Descendants of the Holocaust Inherit Two Competing Stories
When my father died, Elie Wiesel came to my home to make a shiva call. The first question he asked, “Did your father write down his story?” This question continues to haunt me every day …
Topic: Survivors
Group Belonging and Mourning as Factors in Resilience in the Second Generation of Holocaust Survivors
Historically, the marker event for the identifiability of children of survivors as a group was the seminal article in the New York Times by journalist Helen Epstein, herself a child of Holocaust survivors, on June …
Adult Offspring of Holocaust Survivors as Moral Voices in the American-Jewish Community
I am an adult child of Holocaust survivors born in a half bombed out hospital in Kassel, Germany. For me, the whole notion of the Holocaust evokes never ending questions about human beings who annihilate …
Holocaust Survivor Families: The Dynamics of Adaptation
“As a child of survivors and as a psychologist who has worked with survivors and their families for 40 years, I am fascinated in particular by the varied dynamics of adaptation that these families manifest” …
Holocaust Child Survivors, Sixty-Five Years After Liberation: From Mourning to Creativity
Most of the world does not contemplate children as survivors of the Holocaust; surely it is understandable why this is the case. After all, the image that most have is that of Jews spilling out …
Third Generation of Jewish Holocaust Survivors
“Why are Holocaust survivors obsessed with future generations remembering? Why do they command us all to Zachor, to remember? What is it they want us to remember?” That is the challenge every post-Holocaust generation will …
The Evolution of a Second-Generation of Holocaust Survivor Identity
In the late 1960s, Henry Krystal, a psychoanalyst and Auschwitz survivor, organized several conferences for doctors, social-service providers, and German government officials on the after-effects of “massive psychic trauma” on survivors of Nazi concentration camps …
Breaking the Silence: The Generation After the Holocaust
In 1978, Fogelman was leading a group for children of Holocaust survivors with Dr. Henry Grunebaum in Cambridge, MA, which became the subject of Breaking the Silence. The film portrays a number of survivor parents …
Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust
Conscience and Courage examines the psychological transformation of a bystander to a rescuer through compelling accounts drawn from interviews with survivors of the Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jews of Europe in WW II. Once …