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  • Second Generation Voices: Reflections by Children of Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators
  • Ethan Goffman
Second Generation Voices: Reflections by Children of Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators, edited by Alan L. Berger & Naomi Berger. Syracuse University Press, 2001. 378 pp. $59.95 (c); $24.95 (p).

The children of concentration camp survivors have long been prominent in the media and in scholarship, while the stories and thoughts of children of holocaust perpetrators have been more submerged. Despite the obvious dichotomy between the two groups, they have much in common. Both must grapple with a family history dealing with events almost beyond belief. Both groups find their personal identity often overshadowed by their tragic history. And members of both groups have responded to this history with lives dedicated to helping humanity through teaching, activism, and community service.

Because of the personal nature of these essays, they constitute in no way a unifying overview, but rather a series of viewpoints, almost of short stories, always dramatic and compelling and often beautifully written. As such, the volume provides a rich vein of raw material to be further mined by future scholars and analysts. Nevertheless, more scholarly balance is called for; the voices in Second Generation Voices mirror current media and social awareness, foregrounding the Jewish experience over the German. Most of the volume explores the perceptions and experience of the children of holocaust survivors, [End Page 166] while a shorter section is devoted to essays by children of Germany’s wartime generation, often children of Nazis. Some Jewish sections are digressive, such as a discussion of the Yiddish language. Jewish issues are explored in depth and intricacy, whereas the German voices, equally heartfelt and dramatic, do not as fully discuss issues of historical identity.

One issue confronted by both the German and the Jewish second generation is the need to reconstitute a vanished, often repressed past. This repression, while notable in American Jews in the years after World War II, is no longer a part of the larger Jewish social landscape. Yet historical restoration remains critical to individuals; one essay discusses the need “to fill in the gaps, fit the pieces of the puzzle together” (p. 52), a task shared by all writers in this volume. Historical and personal reconstruction are approached most directly through flashes of memory and meaning in which history and symbol converge. One child of survivors remembers dreams of being hunted by Nazis. Another describes a routine question from her gynecologist, “had anyone in my family had breast cancer. I thought for a moment and to my shock realized that every single woman in my family, excepting my mother, had been killed in the war” (p. 245). Still others recall moments of realization that long ago their parents had lived other lives with other spouses and children and discuss the burden of being replacement children for those destroyed by the Nazis.

One German writer also born as a replacement for war deaths, as a gift to Hitler, has rejected her personal history, going so far as to convert to Judaism, epitomizing a blatant confrontation with the past. Obviously, this situation is not a representative reaction; indeed the German writers in this volume are notable as anti-Nazi activists. Anna Rosmus, for instance, is famous for unearthing her hometown’s crimes in the face of virulent resistance. The drama of repression and recovery shared by all of these writers is stronger among the Germans, for whom often “Jews had been edited out of family narratives” (p. 267). Paradoxically, then, German children of the Nazi generation may face a more difficult task than children of Holocaust survivors. The latter, while dealing with a horrific past and with shorn family trees, often look up to their parents as heroic or, at the very least, consider them innocent. Children of Nazis, by contrast, inherit a terrible shame. One writer complains of being orphaned when she learned of her parents’ deeds, and believes that “to stop loving one’s parents is to stop loving oneself” (p. 304). As someone who believes in a collective responsibility to the past but not in collective guilt, I became aware, through reading this volume, of how guilt, both intellectual...

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