Holocaust Survivors and Families Look Back

The conference started Friday night with something every Jewish family knows--the lighting of the candles that marks the beginning of the Sabbath. But this ritual was different.

Instead of an intimate family dining room, the setting was a conference room at the Burbank Airport Hilton. And, for the 170 participants--Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, their children and their grandchildren--the ritual was bittersweet, both a celebration and a reminder of a time when observing the Sabbath might mean death.

“A Gathering of the Generations: Shoah Remembrance and Dialogue,” which continues through today, includes lectures, workshops, “schmooze time” and other events. All reflect the belief that the horrors of the Holocaust, or Shoah, as it is called in Hebrew, affected not just the people who experienced it but their sons and daughters as well.

“The second generation has its parents’ nightmares,” said Anne Reisman of Beverly Hills, a founder of Second Generation of Los Angeles, an organization for children of Holocaust survivors and co-sponsor of the conference with the Leslie and Susan Gonda Foundation.

The 38-year-old Reisman, who is chairing the conference, is the daughter of a mother who was 15 when she was liberated from the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. Her father spent the war years in hiding in Budapest, Hungary. Like other children of survivors, Reisman said, she grew up aware that her parents had suffered unspeakable things, that she had far fewer living relatives than other children, and that she didn’t want to add to her parents’ burden by misbehaving.

Youthful rebellion was hard in survivor families. Reisman recalled that she once balked at going to temple during the High Holidays. Her mother, Hedy, told her: “My family burned in ovens, and I want my family with me at temple.” Hedy Reisman is attending the conference with her daughter.

Her parents were able to talk about their experiences, Reisman said, but many other survivors were not. “But the parents’ trauma is transmitted to the children, even if it’s done nonverbally,” said Reisman, a clinical social worker whose practice includes survivors and their offspring.

The organizers of the conference hope that the lessons learned from how successive generations deal with the Holocaust can be applied to other genocides and mass traumas, including those of Cambodia and the former Yugoslavia, she said.

Typically, children of survivors grow up “with a lot of overprotectiveness and fear,” Reisman said. “There’s a sense that the world is not safe. They’re right, but we still need to live in denial--the denial that gets us through the day.”

One of the things the conference hopes to do, Reisman said, is to give the second generation the opportunity to talk about their feelings and concerns.

“The idea of the dialogue is not necessarily to talk to your own parents, but to other people,” she said.

That often feels safer to children who have spent a lifetime trying to spare their parents more pain. Workshops include those on such second-generation issues as “Can I Ever Do Enough for My Parents?”

Asked at the conference if her survivor parents had overprotected her, Marylin Kingston of Sherman Oaks said, “Sure!” Almost to a person, survivors wanted to have children, not only in the futile hope of replacing children who had been killed, but as evidence that the Nazis had not succeeded in their plan to destroy every Jew.

Kingston sat with her mother, Cesia, and her father, Morrie, who live in Studio City. From the Polish city of Lodz, Cesia Kingston survived two concentration camps, including Auschwitz. Morrie Kingston, also from Lodz, does not talk publicly about what happened during World War II.

Marylin Kingston remembers that her parents were stricter than many. “I had to be home earlier from dates than everybody else,” she said. “What they wanted to do was make sure my life was perfect. I had a great childhood.” Kingston’s husband, Harry Cynamon, is also a child of survivors.

According to Yael Danieli, a clinical psychologist who is the keynote speaker at the conference, all survivors are not alike in how they cope with the unspeakable. Danieli, who is the founder of the Group Project for Holocaust Survivors and their Children in New York City, describes four distinct types of survivor families: victim families, fighter families, numb families and “those who made it.”

Even survivors in the last category, who have achieved worldly success since World War II, tend to be achingly lonely and to fear that German leader Adolf Hitler may have triumphed by leaving his mark on their much-loved children, Danieli said.

Many survivors had special problems raising their children that had to do with having no living role models, “only idealized parents who had been murdered,” Danieli said. Survivors who had been robbed of their childhood and adolescence were sometimes at a loss in dealing with those stages in their children’s lives, she said.

Danieli said the second generation responded enthusiastically to the opportunity to share its experiences after the founding of the Group Project. “Soon enough, the children clamored for us,” she said. The children of survivors were so avid, she and the other therapists sometimes joked: “Who is going to take care of the parents of the children of survivors?”

Immediately after the Holocaust, survivors suffered from “a conspiracy of silence,” Danieli said. No one wanted to hear their awful tales, including many therapists. That refusal to listen was another blow to people who already had suffered too much, she said.

Danieli told the conference that trauma victims must find a way to incorporate the horror into their lives without allowing it to define them. “Having been helpless does not mean one is a helpless person,” she said. “Having witnessed or experienced evil does not mean that the world as a whole is evil. Having been betrayed does not mean that betrayal is an overriding human behavior. Having been violated does not necessarily mean that one has to live one’s life in constant readiness for its reenactment. Having been treated as dispensable does not mean that one is worthless, and taking the painful risk of bearing witness does not mean that the world will listen, learn, change or become a better place.”

The fact that the survivor population is aging was very much on the minds of participants.

“As we grow older and realize there is an end to this, we realize we better speak now,” said Daisy Miller, of Studio City.

Miller, who was born in Croatia in 1938, spent the war years in hiding in Italy. A founder of Child Survivors of the Holocaust of Los Angeles, she is also community relations coordinator for Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation.

For many of the survivors, the third generation is the best revenge. When Marylin Kingston gave birth to son Jeremy, now 2, both her parents were triumphantly present.