Suddenly Jewish: Jews Raised as Gentiles Discover Their Jewish Roots

Children of Survivors

Like many newly arrived families, we immersed ourselves in the business of making a living and fitting in. I always had the feeling that we had Jewish family or were Jewish ourselves, but I was not able to actually ask the question. When I did ask my mother about it during her last illness in 1979, her answer was, “No, we have no Jewish relatives.” Then, when I started working on our genealogy, my father also denied having any Jewish relatives, but the way he answered always raised more questions. Helen Epstein was born to two Holocaust survivors in 1947, two years after the end of the War. Thirty years later she began the research that would culminate in her book, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors.1 She and her peers, fellow children of survivors, had reached an age when they could take a retrospective look at their lives and try to reach an understanding of how their upbringing differed from, shall we say, normal experiences. Some of the recurring threads in Epstein’s interviews included parents who, because they had lost their own parents so young, had no model from whom to learn how to bring up a child. Some interviewees mentioned distant parents who, having endured wrenching loss, were afraid to establish close emotional bonds for fear those bonds would be violently severed again. Others talked about parental episodes of profound depression, extended unexplained silences, or severe temper tantrums. Children of survivors are exquisitely sensitive to their parents’ history . They dare not add to their parents’ abundant measure of anguish. Even into adulthood, these children are careful to shield their parents from bad news, from failure, from any more blows to the psyche. They instinctively know that if their parents have not been forthcoming with Children of Survivors information, they are not to initiate a painful discussion, even if they come across indisputable evidence of the unmentionable past. All these patterns surfaced in my interviews. The difference, though, between the people I interviewed and those whom Epstein interviewed, is that I was speaking exclusively to people who did not know their parents had suffered under the Nazi regime. Yossi, a fair-haired, fair-skinned, middle-aged Dutchman of trim build, met me in a quiet Tel Aviv café, wearing a plaid shirt, chinos, and a skullcap. He was coming straight from the army’s National Defense College in Tel Aviv, where he was spending his mornings for one year, before returning home in the afternoons to his wife and five children in Jerusalem. Because it is not his mother tongue, Yossi spoke a rather formal, book-learned English, but the more he relaxed, the more colloquial his language became. My mother was born in Amsterdam in 1918 to an Orthodox family. She was one of five siblings. Her father was the hazzan [cantor] of the synagogue . My mother, who was a nurse, and two of her brothers went to work in 1937 in a Jewish psychiatric facility. Three years later, the rest of the family, including my mother’s fiancé, was rounded up in a Nazi raid. They were deported and killed, which my mother found out for certain only after the War. In 1942, the psychiatric hospital received advance word that the Nazis were coming for them. They released the ambulatory patients and much of the staff. Some of the staff, including my mother’s two brothers, volunteered to stay with the bedridden patients. They were all deported and killed. My mother, meanwhile, was hidden along with three or four others in the basement of a mansion by an unmarried Christian woman in a wealthy neighborhood. For three years she did not see the light of day. Even now, when we go camping, for example, she quakes at any unexplained noise and can’t relax until she knows what it is, for fear of Nazi footsteps. When the war ended, my mother was determined that no family of hers would ever be targeted by Nazis again, so she cut all her ties with the past. Having come from a practicing family, this was a traumatic break with Judaism, but she had lost her faith and suffered tremendous 73 Children of Survivors anxiety about anti-Semitism. She returned to nursing, and seven years later married my non-Jewish father, whom she met at a table tennis match. He found her...