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Children Without Childhood
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11688 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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2 / 1994 |
2,600 Words |
| Author
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Edward S. Shapiro
Edward S. Shapiro is professor of history at Seton Hall
University and author of The Letters of Sidney Hook:
Democracy, Communism, and the Cold War (1995). |
THE HIDDEN CHILDREN
The Secret Survivors of the Holocaust
Jane Marks
New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993
308 pp., $22.50
0ne of the most interesting characteristics of Holocaust survivors was their initial reluctance to discuss their horrific experiences. Among the more popular explanations for this reticence was guilt for having survived when their closest relatives and friends had been murdered, a reluctance to burden children with their own nightmares, and a desire to compensate for what they had gone through by living as normal lives as possible.
This quest for normality accounted for the fact that survivors quickly married after the end of the war, had children, and focused their energies on economic and social advancement. They did not wallow in their memories. It was almost as if the survivors had decided collectively to repress their memories, make up for lost time, and get on with their lives. Children of the survivors would often only find out much later what their parents had gone through.
Just as most veterans of the Vietnam War did not become maladjusted Rambos and walking zombies, despite what Hollywood would have us believe, so most Holocaust survivors were not psychologically crippled by their wartime experiences. In fact, the survivors' postwar saga is a tribute to the resiliency of human nature. Perhaps the survivors' most notable characteristic was their refusal to succumb to despair and dehumanization. They, more than any group, had good reason to become cynical. "The survivors did not dwell on death, they rebuilt life," the historian Arthur Hertzberg correctly noted. "This was the lesson they were teaching." The survivors were remarkable, Rabbi Steven Riskin asserted, not because they continued to believe in God but because "they have children after Auschwitz . . . they affirm life and the future."
By the 1960s, the survivors and American Jews evidenced a new openness about the Holocaust. Its meaning was something to be explored, not suppressed. American Jews eagerly read histories and novels of the Holocaust, and they elevated Elie Wiesel, a survivor of Auschwitz, to the status of a wisdom figure. This interest in the Holocaust was intensified in 1967 by the events leading up to the Six Day War in the Middle East. The bloodthirsty threats of Arab leaders bent on destroying Israel evoked memories of World War II.
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