We Are Special!

Blog 23-7, written by Jerry Elman

Second Generation Holocaust survivors hold a special place in the world. Yet few of us have ever felt that way. So many of us have lived lives believing the exact opposite.

The horrors our parents lived through are in our DNA. The many relatives we never knew and never had the opportunity to grow up with left a deep hole in our development and the family support structure we needed.

So many of us grew up having conflict with a parent or even both parents, which we never understood. Some of us grew up feeling we were not loved. Many of us grew up with guilt we never understood. Many of us felt a need to be our biggest critics and believed we needed to be more than perfect at everything we did! We always felt we were being judged and held to a high standard that was so hard to achieve. Many of us were held to low standards because our self-esteem was lost.

We suppressed our feelings growing up with all this baggage. We did not understand. And by the time many of us did understand, our parents were gone before we could have that important “discussion” with them. They did not have closure with their parents, and we did not have closure with them!

Today, most of our parents have passed away. Much of their stories may still be unknown. Their families are unknown. Their hometowns and heritage are unknown. We have few pictures, and many pictures we do have may contain people we still can not identify. All we know is they were a family member or friend who perished. Many of these pictures have Yiddish written on the back, which will tell us all about the picture if translated.

I had the opportunity to find my parents’ stories—at least a big part of it. Even with my book, so many of their stories remain unknown. I know little about my family members who perished in the “Shoah,” the Hebrew reference to the Holocaust.

Since writing my book, I have spent considerable time researching the bigger picture of the Shoah and how an entire nation (Germany) mobilized all its government and industrial resources to kill people in numbers that remain unimaginable even today! How other nations worldwide were, at a minimum, silent and, at a maximum, active participants in the killing.

I have discovered facts and information of horrors even many survivors did not know had taken place. The story of the Shoah gets worse the more you dig into it.

One would think that the more I learn about the horrors, the more depressed, sad, or guilty I would feel. At first, I feared that. That is probably why it took over 30 years for me to gain the courage to do it.

And the result is I feel stronger emotionally. My self-esteem is the strongest it’s ever been. And I feel free of something that held control of me most of my life.

I have also realized something I never thought about before. My brother and I were born out of the ashes of the destruction of our families. We were born out of the horrors our parents endured. And we had the opportunity to live our lives as Jews!

Despite all the efforts of Hitler, the Nazis, the German war machine, and the collaboration of much of the world to annihilate all the Jews in the world, our parents survived, and we are here. Hitler did not survive. The Nazi killing machine was destroyed. The world rebuilt. Israel was born. And we are here as Second Generation Survivors born and living our lives despite all of Hitler’s efforts to prevent our existence from ever happening.

We were not supposed to be conceived. We were not supposed to be born. We were not supposed to have lived on this earth! Yet here we are!

When Janet and I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau last year, I shared my emotions about that visit in a blog. I was not sad. I did not cry. I was not angry. I was defiant!

I stood in front of the main gate looking at “Arbeit Macht Frei,” holding my mother’s silver neckless, which is shown on the cover of my book, declaring to Hilter and the Nazis that I stand here despite all you did to prevent that! Jews prevailed, and you were the ones to die forever etched in history as monsters. The Jewish community worldwide struggles like always but thrives. And after over 2000 years, we have our homeland Israel again.

I realized we need to count our blessings. Because we are here, all Second Gen are special. Our children are special. Our grandchildren are special. And future generations will be special all because our parents survived.

Most of our parents have passed away, no longer here to celebrate our existence. Most of us have not captured our parents’ stories. Their horrors and triumph of surviving. And most 2nd Gen survivors are approaching the age where we see our peers passing away. More and more of us will pass away over time.

We must use our time to celebrate our lives and families. To stop beating ourselves up and feeling sad or insecure about anything. To live our remaining years feeling special because we are!

We must go through all our parent’s things that were filed away or put in closets years ago. The papers, pictures, whatever! Get the Yiddish translated. Not everyone needs to write a book!

Just figuring out the things our parents left us, knowing what they are, where they came from, and passing that on to our children is enough. We cannot leave them things from our parents that they will not know about and toss. Even if it’s just their visa, travel documents, and nothing more, it’s important and must be passed on!

And finally, we must stand up for the lessons learned from the Shoah. As hate rises in America and worldwide, we, the Second Generation, know from our parents where silence and doing nothing leads. We must stand against those who hate Jews. We must stand against those that hate others. Why? Because our parents lived the consequences of a world that sat on the sidelines! We lived the consequences!

We, the Second Generation Survivors, are special! We are the only link left between our parents and our children. Let’s not waste time pulling that link together and passing it on.

Let’s also hold our leaders and the world accountable to stop the rise of hate!