Second Generation: Memoir of a Child of Holocaust Survivors

I have been consumed with thoughts about the Holocaust ever since I
was a little girl and I have decided to write about my experiences as a child
of Holocaust survivors both as a catharsis and as a memorial to my parents'
memories. I would like to note at the outset of this memoir that until very
recently, I always felt that the story I want to tell here was not my story at
all, it belonged to my parents-what happened affected them profoundly,
but surely, or so I thought, not me. I am American born-born in 1943 and
brought up in the tiny village of Homer in Upstate New York. I have been
fortunate enough to have lived a relatively peaceful life which is light-years
apart from the experience of my parents. But I have come to realize that my
parents' stories are, indeed, my stories. Their identity is, indeed, my identity in
very profound ways. They survived the Holocaust. I am a second generation
survivor.
As a child, I lived under the pall of the Holocaust. My parents had
been thrown out of Germany. That's exactly the way my Dad sneered the
words-he was "thrown out of Germany by Hitler." When speaking of
Hitler with our relatives, he always referred to him as that "Schweinehund,"
the nastiest epithet he could conjure up-translation, "pig dog." The English
translation does not do justice to the scorn in his voice. When he used those
words, his entire body revealed his contempt. Fortunately for our family,
my parents were able to escape Germany in 1939 shortly before the mass
murders began.
My parents rarely talked about their experiences, but it pervaded the air I
breathed from the day I was born in a hospital in Cortland, New York, three miles
from Homer, New York,-three thousand miles from where the catastrophe
of the Holocaust took place. Whenever my parents would get together with
family or friends, their voices would be hushed as they would talk about things that I was not supposed to hear because I was too young. I learned about the
Holocaust the way most children learn about taboo things-by listening in
stairwells or by pretending to be asleep as my parents had conversations in
German in hushed voices. In this way, the story of the Holocaust seeped into
my consciousness subliminally and effortlessly.