Self Searching

Thursday, September 13, 1979

Self searching never ends, even though it does take on another form.  I was thinking last night that if I had lived during the war, as my relatives who were taken to the concentration camps, to live in a free world would have appeared to be a marvelous Quixote-an dream.  Yet, while I was not alive then, I am a survivor because my mother and my father survived. If either of them had been killed in 1944, I would never have been born, I would never have existed but chance made it so that they both individually and separately survived.  Had it not been for the war, many of my friends would never have been born. They came to be because the family of their fathers (generally not the mothers) were exterminated. Complete families with three, sometimes four, five children taken away and annihilated.  The men, those who returned, remarried, started new families. These children, their children, are my friends. And we are the lucky ones, because we were born after the war, to survivors of the Holocaust, and we were not the ones to be taken away.  But we are still a marked lot.  We suck the milk of mothers whose lives were haunted by painful memories like broken glass.  We were left with the pieces, and we were to become the replacement.  But how could we ever replace what they lost – different children, different marriage partners, mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters.  Much was expected of us, but how were we to understand, for we were at that time as yet unborn.  So we became the bearers of their guilt, what they felt for surviving with so many having lost their lives.  We in turn felt guilty because we could not give them back their lost families and balanced lives as they knew it before the war.  But these are the things that remain forever unsaid, unexplored.  We are a generation after.  We are supposed to be content, unscarred, unbeaten.

Note:  written Thursday, September 13, 1979
Janka Streda
(nom de plume, Janka perished in the Holocaust)

By ONI