NEWS FEATURE: Children of Holocaust survivors remember and weep

c. 1996 Religion News Service BURBANK, Calif. (RNS)-Adolf Hitler’s”final solution”focused not only on the physical extermination of Jews, but also on a nightmarish dream to wipe out all trace of Jewish life and culture. At a small hotel gathering here this past weekend (May 17-18) of about 130 Holocaust survivors and their grown children, the […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

BURBANK, Calif. (RNS)-Adolf Hitler’s”final solution”focused not only on the physical extermination of Jews, but also on a nightmarish dream to wipe out all trace of Jewish life and culture.

At a small hotel gathering here this past weekend (May 17-18) of about 130 Holocaust survivors and their grown children, the generation that followed the”Shoah”confronted their own pain and resolved to keep fighting Hitler’s plan by never forgetting their parents’ experiences.”I feel like I carry the load, sometimes, of Jewish history,”said Irit Eckhaus, 39, a Polish-Israeli woman now working in Los Angeles as a physical therapist. She described the weekend gathering as”cleansing,”but added that being there”still keeps me down.” This conference of intergenerational dialogue, billed as the first of its kind on the West Coast, was sponsored by Second Generation of Los Angeles, a 300-member group of adult children of Jewish Holocaust survivors, who escaped the fate of the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis along with another 6 million Gypsies, homosexuals, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, socialists, communists and resistance fighters who also died.


The group’s mailing list is about 1,000, including a large number of those in the helping professions-psychotherapists, clinical social workers, doctors and nurses-who dominated the conference. Most of the attendees were women.”As mental-health workers, we’re inordinately sensitive to other people’s pain because we grew up with our parents,”said Deborah Simon, 39, a Los Angeles school psychologist who wrote her doctoral dissertation on guilt and achievement motivation among children of Holocaust survivors.”It was our role to try to heal our parents. That’s why we try to heal others.” Indeed, a common feeling among the grown children of survivors, Simon said, is that they can never do enough for their parents because it’s impossible to make up for the experiences of the Nazi concentration camps. How can we … as their children make up for what they went through?”Simon said.

Simon’s mother, Judy, 72, is a Hungarian-born survivor of Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp. Her father, Bernd Simon, was arrested in 1938 after Germany’s Kristallnacht, the”night of the broken glass,”which was the Nazis’ first widespread attack on Jewish businesses and institutions.

Bernd Simon was sent to the Dachau concentration camp, was freed and escaped to America via Cuba. He joined the US Army Air Corps, was kicked out of the service as an enemy alien because of his German accent, then was cleared of suspicion and allowed back into the service, where he did counter-radio broadcasts against German troops in Italy.

Finally, the elder Simon served in postwar intelligence, identifying Nazi officers among the thousands of German prisoners-of-war. He met his wife after the war in an Army mess hall; she was a United Nations worker helping displaced persons. Now 76 and a retired language teacher in Ventura, Calif., he often visits schools and tells his story to attentive 8th graders.”The younger generation, they don’t know too much about it (the Holocaust),”Bernd Simon said.”It’s very important to keep the story alive.” Moved to tears by Simon’s story was Cleveland-born Susan Weil, 42, a UCLA dietitian whose Czech parents escaped to America and whose father returned to Europe during World War II in U.S. Army intelligence.

The stories she heard as a child about her father’s survival”are very close to the surface for me,”she said. Still, she added,”I’d rather be a little too close, in touch with my emotions, than not in touch at all.” Balancing emotions and history was a key point of the conference, as people learned to integrate their Judaism with the personal legacy of family members.”It’s one thing to think about the 6 million,”said Rabbi Leonard Lewy, a Los Angeles hospice chaplain.”It’s another thing to know that my own grandparents and uncle were annihilated.” The conference keynote speaker was Yael Danieli, a New York clinical psychologist specializing in trauma of camp survivors and their children. The need to remember and include the dead among the living, she said, is so strong that some ultra-Orthodox Jews in New York send wedding invitations to their dead relatives, addressing the cards to death camps where they died.”I’m not interested in normal or abnormal-I’m interested in how people live and what meaning there is to their lives,”she said.

According to”Every Day Remembrance Day,”a 1986 chronicle of Jewish suffering by famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, a combined 13,899 Polish, Austrian, Ukrainian, German, Dutch, French and Belgian Jews were shot or deported to the Nazi camps on May 17-19 in 1942, 1943 and 1944-the same three days of the Burbank conference.

Danieli said the second generation’s collective pain and guilt over these deaths is healthy.”Guilt operates as a vehicle of loyalty to the dead, keeping both generations in relationship with those who perished,”she said.”We are keeping the continuity despite the destruction.”


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