‘It’s happening again’, say children of Holocaust survivors

ILLANA HITNER KLEVANSKY

We grew up in homes with dark corners of secrets. We acquired shards of information; osmotic whispers; shadows of something terrible that had transpired in the lives of our mothers and fathers. Unanswered questions by questing sons and daughters, searching for questionable answers.

“Where is your mommy and daddy? Why don’t we have a granny or grandpa? What do you mean, ‘They were killed in the war’? Why were they killed in the war? What is war?”

Some of our parents were able to speak. Some were so traumatised, they were paralyzed into silence, rendered inarticulate and inconsolable. Some carried the brutality of their enslavement across the threshold of their doors, inflicting grave physical assaults on their own offspring. Some sank into blank landscapes of deep depression, emotionally ill-equipped to protect their children from growing up anxious, fearful, and forever psychologically damaged.

Some of us got lucky. We were gifted with parents who managed somehow, with superhuman powers, to overcome their horrendous past, determined to face living again. Empty eyes. Bleak souls. Shattered hearts. Trying to reconcile an impossible past with the possibility of a positive future. Emotionally bereft, these half-dead skeletons who crawled out of Nazi concentration lagers with only their names and tattooed numbers, survivors of death marches and slave labour camps.

Their crime? They were born Jewish.

Our conversations are littered with accounts of unspeakable brutality. We hold epigenetic memories of burning flesh in our nostrils, see children hanging off electric fences in our dreams, hear the echoing screams of our terrified grandparents as the fumes of Zyklon B suffocated them, and tremble with midnight shakes as we weep for what was, what was lost, and the embedded effect on successive generations.

The perpetrators who participated in this insane barbarism were dutiful citizens who murdered Jews in ghettos and concentration camps during the day, returning to their warm homes at night to oversee homework and chat over family dinners.

Whether they lived in Germany, Lithuania, Poland, Austria, Holland, Hungary, France, Czechoslovakia, or for that matter, anywhere else in Europe, not many of them subsequently admitted to knowing what was happening to Jews on their blood-soaked continent. Denying both accountability and culpability. Eschewing their complicity and collaboration, whether active or passive, in the wholesale slaughter of six million Jews.

Our group discusses our inheritance; our travel talk covers geographical signposts of hellish place names. A map of killing grounds mulched with the ashes and bones of Jews, through periods of crusades, inquisitions, expulsions, pogroms, gas chambers, and death camps. Auschwitz. Belsen. Buchenwald. Dachau. Mauthausen. Ravensbrück. Sobibor. Stutthof. Theresienstadt. Treblinka.

We the children are now senior citizens ourselves and every week or so, someone in the group sombrely announces the passing of their mother or father. And so, collectively, we of shared histories, mourn collectively. We respond to these familiar strangers, most of whom we’ll never meet face-to-face but with whom we share a universal sorrow, with our traditional words of condolence, “Wishing you long life.”

And, of course, we discuss the noxious waves of anti-Semitism; a rising tide around the world, relentlessly lapping at the bulwarks of our fragile fortifications. We watch with mounting horror while the drumbeats of anti-Semitism thrum louder, as extremist fanatics try to legitimise their illegitimate agenda. Age-old hatreds, centuries in the proliferation thereof, covert through some historical epochs, overtly festering in this millennium. Again.

In the face of Holocaust deniers, who lyingly assert that the gas chambers and crematoria were a myth, we pledge to keep reiterating the testamental truths that are our legacy.

Spread by social networks, endorsed by mainstream media, cynically radicalised by self-serving politicians, and funded by shady alt-right/left-‘luvvy’ groups, we despair at the sly vitriol promulgated by disgraceful academics across educational institutions. Add to that, the conspiracy theorists and tinpot zealots, and we realise that the scourge of anti-Semitism is upon us. Again.

Imams incite their brainwashed followers to “stab the Jewish infidels”. Pious prelates proclaim their affiliation to the abhorrent Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement by divesting their well-heeled pension funds from Jewish businesses. And political poltroons rail at the effrontery of other governments relocating to Israel’s eternal capital, Jerusalem.

Jewish academics are boycotted from speaking on campuses. Jewish students are under physical threat at some of these same institutions. And across Europe, it’s too dangerous to identify as a Jew by wearing a yarmulke or placing a mezuzah on the front doors of homes. Incitement and provocation are the catch calls of current rhetoric from those who are determined to marginalise, some even positing aloud, to eliminate Jews. Again.

Here’s why we worry: our own grandchildren, the great-grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, now go to Jewish schools and cheders under armed guard. In fact, every single Jewish organisation around the world, whether synagogues, schools, museums, community centres, hospitals et al, every day, for every function utilised, requires security protection. A frightening reality for us and a terrifying portent of what could lie ahead. We keep repeating “Never again!”, yet this seems a hollow phrase as we stare into the swampy abyss of endless anti-Semitism.

As I was growing up, my beloved mother, herself a survivor of the Kovno ghetto and Stutthof Konzentratzionslager, having grieved for the murders of her mother Irla, father Tevye, and brother Hessel, would often admonish my siblings and myself. She warned us that although the post-Holocaust world seemed slightly more favoured towards Jews as a result of its combined guilt, the anti-Semitism spectre constantly hovered in the background. She would say, in Yiddish, “Kinder, es is kumendik (Children it is coming).

We, the children of Holocaust survivors, now confirm our parents’ most dreaded fears. Es ist doh. (It is here).

• Illana Klevansky is an ex-South African freelance writer residing in Australia. She is the author of ‘The Kugel Book’, as well as being a sometime guest editor of ‘The Maccabbean’, which is Perth’s weekly Jewish newspaper.
• This piece is dedicated to her mother, Henny Kagan Hitner, her family, and the millions of Jewish souls whose lives were cruelly eviscerated before they reached their allocated potential.