Messianic Jewish Studies

CHILDREN OF HOLOCAUST VICTIMS

CHILDREN OF HOLOCAUST VICTIMS by Raphael ben Levi

In the 1960s and 1970s, many children of Holocaust survivors began exploring the repercussions of the traumas their parents had experienced and somehow survived, and how this impacted their lives as the next generation post Holocaust. Until then, since the end of WW2, the subject was largely taboo and instead filled by a terrifying vacuum which desperately sought an audience but dared not speak out. Psychological studies were conducted among several of these 2nd generation “anomalies” to determine how profound and in what manner of expression had their parents’ nightmarish experiences affecting their lives? 2nd generation awareness groups began to be established, where people shared and explored their experiences in a safe place within a climate of understanding and mutual support.

Holocaust survivors battled with what they considered would be best for their children regarding their upbringing and future. Should they live in a Jewish or gentile neighbourhood? To become well known in society or hide and never be seen? To bear offspring to replace all those who had been lost, or choose never to have any children again who might become future victims of fierce anti-Semitism? They were besieged by these and many more questions emerging from a common fear that the next generation might also face the horrors of genocide.

People who survived the Holocaust bore open wounds of unresolved conflicts in the aftermath of their experiences which faced them as spectres and invaded the lives of those who were closest to them – and most vulnerable – their children. Among them, were a small number of Messianic Jews who were able to receive healing and restoration. Some, I knew personally from Israel and abroad, but even they retained scars that manifested as a ‘Jacob’s limp’ – those who fought with God like the patriarch yet prevailed, though at a cost that would remain with them always.

Messianic believers who are children of Holocaust survivors constitute a wide diversity of people from a,

a. secular background, and strong ties to Israel/Zionism

b. traditional Jewish background merged with other culture and traditions (mainly liberal, reform identifications)

c. religious Jewish background: e.g. conservative, orthodox

d. assimilated Jews with little to no interest in their Jewish roots.

Messianic believers are challenged to make sense of the Holocaust from a spiritual perspective – questions such as, “How could God have allowed these things to happen?” Or, “How does the Holocaust relate to a biblical understanding of the events which took place?” Or, “What does the Bible teach us about forgiving our enemies?”

From a broader perspective, many Holocaust survivors, whether Messianic believers or not, had themselves been children during the war, with significant numbers finding themselves as orphans who were subsequently fostered out in a foreign land, alien language and unfamiliar culture that could often be cruel and lacking in sympathy. In this sense many lacked positive parental role models as a support once they had their own children. Some Holocaust survivors recall how their parents used a “fight or flight” method of problem-solving during the war, that was transferred by default to their children.

It is this category – children of Holocaust survivors who I would like to focus on in this session, whose lives were less obviously impacted yet nonetheless implicated through reliving the traumas of their parents. Parents who had been traumatised by the Holocaust, subconsciously transferred much of their emotional baggage upon their children, something very messy and complex because instead of remaining spectators the children found themselves trapped within their parent’s nightmare. This is something personally I can bear witness to.

My mother became an orphan with no surviving relatives except a distant uncle. She was tormented with the guilt of survival while others had perished. Out of a total population of 1.6m children from European descent, over 1m Jewish children perished in the Holocaust. Only a remnant survived to bear families. Their offspring were raised within a traumatised family environment as de-facto casualties of the Holocaust that had been transferred to them unconsciously rather than as intended. Out of this 2nd generational group, a remnant became Messianic believers. However, this did not prevent their world view being tainted with a layer of woundedness not experienced by other Jewish families living in safe havens for generations who had been spared the associated traumas of these Holocaust refugees.

My paternal grandfather attempted to reach freedom from Nazi Austria for Palestine. After miraculously reaching the shores of Haifa, he was arrested by the British and deported to a POW camp in Mauritius where he was treated as a criminal and died 2 years later due to the harsh treatment and lack of care. My grandmother, who had miraculously escaped to the UK with my father, died shortly afterwards from a broken heart, leaving my father a refugee in a foreign land empty handed. Consequently, my sister and I grew up without grandparents and parents who struggled to come to terms with life in post-Holocaust UK.

If God has a destiny and perfect plan for our lives (which I believe He does) how does it relate to casualties of the Holocaust? What constructive purpose was served in the traumas and magnitude of loss which 6 million families suffered? Jewish people have consistently asked these questions with varieties of explanations that can only at best provide only a conspicuously incomplete picture. This is significant. Some claim that it was the judgement of God upon an apostate people; others provide economic explanations: During the time leading up to the rise of Hitler, the nation of Germany was bankrupt from World War I. Hitler began sharing his strong antisemitic position and used the Jewish people as a scapegoat of the nations financial problems. It was all about economics.

Others view things from a lens that is purely secular suggesting that the Holocaust is a prime example of the evil humanity is capable of perpetrating beyond which everything is meaningless.

The Bible clearly states that God uses everything, including evil, for His Sovereign purposes otherwise, how can He be God? We may only gain a glimpse how God used the Holocaust for good, beyond the fact that in the aftermath of the Holocaust was born the re-establishment of Israel as a sovereign state, a miracle of epic proportions (Isai.66:8) preceded by over 1900 years of exile.

For a Holocaust victim, to forget is impossible; to attempt to do so is like peering over the precipice into an inferno. The spectre is always there to haunt them. Some sought closure by breaking the silence but most others did the opposite – to suppress their emotions for fear of reliving the nightmare, a very common characteristic from those who have experienced severe trauma.

Children of Holocaust victims grew up in two worlds: one with family and the other, independent from them. For example, at home they were surrounded with relics of an alien culture which was immersed within a closeted ghetto environment. But, parallel to this, they experienced an entirely different life externally within a society of expanded boundaries, acceptance and normality.

How did the next generation post-Holocaust cope with growing up in a world without grandparents or close relatives, many times owning an overbearing and dysfunctional family who loved them passionately but struggled to express it healthily? The simplest thing for many of this next generation was to accommodate unreality with denial. But, the past has a way of catching up with you, marring one’s identity with deep scars inherited from parents who experienced the unthinkable and yet somehow had survived.

Children of Holocaust survivors grew up under the guardianship of traumatised parents and, for the vast majority, they were doomed to relive the effects of it upon their lives. In that way Hitler triumphed in a manner even he could not have conceived. One child of parents who were Holocaust survivors, the author, Fern Schumer Chapman, a child of Holocaust victims observed that:

“…survivors were generally older than escapees and had slightly more control over their fates. They relied upon qualities within themselves that saved their lives. Torture, abuse, and loss taught survivors to be cunning, enduring, or even complicit—anything to live another day. Yet, escapees were children and, therefore, pure victims.”

She continued:

“If my mother had been a (Holocaust) survivor, maybe she would be grateful, and could have felt each day as a gift, every year is a mission. Yet, as an escapee, she feels she doesn’t deserve to live. For that matter, she’s not sure she wants to . . . . not without her parents. Her understanding is stuck in a twelve-year-old’s broken heart. All she can know is that her mother and her Motherland abandoned and rejected her, and that’s what she can never escape.”

Here is a shocking example she used to illustrate her point:

“When I was ten and our family returned from an unusual, delightful weekend of downhill skiing, I saw the limitations of (my mother’s) happiness. When we got home, she locked herself in the bathroom and sobbed wildly from behind the door. “What’s wrong” my father asked as he knocked? “Didn’t we have a good weekend?”

She refused to open the door, but yelled from what seemed like the other side of a gulf. “Yes, we had a wonderful time. I don’t think I will ever have a day like this again. I have never been so happy and I doubt if I’ll ever be again. I don’t deserve it.”

Her whole thinking was submerged in the false narrative she had bought into that, because so many ‘better’ people than herself had perished, she had no right to have survived, let alone lead a happy and fulfilled life. These are the types of thoughts and common threads which Holocaust survivors were tormented with and struggled to come to terms with using mechanisms such as overcompensation which was unconsciously dumped upon their offspring.

Children of Holocaust survivors generally lacked the skills to respond effectively to the psychological traumas and dysfunctions variously expressed as they grew up and relived the effects of the Holocaust through their parents. Instead, it became woven into their fibre and manifested as a second generation anomaly. The overpowering feeling of overprotectiveness from their parents held a strongly negative impact that became invasive. Consequently, many children experienced difficulty leaving home when they became independent for fear of hurting their parents and it being seen as a rejection.

Children of Holocaust survivors had not yet developed the emotional maturity to understand what was happening in the lives of their parents, so instead they simply considered everything, the good, the bad and the ugly, as normal. According to current statistics, there are over 200,000 children of Holocaust survivors across the world and each have been faced in some measure with this dilemma. Here is an example from a well known author:

“My mother was just 12 when she and her family were rounded up from their home in Chernowitz, Romania, and sent to the ghetto. Her father was killed almost immediately and other relatives perished at some point or another, but she, her mother, aunt and young cousin were shipped to a work camp in the Ukraine before they escaped via the Jewish underground to another, supposedly better, camp. She was 16 when liberation came, survived a bout of untreated typhoid fever that killed her mother, and lived in orphanages until she was reunited with family members who luckily had left Romania before Hitler arrived. And that’s about all I know.

She went on to marry, as many survivors did — to mixed results, especially if they married other survivors — and made a life in a world that often didn’t want to know too much about their experiences or that sometimes blamed the survivors themselves for their own fate. They were eager to have children — what better way to prove their aliveness despite their immense losses and suffering? Or, if they had lost children in the camps or on the way to them, to start a new family?

Some Holocaust survivors shared intimate details of their experience with their children, sometimes with a layer of guilt when there should be none, like when their children misbehaved as all kids do — “I survived for this?” — or expressed their own pain — “You don’t know what suffering is.” Others, like my mother, were unable or unwilling to speak of the horrors they knew, thus creating a mystery that their children can’t help but try to solve. With a child’s curious mind and a budding writer’s vivid imagination, I filled in the blanks of my mother’s life, imaging all sorts of terrors that may or may not have been true — all of which made me become protective of her. That was not a healthy thing, as I later came to understand; caretaking, denial, anxiety and self-sacrifice became my unconscious vocabulary when it came to those I loved. And, really, what was I protecting her from? She survived, she was strong.

I’m not too interested in being a victim or pathologizing my past — many of us grew up with less-than-perfect childhoods just as many have experienced horrific situations, such as poverty, abuse, trauma, natural disasters and war, and yet have managed to live happy, healthy, fulfilling and productive lives. Others continue to struggle, some more than others, sometimes with devastating effects.

Still, I do not really need Second Generation studies to understand how the Shoah and the loss of everything my mother had — her home, her parents, her friends, her sense of normalcy — transformed a confident, healthy, well adjusted and normal girl who was known in her family as a bit of a rascal into the woman I knew as my mother. While I spent my adolescence like most teens — crafting my own sense of identity, — she was just trying to survive. Hitler did not take her life, but he changed it in ways that linger in her children even today.”

One of the most frequent questions for Holocaust survivors has been, Why me?Why was I allowed to live while many others better than myself perished? Asking these types of questions is normal, but often keeps a person emotionally paralysed. Of greater significance, for those with the courage, is acknowledging in true humility that none of us possess all the answers to life’s dilemmas. Rather than diminishing the greatness of God they enlarge it. Scripture puts this well such in the Book of Proverbs: “Trust in the Lord with all our hearts, not in our own understanding. In all our ways to acknowledge Him and He will make straight our paths.”

Things are not always as they appear, but God can use any situation, however unlikely, to fulfil His purposes. Take the following story as an example.

“When we were in the concentration camp, we slept in ‘bunks’ in the barracks. They weren’t bunk beds like you have, comfortable, with proper mattresses. Each bunk was about the size of a double bed—but nine of us slept on that hard board. How did we fit? We all had to lie sideways, stuffed together like sardines, or like spoons

in a drawer. There was no room for a person to lie on his back or stomach. We all had to turn over at the same time.

I slept on the end of the bunk. You might think that that was a good place to have, because you were only squashed on one side. In the winter it was the worst place to be. You see, we had no covers, and certainly no heat. So the only thing that kept us warm was the body heat of our bunkmates. The person on the end of the bunk had no one on one side of him to keep him warm. Often, after a particularly freezing night, people would wake up in the morning and find that the last person on the bunk had frozen to death during the night.

On one very cold night I was shivering so hard, and I felt that I was freezing to death. All of a sudden I felt a little bit of warmth on my exposed side. Then another and another. I looked and saw . . . . The rats from the barracks, who were also freezing, had crawled onto the bunk and were lying next to me. They absorbed the heat from my body, and they in turn warmed me. Together we survived. So, children, you can’t kill a rat because the rats saved my life.”

Scripture can help us understand things better, but sometimes it depends on a translator’s interpretation. An example is with the verse from the Book of Job. In the Revised Standard Version it reads:

“Behold, he will slay me; I have no hope.”

However the Authorised Version provides a very different rendition:

“Though he slays me, yet will I trust in Him.”

The words of Job can bring hope or hopelessness depending on our point of view.

The Talmud tells us that the 613 Laws can be summed up in just one:

“The righteous shall live by his faith.”

This ‘faith’ which Habakkuk speaks of is an important and distinguishing factor, and an age-old dilemma which has vexed many people. The fact remains that only through faith in Yeshua is it possible for any person, whether it be a Holocaust victim, a child of Holocaust victims, or anyone else, to receive His peace that passes all understanding and a healing that provides us with His Divine rest even amid the worst of circumstances and traumas the world can throw at us.

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