I was scanning some ads the other day, when something about one of them made me pause. It sounded familiar, something about a special community of 100 survivors sharing their stories. Either it explicitly stated Holocaust survivors, or it was implied.
At first the number made me pause. One hundred? Sadly, as each Holocaust Memorial Day comes around, the number of survivors dwindles. It pinches the heart when survivors in the audience are asked to stand up, and only a few slowly, often painfully, rise, bent over.
But it wasn’t the digit that threw me off, although I had noticed it.
Something made me go back and re-read it.
Aha. So it was 100 second generation survivors who were gathering to share their stories?
Wow. Second generation. So, now that’s a thing. Now they are a demographic. Officially.
How painful to realize the speed at which survivors amongst us are leaving us.
And yet, second generation survivors. I wondered about this. About its meaning. About what exactly the legacy they are bequeathing is, while recognizing they indeed do have a sphere of the Holocaust, a legacy, to bequeath to us.
Survivors who were open enough to speak and share about the horrors, spoke about oppression out in big spaces. Countries. A continent. Blood soaked. Death camps. The great outdoors and various nationalities. Flags and swastikas are part and parcel of the narrative. Death marches and freezing or being gassed to death. Surviving that, truly, is the definition of survival. Grazing so closely to death.
The spaces of second generation survivors are different. The word survivors does not imply that they survived their childhood or actively survived anything per se, but rather their intimate proximity to living in the shadow of the survivors. This, too, is a layer of Holocaust legacy.
The layers of memory and the moral obligation of memory are legacies that second generation survivors have been burdened with. They are the witnesses to the witnesses.
And they were molded in the constant shadow of this horror.
It is one degree of separation, the next closest thing to touching the actual war and pre-war life.
Their stories and their memories have a purpose. In contrast to survivors, whose stories happened over there, far away, with trauma and violence, these second generation survivor stories take place in the privacy of homes, in the emotions of a relationship, in wounded traditions that might have died or been bequeathed forward.
These second generation survivors’ layers of memory might be shrouded in silences, painful silences, that molded them, or perhaps in shtetl foods or melancholy melodies.
It is an ironic generation. For while they highlight the disappearance of the actual survivors and the growing distance we have from flesh and blood beloved grandparents, or great-aunts and uncles, it is these people of the second generation who are the next closest to the war as anyone will ever be. While they highlight distance, they simultaneously highlight proximity.
Like the generation of survivors themselves, there’s no uniformity in what second generation survivors are. To be sure, there must be common threads in growing up forged by the war. Yet, each of their stories is unique and evocative in its own way.
Whatever their layers of memories, they are stories worthy of being shared and bequeathed, for us to pause and pay attention to.
As long as we can, as long as the last sacred survivor is amongst us, we honor the survivors themselves.
But we are beginning formally to see a new layer of memory emerge: the next generation, or the second generation, bearing an official designation too.
Copyright © 2021 by the Intermountain Jewish News
