copy and paste from above
"Marilyn Sinclair stood in front of a
packed Toronto conference room a few weeks ago and told the 200 people
gathered there, “We were the children with no grandparents. We had walls
with no family pictures.” By the time she got to “we secretly wished we
had parents who wore blue jeans, who didn’t have an accent, who didn’t
worry about us all the time,” a chuckle of recognition rippled through the group of middle-aged men and women.
Everyone in the room was a child of
Holocaust survivors. Whether they were born in a displaced persons camp
at war’s end or 20 years later into a comfortable suburban home,
Sinclair’s remarks hit home.
“We share memories of trauma from events
that we didn’t even experience,” Sinclair said, kicking off a day-long
seminar for the second generation, or “2Gs,” as they call themselves.
But despite their sometimes difficult
childhoods, Sinclair also reminded the group that they had parents whose
lives demonstrated “strength, resilience and gratitude to Canada.”
Reconciling growing up with
immigrant parents who carried unimaginable burdens with the need to make
sure their parents’ stories are not forgotten is the legacy of the 2Gs.
The conference, titled Dialogue For
Descendants, was the first one organized for the second generation in
Toronto in many years, and it sold out days in advance. Attendees showed
up an hour before the event and just started to connect with each
other, said Dori Rawa Ekstein, co-chair of the conference along with
Sinclair. Carleton University’s Holocaust Centre for Education and
Scholarship was so interested in the conference that it organized a
similar meeting in Ottawa a few days earlier, which also sold out,
featuring most of the same speakers.
About 40,000 Holocaust survivors came to Canada after the
war. As that generation dwindles, their children feel an increasing
sense of urgency to preserve and transmit their families’ history, said
Paula David, the keynote speaker who teaches gerontology at the
University of Toronto’s school of social work and has spent her career
working with Holocaust survivors, their families and caregivers. Her
husband is also a child of survivors, so when David addresses the group,
she is also talking about her own family.
“Children want to know their story and where they come
from, and you don’t [know],” she said to the attendees. “As long as you
had parents alive, you had a story, even if they didn’t want to talk
about it… Once they’re gone, you have no story.”
Survivor parents “knew what they lost, but probably they
didn’t have the words to tell you. They learned to live with their
burden,” David told the group over lunch in a talk that had some
listeners wiping tears from their eyes. “My guess is your burden is
going to keep growing.”
Karen Lasky, who attended the Toronto conference,
inherited her parents’ burdens even before she was born in a displaced
persons camp a few kilometres from Bergen-Belsen. She was raised by
parents who survived Auschwitz and were deeply traumatized, but told her
little about their own experiences.
“I grew up in a silent home,” she said. Her father
suffered mental breakdowns, and, as a child, she saw him being taken
away in restraints to hospital, without ever understanding what was
happening.
About a decade ago, she went on an adult March of the
Living trip to Poland and began to uncover her own heritage. A year
after that trip, she returned to Poland and found information about her
parents’ siblings and their homes. The trip was a “rebirth,” she said.
“I grew up thinking there was nothing left. They lost
their entire families,” she said. “I found everything to tell me who I
was. Without that knowledge, I was incomplete.”
When she returned to Toronto, Lasky became involved with Holocaust Education Week and helping others of the second generation uncover their past.
“It’s our legacy. The story didn’t end with our survivors. We’re going to continue it.”
While some families kept silent in a well-intentioned, but
misguided, attempt to protect their children, others told their
children too much, David said. “They told them everything, in the hope
they would avoid it forever and forever, and that is an enormous burden
for a child,” she said.
Ekstein, who was born in Toronto about two decades after the war, grew up hearing about the Holocaust from her earliest years.
“Sometimes, it was embarrassing,” she said, such as when
her father felt compelled to tell a boyfriend picking her up about his
experiences in Auschwitz and show him the number tattooed on his arm.
“I recognize now, as an adult, it was this overwhelming
urge, it was this moral obligation, to tell the whole world,” Ekstein
said.
As children, the second generation also
tended to be very protective of their parents. “I felt like I have to be
a good girl. I was never the child who caused trouble, because I
already felt like my dad had so much pain,” she said. “I was a pleaser,
which is part of my personality… because I didn’t want my dad to be
upset.”
By the time she was a teenager, Ekstein
was attending Holocaust education programs with her parents. But the
turning point was going on the March of the Living trip as a chaperone,
after which she decided to make Holocaust education “her life’s
passion.”
She and co-chair Sinclair hope the
Toronto conference will be the first of many projects for the 2Gs that
will help them make sense of their families’ story and continue their
parents’ testimony.
It was this desire to understand their
parents and the families they created that motivated Henry and Deborah
Ross-Grayman to become involved in Vancouver’s Second Generation Group
and other Holocaust-related activities. In fact, the couple met in the
group, where Deborah was a facilitator for many years, and they use a
combined surname to “create our own new family, as we have so few family
members coming out of the Holocaust,” Henry said.
Deborah, an only child, was raised by a single mother who didn’t speak English and who, she recalls, was “filled with anxiety.”
“I didn’t really understand what it meant
to be second generation. I wasn’t part of a Jewish community. I just
thought my mother was my mother. I didn’t understand the historical
context and also that there were other people like me who had similar
challenges and experiences,” Deborah said.
An unusually large number of children of
survivors have gravitated to the “helping professions,” as social
workers, doctors, teachers and others, Henry pointed out. Both of the
Ross-Graymans are therapists.
“I knew my family was different from
other Canadian families. That perspective gave me an impetus to
understand not only what was different about my family, but to help
others who struggled to understand their family of origin,” Henry said.
His father endured nine concentration camps, and his
father’s first wife and children, who went into hiding, were betrayed
and died in the Holocaust. His mother survived by hiding in a convent.
His parents remained plagued by anxiety and insecurity after the war, and some of that trauma was transmitted to him, he said.
Deborah’s mother spent the war years on the run, fleeing her home in Poland and travelling across Russia to find a haven first in Japan and then Shanghai. Despite her mother’s frustrations and difficulties, she also gave Deborah a gift, she said.
“My mother gave me this visceral sense of not taking my
life for granted,” she said. “I feel that I’m sensitized to oppression
and racism and bigotry. I feel I have a deep sense of compassion and
empathy for all victims of genocide and their descendants.”
The couple, and Vancouver’s Second Generation Group, are
involved with the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society, which
perpetuates the memory of diplomats Raoul Wallenberg (Sweden) and Chiune
Sugihara (Japan), who provided life-saving visas for Jews fleeing
Europe. Deborah’s mother received a visa from Sugihara.
The society also recognizes contemporary individuals who have taken great personal risks to protect the human rights of others.
The Second Generation Group has also met
several times with aboriginal survivors of residential schools and their
descendants. “We’ve shared stories and shared experiences with them.
It’s really been very meaningful to hear their stories and for them to
hear our stories,” Henry said.
As the Vancouver group ages, its members seem to want to meet more frequently, Deborah has noticed.
“Many of our parents have already died. We are now coming
up as the next generation. There’s a desire to reconnect and share our
experiences,”she said.
“We’re also looking at what kind of legacy are we leaving behind,” Henry said.
He and his wife look at the rising tide of intolerance in
the United States, unleashed by the recent presidential election
campaign, and feel their parents’ old fears creeping up again.
There is also the worry that the personal stories of the
Holocaust will be lost, Paula David observed. Some parents are concerned
that their children are not interested enough in their grandparents’
experiences.
“Rest assured, we have strong evidence someone will tell the story,” she said.
David believes, however, that the third generation is the
best equipped to share the lessons of the Holocaust. Unlike their own
parents, they grew up securely as Canadians, surrounded by cousins and
extended family.
“Children need family history, and you
have to be brave enough to tell the family story,” David told the
Toronto 2Gs. “Anyone who survived and had a family, they’re a hero. How
you tell the story is up to you.”
Oral
History of my mother 2005 and 1979 +
https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn517852
https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn10 and 20003910
https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn517852
https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn10 and 20003910
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