Thoughts on “Voices of the Descendants”

The third and final segment of our three-part program, “The Voices of Descendants of Holocaust Survivors in Writing” took place yesterday. I had the pleasure of conducting a conversation with Emanuel Rosen, the grandson of Dr. Hugo Mendel and his wife Lucie, and Noah Lederman, the grandson of Hadasa and Leon Lederman. Each man went on a long and arduous journey in search of clues about the history of their grandfathers. Each published a book, the culmination of the personal odyssey they have gone through over a period of ten years of interviews, research, and international traveling that they had undertaken.

There are many very talented ‘second generation’ writers among us, but not yet that many ‘third generation’. Noah’s grandparents both survived the Holocaust in Poland. Each of them, separately, endured atrocities in Nazi concentration camps and suffered immense losses of family, friends and community. They met shortly after the war, married, and had their first child while still in the DP camp in Bergen Belsen, which had previously been a concentration camp. The Ledermans emigrated to the USA, where Noah’s father, their second child, was born.

Noah’s grandfather had been one of the “sewer rats” in the Ghetto, risking his life getting in and out of the Ghetto through the sewer system to bring in food. He later participated in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. In the USA, Leon Lederman managed to become a successful businessman, a loving grandfather and a ‘superhero’ to his admiring grandson. Noah’s grandparents never spoke of their experiences during the Holocaust, and dodged his questions about it. Yet, as he said, the Holocaust was “in his face”, as a photograph of some three dozen family members gathered around a Jewish celebration, that hung on the wall at his grandparents home. But no one would explain who these people were, or what happened to them that they were all dead.

Emanuel’s grandfather, an established lawyer in the town of Hamm, Germany, was one of the few who saw the writing on the wall. When he was banned by the Nazis from practising as a lawyer, Dr. Hugo Mendel convinced his wife to take their very young daughter, auction their possessions, and leave for Palestine. The year was 1933. As a result, the Mendels did not go through the atrocities of the Holocaust in Europe. They however suffered multiple, life-altering losses. Uprooted refugees, they found themselves in a completely foreign climate, literally and metaphorically speaking. They lost their material belongings, the social and cultural context in which they were moored, and worst of all, they lost who they used to be. These losses turned out to be particularly devastating to Emanuel’s grandfather.

Even among survivors of the Holocaust in Europe, there is a “hierarchy of suffering”. Many whose lives were dramatically impacted by Nazi persecution, have nonetheless not identified themselves as “survivors”; for example, child survivors, who were often told they had been too young to know and suffer, as well as adolescents and adults who were not in the concentration camps but with partisans in the woods, those who fled to Russia, and other refugees who managed to leave Europe just before the worst of it came to be. My choice of these two different accounts by ‘third generation’ reflects the expansion of the larger narrative of the Holocaust to include those who were forced to flee their countries because of Nazi persecution.

Another very important addition to the narrative of the effects of the Holocaust has been highlighted by several of the stories presented by second and third generation authors in our series. Survivors who after the Holocaust developed psychiatric symptoms were viewed as suffering from ‘endogenous’ vulnerabilities, especially if they managed to function well for a number of years and then succumbed to their illness. Holocaust survivors who developed psychotic symptoms, such as the ones I interviewed in my research with the Yale University Trauma Study Group in 2005, were diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia, which was not regarded as a result of their traumatic experiences. We now recognize the reality of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and other post-traumatic reactions with psychotic features. Those who developed depression, like Dr. Talila Kosh-Zohar’s mother, and those whose depression led them to take their lives, like Goran Rosenberg’s father and Emanuel Rosen’s grandfather, were not always recognized as casualties of the Holocaust. It depended greatly upon the mental health professional whom they met, and professionals were embedded in the convictions of their own professions, and in the attitudes of the larger society, as Professor Haim Dasberg wrote, who was himself a child survivor of the Holocaust. In some atrocious cases, as in the initial evaluation of Emanuel’s grandfather, the psychiatrists assigned to evaluate the eligibility of Holocaust survivors for compensation by the German government had been, just a short while earlier, Nazi party members or even active participants in the medicalization of murder. The horrifying re-traumatization that such ‘evaluations’ inflicted cannot be fathomed, yet it must have been quite widespread, given the research that shows that more than half of the German physicians were early joiners of the Nazi party, more than any other profession.

Both Emanuel Rosen and Noah Lederman expressed the ‘holes’ in their knowledge and in their understanding of the past that propelled them to undertake such an intense journey of research of the histories of their grandparents, which also turned into a valuable process of self-exploration. My friend and mentor, the late Dori Laub, wrote the seminal paper titled “Knowing and Not Knowing Massive Psychic Trauma” in which he described how trauma can be not fully known even to the survivors themselves, due to its overwhelming of the capacity to register, to process and later to retrieve extreme traumatic memories. Thane Rosenbaum wrote about the experience of the children of Holocaust survivors as “Second-Hand Smoke”, the internalization of explicit and implicit affects and fragments of stories that took place throughout daily life in and interactions with survivor parents. For the third generation, empirical research suggests that the toxicity of such intergenerational transmission has been replaced by the sense of being untethered to the past, by holes left by an unknown past, holes that are an omnipresent absence. This absence led Noah to seek the knowledge that his father said he tried to forget, and Emanuel to find the truth that his mother chose not to share with him. In the process, the descendants who write about their family’s past must grapple with many dilemmas, about privacy of those who are no longer here to give their consent to the story being told, about whose story it is, theirs or ours, and do we have a right to insert ourselves into the story, as it has impacted our lives?

Given the series of meetings we just had, and the products of the efforts of the writers, the answer seems quite a resounding “yes”.

         Irit Felsen