‘What About the Children?’

Reading articles on the Holocaust throughout my adult life has kept open my gaping wound.

I read stories about monetary retribution from the German government to Jews who lost family, property and a future. Now I read about Swiss money to be returned to aging Jews in the sums of $500 to $1,000 per elderly survivor who fills out a tedious questionnaire.

In all my reading, regard for the survivors’ children is hardly mentioned. The level of family dysfunction in a Jewish household where the parents were survivors seems to have been swept away with the ashes from the infernos in which many of their family members perished.

My first memories of seeing candles flickering were not those my mother lit on Friday night in observance of the Sabbath. They were candles in glasses that burned 24 hours, called yahrzeit candles--memorials to the large family both she and my father lost during those terrible years.

I was born in the summer of 1946 in a displaced persons’ camp in Eschwege, Germany. My parents met and married there the year before; each the sole family survivor. We came to America with thousands of other immigrants on the SS General Taylor in September of 1949.

I recall the stories my mother told me after she lit those glass tumbler candles while tears trickled down her face. I heard the names of her three sisters, Luba, Gelche and Perle, who were gassed at Treblinka. She cried especially hard when she visualized her three younger brothers ages 13 to 16 being carried off to death trains. The youngest died in her arms from typhus while they were in a wagon transport.

Dazed, my mother jumped from the tiny cattle car window, landing on the Warsaw countryside’s first major snowfall. It was Nov. 2, 1942, she told me. She was only 20 and wanted to live. Guards shot her and left her for dead. Farmers found her frozen and nursed her. When she was well enough, she ran to the woods and joined the partisans--a Jewish band of underground fighters in the Polish pine forest.

Growing up in New York in the 1950s, I heard many stories from my classmates’ parents. The details were always different; the countries in Eastern Europe varied. But, the household sentiments were the same: sadness, loss and guilt.

My friends and acquaintances did not talk about our dysfunctional homes, but we knew we were different from our American friends. Some of our parents described the war years in graphic detail while we made faces and held our hands over our ears. Other parents kept their wartime experiences hidden from their children. The exclusion from their parents’ past left a tremendous void in their lives. There was rarely a happy medium--if there was happiness at all.

Who will address the pain and suffering of the children of the survivors? Many of our elderly parents have passed on, and the rest are teetering along in their final years. Our childhoods were marred from our parents’ pain and we remain scarred. For many of us, no dollar amount can bring back carefree childhood years when we were not somehow reminded daily of our family’s loss, of how we looked like our mother’s youngest sister, of how we must never complain or even have too much fun.

We had to keep decorum. We had to excel in our studies. We had to become somebody--to make up for all those who perished. We almost had to be superhuman. And, we had to mourn with our parents, to help them never to forget their past.

How do we, the children of survivors, wish to be publicly compensated? Dollars and cents won’t do it. Blind hatred must not be accepted. We ask parents, educators and clergy to teach and practice universal acceptance of their neighbors--not just tolerance. We want our children and their children never to know firsthand the miserable scourge their forebears suffered. We are grateful that the grandchildren born to us, the children of Holocaust survivors, will have someone to call Grandma and Grandpa.