming My German Citizenship in a recent essay for The Jewish Writing Project http://tinyurl.com/3ffufg9.)

And then there are those perpetual encounters with Germans whose scrutinizing comments leave a chill in their wake.  I have endured quite a few mini-lectures about what rule my children have broken and how important it is that they “pass auf” (watch out) and modify their behavior.  After silently suffering through too many of these lectures, I recently blew up at a woman on the U-Bahn in my best German for lecturing my daughter about her subway behavior.  These encounters make my skin crawl with their eerie reminders of an era when everyone was under suspicion for conduct that was outside the narrow realm of what the National Socialists deemed permissible. Is there something in the German psyche that propels such finger-wagging behavior?

But as I embark on my second year of living in Germany my paramount feeling is that this is a place where I can be fully German, Jewish and American.  As part of Germany’s growing Jewish population, I want American Jews to understand that there are Jews who do not want to place a strike out line through the German part of their identity.  The German thread does not have to be tucked away but can be woven back into the tapestry of self that represents who we are.

Donna Swarthout moved to Berlin with her family to explore her German Jewish heritage and identity and the nature of Jewish life in Germany today.  You can read more about her experiences on her blog Full Circle: www.dswartho.wordpress.com

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August 8, 2011 · 7:58 am

My Father Is Dying

by David Merkler (Barcelona, Spain)

My father is dying and I don’t know how to handle it. My father is dying and I don’t believe in G-d. My father is dying and I’m having difficulty seeing justice in the world.

My father was born in Budapest on 6th January 1933. On the 30th January Hitler came to power. I was born on the outskirts of London, and raised in a very comfortable middle-class neighbourhood of London, but I am a Hungarian Jew. A Hungarian Jew who doesn’t speak Hungarian and has hardly visited the country, but my temperament and spirit are there in eastern Europe on the banks of the Danube. We grew up without knowing anything about the Holocaust. The only thing I knew was that my Uncle and Grandfather had died in the war. The details were sketchy, but I knew I was afraid of Germans. We had a beautiful house, a 3 storey detached house, but nothing in it. All my friends were surprised. When they came to visit us, our million pound house was furnished with sticks of furniture and second hand items. Even we children were clothed in second hand garments. Other memories stay with me. I marveled as my father would “weld” spent bars of soap onto new bars of freshly opened soap. How did he do it? What was the trick? The trick was not to waste anything. And food, of course. Nothing could be thrown away. I sat at the dinner table until my food was finished. I didn’t like the food. Hard luck. I sat at the table for half an hour or longer after dinner had finished until my plate was empty. Rules of the house.

And looking back on this regime, I finally began to understand what had been happening when I was well into my thirties. We were always in a ready state to move, to flee the country. What if the Hungarian Fascists (the Arrow Cross) took over the leafy Wimbledon suburbs of London? What if Eichmann marched in again on March 19 with a contingent of SS? You could never be too safe. If they came, we wouldn’t wait around this time. Sell the house and on to the next country, wherever that would take us.

My father is dying and I can’t understand why. If G-d exists, surely the survivors should be allowed to continue surviving. If virtually my entire father’s family was murdered, worked to death, died of starvation in the Budapest ghetto or committed suicide, then my father must have been a statistical mistake. (Correction: my father stated that, in fact, most of those who died in the ghetto died of thirst. Nuances of an agonizing death. What would you prefer? Starvation or dying of thirst?) Yes, by 1944 they knew where they were going. They weren’t going to be resettled in those exquisite cattle trucks or forcibly marched on a school excursion. So my great great uncle Sandor Feuermann and his wife Mitzi committed suicide. They chose to cheat the hangmen in their own way.

I have just read Suzanna Eibuszyc [http://tinyurl.com/3rl2ktf]. She states “that in every survivor’s family, one child is unconsciously chosen to be a ‘memorial candle,’ to carry on the mourning and to dedicate his or her life to the memory of the Shoah.” So now I understand why I was placed on this earth. My Argentinian born psychologist has told me to try to learn to “bear” the burden and not “suffer” the burden. Semantically it makes sense, but in practise? I walk down Barcelona’s sunny streets and I cry. I cry every week and sometimes every day for the 16 victims of my grandmother’s family (direct and in-laws) and for all the Merklers who were deported from Batya and Kalosca. All German speakers at some stage with German surnames. Feuermann, Haas, Merkler, Glück. My 8 year old son Alexander asks me: If we have a German surname, why did the Germans kill the Jews? Answers on postcard please addressed to Alexander Merkler, aged 8, Gelida, Barcelona, Spain.

My father is dying and probably the only person who cares is me. I am such an egoist. My link with the old country, the old language, with a witness to the atrocities of another age, is leaving me. My father’s memories are the memories of a child survivor. The shame of having to put on the star of David, the shame of being called a filthy Jew, the guilt of remembering stealing bread from a woman at night in the ghetto, the excitement of watching films though a crack in the wall at a cinema where Jews weren’t allowed to go. My father is dying. Hungary paid USD 50 to my father in compensation for the murder of his brother and USD 80 for the murder of his father. They recognized their collaboration with the Germans in the murder of the Jews. Post-communist Hungary didn’t have much money to pay out. Keep your money. It doesn’t help.

As I grow up, my father shares more and more information about what actually happened. When his mother dies, he delves back into the past, divorces my mother, marries a Hungarian woman with a large family and starts research work on his family. The work is gleaned into a book. A tribute to that lost lifestyle and those who lost their lives. I am educated in details of the Holocaust that most people will never know about. Hungary was the last country whose Jewish population was exterminated and Budapest the last city to be “cleansed,” but they didn’t have time to finish the job, not quite. They murdered my grandfather in March 1945, they murdered my uncle in April/May 1945, but they couldn’t destroy all the evidence this time, the personal possessions, the photos, the intervention of the neutral powers, the liberating forces. My father was liberated by the Soviets. My uncle? Did he pass away before or after Gunskirchen camp was liberated by US forces? Did he breathe a moment of freedom before passing away at 16? Peter murdered at the age of 16 far from home, far from his parents. G-d doesn’t exist. I am telling you G-d doesn’t exist. Stop praying. To put it in my grandmother’s words. “When you are dead, you are rotting meat.” And she knew what she was talking about.

My grandmother died in 1984 at the age of 80. We visited her house every Saturday until I went to University. I don’t know how she bore the burden. She lost her husband, her elder son, her sister, her nephew and her best friend, but she was unrelentingly tough. Her pain was everywhere, but she was so strong. When she finally decided the time had come to end it all, she decided to take an overdose of sleeping pills. We found her on the floor of her kitchen on several occasions still conscious. She was simply too physically tough. Her body wouldn’t obey her and give in. My father wants to be buried with his mother. She is his hero. She had escaped to Britain. She enlisted in the US Army, worked as a translator translating correspondence going into and out of Germany for the Americans in their efforts to catch Nazis at the end of the war. My grandmother went into communist occupied Hungary, found my father in an orphanage, bribed the Soviet border guards and took him out. Only 3000 DPs (the initials of that pleasant British euphemism stand for Displaced Persons) or Jewish survivors were allowed into Britain because the British were quite sick of the “Yids” at this stage blowing up their troops and the like in British Mandated Palestine.

So I discover I am a minority three times. I am a Jew. My father is an immigrant, whereas almost all the Yids I know in Britain are second generation, and, finally, I discover that my father Andrew (in fact András) had had the gall to cheat death and was placed in a Swiss safe house towards the end of the war. So what does that make me? My mother’s family were from the Russian empire and my father’s family from the Austro-Hungarian empire. Simple, but according to the new map of Europe I am a Hungarian, Slovakian, Polish, Bielorussian Jew with a German surname born in England living in Spain. My father told me more recently that we are ethnic Germans because the first Merklers came down the Danube from Germany to Hungary in the 17th century. Tracing back through my paternal grandmother’s line, we have changed mother tongue four times in five generations from German to Hungarian to English to Spanish/Catalan. Motke always said, “More Askenazi than David isn’t possible.”

My father is dying and doesn’t know where he wants to be buried. A very untypical dilemma. Should he be buried in Budapest’s Jewish cemetery where we have plots purchased for life or death (or until the next Holocaust when it is decided to dig up the remains of the Jews and burn their bones as there aren’t enough Jews alive to murder in Europe any more), or should he be buried with his mother on the outskirts of London? The only problem is that the London burial plot has to be renewed after 40 years, and will I take care of his grave if I am living in Spain? Or maybe he should be buried in Spain? So my father discusses the options over the phone coming to the conclusion that he should have his mother dug up and buried with him in Budapest or Barcelona. Sounds like a sight-seeing tour of Europe. Where shall we go–London, Budapest or Barcelona? But in this case it’s deadly serious.

My scars will never go away and I wasn’t even there, but I feel I was there. My family were murdered and I know all the details of their last moments because of testimonies, because of my father’s work, historical records, because I have their photos, even passports, even personal possessions. My father went to Kalosca. The main employer of Kalosca was Merkler Lajos, and his paprika mill was the biggest in Hungary. When they came to take him away, nobody cared that he had created more employment and wealth for everybody in that town or that he was married to a non-Jew. They took him away with the other Jews and they pillaged and stole everything. My father visited the town several years ago. When they discovered he was a Merkler, one of the old men returned to him an ivory letter opener without saying  a word. A symbol of opulence in the 1940s when not everybody could afford such an item. The guilt had got to him and he wanted to return the stolen goods 60 years later. I have the letter opener in my study. Another scar, but this time visible.

My father is dying and the doctors don’t know what he’s got. He’s been sweating at night for a year and has lost 10kg (22lbs). The symptoms are the same he had after the war when he contracted tuberculosis. Tuberculosis, the disease of the ghettos, thriving on overcrowded, unsanitary living conditions, attacking the undernourished whose defenses are weak. The virus stays dormant in your body and as your defenses get weaker it gets stronger. My grandmother died at 80. My father will be 79 next January 2012.

So you see Hitler will finally get what he wants. Another Jewish corpse will be added to the Jewish graveyard called Europe.

David Merkler wrote this piece in between managing two small businesses, one a language school, the other a remodeling business. He was born and grew up in London, England  and now lives in Gelida, outside Barcelona, Spain, with his partner, Valeria. He has two sons, Joel and Alexander, from his first marriage. You can reach him at davidmerkler@languagesbarcelona.com

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July 18, 2011 · 7:52 am

Reclaiming My German Citizenship

by Donna Swarthout (Berlin, Germany)

It was last June that my husband Brian and I completed our applications for German citizenship before moving from Bozeman, Montana to Berlin, Germany.  By reclaiming our German citizenship we hoped to come “full circle” as the descendants of German Jews who fled Nazi Germany in the late 1930s.  We are still waiting for the magical moment when we learn that our citizenship has been restored, but we both believe it will be worth the wait.

It was not a magical moment when we told my mother that we were moving to Germany.  The opportunity to connect with my past, become fluent in a language I fell in love with as a child, and to once again be Jewish in Germany meant nothing to her.  How could we bring her grandchildren to the place of horror and persecution from which she and my father had fled?  No answer would suffice.  She did not speak to us for six weeks.

I don’t know what it felt like for my parents and grandparents to be stripped of their German citizenship, to be stateless from 1938 until 1944, and to finally become American citizens.  My maternal grandmother seemed to remain stateless, eventually leaving America for Israel, then Switzerland, and finally going back to her beloved  Germany.  My paternal grandparents were more typical immigrants, creating their own oasis of German culture in the middle of New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood (complete with apfel strudel, kartoffel salat, and lots of wurstchen).

No form of Holocaust reparation is enough, but reclaimed citizenship has more significance for me than any financial restitution our family may receive.  My children and their descendants will have opportunities that my grandparents could never have imagined.  We will have access to Germany’s universal health care system and free system of higher education.  We will automatically become citizens of the European Union which means we can live, work, and study at a university in any EU country under the same conditions as nationals.  We will not have to give up our American citizenship, nor do we want to.

I will take full ownership of my identity when I regain the citizenship that was stripped from both my parents’ families.  As a German American Jew I can embrace each of these three elements of my identity to whatever degree I wish.  Just as I have always struggled with what it means to be Jewish, I will always struggle with what it means to be German.  But I am entitled to my German citizenship, and I may soon have it.

After months of fruitless attempts to track down my citizenship application, I learned in March that the all-efficient German bureaucracy had lost it.  The application contained many documents that I had painstakingly put together to establish my German Jewish identity.  These were my personal historical building blocks that had suddenly vanished.  The official who delivered this disturbing news politely apologized and suggested I file a new application and begin the process all over again.  His cold words hit me like a stamp that says “no one cares.”

Now it is June again, our first school year in Germany is coming to an end, and my oldest son is preparing for his bar mitzvah in Berlin this fall.  Avery’s bar mitzvah will take place on the anniversary of my father’s bar mitzvah in New York City in 1942.  My son and my father will have both taken this step as immigrants, and as German American Jews who belong to a vibrant and thriving Jewish community.

I also have high hopes that the stress and frustration of trying to move my  citizenship application forward are finally behind me.  My application was eventually found and is being processed in Rathaus Schoeneberg, the place where John F. Kennedy gave his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in 1963.  Kennedy not only said that he was a Berliner, but that “all free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin.” As we embark on our second year of living in Germany, I feel optimistic that Kennedy’s vision will become a reality for me.

Donna Swarthout came to Berlin with her family to explore her German Jewish heritage and identity and the nature of Jewish life in Germany today.  You can read more about her experiences on her blog Full Circle: www.dswartho.wordpress.com

And you can hear her reading a version of this story on NPR’s Berlin Stories: http://berlinstories.org/2012/06/27/donna-swarthout-on-coming-full-circle/

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April 25, 2011 · 8:07 am

How I Knew and When

by Janet R. Kirchheimer (New York, NY)

Age 8 – My father hangs upside down on a pipe that was part of a fence
that separated our street from the next. All of his change
falls from his pockets. He looks so young.

Age 15 – “There were one hundred and four girls
in the Israelitisch Meisjes Weeshuis orphanage in Amsterdam.
Four survived,” my mother says.
“I remember Juffrouw Frank, the headmistress.  She made us
drink cod-liver oil each morning. She said it was healthy for us.”

Age 17 – My father tells me his father and sister, Ruth, got out
of Germany and went to Rotterdam. They were supposed to
leave on May 11, 1940, for America. The Nazis invaded on May 10.

Age 21 – My mother tells me Tante Amalia told her
that on the Queen Elizabeth to America in 1947, after she
and Onkel David were released from an internment camp
on the Isle of Man, she was so hungry she ate twelve rolls
every day at breakfast. She said it was the best time she ever had.

Age 24 – My father tells me, “Otto Reis got out of Germany
in 1941. He took a train to Moscow, the Trans-Siberian railroad to
Vladivostok, a boat to Shanghai, a boat to Yokohama, a boat to
San Francisco, and a bus to Philadelphia, his wife and three sons
staying behind. Carola Stein signed affidavits for them, but
the government said she didn’t make enough money.”

Age 31 – My mother’s cousin refuses to accept money a rich
woman left him. He says the money has too much blood on it.
My mother tells me that in 1939 her cousin had asked this woman
to sign affidavits for his wife and two daughters. She said no.

Age 33 – My father asks me to dial the number. His hands shake.
He asks my cousin Judy if she wants to send her three children out
of Israel during the Gulf War. She says she can’t let them go.

Age 42 – A waiter in a Jerusalem hotel tells my father
he should come to live in Israel, because it’s home.
My father tells him, “Home is anywhere they let you in.”

Janet R. Kirchheimer is the author of How to Spot One of Us (2007), a collection of poems about her family and the Shoah. Her poems and essays have appeared in several journals such as the Connecticut Review and Limestone, as well as on Beliefnet. She is a teaching fellow at Clal.

This poem has been reprinted with the kind permission of the author and Clal-The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership.

For more about Kirchheimer’s work, visit: http://productsearch.barnesandnoble.com/search/results.aspx?WRD=janet+r+kirchheimer&page=index&prod=univ&choice=allproducts&query=Janet+R+Kirchheimer&flag=False&ugrp=2

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November 8, 2010 · 8:36 am

On Transmitting Family Trauma to the Next Generation

by Suzanna Eibuszyc (Calabasas, CA)

It is said that in every survivor’s family, one child is unconsciously chosen to be a ‘memorial candle,’ to carry on the mourning and to dedicate his or her life to the memory of the Shoah.  That child takes part in the parents’ emotional world, assumes the burden and becomes the link between the past and the future.  I realize now that my mother chose me to be that memorial candle.

My mother was forever haunted by her loved one’s images. She saw them starved and frozen in the streets of the Warsaw ghetto. She saw them in the cattle cars that took them to the Treblinka death camp. My mother never forgave herself for leaving to save her own life and abandoning them to the horrible deaths that followed. She never stopped mourning.

My parents’ huge losses were more than I could fathom. In time I came to realize it was impossible to recover from such a tragedy.  They carried on with their lives, but the Holocaust was being played out in their minds on a daily basis. Understanding this became crucial in my understanding of myself.

I grew up in a home where my sister and I lived, day by day, with my parent’s experiences.  I sensed my mother’s abandonment and helplessness and felt her fears and resignation. I lived with her rituals, where every crumb of bread was important, where fear of being cold was magnified, and where suspicion of others, and secretiveness and mistrust ruled everything she did.  Her scars became my scars.

Growing up in the shadows of the aftermath made me a witness to what had happened.  Sometimes I was sympathetic. Other times I was filled with contempt.  I was angry, and overwhelmed for being connected to my mother’s ongoing grief.

I tried to understand how my parents’ family could just be gone, completely gone.   My mother visibly mourned her five nieces and nephews, repeating often, with emotion, “so young and innocent, they should be among the living. They were all taken away and murdered.” And I grieved with her although I had never even seen any photographs.

In truth, I could not comprehend how her family could just be gone.  I have never seen any concrete images that my mother once had an extended family.  I was frightened, confused and ashamed that I did not believe my mother. In my heart I was sad but in my mind I decided her family had never existed.

I was also envious of my mother’s incredible adventures.  Overwhelmed by the tragedy, I found that I could feel safe when I focused on her Russian stories.  I loved the glimpses of hope and excitement that my imagination turned into exotic tales.  I pictured her living in a foreign place, in the desert, under a hot sun and riding camels.  I never imagined her going hungry or being sick.  From those early childhood stories I decided I wanted to be like her, to travel and visit unusual and far away places where she was heroic and a pillar of strength.

I also did not understand my mother’s fearful and anxious behavior.  I remember her being especially intensely anxious and fearful during Christian and Jewish Holidays.  She seemed to want to make us invisible.  This was a time to stay indoors, to be mistrustful, afraid of a possible mob mentality.  The baffling, unexplained, anxious behavior only intensified the fear in my child’s imagination.

In Poland, where I grew up, people had a deeply rooted belief that Jews were responsible for killing Christ.  Jesus’ birth at Christmas and his resurrection at Easter was a time of great fear for Jews.  The Jewish holiday of Passover was a time of anxiety too.  The wide-spread rumor was that matzoth was made with the blood of Christian children.  It was not until I got to the United States and was in college that I learned that Jesus was a Jew who was crucified by the Romans.  To this day I do not have any emotional attachment to holidays, but now at least I understand how this disconnection came about.

* * *

My very first memory is the sensation of fear.  I believe I was born being afraid.  I believe the Holocaust left in its path a darkness and despair that enveloped both survivors and their children’s consciousness.  I am convinced that the fear my mother experienced was passed on to me through the sinewy strands of chemical inheritance known as genes.

As a child I had an abnormal fear of people.  When people came to our home I hid under the large kitchen table covered with a linen cloth that reached to the floor.  I refused to come out until the guests departed.

I remember the trauma when I was five years old and our town held army maneuvers in the city square right in front of our house.  Although I understood that they were just exercises and celebrations for showing off what the Polish army could do, I was inconsolable.   I often wonder if my over-sensitivity that day to the sharp sounds of gunfire and tanks rolling through the streets had anything to do with my mother surviving the bombing of Warsaw.

I was six years old when my mother took me to an art exhibit that had come to our town.  My sister was in school.  The exhibit was a tribute to mothers and children who suffered during the war.  The art showed SS soldiers ripping children from mothers’ arms and killing them, mothers being killed and mothers begging for mercy.   I remember how my mother cried when we walked through the exhibit.  I was overwhelmed with both her tears and because the art was frightening. When I think back to that day, I realize my mother had no idea the exhibit would be as traumatic as it was. She also probably thought I was too young to really understand.   Her tears were enough for me to see and know the horror of what the work depicted.

The next morning as I was waking up I had a hallucination.  An SS soldier was standing on each side of my bed. I was not allowed to move.  If I did, they had orders to shoot me.  I remained motionless, afraid to take a breath until my mother came looking for me. I never burdened her with my terrifying waking dream because I remembered how she cried that day.

I was seven when I learned that being Jewish meant that I was different from my Polish friends. On September 1st 1958 I attended my first day of school.  It started happily enough.  My mother allowed me to approach the school alone.  As I got closer I was confronted by some of my future classmates who proceeded to taunt me. “You are Jewish, Poland is not your country, and Palestine is where you belong.”   I didn’t understand. This was the first time I’d heard that my home was in Palestine.  It also was the first time I realized that being Jewish and Polish could not be combined. Suddenly that day that began so happily for me dragged on.  I could not wait to run home.

I remember that I was crying as I opened our kitchen door. I needed an explanation. My mother sat with me by the kitchen window and explained what it meant to be Jewish.  I can still remember the sadness in her voice and the tears in her eyes.  At the time my mother’s reaction was not important; it was eclipsed by my amazement.  Our true homeland was in Palestine.  My response was a simple one, ‘let’s go where we belong.’

I still remember going to the train station on so many occasions to say good-bye to friends and people we knew.  It was always someone else leaving for Israel or America.  I could not understand why it was not us.  I was intensely angry with my parents because it seemed they had chosen to stay behind.  It wasn’t until I was an adult that I found out my parents secret and why we could not leave Poland.  We had to stay until my father died in 1961; he was only forty nine years old.  He died of the tuberculosis he had contracted in Saratov in 1940.  As Jewish families were leaving for other countries we were denied entry because of his illness. Even Israel would not accept him because of the advanced stage of his tuberculosis.  My parents concealed the seriousness of father’s health.  My sister, who was four years older than me, was able to finally figure out the reason. I never did. In my anger I saw them as weak, indecisive and helpless.

My father, Abram Ejbuszyc, was silent about his past. He never uttered a word about what happened to him during the war or even about his life before the war.  I cannot help but wonder if this was a form of self-imposed punishment.  Studies have shown that there are two kinds of parents among survivors: those who can not connect and those who can not separate from their children.  My father detached himself and didn’t talk, as if afraid to make a close connection and lose loved ones again, as if to contain his trauma within himself and spare his children.  He lived behind a wall of silence. That was his shelter.  He took his burden to his grave.

* * *

In New York, in order to survive, we each went in different directions, and the family that we had been in Poland disintegrated.  Our lives became turbulent as our notions of how things should be collided.  My mother worked in a factory. She got up at six in the morning and took the one-hour subway ride from the Bronx to Manhattan. With an address scribbled on a piece of paper, she managed to ask for directions and got to work and back home again. She was a fighter and a survivor.  She was not going to succumb to her fears.  She was determined to make the best life possible for herself.  And so, at age 50, after working in a factory all day long, she enrolled in night school and soon became fluent in English. I watched her navigate through her new life, never giving up.  She did not burden us with her fears and problems, she buried those deep inside her.  Two years later she was working in a bank.

I took classes at City College in the department of Jewish studies.  One of my professors was the famous writer and survivor Elie Wiesel.  It was in Professor Wiesel’s classes that I realized the importance of my mother’s story.  I persuaded her to write about her tragic life.  My mother listened.  She understood the importance of history and of remembering, not just with regard to the Holocaust but also for the Jewish legacy in Eastern Europe.  She wrote her story in Polish.  My huge regret was that I did not get to translate her memoir while she was still alive.  Somehow we never had the time to journey and emerge together from her trauma as adults.

I went back to Poland in 1972 when I became an American citizen. I was still haunted by the memories of our departure from Poland when my mother was inconsolable.  I had to return.  I was looking for something, a piece of me I believed I had left behind.  The rationale for going back had to do with nostalgia for my homeland, and the belief that my father was calling me back to the tiny, overgrown Jewish cemetery where he was buried. The ghosts of my past were clamoring for some attention.

I traveled through Europe and Israel. I lived in the desert, under the hot sun, in a tent.  By 1979 I moved to the West Coast, far away from my mother in New York. I saw her a few times a year and we talked on the phone every week.  I often remembered that when I was a child all I ever wanted was to follow in my mother’s footsteps.  I wanted to go to exotic and far away places.  I turned her stories about surviving in Russia into heroic journeys.  Traveling made me feel courageous like my mother.  She passed down to me her pessimism about life, suspicion of others, and assumptions about everything turning out for the worst. However, traveling always put me in touch also with my mother’s strengths. It temporarily wiped out the negative themes that played on in my mind.   While on the road, surrounded by unusual, new places, I was happy and at home. At the same time I had an overwhelming fear of putting down roots.  I did not want to have them severed in the same way my mother had.

The trauma of loss, the disconnection from community and my frightened family influenced how I chose to live my life.  Like other children of survivors, I developed a self-preservation defense.  I built a wall around myself to protect me from the traumatic home that I grew up in.  I was torn between letting go and staying connected.  At times my mother’s gloom was almost too intense for me, but I continually found myself being pulled back into her world anyhow.  My conscience would not allow anything else.  With my mother’s death, remembering carried a deep and sacred meaning.

* * *

I feel that it is not only my obligation to remember the Holocaust, but also to carry the burden.  I was raised in its shadows, inheriting my mother’s trauma which in turn shaped my personality, and will continue to burden my daughters who grew up with my emotional experiences of loss and abandonment.  My daughters knew about my Jewish Polish history, but years went by before I shared with them my family’s dark secrets of surviving and perishing in the Holocaust.

In the summer of 2008 I took my two daughters to Poland to keep our Jewish history and heritage alive. They were twenty-one and eighteen.  I wanted them to see the country of my birth and where I spent my childhood and teenage years.  We went to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Auschwitz had been turned into a museum and it does a credible job of telling what happened to our people.  When you enter Birkenau you go into shock.  The sheer vastness of the place, with the train tracks in the middle, made me gasp for air.  It was the reality that the Nazis intended and almost succeeded to annihilate the Jewish people in Europe.  My mind saw the trains coming and going, the selections taking place, the gas chambers and ovens working.  I heard the cry that went unheard. I saw the guns, the dogs, and the killing machine going at full speed.  In Auschwitz-Birkenau alone millions died, ninety percent of them Jews, among them my father’s family.

We went to my mother’s city of Warsaw, my father’s city of Lodz, and to visit his grave in the city of Klodzko.  We went to Poland to pay homage and ended up mourning.  I went to remember what my family had lost, to face my own exile and my need to reconnect to my roots. It was only with my mother’s death that I truly understood the magnitude of the loss and suffering she and her generation endured, and the importance of never forgetting.

Born in Poland, Suzanna Eibuszyc graduated from CCNY where she took classes in the department of Jewish studies with Professor Elie Wiesel, who encouraged her to translate her mother’s memoir, Bashert: It Was Meant to Be, into English. You can read an excerpt of Bashert in an earlier posting on the Jewish Writing Project: https://jewishwritingproject.wordpress.com/2010/09/27/devotion-to-faith/

This essay is an edited version of a longer chapter, “Afterward/Epilogue – Our life in Poland after the war and my insights about family trauma and how it is transmitted to the next generations,” which appears in Bashert: It Was Meant to Be.

All rights reserved “On Transmitting Family Trauma to the Next Generation” by Suzanna Eibuszyc.  No part of this work may be used or reproduced without written permission of the Author/Translator/Rights-Holder. For more information about the work, write to: suzanna_eibuszyc@yahoo.com

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