- Reluctant Witnesses: Survivors, Their Children, and the Rise of Holocaust Consciousness by Arlene Stein
Arlene Stein, a child of Holocaust survivors, tells us that her book originated in a personal effort to make sense of her traumatic inheritance and a desire better to [End Page 308] understand her survivor parents (particularly her father). However, its scope expanded to an exploration of how postwar cultural changes in America and the evolving position of American Jews affected Holocaust survivors, children of survivors, and the Holocaust-consciousness of society at large. Indeed, hundreds of articles, dissertations, books, and films focus on the psychological reverberations of the Holocaust for survivors and their children, and a goodly portion of Stein’s book surveys this prodigious output. However, this effort underlies the actual thrust of Reluctant Witnesses: “How … did we get from there—a time when speaking of the Holocaust was mainly a private activity … to the rise of a robust Holocaust memorial culture that has broad resonance?” (p. 3).
The author writes, “the late 1940s and early 1950s, when survivors arrived, was a time of ‘moving on,’ of celebrating American victory, when victimhood was not yet associated with either compassion or virtue…. The Cold War years encouraged conformity, and made expressing negative feelings in public taboo” (p. 21). American Jews told survivors not to look back, but rather to embrace their new lives in America. Survivors were implicitly and explicitly encouraged to remain silent about their experiences. While they raised funds for the resettlement of survivors, American Jews psychologically distanced themselves from these foreigners.
Whether out of guilt or their own insecurities, well-intentioned American Jews offered the survivors bromides designed to protect their own psyches. The defensiveness and lack of compassion on the part of their co-religionists left survivors feeling awkward, self-conscious, and even apologetic for several decades. Survivors did not want to be seen as victims in a culture that prized individual initiative and self-advancement. As a result of such cultural and interpersonal pressures, survivors adopted a “surface happiness.”
In the 1950s many American Jews themselves exchanged outward Jewishness for social acceptability. These expressed their Jewishness through their Americanness, playing down the recent war’s Jewish tragedy. “Race, not ethnicity was becoming the ‘paradigmatic problem of America,’” as Stein observes (p. 31). (One group who were publicly recognized was survivors who had fought in the resistance—America did embrace heroes. Unfortunately, this further intimidated those who had not been partisans from speaking. As I have written in my own work, there arose a “hierarchy of suffering” in which survivors who had not experienced the worst deferred to the “real survivors.” This deference might even appear within a marriage of two survivors.)
Because American Jews clearly did not wish to hear of their European brethren’s experiences, survivors clung to other survivors for emotional sustenance and recognition. Cut off emotionally from the wider Jewish world, survivors often turned to their children to compensate for what they had lost and to provide meaning to their own recovery. Held tightly, many children of survivors faced difficulty separating from their parents. [End Page 309]
More often than not, survivors tried to protect their children from knowledge of the personal trials and tribulations they had experienced. Nevertheless, information seeped out in the form of a precious few photographs and offhand remarks (“I wish I had had that food in the Warsaw ghetto”). But even if certain experiences of deprivation or mortal fear were mentioned frequently, survivors rarely provided coherent narratives. Moreover, whether children of survivors sought not to revive their parents’ anxieties, or whether out of their own anxiety-driven reticence to know more, the latter rarely pressed their parents to fill in the gaps.
Still, despite recurring nightmares, a profound mistrust of others, and a generalized anxiety which produced a hypervigilance borne of anticipated future persecution, survivors needed to see themselves as normal. To do otherwise would imply a further victory for Hitler. Survivors almost never sought psychiatric assistance because of...