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continued from Page 2 So I have returned once again, now at age 65. Have I learned anything that might be of use to you? Perhaps. I am one of the people who discovered in the early 80’s that we children had been ignored, not considered to have suffered or have memories, not considered to be Holocaust survivors. We were considered to be lucky on the wrong assumption that most of us were too young to know what was happening and therefore spared the torment of those old enough to know. Now it is clear that even the youngest were not spared the consequences of those early years, whether in ghettoes, in hiding, in forests or in camps. In 1982, I helped Sarah Moskovitz and others found the Los Angeles Child Survivor Group, edited and wrote a series of articles published in 1985 in the American Academy Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry on “Child Survivors of the Holocaust”, and served on the International Advisory Committee for the 1991 Hidden Child Gathering in New York, having convinced Abe Foxman to provide the ADL support of that pivotal event. Try to recall when you first identified yourself as a child Holocaust survivor. For most of us, it began no longer than 25 years ago. And there still are child survivors who do not consider themselves as belonging to the Holocaust survivors. The process of self-discovery has been long but necessary for it is intimately connected to our identity and how we view ourselves. No matter where we ended up, our survival caused us to have shared themes pervading our postwar lives. These include the effects of loss, grief and chronic mourning; dealing with memories or fragments of memory; and the complications of identity related to adopting Christianity for survival; then having to discard this disguise if we wanted to return to the Judaism for which we were persecuted in the first place. These issues left us a complicated legacy in later life, one that still reverberates in the manner that we handle our world. For example, because I never complained of illness during my hiding, I still do not complain, even when I should. That nearly cost me my life when I suffered a burst appendix and did not see my doctor for many days, thinking that whatever the pain was, it would go away. Not a good way for a doctor to deal with his own illness. Another example reflects our childhood reliance on adults for our safety. A child survivor friend pointed out to me that in all his postwar group pictures he always stands next to the group leader. Throughout his life he befriended those who may have the power “to save him.” Life-saving habits endure. Memory has been both a blessing and a burden. We want to remember, need to remember, in order to make sense of our lives. However, what is remembered is often tinged with horror – of loss, of danger, of raw fear. My hiders were so kind. Why did I never feel totally safe and secure? Not then, not now? I have learned to live alongside my fears, knowing they will never leave. Another lifelong struggle for most of us – no matter where we have lived, has been with our personal identity. There are the extremes of children raised in Israel in a Jewish atmosphere where identity was integral to daily life, as opposed to Jewish children in Poland just now finding out that they are Jews. And in between are those of us who have lived life knowing we are Jewish but where identity as Jews had not yet been consciously formed because we had been too young to absorb the traditions. A 15 year old, like Elie Wiesel, had a great deal of Jewish learning prior to his deportation in 1944. A 2 year old like me, had none. By age 5, I thought I was a Christian and in fact, went to a Catholic kindergarten that only solidified my faith in Christianity. It was a long road to recapture my Jewish identity as it has been for so many of us who undoubtedly felt safer as Christians than as Jews. So it has been a complicated journey these past 60 years. Let us accept that fact. Let us accept that in the big picture we are fortunate to have lived, worked, raised families, contributed to our communities, and to Israel, no matter our fragile childhoods. What has been the impact of our experiences on those we love, particularly our children? It has been long recognized that the so-called “second generation” lives with some of the consequences of being the offspring of Holocaust survivors. But these children are now themselves aged 45 to 55. Children born in the Displaced Persons’ Camps in 1947-1950 or shortly thereafter in new countries have generally dominated the discourse. They were born to newly married couples, often both survivors, who frequently went to work in a trade, spoke with strong accents, and lived near one another. There are second-generation children who lived entirely amongst Holocaust survivors. The children of child survivors are an entirely different demographic group. Child survivors were too young to marry immediately after the war, they were more likely to go back to school than straight to work, became more proficient in their new languages and attempted to blend into the wider community. Child Holocaust survivors seldom married another survivor nor did they live close to other survivors. While acknowledging the older survivors as the “real” Holocaust survivors, they remained unaware of their own personal histories as particularly relevant to their lives. If we were not defining ourselves how could we possibly expect our children to understand the powerful forces inherent in our backgrounds? On the whole, our second generation children are more likely to be about 25-40 years old, nearly a generation younger than the offspring of the adult Holocaust survivors. My children are 32, 29 and 26. My wife is a Canadian Jewess whose father was born in Canada. If not for my activities in Holocaust Education and Remembrance, they would be unlikely to take particular notice of the mystery of those experiences. So here lies the challenge. What do our children know about us, their child survivor parent? How did they shape their self-identity and is there a connection to the Holocaust experience? The older second generation children definitely carried the burden of sensitivity to the pain experienced by the parents, and therefore responded by attempting to be the bearers of good tidings, high marks, popularity with friends, offering few complaints, and asking even fewer questions about the Holocaust in order not to upset their parents. They became caretakers of their parents so as not to add to the hurt they could see but without knowing the precise origins. The younger second generation, ours, reacted differently, although not less caringly. They knew we carried secrets, not frequently shared. Our unexpected tears must have frightened them. Which of us knows the precise triggers to our pervasive sadness? Who amongst us knows what thoughts may trigger despair? I think we owe it to them and to our grandchildren to offer our stories, the best we can, with honesty and with candour. They do not know enough to make sense of us. Perhaps they will think us a little less crazy when they know why we do what we do. After all, we lost our parents, our guides to how to raise them. We re-invented parenting. We were once hungry, alone, frightened, not for a day but for years. Surely, some of that trauma remains in our behaviours today. Perhaps we are smothering in some instances, or too determined to make them independent in others. After all, we survived and so must they. We know how tough a world it is. And for Jews it is growing tougher. The world has not forgiven us for providing humankind with the basic laws for human conduct and decency. It has not forgiven us for re-establishing Israel as a nation, a homeland for Jews so that we are no longer entirely at the mercy of our hosts. We must tell our stories, to prepare our own children and those of others. For we child survivors, no longer in hiding from our past, have a message for the future. Our message? To what particularly should we alert our children? We must remind them, above all, to be watchful of words. Words come first, then murder follows. “Mein Kampf” outlined the plan. “Der Stuermer” provided the vocabulary - vermin, rodents, bacteria, disease. It was no different in Rwanda. First the Tutsis were labelled “cockroaches”, their brutal annihilation followed. An Imam in the city of Vancouver where I live, teaches his congregants that Jews are the children of pigs and monkeys. The president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, Mohammed El-Masry, last week called on the Canadian government to remove two prominent Canadian Jews from an advisory committee on the prevention of terrorism. El-Masry accuses them of being pro-Israel. In other words, he questions their ability to serve objectively. The same El-Masry last year stated that it was alright to kill Israeli civilians in the struggle for “Palestine”. He condones the murder of Jews in Israel while calling for the removal of Jews, fellow Canadian citizens in Canada. We must watch his words. Take note of the media and prepare yourselves. Not so long ago, leading newspapers and news magazines juxtaposed the pictures and fates of a young Arab woman with that of a young Jewish woman. Only the Arab woman was a homicide bomber, the other her victim. The article made them appear morally equivalent, bound by fate. They failed to label one a terrorist, the other, an innocent. It was as if the Trade Towers murders of 3000 civilians could be reduced to the fated meeting of Mohammed Atta and a Jewish strockbroker in those Towers – two equals caught in a bad situation. We cannot allow such moral perversions to remain unchallenged. In Egypt the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, the anti-Semitic forgery, is shown on television regularly. Perhaps it could be stopped if the United States withheld its annual 3 billion dollar aid package to Egypt. In the Madrassas of Pakistan and the Wahabi teachings in Saudi Arabia, we Jews are brainwashed into the minds of millions of Muslim youngsters, as pigs, dogs and monkeys. It is a preparation for slaughter and time to remind our non-Jewish friends that while it may again begin with Jews, it will not end with us. They will be next. We know. And you must tell your children to protect Israel, now serving as the world’s “Jew”, the Jew amongst nations and vilified with anti- Semitic language disguised as “anti-Zionist” and “anti-Israel”. It is raw and vicious anti-Semitism, aided by news agencies like the BBC which cannot bring itself to define a terrorist and by the European Union which cannot bring itself to support the democratic state of Israel, especially after the Palestinian Authority rejected the perfectly good offer of Peace in the year 2000. The Arabs rejected it and initiated a war of terrorism. And who was blamed for the violence? Not Arafat but Israel. It seems that the world is not done with us. But we shall not despair. We must not despair. We are the children who overcame despair to forge new lives. We are the remnant that has served as a reminder to what is possible. And we remember and we know. Everything is possible – even Peace. |