Author: Club 2G Boro Park

“Rabbi is there a date set for the arrival of Messiah? Awaiting the signal for Salvation by
Resurrection!!”  Lazer sang the song every Pesach during Seder meal – became part of the celebration of Passover in his Sister’s home after the Second World War. Lazer returned from the War to find his wife and children “Gone”.  My Mother was the Sister who survived; his two other Sisters, “Gone”.   Three of his Brothers “Gone”. Lazer singing about Resurrection with his wife and children “Gone” every year as I, a very young Second Generation Survivor opened the door for Eliahu HaNavi to come in.

ONI

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

In nature, summer must be before the breath of autumn rapidly shakes off barren discolored leaves. All my life I improvised adapting to customs of yet another country – a new beginning in three continents; a magician wearing many hats – a stranger in foreign lands. 
Learning, speaking, mastering different languages, life force survived not transformed the solitude that comes with being a second generation survivor.

In sleep we close our eyes yet see visions that set our soul on fire; past present future one two three do re mi libretti inspired by desire – redemption upon awakening, awaiting the second generation survivor.

By a Second Generation Survivor

ONI.

Thankfully some of us are here; sadly we mourn the ones who left us as if making their final exit in a play leaving the stage in numb silence. Yes they were here born after the war to survivors who escaped the barbaric conditions; several ironically were born as a consequence of families torn apart by the war; survivors remarrying having children with another partner. Not all, some survivors married for the first time after the war, having lost a majority if not all their immediate family members; parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces then we came, a consolation prize? the second generation. The second generation growing up traumatized by brutalized pain unspoken feeling guilt without understanding why. Yes children of survivors lived misunderstood.

ONI

The impact of the Holocaust on the children of the survivors.

The subject has preoccupied me for a very long time. Articulating it was repeatedly
postponed due to the many other obligations considered – arguably erroneously – more
important. In the [postponed] Tisha b’Av 5779 fast, Sunday August 11, 2019, it reoccurred
to me at the right time. We are Halachically very limited in what we can learn or do on this
day. Triste subjects are permitted and encouraged on this day. Therefore, here it is now.

A lot has been written about the kedoshim Hy”d. And rightfully so. After all they are the
ones who paid the most, losing their lives. A lot has been written about the survivors. And
rightfully so. The indescribable sufferings that they endured. But I have yet to encounter
an entire exposé dedicated to the impact of the Holocaust on the survivors’ children – the
next generation.

In my early childhood my parents z”l went out once of the house early in the morning for
a short very important task, leaving my sibling and myself sleeping, estimating that they
will be back before we awaken. But it so happened that we were awake before their return.
We were pretty afraid of the situation. Going out into the courtyard, we found that it was
populated as usual. One of the plausible possibilities that we seriously contemplated, was
that the Germans once again deported the adults. Not much imagination is needed to
gage the state of our minds at that eventuality. (Do not rush to alert the Social Services,
this happened in entirely different circumstances than today’s America; on a different
continent and in a different era).

Up to a certain age, all childhood thoughts of adulthood were painfully suppressed and
relegated to the recesses of the mind due to the big question mark hanging over ever
reaching that age. Due to the constant chatter of the adults around us of so-and-so “is
aheim gekumen”, came home [from the deportation], and so-and-so “is nisht aheim
gekumen” did not come home [because he perished in one or the other camp], made us
believe that around early adulthood every Yid is taken away to some dreadful destination,
and his survival and return from there is very much in doubt.

The long string of extra-ordinary achievements in the following six and a half decades,
negates any cynical attempt to ascribe the above to one’s intelligence level.
I remember very vividly the still-wet just-rinsed large-grapes bunch that the grandfather of
the goy neighbor brought him, and looked longingly how he is lovingly cuddled in his lap,
thus adding an additional layer of affection and dotting to the parental one. When I asked
my parents “Why don’t I have grandparents?”, they revealed that they were murdered by
the Germans ym”s. (This being way before the politically-correct era, they weren’t
compelled to distinguish between ‘Germans’ and ‘Nazis’).

It wasn’t the most pleasant experience, to put it mildly, to see one’s father, decades after
the war, looking out of the window, tugging with some anguish at his beard, and believing
to be out of the hearing range of everyone, murmuring to himself: “dus is ales du”,
everything is [still] here, “dus ales existirt”, everything [still] exists; referring to his first
family, a wife and three children annihilated by the Germans, consoling himself that
although physically destroyed, their neshomos are intact. (Returning to his home after
being liberated from his local forced labor camp ‘munkatábor’, he found out, from the
settings, that his family has been led away in the middle of their meal, with his three-year old
son having been snatched out from his bed by the sub-human perpetrators). An
attached copy of a faded picture in one of my albums, depicting a sweet, innocent,
pampered six year old girl, my half-sister that I never knew, unfailingly generates great
grief whenever I see it. Quite frequently, when I am enjoying the sight a sweet little Yiddish
child waiting for his school bus, I have to avert my gaze, because the infamous mountain
of children’s shoes in Auschwitz pops into the mind.

Parallelly, it wasn’t pleasant at all, to see my mother a”h in the throes of excruciating pain
and suffering in the four years preceding her petirah from a malady induced – according
to a specialist in the know who cared for her – by the additive(s) that the Germans mixed
into the food of the inmates to increase productivity. (In a bitter irony they forced the
captives to process the gun powder used in their war effort).

But there is a silver lining in all of the above. The resilience of Torah-true Yidden having
rebuild doros yeshorim mevorochim be”h.

I hope that this exposé will open the flood gates and prompt many other survivors’ children
to come forward and share their experiences.
To conclude, I cannot refrain from touching upon the current political climate. In my teens,
I was smug and very pleased of having been born after the war into an inebriatingly free,
pleasant world. Alas, as a septuagenarian, I am witnessing the re-rise of the ominous
black clouds of anti-Semitism over the globe. They are not anymore just over the horizon,
rather almost literally overhead. My heart is full of trepidation for the younger generations,
and for that matter for my own generation as well. Let us do what’s incumbent upon us,
and beseech Hashem, the real shomer Yisroel, to protect us and redeem us speedily in
our days. Amen.

Mordechai Schwimmer
Author of the III Tome Va’Yichtov Mordechai series on the subject of Kiddush HaChodesh
and additional Seforim.