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Daniel Rachel: How Do We Confront the Hatred in Rock Music?
Episode 10
Tuesday, September 8, 2026 • Duration 49:08
In this episode, TO BE CONTINUED... steps outside its usual format for a podcast exchange with Martini Judaism, also hosted by Rabbi Jeff Salkin. He speaks with author Daniel Rachel about This Ain't Rock 'n' Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika and the Third Reich, a history of something that has been hiding in plain sight for more than 60 years.
The conversation runs from the Beatles and John Lennon's private Nazi memorabilia collection, through David Bowie's years-long obsession with the Aryan ideal and Eric Clapton's admiration for Enoch Powell, to the punk scene's casual use of Holocaust imagery — the Sex Pistols' "Belsen Was a Gas," and Joy Division taking their name from the women forced into brothels in the camps. Rachel and Salkin also work through the paradox of Jewish musicians, from the Ramones to Blondie to Kiss, using the same symbols, and consider how gaps in Holocaust education on both sides of the Atlantic help explain it. They turn to Roger Waters, Michael Jackson, and Kanye West, and ask why it took governments rather than rock fans to finally draw a line.
Rachel's answer to the silence is unsparing and includes himself: "I think we're all complicit."
Daniel Rachel was born in Birmingham, England and raised in a progressive Jewish household. He wrote his first song when he was sixteen and was the lead-singer of Rachels Basement, which he formed in his early twenties. He released two solo albums in 2001 and 2006. Daniel is also an award-winning and bestselling author. Isle of Noise: Conversations with Great British Songwriters was his first book. His latest book, published in early 2026, This Ain’t Rock ‘n’ Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika and the Third Reich, has received rave reviews and standing room only appearances. Daniel co-authored several other books as well. He has served as a consultant and appeared in several cultural documentaries. Daniel lives in north London with his partner and three children.
Transcript:
Today’s episode is a little different—and there’s a reason. TO BE CONTINUED... is participating in a podcast exchange with Martini Judaism, which is another podcast I host. Podcast exchanges are a popular way for podcasts with related subject matter to introduce their audiences to conversations they might not otherwise hear.
Most episodes of TO BE CONTINUED... explore the Holocaust through the experiences of 2G and 3G descendants and how that history has shaped their lives. But countering Holocaust denial and distortion, and the trivialization of Nazi history, that's also an important part of our mission.
So today, we’re stepping outside our usual format to explore how Holocaust history and Nazi imagery have entered popular culture. Daniel Rachel is the author of This Ain’t Rock ’n’ Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika and the Third Reich. And he asks a rather provocative question: How do we confront hatred in rock music?
This is a different subject for us, but it is really very much part of the conversation we’re continuing here on TO BE CONTINUED.. And we return in October with a new episode featuring award-winning journalist and filmmaker Marisa Fox, a 2G descendant and the writer, producer, and editor of her new film, My Underground Mother.
The Stones put it this way. "It's only rock and roll, but I like it." Oh, I really like it. You know that. If you've been reading my column for any length of time, you know that I am a serious rock and roll fan. Oh, it starts with the Beatles, it goes into the Stones, David Bowie, The Who, Dylan, obviously, always Dylan.
You know, when I was a grown up, I learned how to interpret sacred texts, but when I was a teenager, the only sacred texts I was interpreting were Dylan lyrics. It's only rock and roll, but sometimes I don't like it.
From the Religion News Service, this is Martini Judaism. For those who want to be shaken and stirred, and I'm Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin.
And today we're doing something a little different. We're not going to be talking about Torah, or theology, or Israel, or even the crisis of American Jewish identity. Though I promise you that these topics will sort of show up in some form or another. They always do. Today we're talking about rock and roll. Specifically, we're talking about a remarkable, disturbing, and overdue book called "This Ain't Rock and Roll, Pop Music, the Swastika, and the Third Reich” by Daniel Rachel. The book documents something that's been hiding in plain sight for more than 60 years.
Here's the quote:
"For over 75 years, musicians have been drawn to the language and provocative imagery of Nazism, fascinated by its power, menace, and underlying sexuality. They have flirted with the theatrical spectacle of the Third Reich, displayed the swastika, flaunted memorabilia, wore Nazi uniforms, and marveled at the grandiose rallies of 1930s Germany." Let me put it to you this way. Decades ago, the American folk singer Woody Guthrie had a guitar with these words inscribed on it -- "This machine kills fascists." Who could have ever thought that future rock stars might have had guitars upon which could have been inscribed the words, this machine celebrates fascists?
You want to know what the worst part is? The entire rock music industrial complex spent seven decades looking the other way, and so did the audiences, including me. I don't get it.
Rock music, stands against racism, it's against oppression, it's against injustice. So why, when it came to Nazism and its symbols and its rituals and its hatreds, why did those get a pass? So today we're going to talk to Daniel Rachel about the great moral paradox that turns out to be rock music.
Daniel, welcome. It's great to have you here.
Yeah, thanks so much.
Daniel, tell us about your own background and your own Jewish journey.
It's very strange because I haven't really spoken about my Jewish upbringing in decades. It's only since writing this book it's become something I've had to talk about again. It's very strange. I mean, yeah, it's brought up in the faith, but as an adult, I didn't pursue it.
And did this book and its research connect you in any way to that faith and that heritage?
I mean, I'm always connected because it's such one and because it's part of my upbringing. And, you know, there's always a waft of chicken soup somewhere coming beneath my nostrils. But, you know, there's also a persecution of Jewish people for, you know, as you well know, for thousands of years.
But because of the content of this book and the persecution in the 1930s in Germany, and then the road and the path to the so-called final solution, I think that because I knew about that from, being a young teenager, that it's not anything I can ever let go of or, you know, push to one side. It's part of my personality as much as Rock and Roll is part of my personality.
Well, the two of us have that in common. For me, my Jewish heritage, my Jewish commitments and my love of rock music are intertwined together. So tell the story, please.
Rock stars, mostly Brits, but not all of them, fascinated by Nazism and or fascism, who use those symbols and aesthetic in their music. Can you give us some examples?
Yeah, of course. I mean, the book is a catalog of examples. It starts with The Beatles, Zeke Eiland at the premiere of "A Hard Day's Night" in Liverpool and in Australia; John and Paul being told off by Ringo.
There's various John Lennon's Nazi memorabilia collection. We go through the stones being depicted and flirting with images of Nazism, whether it's Brian Jones or Mick Jagger. It takes us through Roxy Music and Brian Ferry and Jimmy Page and Zeppelin. It goes through early punk in the States with Iggy Pop and the Stooges and various lesser known bands on the New York scene, even the Jewish musicians like Chris Stein and Blondie. It's in the managers of the Clash and the Sex Pistols, both Jewish, both by mitzvah'd. One using the Swastika, one against it. It carries on in the 80s. You can see it in the work of Madonna. You can see it in the work of Lady Gaga. [It] takes us through to the current debate around Kanye West and his denial to enter Australia, to now, not be allowed to enter Great Britain, various European countries banning him. I mean, the story that I start in the late 1950s, with the Jewish heritage of Elvis Presley, carries on to this very day.
Oddly enough, there's now more controversy and press globally around this issue in the last, probably, six months than ever before, I would say. And obviously, I was writing this before October the 7th. And then suddenly there's an explosion of Jewish anger, of an increase of antisemitism. And yeah, I mean, it felt like...it's all over the place.
It's about to happen.
So here's what I find very interesting. I want to start with the Beatles, of course, because for me, it all starts with the Beatles.
Fab.
Well, imagine John admiring Hitler. It isn't hard to do. You know, the gap between this public persona that he had, and he was not a nice person.
Did you know him? What's that?
No, I did not.
But everyone who did, or his report on the fact that he had rather misogynistic and antisemitic tendencies. He used to torment the late Brian Epstein, who was both gay and Jewish.
Yeah, I don't think that's true. You don't know him and I don't know him, and I've never read those accusations that you're saying. I mean, he would mock Brian Epstein and use Jew as a joking derogative term, but that doesn't make him antisemitic.
Ah, thank you. I'm really glad that you clarified that. Actually, I will agree with you.
Might we say that he used antisemitic language, therefore? We don't know what's in his heart. We can't know, by the way.
We know that the Beatles were managed by a Jewish guy for more than seven, eight, nine years. And you hear from all four Beatles, a great love for Brian Epstein. And that's important."
And I think that, I also have got no sense that John Lennon was misogynistic. He had, he beat women in his early years. And, and he was in many ways repentant once he met Yoko Ono.
And Yoko Ono did incredible things to make John publicly acknowledge the man or the boy, the teenager he had been with girlfriends and with his first wife and set him on a different course. And I don't think there's anything Yoko Ono has ever said that suggests John Lennon returned to those ways about him, which is as violent, despicable as they were. And his behavior was, he changed, is what it seems.
And what I do applaud John Lennon for in the context of this book, is that many, many musicians, Jewish and non-Jewish, have Nazi memorabilia collections and have made parallels between being a rock star and the magnetism that Adolf Hitler had in the context of a Nuremberg rally. But John Lennon kept that private. He didn't share that in the public domain.
He didn't share his collection. He didn't share his drawings. That's unlike other musicians who did share their collections.
They did speak out about Adolf Hitler. John Lennon's way of doing it was mocking and playing with the tropes of the Third Reich and Nazism. I think when you look into that, if we don't reduce this, the simplistic accusations and we look at his behavior and where and the context and the time, it's understandable.
For other musicians in the book, you begin to struggle to make the connection that John Lennon would have had with these ideas and thoughts.
So what I find fascinating about what you're saying is of course a rather well-known paradox. We have otherwise intelligent, humane people who, as you wrote, were kind of susceptible to the aesthetics of fascism. There's a fascinating bit in your book a lot about Lenny Riefenstahl, one of the most fascinating and troubling artistic figures of Germany and of general culture.
Mick Jagger seems to have had some kind of fascination with her. What was this all about? Was it merely spectacle? Is that where they saw the parallels?
Largely so. I think you're right to say that spectacle is the attraction. I mean, through the lens of Leni Riefenstahl's camera, and let's not forget she was a hugely influential and magnificent filmmaker, but as I think you're alluding to, compromised for her involvement with leading figures of the Third Reich, her complicity in atrocities that happened in use of actors that went on to be gassed, I believe, at Auschwitz, and I think you pronounced it Tiefland, extras from that film, and saw an atrocity herself in Poland.
But what she was capturing on film that we see in "Triumph of the Will" is actually the brilliance of Hitler's architect Albert Speer, again, a Nazi in denial of knowledge of the persecution and eventual annihilation or attempted annihilation of Europe's Jews. He was in denial for most of his life, but it became obvious and clear, not least because of the historian Gitta Sereny, who discovered his knowledge. But what Speer was brilliant at, and what we see at Nuremberg, is theater. And he created theater. He creates it in the hundred foot golden eagles, in the use of flags, the positioning of members of the Nazi party, the staging of Hitler and speakers, etc., etc.
All of that is the mind of a theater magician, in many ways. And what I see in rock and roll is many artists admiring what they see through, in Riefenstahl's films, as the work of Speer and saying, that's what I experienced at a rock concert. Even in Kiss, what's his name, the lead singer, Kiss, Gene Simmons, again Jewish, born in Israel, in Haifa. He admired that theater of a Nuremberg rally in the same way Brian Ferry did, as Mick Jagger did, as David Bowie did. Because they saw the power that Adolf Hitler had, literally in the palm of his hand, over thousands of people, and they thought, that's the power I hold when I'm in a stadium setting. We see it at Live Aid with Freddie Mercury and 80,000 people clapping, arm in arm.
I always thought that "We Will Rock You" was somewhat fascist.
Well, it has fascistic tendencies in the theater, the way it looks, but that doesn't mean that he is a fascist.
No, no, no, no, not, but just the, again, we're talking now, not ideology, we'll get back to that. We're talking aesthetic.
Yeah, aesthetics, that's how I agree entirely, yeah.
Now, you mentioned Bowie, so let's do a little bit of a sidebar here. With David Bowie and with Eric Clapton, we actually have two British performers who seem to have sympathized with Enoch Powell and the English right wing, which was anti-immigrant and racist. Am I correct in assessing it that way?
Well, Eric Clapton, absolutely. I mean, he was quoted at length that Enoch is a prophet, and Enoch Powell, let us not forget, was responsible for the rivers of blood speech in 1968, and calling for the voluntary repatriation of British citizens to places where they come from back to the motherland, as it were, from undisgraceful racist rhetoric, which he has never satisfactorily or explicitly apologized for to this day.
David Bowie is far more, he's deeper into the well of right-wing thinking in as much as he extolled the brilliance of Adolf Hitler as rock and roll's first superstar, and had at least a 13-year obsession with Nazism, that infiltrated his songwriting, his stage act, his costumes, his set design, his lyrics, his reading, his interviews.
He was deep deeper into not only the aesthetics, but the ideas behind the Aryan, the Aryan ideal, the search for the Aryan man, which let us not forget is what Himmler instigated for the SS to be able to prove that the right to exterminate European Jews is in the basis of an Aryan man, an Aryan person, and that took the SS all the way back to Atlantis and in that search to justify what was unjustifiable ultimately.
Well, my goodness me. Let's cross the pond, if we can. Let's go to the Ramones, Joey and Tommy Ramone, Jewish, okay? Family perished in the camps, and yet the Nazi imagery is there in the lyrics. How do you explain this? Look, I don't ever like to accuse people of being self-hating Jews. Is it ignorance? Is it mischievous? Is it just being outrageous? Is it something else entirely? What are we seeing and what are we not seeing?
In England, we only taught the Holocaust from 1991. It wasn't taught in Scotland, Wales, or Ireland. And as we know, the Holocaust Memorial Day, it was only brought to the US and the UK in the early 2000s. So therefore, in England alone, if you're born any time before 1977, 1978, and later if you're a US citizen, your understanding and knowledge of the Third Reich and the persecution of Jewish people and the road to the Holocaust is hearsay or self-educated knowledge, not from a trusted source, perhaps like yourself, a rabbi, or a teacher, or in a school.
There's many incidents of American musicians, British musicians etching the swastika into their school desk, writing it on their school satchel bag. Not really understanding what that is, but thankfully Adolf Hitler makes that explicitly clear for us. He tells us in Mein Kampf what this swastika is, in the context of the Nazi party. He took that from thousands of years old cultures across different continents, meaning peace a symbol of goodwill, took it, added the white and the red around it, which was to express the nationalistic idea and the social idea, and the swastika itself as an explicit symbol of antisemitism.
But where's that education? That's what we have to look at when we think about the Ramones. Just as a base for conversation.
But what kills me about this, is that the Ramones themselves were Jewish. They had this story in their family. And so I'm just wondering, how did this become a tool for outrageous behavior?
Well, we don't know that the families within, talk to their kids. We know from understanding of the post-holocaust years that many survivors and families didn't share their knowledge. And it almost became verboten, did it not, in Israel, where there was an almost divide between those that had come from Europe and those that hadn't experienced the hand of Hitler. So we don't know what happened and didn't happen. But yeah, it is mystifying. And that's what I do. Within the book, and that's one of the questions, is to answer these questions. We obviously go back to the source and we say, well, what did the musicians say at the time? And what were journalists asking of the musicians at the time? What were, what was the record industry allowing at the time? And, and so on and so on. And what I'm finding or did find in the research of this book, is the answer was...very little. Because people could get away with using symbols, using Nazi terminology, and it was largely either ignored or laughed at, or just an accepted trope of rock and roll.
We're going to get to the response to this after our break, but, you know, the whole punk thing. Now, I realize that punk aesthetic is about chipping away at, and willfully destroying social norms. But, you know, you have the Sex Pistols recording "Belsen Was a Gas", and Bergen Belsen was one of the most notorious concentration camps, and you have the late lamented rock critic Lester Bang saying that this is just cheap nihilism. You have Joy Division, which, a group named for the Jewish women who were kept in concentration camps, in the brothels, for the sexual pleasure of Nazi soldiers. This has all been hiding in plain sight, and you're absolutely right. People just didn't talk about it, or they blew it off, or they excused it.
Yeah, I mean, some did talk about it. I mean, we have to be careful with the brothels across the Nazi network. There were some in concentration camps, there were some in extermination camps. Of course, SS soldiers weren't officially allowed to sleep or have sex with Jewish women because that would be against the blood/the rules of the Third Reich. Hitler actually introduced brothels as an incentive for workers because he feared homosexuality in his words. And so it was initially aimed at Russians and Poles.
And then outside of the camps, there were wider brothels.
I mean, that whole story is, you know, I've only begun to see that being told in documentaries about the Third Reich in more recent years, in the same way as rape is a weapon of war. That's taken so long to become a narrative in documentaries and history books, because it's men writing it invariably or telling stories, and men don't want to talk about state-sanctioned rape or rape as a weapon of war.
But that is fundamentally part of this narrative. And that, and within rock and roll, as you rightly say, that's where the band took the name Joy Division. They took it from the book written by a Holocaust survivor who wrote a semi-pornographic book charting what happened to a woman that was taken into a camp, and was used for sexual pleasure and for to be experimented on.
And they even used a passage, a gruesome passage from the book, read out on one of their first songs, on their first single. This is the first record, we're talking about "An Ideal for Living", which features on the front cover a Hitler youth boy playing a drum. And inside the cover, an SS soldier with a machine gun aimed at a young Jewish boy who's just escaped out of hiding in Warsaw, surrounded by women. And research has shown that every single one of those persons in the photograph was subsequently taken to I think either Majdanek or Auschwitz.
My God.
We'll be right back after the break.
This is Rabbi Jeff Sulkin, we're back. Martini Judaism, For Those Who Want to be Shaken and Stirred, from the Religion News Service.
We are here with Daniel Rachel, talking about his new book, "This Ain't Rock n Roll", about fascist and Nazi themes and admiration in rock music. And I have to tell you, Daniel, I never realized why I named this podcast and my column, Martini Judaism, For Those Who Want to be Shaken and Stirred, because what we're talking about today is going to shake everyone. And we're all going to now be going through our CD collections and our album collections and we're going to be saying, how did I miss this? Let's go to the present, almost to the present.
I'm going to just go out on a limb here. You don't have to agree with me. You might not agree with me, but certainly the data in your book only fuels this. I despise Roger Waters. What a hateful piece of you-know-what. I mean, not only is his anti-Israel stuff. He is exhibit A of how anti-Israel ideation just morphs into antisemitism. That whole concert where we had the inflatable pig with the Jewish star, and that he appears in SS uniform. Can we talk more about Roger Waters? Not that he's worth much time, but Roger Waters.
I have to say for listeners that in the book, I don't explicitly call out individuals in the way that you just have. My approach is to lay out the facts as best or as well as I know them, through catalogs of incidents and comments. And the reader can see between the lines and make their own judgments as you have.
I just did. That's why they pay me the big bucks.
Yes. You could well say that Roger Waters hangs himself. He doesn't even state anything. The book isn't about my likes and dislikes, but yeah, you're absolutely right there.
I'm sorry. I'm sure he's a lovely guy. He's misunderstood.
No, it's a great shame because there's a documentary, just a couple of years ago with members of Waters' touring bands of recent years, and they all on camera tell of antisemitic incidents with him. And that's not good to hear. And David Gilmore's wife calls him out for being antisemitic.
Yeah, it's just, I think it's about patterns of behavior. And you put his together in a line from the wall to the present day, and it tells the story it needs to tell.
Now, let's go to someone who is even more iconic, more popular, and there's a new feature film about him. And I'm referring to Michael Jackson. One of his lyrics contained the unfortunate verb, to Jew, Jew me, and then Jew me and kike me.
Yeah. To his credit, when he was called out for his lyric writing by members of the Jewish community on the West Coast, he changed the lyrics or possibly even re-recorded them, albeit two million plus records are sold by that point, but on further additions. And he then went to, I think the Holocaust Memorial Center, to show how deep he felt for the mistake he had made. So I did admire him for that acknowledgement, which is more than many other musicians have done.
But in terms of this idea of going back to your record collection, what do you do with artists you admire and love? I mean, it's tricky. We know from the 1930s, what it is to pull out books and burn them. You know where that leads to, and we're already seeing that across the US at the moment, where libraries have been stripped of books, even "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee, isn't allowed in certain states on the library shelf.
But what I think is important to say is that, we can't change history, and history is what it was, what it is. What we can do, it's how we then use our history and talk about it, and we can bring this into conversation. We can acknowledge this was a part of it. In some instances, we can hear it lyrically, we can see it graphically, and that then begs a question for the reproduction of images, album sleeves that perhaps have to be changed or looked at again, or lyrics aren't printed, or perhaps there has to be "contextualization when images are used in the wider domain - online or in newspapers - wherever, etc. It certainly requires some kind of, you know, not vetting, but it needs to be acknowledged, doesn't it?
I think you're absolutely right. It needs to be understood, it needs to be acknowledged. Certainly we're living in a time now where sensitivities are definitely sharpened.
But I want to talk about audiences now. I hope that your book will get the attention that it needs. I've been touting it to all of my friends.
Thank you.
Has it been reviewed yet in Rolling Stone?
No.
Will it be? Let's hope.
Well, in Britain, it had a front page of the culture section of The Times and then a double spread. But then the British media ignored it thereafter. This is my sixth book; eleven, including co-writes. I've always had reviews, I've always been welcomed on BBC Radio, whether that's Radio 2, 4, 5, or 6. I haven't been invited to do, to talk about this book on BBC Radio. And as I say, only a couple of national magazines have covered it.
In the States, I don't understand it so well. It's a great feature in the Wall Street Journal. And there's been a multitude of podcasts like this and interviews across the States. But nationally, I'm not, no, it hasn't. I mean, it'd be amazing if Rolling Stone were to cover it. You think they might?
Well, it goes to a larger question. It goes to a question about the audiences over the years, and the relative lack of pushback. But it also goes to the exception of Lester Bangs that critics, rock journalists seem to have been rather silent about this as well. And you make a really interesting point. I'm going to just restate it starkly. I don't think we would be as tolerant and as willing to contextualize this if it were rock stars wearing the robes and hoods and the insignia of the Ku Klux Klan and making racist comments. That would get shut down immediately. There was, as you are very, very keen to point out, there was rock against racism, but there's been no rock against antisemitism. This is something that is of great concern to me. What do you make of this? The silence from the critics and the audiences.
Yeah. I mean, there have been journalists along the road like Lester Bangs, but they're been far and few between that have called this out. There's a comp... you know, I think we're all complicit. I'm complicit because, contrary to what you might think, as a young kid, I used to sing along to "Belsen Was a Gas", and I bought records with Sid Vicious wearing a swastika on.In the States, I don't understand it so well. It's a great feature in the Wall Street Journal. And there's been a multitude of podcasts like this and interviews across the States.
But nationally, I'm not, no, it hasn't. I mean, it'd be amazing if Rolling Stone were to cover it. You think they might?
Well, it goes to a larger question. It goes to a question about the audiences over the years and the relative lack of pushback. But it also goes to the exception of Lester Bangs that critics, rock journalists seem to have been rather silent about this as well.
And you make a really interesting point. I'm going to just restate it starkly. I don't think we would be as tolerant and as willing to contextualize this if it were rock stars wearing the robes and hoods and the insignia of the Ku Klux Klan and making racist comments.
That would get shut down immediately. There was, as you are very, very keen to point out, there was rock against racism, but there's been no rock against antisemitism. This is something that is of great concern to me.
What do you make of this? The silence from the critics and the audiences.
Yeah. I mean, there have been journalists along the road like Lester Bangs, but they're far and few between that have called this out. There's a comp... you know, I think we're all complicit. I'm complicit because, contrary to what you might think, as a young kid, I used to sing along to "Belsen Was a Gas", and I bought records with Sid Vicious wearing a swastika on. Because as a young kid, I thought that was funny, but that was coincided at the same time when I began to see images for the first time of the liberation of the camps and what had happened in them, over the preceding year. So, that set a new dialogue. But yeah, the complicity of not just artists, the journalism, and the music industry... and if you were to call these artists out, you're calling out your own profession... and if you call out your own profession and potentially your own acts that you need to sell records or sell papers, that might put you in a precarious position. Which is why it's gratifying to see what's happening around Kanye West at the moment. I mean, when he was booked to come and perform in the UK, he was booked. That's really significant. This is a man whose summer hit had been the song "Zieg Heil", with the chorus "Zieg Heil" all the way through. Literally a chorus of voices. The man who in the middle of the Super Bowl had an advert to buy one item from his website, and that one item was a white t-shirt with a black swastika on it. A man that has openly said, I'm a Nazi, I hate Jews. He was booked to perform in Britain, and yet then there's been the kickback and his cancellation.
But it's taken, in fact, took after 70 years to face up to itself. And at the end, this kind of hatred and antisemitism, I mean, in the case of Kanye West, took the establishment, everything that rock and roll purports to be against. But, it did the one thing that rock and roll, as you said at the beginning, is meant to be fantastic for, which is fighting against and for minorities. And in the end, it took a British government or in Australia... their government, or the Austrian government. Why didn't rock and roll fans do it themselves? That's a great shame to me as a rock and roll fan. And my own love.
And to me. To me, the bullet point take away quote is, 'we are all complicit'. We saw it, we loved it, we danced to it, we ignored it, we bracketed it. It is true that for a good chunk of American and British history, many of us might have been ignorant of it.
And I think that your point about Holocaust education, both in the UK and in the USA, is absolutely spot on. Now, by the way, from what I know about humor in the UK, I think some of the Nazi stuff was a deliberate attempt at satire. You have that tradition certainly in Monty Python, right?
Yeah.
You had it with Charlie Chaplin even, yes?
Yeah.
And that some of these performers were born during the 1940s. John Lennon himself was born during the Blitz.
Yeah.
His middle name is Winston, which at one point he playfully changed to Adolf. Maybe this is PTSD. Maybe this is just a different way of coping with a horror that touched Britain much more than it touched the United States.
Yeah. In many ways, you're right. I mean, that's why the contextualization of time and place is all important, especially for those artists that, as you say, were born in the war and were coming to terms with that as young kids and adults. Absolutely. And yes, we do have a history in this country of lampooning as the States do in the Three Stooges, for example, and Charlie Chapman came over to America and made The Great Dictator. Yeah absolutely.
And the Three Stooges were Jewish. Moe Howard, who looked the most like Hitler, was... they're all Jewish.
So, let's get into a redemptive frame of mind now because I'm a rabbi, we're Jews. We never end on a dark note. We always try to end on an up note. That's the way it is at Passover, any Jewish holiday, any Torah reading.
I, by the way, am now in the process of doing research into Jewish singer-songwriters who use Judaism in their lyrics. Not who's Jewish, but I'm really fascinated by what's Jewish. Leonard Cohen, of course, deals with the Holocaust in his writings, but certainly in his final song, "You Want It Darker", and his song, "Dance Me to the End of Love", etc. Can we talk about singers who got it right?
Well, Leonard Cohen's beautiful song, "Dance to the End...", talking about, I mean, it's a dark subject, which is orchestras in the camp network, of which there were nine across Auschwitz and Birkenau, and that's what he's singing about in that song. But that tradition goes back to Woody Guthrie, to Pete Seeger, to Tom Paxton, to talking about using song as an historical vehicle to share information. It's in the "Questions of God on Our Side" of Bob Dylan.
Which was the first time in popular music, I think, that the Holocaust was referenced. Early 1960s.
Wow!
I'm pretty sure. And by the way, I date the writing of that song to the years after the Eichmann trial, which is when many Americans started to wake up to the horrors of what had happened.
Yeah, I mean, the Eichmann trial was hugely important, wasn't it?
Absolutely. And then my favorite, actually, is Janis Ian's song, "Tattoo". Can you talk a little bit about that? Tell our listeners about it.
Yeah, Janis Ian was [is] a, she was asked to perform in the Netherlands, and she wrote and performed that piece in the early 90s about the horrors of the Holocaust. And it's a beautiful song. Yeah, and there's, you know, it goes all the way through to the Indigo Girls doing a similar thing. That's a non-Jew, she's not Jewish, but she was ashamed she hadn't been taught about the Holocaust in school, and self-educated herself, and then went to a memorial museum, did research, and then rewrote Woody Guthrie's "This Train", and contextualized it with the wagons going to the extermination camps. I mean, yeah, there's a couple of chapters in the book of artists that have positively used what we've been discussing as an influence and an implement of instruments of history with beautiful verse and melody. Yeah, it's a good thing.
Pete Seeger's song "Last Train to Nuremberg", which ties together war crimes across history. Absolutely gorgeous. So here's something that I want to ask you. First of all, I think about the number of kids who listened to this stuff and were influenced in some way. And we believe that culture has a great educational piece to it. And so they got an education in a way that we would not have wanted. And I really liked what you said earlier, Daniel, about how we now need to contextualize, maybe even put warning stickers on things. Those are my words, not yours. What can the recording industry, what can the popular music industry now do better?
How can they make this better?
Well, here's the next question that the record industry has to confront. And that's in November, is whether or not sponsors will provide finance for the next tour of Primal Scream. We've seen that finance was the reason for pulling Kanye West, Pepsi and the like.
And the band Primal Scream, who were featured in the book quite a lot, at the end of last year, did a concert in central London, where they displayed behind them the "image of the Star of David intertwined with the swastika. Several people walked out of the concert saying they were Jewish and were offended. It made national news across all medias. And now that band are going to be celebrating their 90s album, "Exterminator" in the autumn. And it features the song "Swastika Eyes". In previous years, the singer of Primal Scream, Bobby Gillespie, sieg heil while that song, while he performed that song. And I think it'd be interesting for venues to do due diligence before booking that tour or inviting the band to play exactly what they will be performing and what images they will be showing. I think that would be a really interesting, it could be a pivotal moment in the history of rock and roll in the wake of Kanye West. Do bands...Is due diligence always been shown at any live performance of a band that may be showing Nazi, and by default, antisemitic imagery?
In some ways, we should be grateful to Kanye because his outrageous behaviors, his outrageous ideologies has really raised this topic into national and international consciousness. And we can't now unhear that. We can't unsee that.
Sadly, I think we will. Because history has and history does. We have a blow up around an event, a kind of outrage, and then two days later or however long later, it's all, something moves on until the next thing happens again. You know, how many attacks do you need for an attack to be taken seriously?
Well, just to close up, I think of Simon Wiesenthal.
Yeah.
The notorious, famous Nazi hunter.
Yeah.
You yourself, I think, had said, if I quote you correctly, that you never wanted to be the Simon Wiesenthal of rock and roll.
That's what I said to you.
That's a great line. So, Daniel, did you pay any personal price for writing this book? Has anyone pushed back against it?
Well, I think I wrote the book, as I said, in a fair-handed way without trying to express my likes and dislikes [or within the cues and finger]. I'm just saying this history has existed in plain sight. Here it is. This is what people said. This is what people did. I'm just outlining as an historian. I don't know what you can attack me for in that.
I think the more personal difficulty in writing the book was that after 30-odd years of going to see various Nazi sites across Europe, I went to in 2023. I did a solo trip of 800 miles around Poland. And I went and visited extinct ghettos and all the sites of former extermination camps, of which I have to say, and the multitude of events I've done across the UK, and there's some thing that has been successful is the people coming to events, people are coming in their hundreds. I often challenge the audience to tell me the name of more than one extermination camp in Poland. And when we begin to talk about the numbers of people that were slaughtered, we're not talking one or two, we're talking tens and tens of thousands. And how many people have heard of Chelno, Belzec, Majdanek, Treblinka, you know, Sobibor, Birkenau. You know, and I went to each one of those places and that was one of the greatest experiences of my life to do that.
It's truly an amazing story that you tell. Daniel, you really have, you've really written a heroic book. "This ain't Rock and Roll", but it's 75 years overdue, this book. And library books can be overdue, and sometimes books need to be written, which are overdue. This is a moral reckoning with popular culture. And it is very rare.
We've looked at Ezra Pound. We've looked at certainly Wagner. We've interrogated past literary figures, past musical figures for their antisemitism or the use of antisemitic images, which I think you and I have settled on as the right way of discussing it. Charles Dickens, Shakespeare -- all of this stuff is certainly found in English culture and in American culture. But up until this moment, we have allowed popular culture, rock music, to occupy an exalted place in our culture, where we have not asked some deep moral questions.
And as someone who lives with a foot in Jewish culture and a foot in popular culture, I really salute you. I really hope that Rolling Stone will review this book. I think that you really have a very important voice and that you made this pilgrimage, this journey to the places of our pain is really, really a very sacred endeavor. You really did a great job. I really appreciate the book and I appreciate your time with us today.
Very kind words. Thank you very much.
Again, the book is called This Ain't Rock and Roll. We hope you'll get it on Amazon or wherever else you get your books. And really with deep thanks again to our friend Daniel Rachel.
I invite you to follow my regular column, Martini Judaism on religionnews.com. Our producer is J Woodward. Martini Judaism, For Those Who Want to be Shaken and Stirred, is available on Spotify, Google, Apple, Audible, wherever you get your podcasts. Please download our podcast and leave us a 5-star rating. Many thanks friends, and we will see you again soon.
Judy Batalion: Trauma Moves Through Generations — But So Does Strength
Episode 9
Monday, August 10, 2026 • Duration 46:38
This episode is generously sponsored by Gail and Dennis Roth in loving memory of Gail's parents, Frances and Meyer Weisman who were both born in Czechoslovakia. Frances survived both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and Meyer endured various hard labor camps. They were thrilled to arrive in New York in 1949, to begin a new life together.
New York Times bestselling author Judy Batalion grew up in a house in Montreal that was filled to the brim: her mother and grandmother had suffered from compulsive hoarding. It could in part be attributed to years they spent as nomads, fleeing from the impact of the Holocaust.
"One of the metaphoric poetic real reasons that I instinctively feel with my mother was that her stuff was security. It was safety. She literally formed barricades around her with stuff. She was holding on to something."
In this conversation with Rabbi Jeff Salkin, Judy Batalion pieces together what she knows of her grandparents' survival and her mother's childhood. She also discusses her own lifelong anxiety along with her interpretation of her father's belief that anxious people were the ones who survived the Holocaust.
As a young adult, Judy left home for Harvard and then London, deliberately escaping that landscape and building the opposite kind of life: minimalist, orderly, white-walled. She became an art historian working in the British museum world, as far from her family's history as she could get. Years later, she found herself writing three books about exactly the world she had left behind.
Judy Batalion is a New York Times bestselling author of award-winning nonfiction and fiction. She is the author of The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos, for which Steven Spielberg's Amblin Partners has optioned the film rights, and White Walls: A Memoir About Motherhood, Daughterhood, and the Mess in Between, optioned by Warner Brothers for development as a television series titled Cluttered. Her latest novel, The Last Woman of Warsaw, is a story of friendship, love, and home set in Warsaw on the eve of World War II.
Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Vogue, among other publications. She earned her bachelor's degree at Harvard and a PhD from the University of London, and has worked as a museum curator, a university lecturer, and a stand-up comic. The granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, she grew up in Montreal and now lives in New York City with her husband and three children.
Transcript:
Dara Bratt and Michelle Rose: Tattoos, The Evolution of Holocaust Remembrance
Episode 8
Monday, July 6, 2026 • Duration 42:55
The real question isn't simply whether Judaism prohibits tattoos. We know the Torah speaks against them. Holocaust survivors imprisoned at Auschwitz II-Birkenau did not choose their tattooed numbers — they were an act of degradation and dehumanization. But what happens when descendants of Holocaust survivors choose to use that traditionally prohibited practice as an act of sacred remembrance? Is this a break with tradition, or an attempt to fulfill one of Judaism's greatest commandments: Zachor— to remember?
In this powerful episode of TO BE CONTINUED..., Rabbi Jeff Salkin sits down with award-winning documentary filmmaker Dara Bratt and third-generation Holocaust descendant Michelle Ekstein Rose to explore one of the most unexpected and moving expressions of Holocaust remembrance today: commemorative tattoos. Dara shares the story behind her acclaimed short documentary Inked: Our Stories Remarked, which follows children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors who have chosen to etch their family's Holocaust legacy onto their bodies. Michelle opens up with her grandmother Anita Ekstein's extraordinary story of survival in Nazi-occupied Poland, and the deeply personal tattoos she carries in her grandmother's and her great-grandfather's honor. Together, they challenge us to ask what it truly means to remember, to reclaim, and to pass a legacy forward, and whether something some consider religiously prohibitive can become an act of devotion. This is an episode about "ink", identity, resilience, and the evolving ways each generation carries the legacy of the Holocaust. It will spur conversations; it will stay with you long after you listen.
Michelle Rose is a third-generation descendant of four Holocaust survivors and a passionate community activist dedicated to Holocaust remembrance, education, and justice. Raised with the stories of her grandparents woven into the fabric of her identity, Michelle was particularly shaped by her grandmother Anita Ekstein, a prominent Holocaust educator and survivor who escaped Nazi persecution through extraordinary acts of courage and kindness from righteous gentiles. Michelle lives in Toronto, Canada with her husband and two young sons.
Dara Bratt is an award-winning director and film producer whose work has screened at prestigious festivals around the world, including Tribeca, SXSW, and the Abu Dhabi International Film Festival. Known for shining a light on extraordinary and unconventional stories, Dara was drawn to the powerful and little-known phenomenon of Holocaust commemorative tattoos after a conversation with a professor researching how tattoos can heal trauma. That curiosity led her to create Inked: Our Stories Remarked, a short documentary exploring how grandchildren of Holocaust survivors are etching family memory onto their bodies as acts of identity, resilience, and education. In June 2024, the film took first place in the Claims Conference Emerging Filmmaker Contest, chosen from 35 submissions across nine countries. Since its 2025 premiere, the film has screened at festivals and cultural institutions across North America. The film has received Best Female Director at the Istanbul Women Film Awards, Best Short Documentary at the New York Women Film Festival, and Best Historical Documentary at the Milan Indie Film Festival. It has also been featured in university classrooms at Loyola University New Orleans and Tulane University, where Bratt has guest lectured on Holocaust memory, identity, documentary storytelling, and intergenerational legacy.
TRANSCRIPT:
This episode is generously sponsored by Susan Singer in honor of her parents Yolanda and Siegmund Joseph, courageous Holocaust survivors from Czechoslovakia, who kept the memory of their lost families alive.
Charlie Scheidt & Kat Rohrer: Holocaust Descendants on Different Sides of History
Episode 7
Monday, June 8, 2026 • Duration 48:28
What happens when the son of a Holocaust survivor meets the granddaughter of a Nazi officer?
In this powerful episode of TO BE CONTINUED... Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, host Rabbi Jeff Salkin sits down with Charlie Scheidt and Kat Rohrer, co-authors of Inheritance: Love, Loss, and the Legacy of the Holocaust.
Charlie grew up in a German Jewish household on New York's Upper West Side, surrounded by family members who had fled Nazi Germany, and a silence about the past that was deafening. When his mother died in 1988, she left behind an armoire filled with nearly a thousand documents: letters, visas, identity papers, and more. It would take Charlie twenty years before he could bring himself to open them.
Kat is an award-winning Austrian filmmaker and the granddaughter of a devoted Nazi officer. Haunted by her family's role in one of history's darkest chapters, she had spent years grappling with what it means to carry that legacy.
When they met, an extraordinary partnership was born. Over fifteen years, four trips to Europe, and hundreds of conversations, they pieced together a story of loss, memory, and unexpected connection. Together, they reflect on the silence that shaped them, the documents and discoveries that changed them, and why they believe that breaking that silence is the only way to ensure the oppressors don't own the story.
TRANSCRIPT:
This episode of our podcast is generously sponsored by Irene and David Beyth, in memory of David's parents, Hannah and Werner Beyth, who were both fortunate to escape Nazi Germany before the war.
Let us start with a German lesson.
The word is Erbe.
It means both inheritance and legacy.
Today's guests have spent more than a decade sitting with that word.
One of them grew up in a German Jewish household on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, surrounded by relatives who had fled Nazi Germany in a family where the unspoken motto was "Forward, never back."
Nick Winton: Inheriting Moral Clarity
Episode 6
Monday, May 11, 2026 • Duration 35:44
What does it mean to grow up in the shadow of an extraordinary father — one whose secret acts of heroism saved 669 mostly Jewish children from the Holocaust, yet never spoke a word of it to his family?
In this episode of TO BE CONTINUED... host Rabbi Jeff Salkin sits down with Nick Winton, son of Sir Nicholas Winton, the quiet, unassuming British stockbroker who, beginning in late 1938, organized the rescue of hundreds of mostly Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Over the course of several months, he arranged eight transports from Prague to Great Britain — until September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, the borders closed, and a ninth train carrying 250 children never left the station.
NOTE: This dialogue did not make it into this episode, but is important to know:
"Most of the children were Jewish, but there were non-Jewish children as well. How did they get involved in this story? Why was it necessary that they be safe as Hitler threatened anybody who was against his regime? Well, obviously, the Jews were primary targets, but there were also writers and people who had spoken out against Hitler, and they were also on his hit list. As well as...colored people...gypsies. So there were whole groups who were at threat. And my father wasn't there to save Jews. He was there to save children. So, some of the children on the transports were not just Jewish. So your father is a part of Jewish history, European history, world history, and moral history..."
The story remained hidden for 50 years, until Nick's mother discovered a dusty scrapbook in 1988. Nick reflects on learning of his father's legacy as an adult, the weight of carrying such an inheritance, and the question at the heart of this conversation: if second-generation survivor descendants inherit trauma, do children of rescuers inherit moral responsibility?
Nick Winton grew up near Maidenhead, England. He graduated from Imperial College Business School, London. After brain tumor surgery and with a five-year prognosis, Nick earned his MBA. Nick Winton is now an international speaker, storyteller, and company adviser. His stories are inspired by his father. Nick now channels his legacy and personal stories into powerful speeches that inspire change. Learn more at https://nicholaswinton.org/.
Leora Einleger: Granddaughter of Dr. Ruth, on Resilience and Connection
Episode 5
Monday, April 6, 2026 • Duration 36:58
A deeply personal conversation with Leora Einleger, granddaughter of Dr. Ruth Westheimer, groundbreaking sex therapist and Holocaust survivor is featured on this episode of TO BE CONTINUED...Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors.
The conversation reveals how Dr. Ruth’s experiences of profound loss fueled a lifelong commitment to joy, human connection, and combating loneliness and antisemitism, offering a powerful meditation on how trauma can be transformed into meaning, and how legacy lives on through the choices and voices of future generations.
This episode is generously sponsored by Karen and George Goldberg, in honor of their children and three grandchildren, who are all descendants of Karen's mom, Ilona Medwied, a Holocaust survivor and the inspiration for this podcast; and also in honor of George's dad, Staff Sergeant Frederick Goldberg of the US Army Air Force, who flew 35 missions as a B-17 side gunner, fighting the Nazis.
TRANSCRIPT:
I once ran into her in the gift shop at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
She was very easy to spot—a diminutive woman who spoke with a German accent anyone would recognize.
I introduced myself. She introduced herself. We exchanged pleasantries. It was all lovely.
Then, a few years later, I was in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel, and I saw her again. I reintroduced myself. Whether or not she really remembered me, she acted as if she did. Then she asked me a few questions about how I was doing.
For some reason, I told her that I had become newly single again—and then her eyes sparkled.
I could tell that she would have given me advice if only I had asked for it.
I am talking about the late Dr. Ruth Westheimer.
Welcome to our podcast, To Be Continued… Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, where we explore the intersections of memory, identity, and resilience.
Our goal is to lift up the experiences of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and to ask: How do those memories shape you? How did resilience create you as the person you are today? What is the legacy that you will leave to those who come after you?
Dina Kraft: The Legacy of Anne Frank’s Best Friend
Episode 4
Tuesday, March 10, 2026 • Duration 45:42
Anne Frank's best friend survived to tell the story Anne could not. Journalist Dina Kraft and Hannah Pick-Goslar’s daughter, Ruthie Meir, reflect on friendship, survival, and the weight of carrying memory forward in this episode of TO BE CONTINUED...
They discuss what was lost, and what was rebuilt through resilience, testimony, and hope across generations.
TRANSCRIPT:
This episode of TO BE CONTINUED… is sponsored by Vicki Robinson and Michael Robinson in honor of Morton Kess, who helped liberate the concentration camps in Germany, and in memory of all those who died at the hands of the Nazis, and by Carl Fremont and Joanne Fremont Burns in loving memory and in honor of their parents. Ted Fremont, born official Fischel Friedman, who was a Holocaust survivor from Vilna, Poland. Ted lost his mother and seven siblings. He married Helen Garfield from the Bronx, and together they built a welcoming and loving home. Both Ted and Helen were beacons of hope and inspiration.
Today's conversation is about friendship, survival, and what it means to carry memory forward, not as history alone, but as life. When we think of Anne Frank, we often think of her diary, her hiding, her tragic death. But Anne Frank was also a girl with friends… friends who loved her and who laughed with her, and who survived her. One of those friends was Hannah Pick Goslar. Hannah survived Bergen-Belsen, where she and Anne had a final heartbreaking encounter through a fence. Hannah lived. Anne did not.
And that single fact shaped Hannah's life and the lives of her children and grandchildren, to be continued for generations.
Welcome to this podcast, TO BE CONTINUED…Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, where we explore the intersections of memory, identity, and resilience. Our goal is to lift up the experiences of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, and to ask, How did those memories form you? How did resilience create you as the person you are today? And what is the legacy that you will leave to those who come after you?
Jacki Alexander: De-Jewifying the Holocaust: Why Naming Jews Matters
Episode 3
Thursday, February 12, 2026 • Duration 44:26
"De-Jewifying" the Holocaust is the concerning trend our host Rabbi Jeff Salkin talks about in this episode of TO BE CONTINUED... with Jacki Alexander, CEO and President of HonestReporting.
We are witnessing the media, politicians, religious institutions, and others talk about "6 million who died" while erasing the Jews. This episode explores this trend of Holocaust distortion including minimalization, inversion and denial, and examines how it threatens both accurate historical memory and contemporary Jewish safety. Is this a form of antisemitism? Listen to find out.
🎧Listen now on your podcast streaming service of choice, and watch on YouTube.
Here is a related article by Rabbi Jeff Salkin: The Many Forms of Holocaust Distortion: https://religionnews.com/2026/02/03/the-many-forms-of-holocaust-distortion-and-why-jd-vances-remarks-matter/
TRANSCRIPT:
Usually on this podcast, we sit with the sons, daughters, and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. We listen carefully as they reflect on memory, legacy, intergenerational trauma, resilience, and what it means to carry stories and experiences that were never meant to survive, but did. This is Sheryl Hoffman, podcast founder and co-director, and this episode of TO BE CONTINUED… Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors is a little different. Not a departure from our mission, but in many ways a descent into its deepest urgency, because in recent years, the Holocaust is increasingly being remembered without Jews. Please listen and share on social media and with your family and friends.
This is "To Be Continued." We discuss the implications of trauma and resilience for second and third generation Holocaust survivors.
And where we are in the calendar right now is very important. We are now following up on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and we're talking about what it means to remember the Holocaust, to remember the Shoah, and what that memory entails, and how sometimes bad actors abuse and distort that memory.
Menachem Rosensaft: Living With Ghosts
Episode 2
Monday, January 26, 2026 • Duration 57:37
Menachem Rosensaft is an attorney, law professor, poet, and one of the most influential voices of the second generation. Born in the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp to parents who survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, he has spent his life engaging questions of memory, justice, and moral responsibility.
In this episode of To Be Continued… Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, Rabbi Jeff Salkin speaks with Rosensaft about what survives survival itself: exploring inherited trauma, the “ghosts” carried by children of survivors, and the obligation to remember in ways that demand action.
Speaker Bio:
Menachem Z. Rosensaft is an attorney, general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) and a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School. He is also adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School. Menachem is also a poet, and one of the most prominent voices of the second generation. He was a founder and first chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors a past president of Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City. Menachem has published several books of poetry, including Poems Born in Bergen-Belsen (2021) and Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz (2025).
TRANSCRIPT:
This episode is sponsored by Barbara Kaufman Simon, in loving memory of her parents, Blanche, (also known as Blima), and Max, (who was also known as Moniek) Kaufman, who were both born in Poland. Blanche survived numerous labor and concentration camps, and Max survived Auschwitz, the death march, and Mauthausen/Ebensee. May their memories be for a blessing.
Today's episode is about what survives survival.
Many children and grandchildren, Holocaust survivors, grew up with what our guest calls ghosts, not as metaphors, but as real presences, or as the author Thane Rosenbaum puts it, they grew up with secondhand smoke. The ghosts live in questions that were never answered. They live in names that are spoken carefully or not at all, in absences that somehow take up space.
Welcome to our podcast, To Be Continued, Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, where we explore the intersections of memory, identity, and resilience. Our goal is to lift up the experiences of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and to ask, how did those memories form you? How did resilience create you, the person you are today, and what is the legacy that you will leave to those who come after you?
Elizabeth Rosner: What Children of Survivors Carry Forward
Season 1 · Episode 1
Friday, January 23, 2026 • Duration 40:22
In award-winning author Elizabeth Rosner's book Survivor Cafe: The Legacy of Trauma, and the Labyrinth of Memory, she confronts what it means to live in the aftermath of the Holocaust — not as a direct witness, but as a child of survivors.
In this episode, our host Rabbi Jeff Salkin discusses with Rosner:
How do we carry inherited pain? What role does storytelling play in transforming trauma into meaning? And how can remembering help us heal?
Elizabeth Rosner has published six books with a new book of poetry, Gravity, coming out in March 2026. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, Elle, and others.
Speaker Bio:
Elizabeth Rosner is the acclaimed author of six books, including three novels, two nonfiction books, and a poetry collection, of which all are full or part memoir. Her latest two nonfiction books are Survivor Cafe: The Legacy of Trauma and The Labyrinth of Memory, and Third Year, Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening. Hew newest book of poetry, Gravity, was released in March 2026. Her essays and poetry have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Elle, Hadassah Magazine, CNN Opinion, the Forward, and many anthologies. Her works have been translated into 12 languages and have received many literary awards.
TRANSCRIPT:
Everyone has five senses.
Taste, smell, touch, hearing, and sight.
But for Jews, there is one more sense.
Memory is a sense. The author, Jonathan Safran Foer, writes that for Jews, memory is no less primary than the prick of a pin, or its silver glimmer, or the taste of the blood it pulls from the finger. The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins.
Welcome to this podcast, TO BE CONTINUED…Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, where we explore the intersections of memory, identity, and resilience. Our goal is to lift up the experiences of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, and to ask, how did those memories form you? How did resilience create you as the person you are today? And what is the legacy that you will leave to those who come after you?
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[00:00:08:02 - 00:00:19:11]
This episode of To Be Continued is sponsored by Gail and Dennis Roth in loving memory of Gail's parents, Frances and Meyer Weisman who were both born in Czechoslovakia.
[00:00:20:21 - 00:00:41:11]
Frances survived both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and Meyer endured various hard labor camps. They were thrilled to arrive in New York in 1949, to begin a new life together.
Welcome to To Be Continued..., Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors. I'm your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin.
[00:00:43:05 - 00:00:51:08]
In this podcast, we explore how the Holocaust continues to shape the lives of the children and grandchildren of survivors.
[00:00:52:26 - 00:01:10:03]
Our conversations begin with stories of survival, but beyond those experiences to examine the profound impact the Holocaust has had on the generations that followed, their identities, their relationships, their choices, and their sense of responsibility.
[00:01:11:17 - 00:01:16:26]
Jewish tradition teaches us the importance of l'dor v'dor, from generation to generation.
[00:01:18:10 - 00:01:26:20]
Each generation receives a story, but also has the opportunity to interpret it and to give that story new meaning.
[00:01:28:15 - 00:01:38:20]
Through conversations with descendants of survivors, we explore the intersections of memory, identity, and resilience, asking how did those memories form you?
[00:01:39:28 - 00:01:46:29]
How did resilience shape the person you became, and what legacy will you leave for those who come after you?
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My guest today is Judy Batalion, a New York Times bestselling author of award-winning nonfiction and fiction.
[00:01:57:11 - 00:02:03:04]
Her work has brought powerful stories of Jewish courage and resistance to readers around the world.
[00:02:04:05 - 00:02:26:03]
Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, and Vogue, among other publications. She earned her bachelor's degree at Harvard and a PhD from the University of London, and she has worked as a museum curator and university lecturer. Today, Judy lives in New York City with her husband and her three children.
[00:02:27:25 - 00:02:42:10]
As the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, Judy grew up in Montreal with her parents, her younger brother, and the house that was overflowing with the possessions her mother struggled to part with.
[00:02:43:22 - 00:03:04:24]
Her family was shaped by the experiences of her maternal grandparents, Holocaust survivors who endured displacement and hardship before rebuilding their lives. Like many children and grandchildren of survivors, Judy inherited not only their history, but also the questions that come with growing up in the shadow of that history.
[00:03:06:25 - 00:03:08:15]
That journey has informed her writing.
[00:03:09:20 - 00:03:21:06]
She is the author of White Walls, A Memoir about Motherhood, Daughterhood, and the Mess In Between, which Warner Brothers has optioned for development as a television series called "Cluttered".
[00:03:22:12 - 00:03:45:14]
She also wrote the New York Times bestseller, The Light of Days, the untold story of women resistance fighters in Hitler's ghettos, for which Steven Spielberg's Amblin Partners has optioned the film rights. And now her newest novel is The Last Woman of Warsaw, a story of friendship, love, and home set in Warsaw on the eve of World War II.
[00:03:46:24 - 00:03:57:13]
Judy Batalion's work spans history, memoir, and fiction, but at the heart of it all is a question that feels especially relevant to our conversation today.
[00:03:58:25 - 00:04:55:02]
How does the past continue to shape us? Judy, welcome to TO BE CONTINUED..., and it's really a privilege to have you with us.
Well, thank you so much for inviting me to be here today, and thank you for that very gracious introduction. Thank you.
Well, it's well earned. I should tell you, by the way, that I absolutely loved your book, The Light of Days, and it's a really compelling, compelling read, and I can't wait for it to reach a wider audience because it so deserves that.
Fingers crossed. Yes, thank you so much.
Stardom being what it is. Let's start this way. I'd like to begin with the story of the generation that came before you. Your family has deep roots in Poland, and your paternal grandparents' journey is an extraordinary one. It goes from Poland to Siberia, their return, the birth of your mother during that journey.
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Would you tell us that story?
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Sure. You know, I always feel like I need to preface my own story by saying, you know, I've spent now 19 years professionally researching and writing about the Holocaust, and yet my own personal story is still very vague. There's so many ruptures in my own family narrative, but I will share with you what I know, or at least what family lore has been. My maternal grandparents, Bubbe and Zadye, they were living in Warsaw in the late 30s when the Nazis occupied Warsaw. They were in their mid- and late-20s. They were married.
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The story from my grandmother is that she had seven siblings, and of all of them, she looked the least Jewish. She was most able to pass as a Christian Pole.
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Early on in the war, there were lines for food rations. Food was hard to retrieve food, and it was my grandmother who would go out and get food for not just my grandfather, but her siblings, her parents.
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She was sort of the one that went outside, and she would tell that during her time waiting in those lines, she heard stories. She heard Nazis asking Polish Poles where Jews live, what addresses are, what names, they list names and addresses. And she heard her neighbors, she heard, as she told them, her neighbors turn on them and report names. And this is what she felt was her moment where she knew this was, she was doomed, and they had to leave Warsaw. There was something very frightening in that for her. And several of her siblings did leave, not all of them. Her parents stayed with her three younger sisters.
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They were all eventually brutally murdered, I believe at Treblinka.
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But my grandmother and her husband, my grandfather, they left. They, early on in the war, and my grandfather had a brother who lived in eastern Poland, and so they decided to go east, which is ultimately the decision that saved them. They went to my grandfather's brother's town, and there was fighting at the time, and there's fighting between the Russian soldiers and the Germans. And my grandfather and his brother got caught in crossfire. I believe it was a Russian shot. And my grandfather was very, very short, and the bullet grazed his neck, and it hit his brother who was standing behind him in the heart. And his brother was killed immediately. And I know this story because my grandfather had a scar on his neck, and I had asked him as a child what it was from.
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And it was from this bullet that had killed his brother. My grandparents decided to continue fleeing east. This is where the story gets confusing to me. My grandmother would tell me bits and pieces. I was very close with her, but it never always, it never seemed to add up to the full narrative. But there was some bit about riding or hiding in a truck with fruit.
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There was a story about hiding in a convent where they'd been taken in. I remember hearing about swimming across a river as part of an escape. And I also remember hearing a story about a Nazi who turned a blind eye and let them pass. And they eventually made it to the Russian border and crossed into Russia, and along with many of the Jews who made that crossing, they were forced into Siberia. They were sent up to Siberia and forced to work in work camps in Siberia.
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I know very little about those camps. I know very little about what they went through.
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The only anecdote I ever recall my grandfather telling me was that they had to eat horses.
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They left, those camps. I think, I'm not even sure when, but they went on a, I don't know, journey, which only recently did I look at a map and it didn't even, they went extremely far east. They went to Kyrgyzstan. I only, again, I only recently realized how far east that was. And my grant, they stayed there for a little bit. My grandfather was, I found some photo before my mother died. I asked what this was. She said it was my grandfather working as a mechanic in Kyrgyzstan.
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And my mother was born there in 1945 while they were stopped temporarily in Kyrgyzstan. And then they continued on the route and it came back to Poland where they lived. Jews were resettled into Western Poland. They lived in Wroclaw for a few years, trying to build a life there and seeing if anyone survived, if any of their many siblings had survived the war, trying to put their lives back together.
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And I believe my grandfather was uncomfortable with the political life in Poland, with the communism. He was afraid. And they ended up in '49 leaving Poland, and moving to Israel where they stayed in, my mother tells story. I mean, they were, they had nothing. They were basically refugees and they stayed in a chicken coop. And my mother would tell a story about the chickens would peck at her toes at night. And they were displaced people and they lived in these camps for some time. And then eventually in the early 50s, they came to Canada where my grandmother's sister, one of her sisters had survived and was living in Montreal, and helped my grandmother come over to Montreal. What do you know about your mother's childhood, drawing up as the daughter of two Holocaust survivors? And how did that impact to shape the home that you grew up in? I mean, my mother's childhood was very nomadic. They lived in Western Poland for some time. I believe my grandfather had work there and they survived there. But it was, I always talk about my mother's childhood, as she was a refugee before knowing what a home was. She was born while they were on the run in Kyrgyzstan. They came back through all the way to Poland. They lived there for a couple of years. My grandmother actually had another child who died shortly after childbirth. And that was very traumatic for the whole family and for my grandmother and for my mother. And then they moved again to Israel and they moved to Canada. So, before she was six years old, she lived in, I mean, four continents. And I think that that instability and nomadism and being born into such a difficult and traumatic
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moment certainly had its impact on her and successively on me.
What do you remember most about the way that she loved and protected and raised you?
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My mother? Yeah. Oh, my mother. That's a very moving question. My mother really loved me.
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My mother really is very absorbed. She loved art, art of all forms, writing, literature. She wrote poetry. She was an amazing, a draftsman, draftsperson. She drew. She was an artist. She really had a very artistic temperament...theater, TV, any kind of fiction narrative story.
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And I really think she, she passionately shared that with me. And we really connected through literature, through stories, through fiction, through most of our lives, starting when I was young. She would read Amelia Bedelia books to me and we would analyze the puns and then she would teach me how to make my own puns and how to play with language all the way through. Even as an adult, she would call me, we would have long discussions about television shows, and the choices the characters were making. She was very moved by art and we connected through that as well.
You've written rather openly about your anxiety. Looking back, where do you think it comes from? And how does it relate to what your father often said, that anxious people were the ones that left? They were survivors.
Well, I don't know...if you could explain my anxiety, that would be great. I'm not sure I know exactly where my anxiety comes from. Probably comes from many places, like most things--genetics, environment, catalysts. I am a very anxious person. It's something I've struggled with my whole life. Yes, my father used to say that anxious people were the ones who ran and survived. And I think that idea lives in me. I think I inherited this notion, not consciously, but that anxiety serves a purpose. Anxiety saves you. Hyper-awareness saves you. You need to be aware of what's going on. And the worst-case scenario can happen. And that's sort of in my blood. And I think that causes a lot of my anxieties, is this almost a burden of awareness and keeping eyes open. And there's no delusions that everything's going to be great. No one ever, that's not an idea I grew up with. It's all going to be okay. I don't know if that answers your question.
Well, it certainly begins to, but let's go to food.
All right.
For many Holocaust survivors, food became more than food. It represented security. And many children and grandchildren remember that they were taught never to waste food and always to have enough. In your memoir, "White Walls", you are remarkably candid about your grandmother's and your mother's compulsive hoarding. As you try to understand it over the years, did you come to see those patterns as rooted in that same sense of scarcity and security, or did you come to understand them as something different altogether?
Yeah, that's a great question. I, okay, so I've given hour-long lectures on this subject, so I'm trying to think about how to be succinct and interesting in a very short period. Okay. So first of all, let me say the research...there's no studies that I ever found that said many Holocaust survivors suffer from hoarding disorder or their offspring suffers from hoarding disorder in a greater prevalence than other populations. However, I would say anecdotally, when I've spoken to audiences across the country about hoarding disorder and Holocaust trauma, and I've had many, many people reach out to me to say that they lived a similar experience, that there were members of their survivor families who were also
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pathological hoarders and compulsive hoarders.
I did find one. Judy, I will say I know at least three children of survivors who are hoarders.
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Any talk I gave, I would be inundated afterwards with people coming up to me to personally tell me stories. However, even when I spoke outside Jewish communities, many people told me their stories too. So, but certainly within Jewish communities, I heard many, many stories from survivor families. I did find one data point or research study that talked about how children who had nomadic childhoods often went on, had a higher prevalence of suffering from hoarding disorder later in life. So that's certainly something my mother had. She really, as I said, lived in four continents before she was six years old. So that is...According...it's genetic, it's environmental, it's set off by some kind of traumatic catalyst. And it's a very complicated disorder that often is accompanied or comorbid with other psychological and psychiatric conditions from depression, anxiety, paranoia, suspicious behavior, social isolation, addiction. And hoarding disorder comprises
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intensive attachment to objects, also for some people and need to continually acquire objects. And for others and many, it's also a disorganization with the objects. So, there's all three components. And so, there are many different understandings, explanations, reasons that someone might suffer from a hoarding disorder, which is partially why it's so hard to treat, really. But I would say, as you were asking, one of the maybe metaphoric poetic real reasons that I instinctively feel with my mother was that her stuff was security. It was safety. It was she literally formed barricades around her with stuff. She was holding on to something. She was, you know, there was also, as I was saying before, this hyper awareness, she kept newspapers, and this is common with hoarding disorder. And I wanted to ask her, why do you need all the news? Why do you print out websites and keep stashes of the web? And she didn't want to miss anything. She didn't want to miss any information. She couldn't miss anything. There was such a need to cull and contain the information to make sure everything was assessed, everything was seen. And these barriers, these barricades, I really do think provided her with almost a security blanket, a literal sense of physical security. And in fact, I think that's why, you know, when you see these reality television shows hoarding disorder, which by the way, is how most people know about hoarding disorder, it's through reality TV, through, you know, people come in and they try to get rid of all the stuff. That's the worst thing, because the stuff is the security. It's not the problem. It's the solution for people who suffer from hoarding disorder to some people and to some degree. And so, getting rid of that is worse. And that's what I felt with my mother.
While your relationship with your mother is a dominant storyline in your memoir, we will not ignore your father and your younger brother. How did they shape the person you became? Were they sources of strength, comfort, and healing for you?
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Hmm. That's an unexpected and difficult question. Yes, of course. My family is, we were very close. And I think that, you know, my father--ptoo, ptoo, ptoo--is turning 90 in a few weeks. And I was just writing a toast in my head for him. And, you know, my father's been a very, he's supplied me through my life with a lot of wisdom, a lot of nuggets of wisdom that really, you know, let me tell you, when I was very young, I was a very shy and anxious child. And my father made me take judo lessons. And I wanted to do dollmaking. I wanted to do chess. You know, I was very, very awkward. And he really forced me to take judo. I was the only girl in the class. And by the end of the class, I was flipping the huge boys over my back. And my father felt you have to take judo because in judo, you learn how to fall. And that was very important for him that I understood how to fall. Because if you can fall well, then you're going to be okay. And that's something I've, I don't know, that stayed with me, still stays with me. And many nuggets like that.
A metaphor. Paul Simon has a song. You've got to learn how to fall before you learn how to fly, right?
Yeah. That's a great metaphor.
So, when you were a young woman, you left Montreal and you went to pursue your education at Harvard, and then you eventually moved to London. So, when you look back, how much of that was you pursuing opportunities and how much of it was a desire to create some distance from the world you grew up in?
Oh, yes, it was both. But I was definitely running away. I always felt out of place. I was just one of those people that never always felt like an outsider. And always for a long time was on the run. But I think I used to say my mother, my grandmother suffered from hoarding disorder, whereas I became a minimalist. My mantra was less is too much. I really tried to distance myself from what I felt was physical and metaphorical piles...weight, baggage. And I really felt I needed to become myself. There was no room for me to become myself among all the stuff. And I needed to find an open, white-walled space where I could start to become myself.
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Wow. In the dedication of "White Walls", you have a quote from Maya Angelou. "You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it's all right." I'm wondering, what was it about that quote? It's wonderful, by the way. What is it that spoke to you?
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You know, I wrote "White Walls" many years ago. So, hearing that now...
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she's so brilliant. I don't know what I can say. I think now when I hear that, I think about safety.
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Maybe we're always seeking, or I was always seeking some sort of
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imagined, original place of ultimate safety. Trying to find that. But I guess ultimately, whatever notion of safety that we have been brought up with sticks with us forever. Does that make sense? Of course. The thing we're always looking to go back to is, it created who we are.
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I absolutely understand that. I can resonate with that. So again, as we follow your life path, London was really more for you than just a new place to live. You really built a life there. You performed as a comic.
Yeah, I used to be funny.
You could still be funny. We don't know. Funny never really leaves us. But then almost by accident, you came across a forgotten Yiddish book that completely changed the course of your life. And that became "The Light of Days". Can you tell us that story, please? I'm sure it's remarkable.
Yeah, so I moved to London. I was busy running away from my family and my past. I used to say, I became an art historian. I used to say curator was the least Yiddish word I knew and I wanted into that. I mean, I was working in the British art world. It was very far away from the home I came from. I literally was working in a museum of living rooms. So, I was trying to create some kind of order through distance. In my life in London, it was the first time in my life where I really found myself to be what I later joked as the "only Jew in the village". I was really in a circle or in social circles with very few, if any, Jewish people. And that was the first time in my life, in my 20s, that I had that experience. And because of that, I started to see myself quite differently. It was really the first time and it feels very obvious now, but it wasn't then. It was when I started to ask, where does this anxiety come from? As you asked me earlier, is my anxiety from my family history, which for the first time felt very unique? Does my Holocaust heritage shape how I perceive and react to everyday threats and dangers? This is what I wanted to explore. And I wanted, so as you said, I was doing stand-up at the time. I was going to write a comedy show about this. I actually did a vague comedy show. I was looking at this idea of strong, what would it take? What would it mean to confront danger as a Jewish woman? How can I confront danger? Can I confront danger? Where is my anxiety? So, I was exploring this idea, but I was also a historian. And so, I wanted this piece to have a historical kind of backbone. And I was thinking, what are examples of strong Jewish women who had really confronted danger? I was looking for almost an answer. And the only person I could think of at the time was someone I had studied in fifth grade. Her name was Hannah Senesh. And as I had studied, she was a Hungarian Jew who made Aliyah in the 1930s. She was a poet. She was a playwright, very artistic family. She moved to British Palestine. She lived on a kibbutz. But during World War II, Hannah Senesh decided to fight back. She joined the Allied forces. She became a paratrooper. And she volunteered to return to Nazi occupied Europe to fight the Nazis. She was actually killed very early on. But as I had studied in fifth grade, the legend was she looked her executioner in the eye as he shot her. I grew up with Hannah Senesh as an example of Jewish courage. She was a hero figure. But back when I was writing this comedy piece, I didn't want to just understand Hannah Senesh, the hero. I wanted to understand Hannah Senesh, the person. I wanted to understand how a Jewish woman confronts danger. Who chooses to go fight the Nazis? What would make a poet decide to jump out of airplanes? I really was looking for a psychological or sociological analysis of Hannah Senesh. And I went to the Bridge Library and I looked up Hannah Senesh in the catalog and there are not very many books about her. So, I just ordered everything. And when I got my stack of books, I immediately noticed one of the books was unusual. It was an old book in a blue fabric cover with gold embossed lettering on the front and yellowing pages. And it was in Yiddish. It was called, as I saw in the front, "Freuen in the Ghettos", "Women in the Ghettos". But I always say, as more unusual than the book is the fact, I speak Yiddish. So, I started flipping through this book looking for Hannah Senesh. And it's like a 200-page book or so. Hannah Senesh is in the last 10 pages. In front of her, there's 190 pages of stories of other young Jewish women and teenage girls who fought the Nazis, and primarily from the ghettos in Poland. These were young Jewish women who were running underground soup kitchens, and schools, and secret libraries, all the way through to young Jewish women who shot Gestapo men in the head, who blew up Nazi supply trains, and who flung Molotov cocktails during ghetto uprisings. And I mean, I'd never read anything like this. And I always say this book, "Mikh Gekhapt," like the "project caught me". I wasn't setting out to work on this. And here I am 19 years later and still basically researching and lecturing on this subject. And that book became the catalyst for my book, "The Light of Days." So yes.
So, you spent years living with those stories. Did those stories begin to change you? What did they teach you? Not only that courage during the Holocaust, but about what it would mean for you to be courageous in your own life?
Yeah. I mean, these stories taught me that, I mean, they taught me many things, but they taught me first of all, that women, these women, first of all, you can be courageous in many ways. Some people can pick up a gun and shoot someone. I don't know that I could do that. But some people were editors or couriers or courageous in spiritual or emotional ways, telling jokes. Some people were, they kept. They created camaraderie through humor. And sometimes you have to fight in a way that's right for you.
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But really these women inspired me. I mean, these women risked their lives time and time again, fighting for justice and liberty and Jewish dignity. They would not be shamed. They would not be
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put down. They were proud of who they were and they would never lose that. And I think that's very powerful. And we talk a lot about how trauma trickles through generations. It's inspired to several books I've written, and probably my day to day, but so does strength. Strength also travels through generations and so does courage and so does daring and so does passion and compassion. And I think and I hope writing that book taught me that too. Yes, my family was very traumatized, but also very strong. It's an amazing insight that we really cannot lose, that strength also moves across the generation.
So, we're going now to your newest novel, "The Last Woman of Warsaw". And that novel goes back to Poland. It goes, rather than memory or history, it follows the path of fiction. So, after writing your own story and then recovering the story of these remarkable women who were warriors, what drew you to tell this story as a novel?
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I'm hearing you ask me these questions. Look, I'm spending all those years running away, running away. And here I am going back and back and back into what I was originally running away from. Yes, once again, I find myself in 1930s Warsaw. So, as I was writing "The Light of Days" and researching it over many years, you know, the questions I was asking, what kind of world created these young Jewish women who are so daring and bold, and intelligent and literary? And if you look at photos and I do a lot of photo research, very stylish. It didn't jive with my conception of what pre-war Warsaw was, even though my grandparents had lived there. I really imagined pre or interwar Polish Jewry. I mean, in my mind, it was basically Anatevka. It was a shtetl, it was back woods, I was kind of...long skirts, religious, and Warsaw--I mean, decrepit, gray, decay, I always say it has war in its name. I always had very negative connotations. And as I started to study the period, and really try to understand these women that
I'd written about, I learned I was completely wrong. Polish Jewry--there were 3.3 million Jews in Poland, ten percent of the country in the late 30s. It was a very diverse community -- politically, class-wise, religious-wise, many secular Jews, many assimilated Jews, many religious Jews. But many who are not wealthy Jews -- very poor Jews, shtetl Jews, urban Jews, leftist Jews, right Jews, capitalist, communist, Zionist, Bundist, every combination thereof. And Warsaw itself was a cultural hub--nightlife, theater, comedy. There were 180 Yiddish newspapers and magazines published in Warsaw in the 30s. Warsaw was a fashion, it was called the 'Paris of the North', and I found archives of fashion shows set in fancy hotels. There was a fashion cafe with a dedicated runway in the back. There was a Warsaw boating club that hosted fashion events. Warsaw was the capital of neons. We think Las Vegas is now the capital of neons. Warsaw was the original artistic capital of the neon bard. I didn't know any of that, and I
felt really, really compelled to tell that story. First of all, obviously we've spoken a lot about the death of Jews in Poland, and rightfully so, but I wanted to write for once about the life of Jews in Poland. Jews had lived in Poland continuously for over one-thousand years before the Holocaust, so I wanted to share that. I wanted to also mourn this lost world of Jewish imagination. I feel like we so destroyed, we don't even know so much that was created there, the theater, the comedy, the music. I wanted to almost say a kaddish for that, in a way.
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I also wanted to share that that was a very sophisticated world, and I think we or I have a tendency to say, well, they were very primitive. We today were very sophisticated, secular, modern, but they were no different. What happened to them can happen now, and to our world.
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And as always, I wanted to inspire with strong Jewish women characters who
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figure out, who work to figure out what they believe in and then fight for it with pride.
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In White Walls, Judy, you described creating a life that was really almost the opposite of the one that you grew up in. It was one of minimalism, order, simplicity. Then you became the mother of three children, and life has a way of becoming a little bit more chaotic. How did motherhood change the way you understood your own mother and perhaps even the way you understand yourself?
I mean, becoming a mother changes everything about my self-perception. Of course, I understand my mother so much more. With every stage of my own children growing up, I can relate back, and better to the challenges that any parent and that my mother faced raising children. It's hard.
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I think that I wrote one piece once about how when my kids were young, I actually had trouble getting rid of some of their stuff, the onesies, and the clothes, and the towels with the elephant hoods, and the machines with the toys, and the things. I almost freaked out. I mean, oh my gosh, am I also, is this a hoarding tendency? Is it? Am I like this too? A little bit of me is. I realized that some of the stuff I didn't want to get rid of because it was so beautiful and it reminded me of these connections and these loving moments and these incredible moments of especially having young children and the excitement of that. I wrote about how my mother, I always thought of her stuff as a barricade, but maybe it was also a bridge, a way of connecting us through maybe you hang on to things that made you feel happy too and try to surround yourself with that. And I understood that for the first time.
You know, we call this podcast To Be Continued... because every survivor's story continues through the generations. We talk about hanging on to stuff. When you think about your children, what would you like them to hang on to? And what chapter do you hope they're going to write next?
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Oh, that's a tough question. I really want my kids to be proud Jews. I really hope that they feel very excited about their past and their identity and their community and their history and, you know, study it and are interested in it and I don't know, I guess we'll see.
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So let me ask you a question that haunts me and maybe it haunts you.
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What keeps you up at night and then the flip side of that, what gives you hope?
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What keeps me up at night? This could be a whole other podcast.
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Maybe I should do it. What keeps you up at night?
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Well, I'll tell you, my case is drinking coffee after 9 p.m.
That's just not a 1 pm I'm like a 1 pm, maybe noon.
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Really? My God, you're a lightweight.
I'm a lightweight. Yeah.
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I mean, I'm definitely concerned about anti-Semitism. It really weighs on me. It really does keep me up at night. I'm concerned about the world that my kids will have to grow up in and face.
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I have a lot of concerns about, I've actually been very concerned about this parasite that's in the produce. I have a lot of anxieties around health and I think also related to my past too and actually that's been keeping me up at night the past few weeks.
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Is that enough? I'm sure there's more but those are the latest.
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You seem to be doing okay.
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I mean, you have to go on. We do. You have to go on. And that really is the lesson. So, Judy, what gives you hope then?
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I'm trying to think of a really good example. You know what gives me hope? Like random acts of kindness or even not random acts of kindness. If someone does something, nice, that they don't have to do. Seeing that, acknowledging that. I'm trying to think of a good example and it can be something from being an ally to the Jewish community that really is meaningful and gives me hope too. This morning, I went for a dental procedure and I really get panicky with dental procedures and one of the hygienists working in the office, she was massaging my arm and really helping to calm me down. I felt so touched by that. She didn't have to do that. Look, I'm crying even. It was so moving to me that, she like went out of her way to comfort me and make me feel better for five minutes. That kind of human connection and desire to make someone else feel seen and safe and comfortable. It can come in the smallest ways but that's what gives me hope. Someone gave that to me. I'm going to do that for someone else today or tomorrow.
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Well, Judy, we want to thank you for being our guest and if I can extend one of the large metaphors that we've been playing with during this conversation.
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We take those stories of kindness, of unremitting goodness, stories of unexpected saintliness, of seemingly small people who do large things, of people who engage in a kind of moral calisthenics.
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We take those stories and if I may, we have to hoard them.
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We have to create our own pile of those stories to get us through the darkness and there is much of it but we are also hoarders of hope.
This episode is a production of The 2G-3G Project, produced and edited by Eli Hershko and co-directed by our podcast founder, Sheryl Hoffman. Once again, I'm your host Rabbi Jeff Salkin.
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You've heard it your whole life. If you get a tattoo, you can't be buried in a Jewish cemetery. That might, or it might not, be true. Yes, of course, the prohibition is real. It's right there in the Book of Leviticus. It's unambiguous to not cut your bodies for the dead, or put tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the Lord. But the cemetery thing -- in all likelihood -- it is probably a piece of communal folklore. It was a cautionary tale, most likely. The Jewish authorities invented it in order to keep Jews away from the needle and the ink. And yet, it hasn't exactly worked as a deterrent. It did for a while, but not in our time, tattoos have become something we could not have imagined a generation ago. The tattoo has become a fashion statement. and makes the body a canvas for identity.
But you see, for Holocaust survivors... tattoos were not a choice. They were a mark of degradation. People decided that Jews were not people, but rather commodities, and they etched those numbers into their flesh. But for some of their children and grandchildren, that same act, marking the body, has become something almost unrecognizable. It has become a way to remember, a way to reclaim, a way to carry stories that might otherwise disappear. So you might ask what happens when an ancient prohibition meets a modern hunger for memory? What does it mean when the very medium that Jewish law discourages becomes, for some descendants of survivors, a powerful and indelible act of bearing witness? It makes the body into a canvas of Jewish memory.
Welcome to our podcast TO BE CONTINUED... Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors. where we explore the intersections of memory, identity, and resilience. Our goal: to lift up the experiences of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, and to ask, how do those memories form you? How did resilience create you as the person you are today, and what is the legacy that you will leave to those who come after you?
I am your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin. Today, we're speaking with Dara Bratt, producer of the short documentary "Inked, Our Stories Remarked". And Michelle Ekstein Rose, a third generation descendant, whose own experience appears in the film. But before we start our discussion, let me tell you about our guests.
Dara Bratt is an award-winning director and film producer. Collectively, her films have screened all over the world, including the Tribeca Film Festival, SXSW, Canne, the Abu Dhabi International Film Festival, and more. She is the recipient of many awards and grants. In June 2024, out of 35 submissions from nine countries, Dara took the first place prize in the Claims Conference emerging filmmaker contest, which focused on films about the Shoah, for her proposed documentary, "Inked: Our Stories Remarked", which is the basis of our conversation today. Gregory Schneider is the executive vice president of the Claims Conference, and this is what he said, "Dara has not only created a film, but she sparked a conversation into a movement few knew about. A conversation that has quietly unfolded within families". Now, there may be some of you who don't know what the Claims Conference does, so let me tell you. They are an international nonprofit organization that secures material compensation for Holocaust survivors around the world, and also seeks the return of Jewish property that was stolen during the Holocaust.
Michelle Ekstein Rose is the granddaughter of four holocaust survivors. She is a passionate voice for remembrance, education, and justice. While all four of her grandparents embody resilience, it was her grandmother, Anita Helfgott Ekstein, who devoted her life to Holocaust education, and she inspired Michelle's own calling. Anita's dedication, her courage, her unwavering commitment to "Never Forget" became the foundation for Michelle's life's mission. which is to assure that we never repeat the past. Michelle is a community activist. She works tirelessly to combat antisemitism. She works to promote Holocaust education. She fosters understanding across generations. Michelle lives in Toronto, Canada with her husband and her two young boys.
Welcome to both of you. It's so great to have you here. Thank you so much for having me here. I am very excited.
Dara, Inked: Our Stories Remarked is such a perfect title for this film, and I have to tell you, I've watched this film. I have found it very moving. It's really a very important piece of work. I wish, I wish we could just make sure that everyone, who is concerned with Holocaust memory, gets to see it, 'cause this film is an exploration into a very complex phenomenon. Wherein children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors are processing this intergenerational trauma by getting tribute tattoos. And so the documentary explores this decision. What does it mean to etch history onto the body? It's an act that invites us to confront essential questions about memory, Jewish identity, and self expression. The movie really, as I said, moved me. So let me ask you, what first inspired you to create this documentary? Was there a particular moment when you realized that this is a story that you needed to tell?
Well, first of all, thank you so much for the kind of words and for watching the film. I think, for myself, as a filmmaker, regardless of the film that I'm making, I'm always interested in ideas that are a little bit out there, like, shining a light on something a little out of the ordinary, and letting it sit with audiences, and letting them decide if it's extraordinary, or what they, what the takeaway is. And for me, this is one of those ideas. It was not something I knew about that much. Um, I have a friend who's a professor who was studying how tattoos heal trauma. And she was looking at the wide scope of what that encompasses, whether it was women tattooing their breasts after mastectomy, whether it's LQBTQ getting the pink triangle. It was reclaiming something that was traumatic and turning it into a story of positivity. One of the areas that she was focused on was commemorative Holocaust tattoos. And so that was my first introduction to the topic. At the same time, I saw that the Claims Conference was having their annual submissions for the grant, for a short document, documentary or narrative, that explored Holocaust education. And I thought, well, I'll apply, but this idea is so out there, I doubt they'll choose mine. Because I always have a little bit of the wild ideas. And so, first, I made it to the finals, and there was round two, and I had to speak about my project, to the jury, and then I found out that I won. So that's kind of how it came to fruition. And after that, it became this rabbit hole of just meeting people that would become the subjects in the film and learning so much more about it. And the whole story around it, the different points of view, which, as you know, I try to include in the film, which I'm sure we'll talk about.
I really need to ask you, how and why do tattoos become such a powerful way for people to express the inheritance of these memories and these traumas?
Well, I think it's a couple things. Firstly, I'm very interested in storytelling and how we tell stories, and I think, you know, looking back in history, we've gone from oral storytelling to written storytelling. Younger generations are visual, they're more graphic. I mean, we literally text people in just emojis, and it makes sense. So I think tattoos are a natural progression of a graphic, more visual language. And I also think it's with time changing the narrative. You know, tattoos, especially ones that were forced on prisoners, reclaiming that, you know, having some time to look back on something, saying, you know what, I'm gonna change the narrative of this, instead of being a victim, I'm gonna be a survivor. I'm gonna use this; I'm going to show it proudly. And I'm gonna embody memory with this. So I think, for me, those were the things that interested me, that I wanted to explore more, how tattoos tell stories, how they carry legacy forward. And I also, like I said, when I first started, I was not aware that this was a thing, and I think post October 7th, I started getting all these friends, um, sending me, um, stories about people in Israel, tattooing themselves, like, "We Will Dance Again". Um, it didn't fit into the scope of what the short film was about, and I stayed in my lane of, like, we were talking about the Holocaust here. But I do think that tattoos have become more prevalent. as a way of reclaiming trauma into a story that is healing.
It's funny that you mention Israel, because the first Jews, whom I ever encountered, who had tattoos, were, in fact, Israelis.
So, Michelle, you're a third generation descendant, a 3G. And so, I'd like to ask you, what role did Holocaust memory play in your childhood and your family life? Tell us a little about your grandmother, Anita Eckstein, who I believe is the grandparent that you were closest to.
Um, okay. Let's dive into it. So, I never have a memory where I didn't know that I was the child, the grandchild of Holocaust survivors. There was never a moment where I didn't know who I was. All four of my grandparents were very vocal on what they endured, what they had been through, and what we were the product of. That being said, I don't necessarily say that my grandmother and I were the closest. She's just, God bless, the one around the longest. Um, but she is the one who was the most vocal about her Holocaust, um, story, and she's the one that fuels my reason for doing what I do. I believe that I picked up a torch that my soon to be 92-year-old grandmother has put down, but not turned off. Um, about my grandmother, so she was born in July of 1934, in Synowodzko Wyzne. She was an only child to Ethel and Fischel Helfgott. The first time she actually was in hiding was in the summer of 1941. There was a Ukrainian pogrom happening where she was, and her family's landlord said, "Come, and I will hide you in the hayloft, in the barn behind our house". His wife never knew about it. People came and went, and for two weeks, my grandmother hid and played hide and seek with her mom and dad for the first time in her life. That was when, um, she... heard the phrase, "This too shall pass", for the first time, um, and that is now actually one of the tattoos that I have on my body. After the pogrom was finished and she came out of hiding, that's when the anti-Jewish laws started happening in her town, and after a little while, they were deported as a family to the Scole ghetto. Once they were in the Scole ghetto, conditions were awful. She lived in a house with three bedrooms, with 18 other people. Um, wasn't very, uh, a good place to be. And in 1942, she was going to go to the market one day with her mother, and at the last second, her mother said, "It's a nice day out. Go play with your neighbor instead." And on her way to the market, her mother was picked up by truck and taken directly to Belzec, and that was the last we ever saw of her. Um, out of desperation, my great grandfather Fischel, he became friends with a local shopkeeper, a Catholic gentleman, um, and basically did the unthinkable, and said, "Can you help?" And this Catholic man, this righteous gentile, um, did the one thing that has left a ripple effect in my family line, and he decided to help. He smuggled my grandmother in a sack of potatoes, and then a buggy, um, a horse and buggy, took her out of the ghetto, into his home, where they gave her a new name, and a name with Catholic identity. She was there for about six months before she was denounced by a neighbor. Um, it was February. It was winter in Poland, and she was home with the niece of the Catholic savior Joseph, and this niece picked my eight-year-old grandmother up, and threw her out a second-floor window, and said, "Run". My eight-year-old grandmother, in the snow, no shoes, and just a nighty, ran into an outhouse where she hid until it was dark. While she was in hiding, the house was ransacked, as well as, she heard lots of gunshots. She found out that the house had been ransacked, and they didn't find anything, and the gunshots were other hidden Jews that they had found during that day in the town that had been murdered. At this point, Joseph and his family knew they couldn't keep Anita, keep my grandma anymore, out of their own safety. So Joseph actually brought my grandmother back to my great-grandfather the same way she was brought in -- in the sack of potatoes, in the horse and buggy, back to the slave labor camp, where my great-grandfather now was. Um, the town of Scole had been liquidated from about 2,000 people to 20. And my great-grandfather was one of those 20. Now, being as it was a slave labor camp, there was nowhere to hide my grandmother. Um, out of fear of her being found. They had a little bunker, the police, house, if you will, and had an armoire in it, and my grandmother spent seven weeks, day and night, in the armoire, locked away out of fear of being found, while her dad went to work. Um, it was awful conditions. There were dead bodies some days thrown into the room. She never knew if her dad was going to come back or not. It wasn't the place that an eight-year-old should be for that length of time. Again, knowing that this wasn't the way to do it, um, my great-grandfather reached back out to Joseph and said, "Please, help me again, find something different", and Joseph managed to get a local parish priest to fake some birth certificates, and my grandmother's identity now became Anna Jerowska. Um, and then my grandmother and her father said their final goodbyes. And it was during their final goodbye, my great-grandfather said to my grandma "You must be good, you must be independent, and you must always remember who you are. And, um, "Always Remember Who You Are" is my second tattoo, and that commemorates, um, the Holocaust for me. So she lived, my grandmother lives with this priest. Um, she learned, relearned schooling. She learned Catholicism, but she always kept her promise to her father that, you know, I am a Jewish girl. I will survive. I will do everything. Um, when she was finally liberated, once the war ended, she was reunited with Joseph's family, where she finally learned the fate of her father, who, unfortunately, um, when he was done working for the Germans, they shot him. She did have a happy reunition with my Aunt Sally, who herself has her own story. She was saved by Oskar Schindler. And together, the two of them started the next phase of life. They moved around Poland for a bit, finding other family members. Um, and then moved to Paris, where my great aunt met a man, um, who also survived with his two-year-old daughter, and now my grandma finally had a family. She had, more or less, two acting parents and a sister. Um, they left Europe, they came to Canada. She was 14 years old, with very little education, started schooling here. At about 17 or 18, she met my grandfather. She married Frank. Together, they had three kids. All together, they have eight grandchildren, plus spouses, and all together, we all have 11 great grandchildren to give to my grandma. Um, she is a Holocaust, until she was unable to, she was a Holocaust educator, she went on the March for Living 20 times. She's a very prominent survivor here in our Toronto community. And her legacy, at the end of the day, isn't just her story. It's all of us.
Dara, we heard about Michelle's tattoos. and both of which carry very powerful messages. Can you tell us about some of the other 3G, third generation tattoos that the film would show to us?
Yeah, so when I started the research to find their generations, descendants, and I knew I wanted to focus on the grandchildren. It seemed like it was the grandchildren who were more open to tattooing, I think, with a little bit more time. Um, it's easier for them to kind of, kind of, um, interpret the stories and bring them to life more than, like, 2Gs. So, I focus on 3Gs, and initially, I was looking for commemorative Holocaust tattoos, that's subjects who have the numbers, the Auschwitz numbers, re-tattooed on their arms. And what I realized, and what I try and share with audiences, because I realized not everybody knows this, but there were only a couple concentration camps that were tattooing their prisoners. People just think, oh, that's what they did. And it is what they did, and it's still an insane amount of numbers, because we know the numbers, millions, who went through the camps. But because not everyone has a tattoo, even including the Holocaust survivor featured in my film, I wanted to open up the door a little bit more to interpretation. Obviously, Michelle's stories are so powerful, and those tattoos are so meaningful that they are part of the conversation. Um, and I think in the film, those are the main ones that we see that are not the numbers. There are two brothers who have numbers tattooed. Their sister is included. Hers are not numbers, but she is covered in Jewish stars, um, evil eye. Like, all the symbols of Judaism. And also, our first subject, she has chai -- which is life, on her arm, and that was, for her, a way to carry her... to see the chai, to see the life, and to remember her zadie. Um, there is one of the brothers who has the numbers, and then he got a second tattoo, which I film on camera. It's the Hebrew lettering for "Am Yisrael Chai". I am with the people...with Israel. Um, and we filmed that on camera, and that was his second commemorative Holocaust. It's not exactly Holocaust specific, but it was inspired because he wanted to be, like, "Here I am as a proud Jew".
There is a tension between seeing these tattoos as acts of memory, and the fact that others might see them as controversial or taboo. How does the film navigate those tensions?
I mean, I think that's, for me, one of the most interesting things is starting a conversation. Um, as a filmmaker, it's not an exciting film if I'm just making a commercial, uh, public service announcement. Hey, everybody, like, this is great. Get a tattoo. And I'm not a 60 Minutes expose. Everybody, this is wrong. And so for me, I really wanted to highlight the conversation around it, the different perspectives, the different sides. I mean, even amongst the subjects featured on camera, other than the fact that they are the grandchildren, excluding the rabbi and the academic, you know, voices of credibility, They're very diverse. They're diverse in terms of, um, political, religious, sexual orientation. They run the gamut, and what brings them to the table and getting a tattoo, their stories are all slightly different. Um, and for me, it was also important to include the voices, you know, Marnie's sister Jody said, is not for it. She says there's other ways to carry education forward. Pinchas, the Holocaust survivor featured, does not support it. For him, it's very traumatic. And I wanted to include all of those opinions. I think... what I hope for is that it sparks a conversation. I don't need audiences to leave saying, "Oh, I get it. I'm for it, or, no, I don't like that". I just wanted to resonate and linger, and hopefully start more conversations. And just bring awareness to the fact that this is something.
So, Michelle, how did your grandma react to your tattoo?
So my first tattoo I actually got had nothing to do with the Holocaust. I grew up with my grandmother, saying you should never tattoo yourself -- "Please don't, please don't". Um, and as the grandchildren, we all kind of looked at each other, always saying, "You know, we want something, but we have to respect"... um, and my first tattoo has nothing to do with the Holocaust, it was actually a horse in honor of my grandfather, my Grandpa Frank, Anita's husband, who passed away when I was 18. And my justification for that was, well, it's not just a random butterfly. It's in honor of grandpa. And then that's spawned my thinking towards what I wanted next. I knew the saying, "Always Remember Who You Are". It's always been part of my vernacular. It's something that has been ingrained in all of us grandchildren and my grandma's children, since we were kids. And I knew that was going to be a tattoo that was going to be on my body. And one day, I just did it, and I showed her, and she said, "That's nice". And that was kind of her reaction. It wasn't upset, it wasn't pleasure. It wasn't joy or anger. It was just, "that's very nice". And then, unfortunately, after that, her mental, her mental state had declined a little more, and we could never really get into it. Um, but I think, I think, I hope that she knows that I have good intentions, um, and that it's something that has built me. Um, she is not cognitively aware of my other tattoo of the, saying that says "This Too Shall Pass". Um, but again, that is something, actually, a couple of my other cousins also have it tattooed on their body, um, because this is such a prominent statement from our upbringing and helped to shape who we are. So I wish I could say more about my grandmother's emotions, but I don't have that. That being said, I did speak to a good friend of mine who's a Holocaust survivor from Toronto. And he said to me that my tattoos don't represent what my family lost, but they represent what they survived, what my family survived. And that that is something that can't be taken away from me, and that's my memory to bring forward. So I like to think that at least I have a blessing of some sort, from another survivor.
Do you see your tattoos as acts of memory, education, identity, a combination of the three?
All three. My, my, "This Too Shall Pass" in Hebrew is on my wrist, so it is almost always visible, and it does for a conversation. My "Always Remember Who You Are" is on my ribcage. That is a little more personal. And that is a story I'd share only when I want to. But I do think it is part of me. It's who I share. It's my identity. I love when people ask questions and want to know why I have it, or what's the meaning behind it, and when I tell people, fortunately, I end up with tears like Dara. But I think that's special, and that really... embodies what my grandmother wanted, which was just to educate, and share the stories over and over again.
If I interpret "This Too Shall Pass", I remember a traditional interpretation, which is that we tend to think that that is about the experience of bad things, and that those bad things will pass, and good things will happen. The opposite is also true, that we're living in the good, and that will pass, and bad things will happen, which is really an enduring lesson of Jewish history.
Yes, it's quite cyclical, and I actually bought my "This Too Shall Pass" just after my second son was born, knowing that, you know, the part that is... was hard happened, but the part that's hard is about to come, too. Um, and it, it's that what you just said, it's, it's very cyclical in life too, it's the balance.
And, Dara, we've often spoken on this podcast about the necessary balance between the trauma that we inherit and the resilience that we inherit. I'm wondering. Where did you see the resilience emerging in the stories that you collected and featured?
I mean, I think they're all resilient. I think I pretty much only featured the resilience. Um, you know, I feel like that every subject in this film was someone who said, I don't want to be remembered for, you know, as a victim, I'll be remembered as a survivor, or wanted to take the history of their grandparents. And, again, change the narrative that it's not gonna be... what you're saying a way of, like, remember what you gain, not what you lost. So I think these subjects, by taking, by saying, opening the door in a conversation, by not closing it, by not just saying, okay, forget the past, let's move on. But here it is, here it is on my arm. Or as one of my subjects says, if you're looking for a Jew, here I am, like, you know, and he's maybe a little more confrontational, but even Marnie, one of my subjects, who's a cancer survivor, who was going through really bad tongue cancer treatment, and she got that tattoo and said, "If my bubs could survive what she went through, I'm gonna look at this tattoo every day and not give up", just when she was thinking, I may not get through this treatment. And so I really do think that they found the strength of their grandparents to not only carry their legacies forward, but to find their own internal strength, resilience, as a person.
It's almost as if, if I may interpret it, that, the Holocaust was a gashing wound inflicted on the body of the Jewish people, and these are acts of memory that are etched into the bodies of individual Jews who carry those memories.
I mean, as you said earlier, it's a literal etching on the skin. It is one form of keeping education, you know, and legacy carried forward. And I think it's a bold choice. It's a courageous choice. Um, and I really respected my subjects for like sharing their stories on camera.
If survivors were listening to this conversation, and this is a question really, I'm directing at both of you, Dara and Michelle, what do you hope they would understand about the generations that have followed them?
I'll say one thing, it's before we screen this film, which I only shared with all the subjects at the screening, the first one was in Toronto in November. Um, and none of them had seen the film. I had shared it earlier with Pinchas because he's a 92- year-old survivor, and I was not going to make him wait. Having watched the film, you know that he's not a fan of tattoos. I share the film, and he loved it. He was so excited and asked if he could share it with his family. And I wasn't sure how he'd respond, because he's someone who so clearly has a point of view, that is not for the tattooing, and he really felt that though he hadn't changed his opinion, he respected the choice. And so I think it was interesting, and I also mentioned that he very much talks about storytelling, and he saw that tattoos are away of telling a story. He still would not necessarily go out and promote it. But he was, he was okay with the film and I, and there, I've been screening at film festivals. The reactions are not always for tattoos, but I think people just get it a little bit more or it resonates a little bit more. Um, we, you're asking about Holocaust survivors, but in Toronto, on our panel, we had a rabbi who was, leads a little bit more Conservative than the rabbi featured in my film, and I wasn't sure what his perspective would be. And he said that he was seeing more tattooing amongst his congregants, and he actually said that we have to be very careful what we tell other people what to do with their bodies. And that he was becoming more accepting of it. So I think it's, and I don't want to speak for other people, but the responses that I'm seeing and the feedback I'm seeing is that, it's either more prevalent, or people are processing it and being a little bit more open-minded.
And, Michelle, what do you think?
I think. Sorry.
Just repeating, if a survivor, were listening, what would you hope they would understand about the generations that have come after them?
I think it's important for them to know that we've seen you. We hear you, we heard you, and we've got you. You know, we heard your warnings, and we're seeing it now. Um, we heard the lessons, we're re-giving them to our children now. The memory, unfortunately, whether the survivors are still with us or not, it's not passive, it's work, it's a daily choice. And we need the stories, the survivors to remember that their stories didn't end there. It continues with each ripple, with each generation, and I would love to see every story told by another gen, by the next generation. Whether you're the descendant or not. We need our survivors to understand that we got you. We're not trying to make a mockery. We're not trying to insult you. We're not trying to hurt you. In each of our own ways, whether it's with words of wisdom given to my grandmother, or putting numbers on your body, or just putting a magen david. We are doing what we should have done for you had we been there eighty years ago.
And if there's one message that you would want listeners, our listeners, and those who see the film, to take away from that film, what do you hope it is?
So, I know Dara is gonna, like, my mic-drop moment, 'cause I did this on our panel, but to basically quote my great-grandfather and add my own little spin on it, you know, "we have to be good, be independent, and always remember who we are as a Jewish people". You know, we have to be good. We have to stand up for what's right, for even when it's hard, especially when it's hard. We need to be independent, and that goes for everybody. Enough with the herd mentality. We need to think for ourselves and think for what's right. And at the end of the day, we need to always remember who we are right here. And never be shamed into fighting that. That's my advice for the future.
And Dara?
Well, I can talk to the film specifically, but or I can say that, as a filmmaker, I'm such a big proponent of storytelling. I think it's so important to have a voice, and share our experiences, and not everyone will agree with them, and that is the point. The more conversations we have, the more education we have, the more we expand our communities and understand each other. And that's what I try and do, that's what I try to do with this film, which is to shine a light on something a little out of the ordinary and let it resonate with audiences. And I hope that's the takeaway.
In listening to you both, and processing what you have presented to us, and confessing that this is really new material to me. I've been a rabbi for more than four decades. I've been teaching the Holocaust and the Shoah incessantly during that time, and have always been tattoo resistant, as it were. You have actually, both of you, really opened a window for my soul into how this works. And I think that the best we can hope for is that this will open people's minds and souls. I do not expect that there will be a run on tattoo shops, uh, in the near future. And no more than has already occurred. But what you've done is you've taken something once, thought, profane. And you've made it holy. And that's a very big Jewish task, and we really are indebted to you. Second thing I want to say is, I remember the first several times that I put on tefillin, and after I removed the leather straps from my arm, the imprint of the straps remained on my arm for several hours, and the feeling of having the straps on my arm, and around my head, lasted, I think, for the rest of the day, and so what these tattoos are, are, in fact, permanent, visual, modern acts of tefillin. They are those things that stay on our body long after we would have thought that it might have faded. My words of wisdom, but let's talk as we say in Yiddish and Hebrew tachlis, let's get down to brass tacks. Everyone's gonna want to see this film. So how can they see it?
Right now, it is still on the festival circuit. I'm waiting to hear back from a few festivals, and we had two screenings in New York recently, and I am also trying to get some education distribution. I've been bringing it into high schools, now sharing it with non-Jewish audiences. at Loyola University, New Orleans, which was an amazing experience. I'm hoping to do that more as well, to go into schools, to get it online. So you can follow me on Instagram, @DaraBratt, or go to my website. I'll have updates there, which is darabratt.com. And yes, trying to get it out there more.
Especially for non-Jewish audiences, and especially what we're experiencing today in America, I gotta believe that in certain demographic groups, just the whole idea of the tattoo is a bridge to a population that we might not have reached before.
For sure, for sure. I mean, I was a little scared sometimes going to some of those university classrooms, um, a lot of teens, a lot of tattoos, uh, a lot of process. But, you know, it was really, there was a bridge, and the feedback was amazing, and I think it opened minds about Holocaust education, and also, um, started a lot, sparked a lot of conversation.
It really is a conversation opener. It, it, you know, it is what we read in the Haggadah, that when you're dealing with a child who knows not what to ask, you gotta open the conversation, you gotta broach the subject.
Today's conversation reminds us that every generation needs to find its own way to remember. Now, that can happen through stories, it can happen through rituals, it can happen through education. It can happen through travel and journeys through advocacy, and it can even happen through a tattoo. But no matter how we do this, the goal is always the same. We want to honor those who came before us, and we want to ensure that no one ever forgets their experiences during the Holocaust. And so it is our prayer, and our hope that we will be able to honor the past by the way we live in the present, and the way that we will live in the future. And then we will honor the past through the stories we pass on to those future generations. The visual, the stories, the hearing, to make sure, Michelle, as you so lovingly put it, that survivors know that they are seen and heard, and this story is not done. This story is still being written. It is TO BE CONTINUED...
Thank you so much to Dara Bratt, and Michelle Ekstein Rose, for joining us and for teaching us new ways to honor our survivors. This episode is production of The 2G- 3G Project, produced and edited by Eli Hershko, and co-directed by our podcast founder, Sheryl Hoffman. Once again, I'm your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin.
You can find the TO BE CONTINUED... podcast on Apple Podcast, on Spotify, YouTube, Audible, wherever you get your podcast. And if you believe that these voices are important, then we ask that you support us in several different ways. First, hit the follow button on your podcast app. You won't miss an episode that way, and you're not gonna want to miss an episode, because they've all been, in my judgment, humbly transformational.
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The other grew up in postwar Austria.
The granddaughter of a man who volunteered for the Wehrmacht, Hitler's united armed forces of Nazi Germany, and a family that kept its silence about what that meant and why.
And yet remarkably these two people found each other. They traveled together through Germany, France, Austria, and the Netherlands on a joint journey of discovery and empathy.
The result is a book called Inheritance - Love, Loss, and the Legacy of the Holocaust, a memoir unlike almost any other in the crowded literature of Holocaust memory because it is written across the deepest moral divide of the 20th century, between the descendants of victims and the descendants of perpetrators.
Welcome to this podcast, To Be Continued... Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, where we explore the intersections of memory, identity, and resilience. Our goal is to lift up the experiences of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and to ask how did those memories form you? How did resilience create you as the person you are today? And what is the legacy that you will leave to those who come after you?
I am your host Rabbi Jeff Salkin, and our guests are Charlie Scheidt, born in New York City, the son of German Jewish refugees. His father Bruno fled Frankfurt in 1933. His mother Sous followed, as did many other close family members. But unfortunately others did not and became trapped in the Nazi Weis in Germany, Holland, and France.
And when Charlie's mother died in 1988, she left behind an armoire containing nearly a thousand documents, letters, visas, identity papers, a baby's autopsy report...that Charlie could not bring himself to absorb and deal with for 20 years.
Kat Rohrer is an award-winning Austrian filmmaker whose films include "Back to the Fatherland," a documentary about Israelis living in Germany. Her maternal grandfather was a devout Nazi officer, a true believer who died fighting in Yugoslavia before her mother was born. Her family, her mother, her grandmother, her great aunt -- who by the way married a Jew and escaped to Australia -- did not speak of him.
Charlie and Kat met almost by accident when Kat was filming the 75th anniversary of Charlie's company, Roland Foods. He noticed she spoke German. A few months later he asked if she might help him translate some papers. She said yes because, as she told him, she had a personal interest in that period of history. It would be some time before he understood what that meant.
Eventually she sent him an email. It was time she said that he knew her story.
She told him that she had been haunted all her life by the same patch of ash that haunted his family.
What followed was 15 years of research, four trips to Europe, hundreds of conversations with strangers who turned out to be guardians of forgotten memory and a book that refuses easy comfort, tidy conclusions, or the warm illusion that history is over.
Today they are here to talk about all of it. Charlie and Kat welcome. It's good to have you here. Both of you grew up in families where the war was present but almost never spoken of. Charlie, in a German Jewish home in New York; Kat, in post-war Austria. What did that silence sound like? What did it teach you even when nothing was being said?
This silence was pervasive. It was, the past was a taboo subject. And as you said, it was a matter of constantly looking forward. That generation and my parents and the people I grew up around were focused on creating a new life and thinking back and living in the past was painful to them. And they tried by being silent to spare me from the knowledge and the horrors of what they had witnessed and what the family had lived through. It was a way of protecting the next generation, but frankly it didn't work because the anxiety was so pervasive and the sense that the subject was a taboo was something I could not avoid and that affected the relationships in the family. And I was aware of something strange in some of the relationships so that the silence didn't work.
And to grow up around the silence does not solve the issue of the past and is frankly one of the reasons for the spoke to break open that silence.
What's it like for you Kat?
It's a different kind of silence because my family did talk about what my grandfather was and that he volunteered and that he was a devout Nazi. So I can't tell you a time where I didn't know this fact. What we didn't talk about is him as a person because in actuality my grandmother died when I was three so I couldn't ask her. My great aunt who became my de facto grandmother, who had fled to Australia. I was too young to ask her questions about why she came back in the summers to Austria to a society that didn't want her, that she had to flee. So that I don't know, and that was just because she had passed away when I was old enough to ask. But the minute I asked about why my great aunt was living in Austria my mom told me why. So it was less of a silence. It was more of a we know this is a fact but we don't need to know more. And because I'm a third generation I have the benefit of time and being more removed. I started to ask questions, you know, what my grandfather had done and where he had been.
Charlie you don't have to be silent anymore, luckily. And I want this to make sense to our listeners. So could you give us a brief synopsis of your family's Holocaust experience?
The Holocaust experience is in several countries. So let's start with Germany where much of the family left but part of the family did not and he in fact was injured in the First World War and for the longest time thought they would be safe. Unfortunately that did not turn out to be true.
Then we had family in Holland. There again Holland had been neutral in World War I and many people in Holland not just Jews thought that they would be safe in World War II as a neutral party and that turned out not to be true.
And then we had family in France. France, of course, there was the fake war.
There's a French expression, but in the Droit des Gares, there was a period from the declaration of war in September 1939 until the Blitzkrieg in April that people could have the illusion that this too would pass and unfortunately it did not. And of course we ended up with family in Vichy France in the southern France. And that's a difficult story. So it's really a story in those three countries and how people coped and tried to save themselves and hoped for the best. And for some unfortunately what actually did happen.
Let's talk about a piece of furniture. A week before your mother died in 1988 she told you about the papers in the armoire. She had kept those papers hidden for decades and then at the very end she told you where they were. What was she saying to you? What was she giving you permission to do and why do you think she kept them hidden for more than 50 years?
My parents, like so much of that generation and as we said before, simply looked forward.
The past was scary, was upsetting and creating a life in a new country is not easy. It's not easy for any refugee or immigrant. So they worked very hard. They tried very hard to give me everything they possibly could in terms of education and a good solid life. So that's the ethos that they embraced and I was the beneficiary of.
But by the time my mother was later, in her later years, and so ill in those final years, a couple of years, she must have come to the conclusion that the time had come for me to what that history really was. She didn't have the time or the energy to really dissect it all and tell me everything. But she wanted me to know that she had hidden all those documents and that she had saved them and she encouraged me to look at them and then decide what I wanted to do with them. In a sense, she bequeathed them to me.
Kat, your mother was born after her father was killed in Yugoslavia and like Charlie's family, she didn't want to linger in the past. But there's a difference between not talking about it and not being affected by it. Those are two very different things. When did you first find out about your grandfather? Who told you? And what happened inside you when you learned?
Honestly, I can't remember. I think there's not a time that I remember growing up that I didn't know. The reason, I imagined, I asked that question pretty early was because my great aunt who had immigrated to or had fled to Australia came every summer to take care of me, because my mom was a single mom, and was working. So I guess, at one point, I asked why she wasn't living in Austria and my mom told me. And then, obviously in school, when you go through the history, it all started to be pieced together.
I think when I was first affected or really started in my adult life, [to] grapple with it was when I moved to New York. When I moved to New York and I had a colleague in university that was Israeli and we had a conversation. We're talking about Austria and he was saying he made a joke and said he didn't mean it as a joke. I didn't find it particularly funny. He said, "Your grandparents killed my grandparents." And I swallowed and I took a deep breath and for a long time I didn't want to introduce myself as being from Austria. Because it was hard to admit that. But with years and with me learning more about the history and also learning more about my family history and with Charlie's project and with making the movie, I became more forward and just telling the story because there's no point in hiding it.
Charlie, you asked Kat to help you translate documents. You knew she was Austrian. You knew she was a filmmaker. You knew that she spoke German, but you didn't know her full story yet. So when she finally sent you that email telling you that she had been haunted by the same patch of ash, what did that moment do to you? What did it mean to you?
She really asked the question how that would affect my willingness to work with her.
And I simply answered that we don't know what we will find in the papers that I had inherited.
Who knows what's there? And in fact, how will that affect anything? Because she is who she is and I am who I am. And each of us is responsible for ourselves. And I believe I even said the sins of the father or grandfather in her case are not her sins. So for me, it was a matter of starting to work together, getting to know each other better and getting to appreciate each other. And if it works, great. And if it doesn't work, well, then we'll go on with our lives.
Fortunately, it did work. I guess I'd say, 15 years down the road, I think it works. Yes. Yes.
And in a way, it's a deep friendship partially because of those differences and an appreciation, which I also gained, of what it means to be in her position. You know, you have to deal with a certain reality that I don't have to deal with.
I think by naming the teaching that the sins of the parents do not fall upon the children, which is from the book of Ezekiel, you're actually naming one of the great internal reforms of the Hebrew Bible, which is that rather than visiting the sins of the parents upon the third and fourth generation, that this doesn't exist anymore. And it's how we are able to move forward.
So the question is, this is a collaboration between the child of victims and the grandchild of a perpetrator. This is not a symmetrical relationship, I think it would be wrong to pretend that it is. So how did you navigate that asymmetry? Were there moments when it felt impossible to stand on equal ground? To finding out the truth, to finding out history, and to learning from history, and understanding the reality of what past generations have gone through, what they have dealt with, how they have dealt with the realities, and what that teaches us in terms of what we do with our lives.
I mean, there's so many other aspects of us potentially not being on equal ground. I mean, Charlie is older. I'm younger, he's an accomplished businessman. I was just starting out with my business. So there's many, many other things. I think that history, despite it being that family history, despite it being very different, it's the lingering grasp this history has on our lives in a way, or be very, very different. That actually puts us on equal footing because I understand where Charlie is coming from. Another person may not have understood it as well. So I think in that respect, we were very complimentary to each other and with each other. And we had conversations that were very important for both of us, but also expanded our horizons when it comes to understanding. For me to understand Charlie or Charlie understanding me, and together understanding history.
This is such an interesting relationship to me. To our viewers and listeners, how does each of your pasts help you understand the other? And were there moments when your opposite inheritance has actually clarified something that neither of you could have seen on your own?
I think the perspectives, I mean, more important than being from different sides is that we're from two different generations. Charlie, because he knew his parents and he grew up with them and was so adamant about looking forward because that's what he had been taught, was in occasions afraid to ask questions. Me being the third generation being removed, not having a relationship with my grandparents because they were both dead, and having had a very open discussion with my mother and seeing some of the not wanting to look back, but forward for a different reason, but the same mechanisms allowed me to know how to approach certain subject matters with Charlie and to maybe nudge him into looking in certain areas that he maybe didn't want to look into.
Nudge is a gentle word, I would say push, but I was willingly pushed because what I realized over time, and you mentioned earlier, Jeff, that for 20 years I really could not deal with the inheritance. Now, I rationalized that by saying I was busy building and running a business, raising a family, living in the present, but I think emotionally what I realized in the course of working with Kat was that I was also protecting myself emotionally from the past and that the world in which I had grown up had taught me that, had taught me to do that, to live in the present, and that the time had come really for me emotionally to deal with it, to understand it, and to understand how it has affected the world in which I grew up.
Kat, you were a very important part, really an integral companion, and something harder to name -- was any part of this work for you a way of trying to make amends, and if so, can amends actually be made across a divide this wide?
I don't think I can make amends for something that happened 40 years before I was born that, you know, by someone I didn't even know. So I don't think amends, I can make amends for anything. And what I can do, and I think that is the responsibility for the descendants of the perpetrators, is to take responsibility, or in my case, help Charlie, you know, go on this journey with him and have this amazing experience of finding out about this family history and preserving it, because very often family histories are not preserved, and I could use my knowledge, I mean Charlie speaks perfect German, but you know, let's say my talents in an archive and my talents in, you know, looking for the needle in the haystack to help him find the answers that he was looking for. So I think that is making amends. No, it was helping along and, you know, taking ownership or responsibility for the history that my grandfather somehow was a part of.
You stayed overnight at La Ricoquette, the house in Normandy, where your Uncle Max, Charlie, and Aunt Erna lived before Max was sent to an internment camp. You wrote that you felt you were inhabiting the present and the past simultaneously. What does that actually feel like? Can you take us into that house and into that moment?
It was not only in that house that I had the experience. The very first time was quite by serendipity when we luckily were invited into, or convinced somebody to let us into an apartment in Germany that my maternal grandparents had lived in. And suddenly being in that space and imagining them in that space really changed the way we approached future trips. And you mentioned the experience in Normandy. That was living in the present, because here, and I'll just mention, for example, sitting in the garden, and it's a beautiful Sunday morning and enjoying it and appreciating it. And then at the same time remembering and hearing my aunt and uncle's letters that they had written from that backyard. And for example, imagining my uncle chasing his cat, his tomcat, I would like to climb a tree. So I was living in that past and appreciating it in a way by just being there.
And it was quite an overwhelming feeling. And I think it enriched our experiences immensely.
Now, Charlie, in terms of these journeys that you took, you also went to Paris with Kat to trace your family's footsteps. And you found the streets and the apartments where they had lived. But when you traveled to Paris with your parents when you were growing up as a child, they never took you to those neighborhoods. So what did it mean to walk those streets now without them and without ever having been taken there?
The first thing that came to mind is, "Why didn't you take me here? What's going on? You took me to see some sights. You introduced me to a cafe and a croissant in Paris, but you didn't show me where you had lived and why?!" And I could think that it was, in a way, painful for them. They seemed to have been very happy there. They were newlyweds. They were living in Paris. For example, when my father loved Charlie Chaplin movies and when we came out of a place that they had lived, I looked to the side and there was the Chaplin Movie House. It still has that name on it. So I was sorry that they hadn't. And yet, I think it was part of that pattern of not going back because I'm sure their memories were very, very bittersweet because so many of the people... I mean, we did trace some of the people who were mentioned in correspondence and did not make it into the book, but did not survive. So a lot of people that they may not have been family, the memories and thinking back about them, I think was painful and they avoided it.
Kat, there was a moment in Amsterdam when a teacher produced a book of research about Jewish students who had been expelled under Nazi occupation and inside it, you found a handwritten note by Charlie's cousin, Ellien. Take us back to that room. What happened there?
We had planned the first day and we were going... back then it was our first trip, so we visited the outside of some of the apartments that the family had lived in. And the last on our list was to go to that school that Charlie's cousin went to. While we were driving there, I realized that wasn't very smart of us because the school was probably closed. So we went anyway, because we said something to check out for our list and see a plaque and see what it looked like from the outside. But when we were there, Charlie went to the entrance of the school and tried to pull the door, but the door was locked. But in the moment, I believe a teacher who was also, or maybe the headmistress, walked out and Charlie stopped her and said, "If we could enter and see the plaque that was there in commemoration of the Jewish students of that school," and she let us in and we told her the story and she said, "Well, you should really talk to this teacher named Ronald, because Ronald wrote a book about them." And Ronald wasn't supposed to be there at this time. It was afternoon the kids were gone. He was supposed to be home, but Ronald happened to be in the school at the time. So she went and got him and we talked to him and he showed us the book he had written and we thumbed through it and ended up on a page. And we both looked at this picture of this handwriting and it seemed oddly familiar. And we looked closer and the caption said that was by Ellien Lissauer, who had written this poem for a classmate and Ellien was Charlie's cousin. And so we asked him where he got this from and he said he got it from a classmate Betsy Vandermeer and Betsy actually was still alive. So thanks to Ronald, we were able to connect with Betsy and we met with her a year later. She was still alive and she showed us pictures and shared stories with us about Charlie's cousin. And that was one of those very, very many fortuitous coincidences that we experienced on these trips.
And experiencing, I would just add, very helpful people which we constantly experienced in each country. I mean, you asked before about Normandy and it's amazing to have been invited to not only to see the house that my aunt and uncle had rented, but to sleep in that very same house. And they certainly didn't know a thing about us when they invited us to do so.
The book is very honest, Charlie, about your favorite, Aunt Lilo, who miraculously survived Bergen-Belsen and the Ravensbruck concentration camps. Now, Charlie, you were born in 1943 and Lilo came to New York after the war and you were very close to her as a child. Did you actually feel her grief even before you could name it? And do you believe that you carry some portion of her trauma in your own body?
Lilo was my favorite aunt. She was a warm, loving presence. And I think that began when she first came here after the war. And eventually, I would stay with her and her husband.
And it was a very close connection and I always felt her pain. Her pain was so obvious, was so real. And there was a certain tension with other members of the family. And I always felt protective of her. And yes, I think I did absorb some of her pain. And it is, I would say, it is with me to this day.
Now, your father Bruno always worried that what happened in Germany could happen again in America. By the way, we hear this quite often from people. And he wanted you to be, these are his words now, adept, alert, and ready. In case it ever stopped being safe to be a Jew in America, I speak these and I tremble to say them. So we're witnessing a very rapid and severe rise in anti-Semitism right now on a daily basis. Do you ever think about his fears? And have you talked about this with your own children?
Oh, I grew up around that fear. And I would say the fear was and is not limited to the United States. I mean, it is a pervasive reality. And that is when my father preached, when he believed and preached. And one must be realistic about it. There's an ebb and a flow. But when there is a flow, you want to be very much aware of it. Now, the difficulty, of course, is knowing where one is at at any particular moment. And he was certainly somebody who had a very keen sense of when the danger is really overwhelming.
What's very interesting to me about what you're saying is that when I have this conversation with people, I have to remind them that Germany in 1936 and 1937 wasn't always Germany in 1937. It first had to be Germany in 1932 and Germany in 1926. And the truth is that we only know through 2020 hindsight exactly when it gets bad. And our early warning systems really in some ways have to be recalibrated over and over again, don't they?
Yes, that's very well said.
Now, Kat, over to you. You know, you've said that for many years you felt, well, there's no other way of putting it. You felt guilty, you felt shame, even though none of these were choices that you made. And you were born 40 years after the fact, and you made that very clear. And every understanding of Jewish ethics and theology that I have come to understand would speak to that.
Charlie, did you feel anything like that on your side? I mean, not guilt. I'm not talking guilt. I mean, something. And do either of you think that there is such a thing as inherited guilt, or is it something else? Is it—I struggle to look for the words—a wound, a grief, a responsibility that has no name?
I would call it a scar. I think the generation that lives through these terrible events is—was scarred. Individuals are scarred. Individuals who live through terrible events today are scarred, and those scars are passed on. And we, the next generations, deal with them. The question is, how do we deal with them, and what do we do as a result of those feelings and those experiences, even though they were not our experiences? We know about them, and we feel them, and need to do something with them for our lives, and also for the lives of our children and grandchildren and future generations.
Kat, do you have anything to say about that?
Yeah, I mean, I think what we—you know, I think we carry a unique sense of responsibility, honestly. So I think it is my generation or hopefully the subsequent generation's responsibility to make sure or try as best as we can, at least within the countries or within the realm that we are in, that something like that doesn't happen again. Because we are—I always feel like our warning systems are uniquely tuned, I mean, for different reasons, obviously. Charlie's warning system is very different than mine, but I feel very strongly when there is a political current in Austria or in Europe, a far-right current, that my alarm systems go off and I feel the need to do something and not just watch. Because dealing with the history and having studied it and knowing, having read letters that my grandfather wrote when he was 16 and stuff like that, I have a different insight. And I know that a lot of people in my generation in Austria who share the history of the perpetrator have that same feeling and passion. I mean, my mom has been a journalist and spent her entire lifetime trying to make sure that democracy is defended in Austria.
You know, it's so interesting to me, Kat. We debate a lot in the Jewish education world, in the Jewish communal world, how effective Holocaust education has been. And one of the great truths that I live with is that whereas the facts of the Holocaust might have gone over the heads of many of our would-be students, the fine tuning of the alarm system is something that has come across the generations and actually works. In fact, it works it might overwork with how often we resort to the metaphor of the Nazis and the roundups in the concentration camps. It's almost a kind of political hypochondria, but we might argue that a little hypochondria is not such a bad thing, is it?
No, it's not a bad thing. I mean, you better be over sensitive and over alert than miss the signs, I would say.
That seems like a very Jewish though my father used to say whenever my car was making weird noises, he used to say to me, "Jeffrey, not every cough is pneumonia." But sometimes they are.
You know, there's something else that's going on right now in America and in Europe, and that's about refugees. This is the story you tell, ultimately a story about refugees, and millions of refugees today are bearing a stigma. They're being turned away just as your parents were. Your family foundation carries your parents' names and supports refugee protection. What do you want people to understand about the line that connects what your family endured to what is happening at the borders around the world right now?
I'm glad you raised the issue of refugees today because my family were refugees. They were stateless. They dealt with bureaucracy, changing laws, uncertainty, and ultimately with their very existence, their ability to survive.
And the story of my family as refugees certainly echoes for me with the story of refugees and the plight of refugees today. And I have noticed that in the book talks that we've given, how the children of refugees from other parts of the world and also first-generation immigrants to the United States really relate to this story of refugees and understand the story that we tell in the book, and that for them in the course of reading the book, their understanding of the Holocaust goes beyond six million, which is this. This, which has no names. It has no people. But our book is a story of refugees that others can relate to. And in so doing, can hear the echoes of the Jewish experience within their own experience.
I remember years ago encountering a Vietnamese refugee, an author named Bí Thanh and she was talking about her experiences escaping from the Viet Cong, the travails of being in the South China Sea and facing being attacked by pirates. It was a horrific story. And she said publicly that what gave her strength was the soaking wet copy of The Diary of Anne Frank that she had with her, that she read that book. And she said, that's what gave me the strength.
The book ends with a line. I want to read it back to you, Charlie. I'm going to ask you just to sit with it for a moment. I love this. "The work on this book, the travels, research, reading and questions became a way to end the familial cycle of silence. I did it because nothing is more important than giving meaning to the loss and suffering. Without that, the oppressors own the story. The oppressors own the story." And the book is called Inheritance. At the end of this 15-year journey, what do you actually, Charlie, want to pass on? Not just to your own children and grandchildren, but to every person who reads this book and to every person who hears this conversation today, what do you want them to own of this?
I would like them to own the fact that it is up to each one of us to make a difference, that it doesn't have to be this way, and that we must be sensitive and empathize with the "others" in the world, whether they are refugees and immigrants, or defined in other ways, that the hope for us as Jews and for all people everywhere is to get away from the fear of people who have different skin colors, different religions, different habits. And there is hope if we create the hope. We must not throw up our hands and give up.
Well, for us in this world, the greatest sign of hope is having a child, teaching a child, nurturing a child, "Kat, you now have a child." How old is your kid? He's nine and a half months.
Wonderful. Congratulations!
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
So there's going to come a time, as our tradition says, when your child will ask you, "What do you want your child and any future children? What are you going to tell them about all of this?"
Well, he's going to be able to read the book, right, when he's old enough. But when it comes to my family, I'm going to tell him the truth. I'm going to tell him about his grandfather and my great aunt, who was a very important influence on my life. And I'm going to tell him about the travels with Charlie and what we learned and how important it is to ask questions. And I want him to ask me as many questions as he can when, you know, while I'm still alive, because that makes it a lot easier. Plus, you know, keep in mind, we had all these wonderful letters to kind of reconstruct Charlie's family history with emails and the cloud. I'm not sure my text messages, I'm not sure my son is going to be able to do that. So he better ask questions while I'm still around.
But Charlie and Kat, the two of you, are quite a team of warriors from memory. What the two of you have proven, really from the different sides of this abyss, is that honest memory is possible and necessary, that reckoning is possible and necessary, that you can hold a letter that was never intended for your eyes, you can walk a street your family was afraid to show you, and you can get a grave you never knew existed, and you can come out the other side not broken, but more whole.
You know, the oppressors, they wanted silence, they wanted to own the story, but the two of you, Charlie and Kat, you've made sure that they don't.
Inheritance - Love, Loss, and the Legacy of the Holocaust is available now. You need to read this book, and there will be links in the show notes. This has been a really rare privilege for me and for all of us.
This episode is a production of the 2G-3G Project produced and edited by Eli Hershko and co-directed by our podcast founder, Sheryl Hoffman. Once again, I'm your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin.
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TRANSCRIPT:
This episode is generously sponsored by Karen and George Goldberg in honor of their children and three grandchildren who are all descendants of Karen's mom, Ilona Medwied, a Holocaust survivor and the inspiration for this podcast. Also in honor of George's dad, Staff Sergeant Frederick Goldberg of the U.S. Army Air Force, who flew 35 missions as a B-17 side gunner, fighting the Nazis.
We often speak about children of Holocaust survivors inheriting trauma.
As our first guest, Elizabeth Rosner, had put it, "We are experiencing post-traumatic stress as if we too went through those experiences. We know that we didn't. I know that I was not there physically. I wasn't even a witness to their experience.” But in this podcast, we are meeting a different kind of a child, a different kind of second-generation descendant.
This is a story you need to hear.
Welcome to this podcast, To Be Continued... Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, where we explore the intersections of memory, identity, and resilience. Our goal, to lift up the experiences of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and to ask, How did those memories form you? How did resilience create you as the person you are today? And what is the legacy that you will leave to those who come after you? I'm your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin.
You are about to meet a man named Nick Winton.
In the Jewish tradition, to bear someone's name is to perpetuate their memory, to make sure that the good deeds that they did will survive them.
Nick Winton bears the name of his father, Sir Nicholas Winton.
It starts in December 1938 with a man named Martin Blake, who was a friend of Nicholas Winton, and who was an instructional master at the Westminster School in London.
Nicholas was about to take a ski vacation to Switzerland, and his friend invited him instead to visit him in Prague, Czechoslovakia, where he had traveled in his capacity as an associate of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia.
This committee had been established in October 1938 to provide assistance for refugees created by the German annexation of the Sudeten regions of Czechoslovakia under the terms of the Munich Pact. Convinced that a European war was imminent, Winton decided to go to Prague.
What happened? Winton immediately established a children's section, and using the name of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, initially without authorization, he began taking applications from parents at his hotel in Prague. Soon, thousands of parents lined up outside of Winton's children's sections office, seeking a safe haven for their children.
Ultimately, Nicholas Winton saved the lives of 669 children, most of them Jewish, who have multiplied to more than 6,000 survivor descendants. What a story. And you can watch this story, as I recently did in the movie One Life, that stars Anthony Hopkins, which is a very powerful film.
But there is so much more that you should hear from Nicholas's son, Nick Winton.
And true to this podcast, we will explore the question of, if many second- and third-generation survivor descendants do inherit trauma,
do children of rescuers inherit moral responsibility?
That is our question, among others, for Nick Winton, the son of the man dubbed Britain’s Schindler.
Nick Winton grew up near Maidenhead, England, one of three children born to Sir Nicholas Winton and his wife, Grete.
Nick graduated from Imperial College Business School in London. After brain tumor surgery, and with a five-year prognosis, he earned his MBA.
Nick Winton is now an international speaker, storyteller, and company advisor. His stories are inspired by his father, Sir Nicholas Winton, MBE, a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. And Nick now channels his legacy and personal stories into powerful speeches that inspire change.
Nick Winton, I have to say to you, it is truly an honor to meet you.
Nick, your father's story is extraordinary and his decision in 1938 to act, before World War II, had even begun, well, that decision reflects a moral clarity and foresight that far too few people recognized or possessed at that time.
Please, for all of us, continue the story of your father's rescue of 669 children, starting with what happened after all those parents came to the hotel in Prague, seeking refuge for their children.
Well, the first challenge he had, Jeff, was to find out whether the country, our country, would accept any children at all. And while he was in Prague, he got in touch with his mum back in London, who he encouraged to go to find out from the British government whether she could actually get any children out of Prague and into London. And there had been some debates, and it was finally agreed that unaccompanied children would be allowed into the United Kingdom under certain circumstances.
So, he started trying to put together a project to make that possible, make that happen. And it was quite daunting because the conditions were quite challenging. I mean, first he needed a foster family that would accept a child and look after them for the duration of what at the time was called the "Emergency,” because we weren't at war. And in fact, the British government didn't think we would ever go to war. So this was considered a sort of a temporary refuge that may never actually be needed.
So having found foster families, he then needed a guarantor of 50 pounds to repatriate them back to their country when the problem had been resolved.
It doesn't sound like a lot in Britain today, but it's equivalent to about $5,000 per child to resettle them after the emergency. So that's quite a substantial commitment to get somebody to make, to get a child into the country.
Then he had to pay for their transport from Prague to London.
They needed a visa from the British home office. And when the Germans finally marched into Czechoslovakia to take management responsibility for it, the government more or less abandoned Czech, he needed an exit permit from the Gestapo. So it was quite a process that he had to go through, the most difficult one being to find families quickly that will be willing to take a child.
I'd like to shift the focus now to your experience.
You didn't grow up knowing your father as a public hero. His story didn't come out until 1988 when your mother discovered a scrapbook with memories, photos, and risks to children. And you were already in your late 30s, and your sister was slightly older.
I'm wondering, why do you think he kept silent for 50 years? Did you experience moments growing up when you sensed that he carried memories or burdens that he did not or couldn't have fully shared?
I'm often asked, and in fact, my father was asked, "Nicky, why did you keep it a secret?" And he said, "I didn't keep it a secret. I just didn't talk about it." And I guess it was emblematic of that generation. Many of them didn't talk about their experiences if it wasn't relevant.
It was a nine-month part-time project for him. It had ended unhappily for him, and he wasn't proud of it. So I guess that was why it was never a topic of conversation in his mind. But it showed up in other ways. For instance, when he was knighted, he didn't tell me about it. I was away at a hotel for the New Year's Eve celebration, and the next morning, the list is published in the New Year's Honors List, and I was just reading the paper, and I scanned it. There was my father's name in the paper, and I couldn't believe it. So I phoned him up, and I said, "But you're in the Honors List?" And he said, "Yeah." "Well, why didn't you tell us?" "Oh," he said, "Well, they asked us if we were offered it, would we accept it? And please don't tell anyone." I said, "Yeah, but that's journalists, so they don't publish the list before it's official, not the family." And he said, "Well."
So he was quite private in many aspects of his life, even with the family. Quite extraordinary man.
Well, especially with a family. So, it's 1988, and you and your sister hear this story for the first time. What was that like for you emotionally?
I mean, he'd done so many things in his life, and this was just another thing. And I sometimes wonder if I'm a bit unimaginative, but does anybody know anybody who would like the scrapbook because we're looking to place it? And what scrapbook? I don't know anything about the Holocaust? No, I didn't know anybody. It was only when the That's Life program broadcasted that exhibit, where half the audience stood up as people he'd rescued, that it actually connected. And even then it took some time for me to process the implications of what I'd just seen. And even now, I'm still getting to grips with this whole aspect of my father's life that was completely hidden until it came out so long ago now. But it still seems to me, quite extraordinary.
Well, that moment, the great reveal, as it were, was a very powerful scene in the movie and must have been even more so in real life. When the world began celebrating your father, did you ever feel that you were sharing him with history?
It never really occurred to me. I mean, he was still my father. He was still Pa. He was the same man he always was. He always found it extraordinarily embarrassing the way he was so acknowledged, even revered in Czechoslovakia. He was sort of a national hero. He always found it very uncomfortable, I think partly because when the story became public knowledge, he was the only person left alive in that project, in that rescue mission. And although he was the instigator, he certainly wasn't at risk in the way that some of the people in the Prague office were.
So, he felt a little embarrassed that he was getting so much attention because it was, you know, as I say, although he was the instigator, it was a team effort. There were others involved, some in far greater danger than he was.
Yeah, yeah. So, the conditions for getting the children into the United Kingdom were quite challenging, but having got the agreement, he then had to find foster families who would be willing to look after them. And he spent a great deal of time trying to find families, usually by getting articles in newspapers, magazines, trying to encourage people to put their name forward. But then because he was convinced that this was an immediate threat, he did something which today would certainly be illegal as a quick solution. He had cards of children. So if a family says, I'll take a seven year old, he'd have cards of seven year olds and he'd send them off to the families and say, pick one a bit like you might pick a puppy at a kennel.
Because he said, you know, they'd look at the face and say, oh, yes, that's sweet. We'll have that one. And, you know, there was some due diligence on the foster family to make sure that they were acceptable. But then having got a foster family to accept a child, he then put together the program so that they could be released from Czechoslovakia, get the immigration permit, get the paperwork in order, get the exit visa, put them on a train and have them brought over to to Britain.
And over the course of the spring and the summer, he managed to organize eight transports with a total, as you say, of 669 children on it. And he was working on the largest. Up till then, the largest had been in July with 241 children. He was working on the largest, which had scheduled 250 children to bring to Britain to safety. And it was scheduled for the end of August and actually turned out to be the first of September. And the train was more or less ready to go with 250 children, which means 250 foster families, 250 immigration visas, 250 guarantors, which is a million and a half dollars of guarantees, 250 exit permits from the Gestapo. And according to five in the morning, the German army marched into Poland. It was the trigger for the outbreak of the Second World War. The borders to Germany were closed and the train never left the station. And almost all of those 250 children were killed in the Holocaust.
And whenever my father was asked to talk about it, he always reflected on the train that didn't leave, which haunted him. And you can imagine why, Jeff. I mean, he must have thought, if I just worked an hour or two harder that day, if I had not taken one day off to do whatever I needed to do, if that train had left a day or two sooner, all of those children would be alive. And that just stuck with him for the rest of his life. And I think that's another reason why he just didn't want to talk about it, because that failure to him eclipsed the successes.
So if I hear you correctly, he expressed what we might call survivor's guilt?
Not overtly, but I can see why whenever he was interviewed about it, he always, always talked about the train that didn't leave, not the transports that did.
I'm wondering, there's something about your father that was unique. We honor and we remember rescuers like Oscar Schindler and Raul Wallenberg, but your father's story is very different. He wasn't a diplomat. He wasn't a business owner. He wasn't a political leader. He was a quiet, private citizen who organized the rescue of hundreds of children. He didn't just save lives, as we've said. He created generations. And there are children and grandchildren of these children who exist because one man chose to act. How does that make you feel?
As you sort of alluded to, he was a very ordinary man, Jeff. He wasn't anything special. He didn't have any authority or permission or titles or anything. And I was brought up in pretty much that style by an ordinary man who had many different jobs, doing many things with a great interest in what was going on in the world. To me, he was just an ordinary, I only ever had one father and that was him. And he was okay as a father. I sometimes say he didn't beat me. But we had interesting conversations and he brought me up to think for myself. And we would talk about a whole range of topics. I even went back to live with him for the last few years of his life for a variety of reasons. And we were still having really fascinating conversations. He was 104 when I moved in to live with him. And we had still quite difficult conversations in the sense that he didn't let me off by just saying platitudes. He expected me to stand my arguments up and make them fly, which was quite a good upbringing.
Have you met any of the descendants of these families?
Firstly, I met many of the children he saved with him on many of the different trips that he made. And what struck me is how many of them have made major contributions to the communities that they settled in. We've got award-winning war correspondents and award-winning film directors, and leading lights in science and technology. It's just remarkable how much the people who he rescued have contributed and still do, those who are still alive. And I've met some of their children and some of their grandchildren and friends with many of them. And in fact, I'll be meeting a few of them in May in the spring in Czechoslovakia, where we're going to speak at another Congress together.
I'm wondering, has your father's story shaped your own sense, your worldview about humanity, the meaning of moral responsibility? Can you tell us what that legacy has been like for you?
My upbringing, I guess, I feel it was quite normal because I only have one to judge by. And it involved my own contribution to the community. And that's the way I was brought up, that if you see a problem, you get involved and be a part of it rather than expect somebody else to fix it.
So it's kind of hard to separate. In later life, I'm now on my fifth career. I've decided that my role is to use my father's story to help show people the impact they could be making on the world, as I say, rather than getting somebody else to fix it for them.
And I have some concerns about the way the world is going. And this is a great example to others of how much impact they can make if they choose to act rather than being passive.
At the risk of being overly political, or even political at all, we avoid politics here. What are your general humanitarian concerns about where the world is today?
I'm a fan of democracy. I like the idea that we have a certain amount of freedom to choose how our lives pan out. And democracy is quite a precious and finely balanced organization, which has a number of pillars. And I've seen in Europe a number of those pillars being eroded. And that troubles me. So, for instance, in some countries, we've seen the press being... not dismantled, but weakened... and a growth in, what can I call it, in the sort of social media source of information to people, which has no real bearing on truth. There's no publisher in social media. Everybody is a publisher. So, the idea that we have a press that we can rely on, that tells us what our politicians are saying and will do, is being eroded. In some cases, we've been seeing an erosion of the political system to encourage or allow extreme parties to have some greater say than I feel comfortable with.
And once in power, they've been dismantling some of the checks and balances to make them able to be removed from power. Just recently, we've seen one of the European leaders who've been in power for 16 years losing the election, which is, to me, something of a relief. Because it does seem that he had been organizing the country to make it harder and harder for him to be removed. And I've seen signs that some of the other countries are also been organizing their system to make it harder to have them removed. I'm a fan of democracy, and I feel that it's our duty to be informed so that when we vote, we know what we're voting for. And that's one of the reasons that I like to point out to people how their role in society is to make sure that we are safe. Because there are a lot of state actors who want to see our democracy undermined.
There's also been in Britain and throughout much of Europe a tsunami of Jew hatred, of Holocaust denial, of Holocaust minimization. Have you spoken out? And do you think her voice would actually mean it?
I heard somebody tell me the other day, "Well, you're only one person. What difference are you going to make?" And I thought, "That is so defeatist." If everybody thought, "Oh, I'm only one voice. What's the point?" Nothing would ever happen. And if I only persuade one or two people to be more aware, more alert, more engaged, that's one or two more people than would have done.
And I am concerned about the rise in Antisemitism. It's an age-old ploy, particularly among authoritarian regimes, to find somebody to blame for all the problems that the country suffers from. Because if you've got someone to blame, you can deflect the criticism from yourself. It's all their fault. And we've been seeing that rise in blame culture in so many different countries now. And it's usually a complete crock. It's not true in most cases.
In my country, a lot of our problems are the result of two recent worldwide tragedies. One was the great financial crash of 2007-8, where our government rolled up a huge debt trying to keep businesses afloat. And the second was COVID, where they increased the debt even further to try and keep the country running.
Now, with so little money and such a huge debt, we're looking for people to blame why it's all gone wrong, why we don't have money to spend on ourselves. We don't have to look very far, and it's certainly not because of immigration. And in fact, with our birth rate falling, if we didn't have immigration, our economy would be tanking in about five or ten years' time. So it's kind of a paradoxical situation where people are trying to prevent people coming to our country. And very soon, we're going to be needing more people to keep the economy afloat.
I'm always fascinated by ordinary people who do extraordinary things.
Your father was one of those people, even if he didn't always like talking about it or rarely talked about it.
I'm wondering, what, in your opinion, are things that ordinary people can do to fight back and to resist?
That's a big question, Jeff. I mean, at the smallest scale, we can all make an impact every day when we see somebody who needs help and offer a helping hand in whatever form that means. It might be just smiling at somebody who's a bit depressed. To us, that's nothing. But we have no idea the impact we may have made on the person that we've smiled at. It may be something a bit more. Sometimes we have a bigger challenge put in front of us than other times. My father was just confronted with a bigger challenge than most of us would see and decided that rather than walk away, he needed to do something. So sometimes it's situational. I'm not saying that we should all go out looking for some major catastrophe that we are going to try and change. But there's so much just in our own daily lives where we could make such a difference if we decided that we were going to help rather than just stood back and be passive about it. In fact, my father was quite clear about it. He felt that a letter that I read at some of my talks, he talks about the concept of "active goodness", which is basically he feels that to be a good person, it's not enough to avoid just being a bad person. You actually have to do something. You have to find somebody who needs help and then help them. That makes you a good person. You're not a good person if you just sit on the couch and don't do anything bad. So he was quite clear that we needed to be actively engaged with our communities and help.
It's interesting you say that because in Hebrew we speak of the need to be a Rodef Shalom, someone who "runs after peace", who pursues it, and a Rodef Tzedek, someone who "pursues justice". In other words, you're right. You have to get off the couch and it's really a morally and often physically aerobic experience.
Okay. I like the expression "an aerobic experience." Yes.
And your father was blessed to live to a biblical age, a hundred and six. He was very fortunate.
He had some great advice on how to live longer.
Oh, tell us.
You have to pick your parents wisely.
That's very funny. Well, we'll talk about that in a little while. So you're 73. Your father was 106. You look back on your father. Has his memory been a burden or responsibility? Can you talk about that?
It's a tough act to follow, Jeff. I think most young men would like to do something that makes their father proud. And I'm still working out what that might have been. But I've decided, I talk about my fifth career, I decided that I've been blessed with this family story. And maybe my role, rather than to create a whole new story, is to take that story and use it to influence others to do good work, rather than say, "Well, it's not my story, so I'm going to have to go and find another one." So it's a bit like standing on his shoulders rather than denying that I had that experience. Would I like to have created something memorable myself? Sure. But we are where we are in this pointless wishing that it was something different.
Before we conclude, I want to mention something that many of our listeners may not know, and that we discovered during our research for this episode, and by the way, which did not make it into the movie either.
Sir Nicholas Winton was not born with the name Winton. Rather, he was a Wertheim. In the late 1930s, when Hitler's power was rising and the Munich Agreement took place, the Wertheim family started thinking about the necessity, or the tragic necessity, of changing their surname to something that sounded less German. Which, by the way, just for the record, the British royal family did as well back during World War I. And so from Wertheim, you went to Wertham, and then to a name that you just invented, Winton.
So, Sir Nicholas's parents were born Jewish. You had Jewish grandparents, and they converted to Christianity, and Nicholas was baptized. And I can say that Sir Nicholas was held in great esteem by Yad Vashem, and that the former president of Israel, Ezra Weizmann, sent a letter of thanks to your father after his rescue efforts became publicly known in 1988. So Nick, you're almost kind of mishpasha-- you're almost kind of family to us. I mean, you're part of our moral family, but there's a little Jew in you, isn't there?
I am honored. Thank you, Jeff. I have a great respect for the culture. I, like my father, have absolutely no interest in religion. His view was that the ethics were far more important than the religions, and he thought that the ethics of most religions were pretty similar, but the dogma of religion didn't appeal to him. And it particularly affected him, I think, during the Second World War, when he couldn't understand how both sides could use God to proclaim that they would be victorious. And I feel that the ethics, which is what I've been brought up with, are far more important than the religion.
What you might discover, and I invite you to discover that many of the ethics that you were brought up with actually were produced in their first and maybe even pristine form by the great Jewish sages and teachers of antiquity. Do you mind if I offer you a Jewish teaching that I'd like you to carry with you?
There's a mystical tradition that says that the world is sustained in every generation by 36 righteous people. The Yiddish word for this is the "Lamed Vavniks." Lamed vav is the Hebrew alphabet's equivalent to 36. And they exist in every generation. They are not known to each other. They are not even known to themselves. But because of their secret acts of goodness that are rarely heralded, for their sake, the world continues to exist.
May I offer you something and a suggestion, which is that I occasionally in my life meet someone who would have been a Lamed Vavnik, one of the 36 righteous. And today, I feel that I and all of our listeners have met a man who is the son of one of those 36. I dare say that because of your Father's righteousness, the world, or at least the world of 669 [mostly] Jewish children, continues to exist. You may not consider yourself to be a part of the Jewish people, but I'm going to tell you this right now.
You are a part of Jewish history. And if not, then for your father, a huge chunk of Jewish history and of the Jewish people would have disappeared. And I just want you to know that, please. From my heart to your heart, I want you to know that.
Nick, thank you. Thank you so much for joining me in conversation today. You are really... I'm going to be moved by this for quite some time. I needed to engage in this, in this week of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, because you are a true ally and a friend. And we need you now more than we have needed anyone since, I dare say...1939.
Your father reminds us that history continues not only through those who were saved, but through the children who inherited the responsibility to care. Your father birthed, not only generations of Jewish children, but your father birthed a whole piece of the moral vision of this world.
This episode is a production of the 2G-3G Project produced and edited by Eli Hershko and co-directed by our podcast founder, Sheryl Hoffman. And once again, I'm your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin.
You can find the To Be Continued podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Audible, wherever you get your podcasts. And if you believe that what we are doing, that these 2G and 3G voices are important, you can support us in several different ways:
First, hit the follow button on your podcast app. You won't miss an episode that way. And then please do us a favor. Do yourself a favor. Do the world a favor. Share an episode with friends and family and on your social media pages. And third, we humbly ask, but sincerely. ask that you consider supporting this podcast. We are fiscally sponsored by Jewish Creativity International, a 501(c)3 nonprofit. We rely on donors for their generosity and vision to help us produce our show.
Once again, Nick, thank you for being with us. Our blessings, our gratitude to you. And until next month, friends, thank you for your support. And really, thank you so much for listening.
Before we begin, this episode is generously sponsored by Karen and George Goldberg, in honor of their children and three grandchildren, all descendants of Karen’s mother, Ilona Medwied, a Holocaust survivor and the inspiration for this podcast. Also in honor of George’s father, Staff Sergeant Frederick Goldberg of the U.S. Army Air Force, who flew 35 missions as a B-17 side gunner fighting the Nazis.
I’m your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin. Because this episode is released in early April—close to Yom HaShoah—its relevance is particularly poignant.
Before Dr. Ruth became a cultural icon, she was Karola Ruth Siegel, a Jewish child in Nazi Germany who escaped on the Kindertransport, a rescue effort that saved thousands of Jewish children from Nazi Europe.
She lost her parents in the Holocaust and grew up as an orphan in Switzerland.
Ruth would go on to become an Israeli soldier. She would come to the United States, earn a doctorate, and eventually become one of the world’s most recognizable and authoritative voices speaking openly about sex, relationships, and human intimacy.
Today’s guest is Leora Einleger, the proud granddaughter of Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer—may her memory be a blessing—whom she calls Omi, a self-described orphan of the Holocaust.
Leora had a rare blessing: she had Omi in her life for 28 years.
Omi’s story of survival, resilience, and joy profoundly shaped Leora’s career and personal pursuits. She is a New York attorney specializing in commercial litigation and white-collar defense and investigations. In Omi’s memory, she maintains an active pro bono practice focused on reproductive rights and combating antisemitism.
Leora represents the third generation—carrying forward both the memory of loss and the extraordinary resilience that followed.
Before we go further, this is Women’s History Month. When we think of history-making women, Dr. Ruth is near the top of my list—not only because she carried grief, displacement, and survival, but because she refused to let loss define her. She used her life to help others live more fully and honestly.
Leora, welcome. It’s great to have you with us.
Rabbi Jeff Salkin: Thanks so much for having me.
Rabbi Jeff Salkin: Let’s start simply—what was it like growing up with Dr. Ruth?
Leora: It was the best experience ever. I had the best grandmother in the world. She was way cooler than I’ll ever be—went out more than I did, had more friends than I did—and she was truly one of my closest friends.
I was lucky to grow up near her. I saw her at least once a week, and when I got older, we spoke almost every day.
People always ask if she talked to me about sex—not really. She kept her home life and work life separate.
But what stood out was seeing people stop her on the street. There were two types: people who wanted photos, and she’d say, “Today I’m just Leora’s Omi.” And then there were often gay men, usually middle-aged, who would tell her that her advocacy during the AIDS crisis saved their lives.
That really stayed with me growing up—and I think not enough people know about that part of her work.
Rabbi Jeff Salkin: How old were you when you first understood her Holocaust story?
Leora: Pretty young. I noticed she didn’t have family like other people. That made me start asking questions.
She was born in Frankfurt and had a happy childhood until she was about ten and a half, when the Nazis took her father away.
She was sent on a Kindertransport to Switzerland. She didn’t want to go, but she somehow understood it was necessary. She lived in an orphanage there for seven years, often treated like a second-class citizen.
After the war, she moved to what was then Palestine, fought in the Haganah, later lived in Paris, and eventually came to New York.
What always struck me was that at ten and a half, she had to leave her family forever. They told her they would see her again—but they were all murdered.
I remember being ten and a half myself and realizing, “I made it past that age. I still have my family.” That awareness shaped me deeply.
Rabbi Jeff Salkin: Why did she go to Israel after the war instead of the U.S.?
Leora: Zionism was central to her identity. After everything she experienced, she believed deeply that Jews needed a homeland.
She wasn’t treated well in Switzerland, even though it saved her life. Israel represented rebuilding—community, family, belonging.
Her life became about creating what had been taken from her.
Rabbi Jeff Salkin: She didn’t consider herself a Holocaust “survivor.” Why?
Leora: She was very intentional about that. She felt the term belonged to those who were in camps.
She saw herself as lucky—saved by others—and didn’t want to center herself in that narrative. It reflects her humility.
Rabbi Jeff Salkin: She was known for her joy and positivity. Where did that come from?
Leora: I think it was her way of surviving.
She chose not to dwell in grief, even though she absolutely carried it. I never saw her cry.
She filled everything with humor, energy, and appreciation. Even small things—like mashed potatoes—became the best thing she’d ever had.
That joy drew people to her.
Rabbi Jeff Salkin: How did her story shape your family?
Leora: Education was everything to her—because she was denied it.
She prioritized it for my mom, for me, for all of us. I became a lawyer, my cousin is becoming a doctor—it meant so much to her.
She also instilled this incredible appreciation for life, and an energy—no laziness, no wasting time. Always learning, always moving.
Rabbi Jeff Salkin: How did that shape your own path?
Leora: I think about what she would do all the time.
At one point in law school, I panicked and thought I should switch careers. I called her, and she immediately said, “No—you’ll make the biggest impact through law.”
That clarity stuck with me.
Rabbi Jeff Salkin: What would she say about the rise in antisemitism today?
Leora: She was already warning about Holocaust denial years ago.
For her, the answer was education—always. Bearing witness, learning, teaching.
That’s why things like visiting Auschwitz or studying history mattered so much to her.
Rabbi Jeff Salkin: Does she still feel present in your life?
Leora: Every day.
I have a sign on my desk that says “It Can Be Done”—it was on her desk too.
She believed in action, urgency, making things happen.
Rabbi Jeff Salkin: So let me ask the final question. If your grandmother could give one message to your generation and the generations to come, about resilience, joy, what do you think it would be?
Leora: I think it would be the importance of finding joy in daily life—no matter how small. And I think it would be that family can be made from nothing. You can create your own family, biologically or not. When things are taken away from you, it's not the end. And something can always come out of nothing.
Rabbi Salkin: It's a powerful message and what a blessing you had.
We're all blessed to have our grandparents and yours gave you a unique blessing, which I can tell has a way of reverberating every day on a daily basis.
Leora: Absolutely.
We'd like to thank our new friend, Leora Einleger for joining us today.
This episode is a production of the 2G-3G Project, produced and edited by Eli Hershko and co-directed by our podcast founder, Sheryl Hoffman. And once again, I'm your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin.
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I'm your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin. Today we're joined by Dina Kraft, a journalist and veteran correspondent who has written for the Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and the JTA, among others. Dina is the co-author of My Friend Anne Frank, who writes not only as a storyteller, but as a third-generation descendant of a Holocaust survivor.
We also welcome Ruthie Meir, Hannah Pick Goslar's daughter, a second-generation descendant who grew up in the shadow and the strength of her mother's experience.
Ruthie was her mother's right-hand assistant before and during the writing of the Anne Frank book. All of them live in Israel. And that matters. Because this is not only a story about what was lost, but about what was rebuilt. It's about how trauma travels through generations, yes, but also how resilience makes that same journey. How survivor's guilt lives alongside gratitude. How memory gives birth to responsibility. And how Jewish life continues publicly and unapologetically after catastrophe.
This is a conversation about intergenerational trauma, but it's also about intergenerational strength. It's about the burden of telling the story, and it's also about the moral courage that we need to carry that story forward with honesty, compassion,
and humanity.
Welcome, friends. It's great to have you on To Be Continued.
Ruthie, your mother, Hannah Pick Goslar, wrote in her book, My Friend Anne Frank,
that “Anne Frank had become a symbol in many ways of all the hope and promise that was lost to hatred and murder.” I would certainly agree that she has become the overriding symbol of the Holocaust…”Talking about her story, our story would later become a thread that bound me to her and kept our friendship alive long after she was gone.” So tell us a short version of your mother's story, from her birth in Berlin to the Netherlands, how she met Anne Frank and their last meeting in Bergen-Belsen.
My mother was born in 1928 in Berlin. She had a lovely childhood. And her father was a very high official in the German Otto Braun government. In 1933, when Hitler came into power, her father understood immediately that he cannot stay anymore in Germany because he also wrote against Hitler, and he went to England. So, we didn't go and stay in England, and he went to Holland. And my mother had to go to school. And so on the first day they would go to the grocery. Her mother sees another woman that comes from Germany. Of course they started to talk and they came from Frankfurt. They came from Berlin. And then she saw a small girl, this woman, and they started to talk.
And the day after, my mother had to go to the kindergarten first day, without knowing the language, without knowing anybody. And she sees the same girl as she saw the day before in the grocery shop. She was ringing the bells in the kindergarten.
And they saw each other, ran into the arms and began a big, big friendship, till the end.
Then, they had a nice childhood till 1939. And in 1940, the Germans invaded Holland in five days. The families were very much very friendly. So every Shabbat, the Frank family came to my grandfather's home. And every Sunday, my mother used to go to the, what is today, the Anne Frank House. It was the office of Mr. Frank. Mr. Frank decided that all the family will go to hiding in his office. The school, now it was the Jewish school, every day one of the pupils or more were just gone. And you didn't ask what happened. Either they went to hiding, or they were caught by the Germans.
Now in 1942, once again, her mother, my grandmother, had to give birth. And she didn't go to a hospital in Amsterdam, because she was already afraid from the Germans. They could take you from the hospital. So she gave birth at home. And she died two days after the birth. And the baby also died. It was a very hard delivery.
And my mother was at home at that time. And since this day, she was like the mother for her sister. And (she) took her all the way to concentration camps, on and on.
Let's see, they had the Paraguayan passport. And they were also on a list that was named the List of Israel. So as if to be exchanged in the future against German soldiers.
But it didn't help them and they had to go to Bergen-Belsen. The situation was very hard and it became harder every day.
Now, one day there was a rumor that a women from Holland come to the camp. And my mother was very curious to know who are these Dutch women. So somebody told her, you know, your friend Anne Frank is over the fence. My mother was in shock because she thought Anna is in Switzerland. And Anna was in a very, very bad shape. It was after Auschwitz. So Anna said, I have nothing to eat. My mother went to all her friends.
All of them didn't have what to eat. All of them were hungry and didn't have what to wear. But everybody, everybody gave her something. And she made a ball with cracker and a sock and a glove and something. She made it like a ball, came to the fence and said, Anna, be careful. And she threw it over the fence. So it was really the last time that my mother saw Anna when she threw the ball with the food to her. And she didn't know what happened to her.
Afterwards, my mother was liberated. And then after that, Mr. Frank came to visit her and arranged everything, that she can go to Switzerland. And then she went to Israel because this is how she was raised. She was a nurse in Israel. Then my mother got married and had three children. She became a nurse and was doing a very good job.
This story is about an iconic Jewish figure, perhaps the most iconic Jewish figure of our time. So I need to ask you, as you were growing up, how present was Anne Frank in your family life? Not as an icon, not as a historical figure, but as your mother's childhood friend. Tell us briefly about the presence of Anne Frank in your family when you were growing up.
It was from the beginning. From the beginning, when I was one-year-old, my mother went already to the United States to talk about Anna, to talk about the Holocaust with my father. And since then, all the time, it was like a sister of ours, like an aunt of ours. And Mr. Frank was like the big, big uncle that was in the picture all the time with writing and with sending people all the time. It was just one of the family all the time, true today, even for my children and grandchildren.
I can imagine that's true. Dina, as you worked with Hannah on My Friend Anne Frank,
how did she describe the way her friendship with Anne lived on inside her, not just as a memory, but as responsibility? How did it shape how family understood loss and remembrance and moral obligation?
Yeah, I mean, for her, you know, the last time she saw Anna, of course, was at this very dramatic moment where these two girls on either end of a fence, crying in this freezing rain on other, you know, at Bergen-Belsen. And they were still so hopeful. They talked about meeting at school the next fall. That's how, like, sort of, where their heads were. They were still optimistic they would come out of this hell.
Of course, Anne didn't come out of this hell. And she only, and she didn't get to tell the story of, really, before or after the Annex. She told the story of being inside the Annex. And that's a very kind of, like, small prism. Of course, you'd read into Anne's, like, deep inner world. But all of that life that came before, that incredibly rich dynamic of a German Jewish enclave in Amsterdam, where they lived as the daughters of German immigrants, and the games they played, and the life that they lived, and the shadow of this war that was approaching all the time.
And then, of course, afterwards, you know, what was happening outside, the roundups, and being taken first to Westerbork, and then to, and then in Anne's case to Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen, and in the case of Hannah, all of that horror Hannah witnessed and was able to tell, because she lived to tell the story.
So, she felt this obligation to sort of carry on, you know, where Anna couldn't. And I think because, you know, from very early on, the diary became a huge success, and then it was a Broadway hit, and there was a film…she had cache because of Anne's story. She had legitimacy. So at a time when people didn't even have a name for the Holocaust, as Ruthie referenced, her mother went off in the 1950s on an 18-city tour, speaking tour of America, talking about her experience in Bergen-Belsen, and talking about her friendship with Anna. It was a time when there wasn't even a name Holocaust or Holocaust survivors. I think she was probably one of the very first survivors to publicly tell her story. And it was always very, very important to her to share that story and tell the world. And until she was, you know, I was interviewing her when she was 93 years old. She was using oxygen to breathe. She wasn't in good health, but she was very, very sound of mind. She was incredibly sharp and incredibly funny still, as well, I might add. And she felt this obligation to keep telling her story, even though these were like her last days.
Why do you think, that already being beyond 90 years old, that Hannah felt it was essential to tell her story now to this generation?
Well, you know, it was interesting. It wasn't her idea to tell the story. It was a Netflix film came out, based on her life, and that generated a lot of interest and conversation. And then a publishing house in London reached out to her, and that's how this began. From our very first meeting, she would say, "Who is going to be interested in my story? You know, who's going to be interested?" I think the answer came in the fact that it became a New York Times bestselling book. It's in over a dozen languages, from around the world now.
But she was so modest. I think she couldn't really imagine the reach that it was, you know, she wasn't just writing on the tales of Anne Frank's story. She herself had an incredibly rich and interesting story to tell, you know, from the very beginning. From her father, who was one of the few Jews in the Weimar government in Berlin, and a very outspoken force against Hitler, and had to flee, to the story of what it was like growing up, and again, in this very close-knit, beautiful place, that felt very safe in Amsterdam.
And, then she always talked about how that safety and that feeling of being cocooned was suddenly washed away, you know, as a Nazi grip got tighter and tighter.
And you live with her. I mean, part of the challenge of writing this book and trying to make it, you know, it was not to write it from the point of view of a 93-year-old woman looking back, but being with her in real time as the noose was tightening and tightening all the time around, not just her, but the Jews of Amsterdam.
You know, as Holocaust denial continues to grow exponentially, this narrative is extremely important. I was in a used bookstore this past summer in the Berkshires, and I found an old Life magazine from the early 1950s with artist's renditions of what Anne Frank went through. This is such an important historical document that we have to keep alive.
Now, let me ask you, you've said that Hannah's accent was familiar to you. Tell us about your family's Holocaust experience and how hearing Hannah's accent affected you.
Well, she immediately reminded me of my own grandmother who was born in Salzburg in Austria, ended up, was living in Italy, in her 30s. And that's where she was when the war broke out, before the war broke out, as the Nazis began to take over Europe. And my family, they were living in Italy, but they were not citizens of Italy. And according to Mussolini's anti-Jewish laws, all Jews that were not of Italian descent had to leave the country. Of course, this was sort of a blessing in disguise. They couldn't wait around and hope for better times. They had to figure out what was what. And so my grandmother furiously wrote for affidavits and letters and visas across the world. And the one place they finally got a visa to was a place that my grandfather had singled out in a map of the world. He saw that New Zealand was the furthest place in the world from Europe. And he said, "I'd like to go there." And indeed, they got a visa to New Zealand. And they left shortly before the war broke out in Europe. They arrived in September 1939, just days before the war broke out, and had this safe refuge in New Zealand. But very, very far away, and very cut off from the rest of the family, and didn't know for years what happened to the fates of their own families back in Europe.
Literally at the end of the world.
The very end of the world. The very end of the world. And it was extremely stressful. They were treated as enemy aliens because they spoke German. Their mail was gone through by the government and censored. And in fact, it was only in 1944 when Italy was liberated. And one of my cousins whose name is Jana and is 98-years-old, and lives in Tel Aviv to this day. And I'm actually working on a book with her about her life now. She's actually a year older than Hannah. And she was a 17-year-old girl, and spotted a New Zealand soldier in the square in Florence the day that Florence was liberated. And she went up to him and said, "I have an aunt in New Zealand. Can you please pass on word that our family is alive and well?" And that is the first news that my family got, that part of their family survived.
You said in The New York Times article about Hannah…this is the quote, "When you look at history backward, she was living history forward." What did you mean by that? And how does it relate to Hannah's enduring friendship and memories of Anne Frank and her own family who perished?
Yeah, I meant by that is, you know, we look at history and we know how it ends, you know, or you know how the story unfolds. She didn't know how the story was unfolding. And she had to live every single day sort of in that sort of, as I was saying, this noose tightening, that sort of gradual understanding of what was going on for her. And so keeping, you know, she lost her parents during the war. And she was like the guardian of her little sister, who's only four years old. Imagine she was taking care of her little sister basically from the age of two to four in the most horrific of conditions. And so, she was living it forward and not knowing what one day would bring to the next. And that was sort of, you know, in the challenge of writing this book and trying to make it captivating to people to make it sort of feel like a thriller as it was and keep people's attention. I wanted to keep the camera as it were on Hannah as she was experiencing it, as she was going forward and not knowing what was going to be what was happening, not knowing what was going to be next.
But Hannah had incredible determination and focus. And also she talks a lot about, you know, survival was a group activity, you know, as it is today. You know, as we saw now in the stories of the hostages coming out of Gaza and those that were with others, you know, really talk about how they leaned on each other and the story, you know, of real, like female solidarity. And the barracks at Bergen-Belsen that when she sees Anne Frank and her friend Anna, you know, cold and shivering and starving in Bergen-Belsen and begging her for some food, she goes back to the barracks and is able to collect food from all the people who had barely had no food themselves, but had hidden a little crust of bread here and a little bit of dried fruit there and a wool sock here. And they were able to sort of together, you know, help this young woman they didn't even, who they didn't even know. So I think, you know, part of the story of survival is community and how Hannah found community even when her own blood family was gone.
So this is for both Ruthie and Dina.
Anne Frank's story, of course, is for many people, the story of the Holocaust. As we all know, that story ends too soon to fully embrace the horror. And I'm wondering, to what extent do you now see yourselves as guardians of not Anne's iconic story, but the human story?
I think, first of all, that you cannot separate the iconic and the regular life.
She was just this. She was Anna and she was the best friend of my mother. And my mother wanted, really to tell about her, and that everybody will know her, will know her life and really her legacy, because she was not the regular girl. She was very, very talented. When she was very small, she wrote lovely stories. I don't know why it is not so famous, but she wrote the tales from the secret Annex. And she wrote about poor people, about really how the life is hard for them. And she did it so nicely with such messages that we really should go on with all that she wrote about the poor people.
And of course, about all that she wrote about, all the, she is the symbol of all the children in the Holocaust. One and a half million. Millions. So as my mother used to say, you cannot perceive six million. You cannot perceive one-and-a-half million. But when you see one story, and of course, if you see some more stories, but when you see one story, you can identify with all that happened.
I understand. Dina, how about for you?
Yeah, I mean, I think this story, what I got from Hannah is a sort of feeling of passing of a torch in a way, passing on a story. It was difficult when she died. She died before the book came out. And I felt like I was doing, wrapping up the interviews with her.
And it was her health sort of deteriorating, even more after that. And I felt this sort of almost like guilt, like, oh, my gosh, like, is she stopping to tell the story? Is this sort of the beginning of her descent? And then someone, from actually Yad Vashem, told me maybe she felt like now that her story was in good hands, she could she could have her final rest, as it were.
And I hope that is somewhat, somewhat true. And I felt like this sort of like, you know, she's not there to tell it anymore. The whole Holocaust sort of like, you know, memorial project is so built on survivors and survivor stories. So now we have this challenge of what happens when the survivors aren't there anymore. So now we are here to tell their stories and in different forms, you know, whether it's through books and novels or plays.
We're speaking and the message I got from Hannah was very much that, that racism kills, that hatred kills, that ignorance and intolerance kills. And in the case of the Holocaust, the hatred was targeted against the Jews. And she was very specific about this was specifically an anti-Jewish hatred. This was not some sort of, you know, anything else.
But it was, but it was part of a bigger story of hatred and racism. And that is, that is a lesson that we have to take with us, you know, not just in this time of occurring anti-recurring and rising anti-Semitism, but just xenophobia and hatred and intolerance and ugliness. And we're just seeing a lot of bullying going around in the world, you know, from the leadership as well across the world. And this is a time where people have to remember their humanity.
And Hannah ended almost every, every speech she gave in all the many years that she spoke, she talked about how we are all created in God's image, every human being. And that is something I feel like it has been tragically forgotten in the various conflicts of the world, that we are all human and all lives do matter.
And if you are not the same and if you are with another color, with another religion or whatever, you should respect each other and you should live in peace together.
Ruthie, that, of course, is the universal lesson of this. And I'm wondering what emotional atmosphere did growing up in a survivor's household create for you? Safety, urgency, silence, gratitude, fear?
I must say that, as I know, a lot of survivors never talked about what happened to them. They said, oh, we don't want that, our children will suffer even by hearing what we we have endured. But my mother was talking about her story, as I remember, myself. So it wasn't like that. And my mother was a happy woman. She was full of life. She was very energetic. She was doing all this, all the time something, and helping someone. And so I think we grew, let's say, in a normal house. I must say there were the anxieties, you know, when you go somewhere and tell me when you come and like this, but not something very, very not normal, let's say, as I look at this. We had a really happy house. I think the resilience of my mother gave me a lot of strength.
Dina, in your conversations with Hannah, did Hannah ever express guilt about being the one who lived to tell the story?
You know, she didn't have survivor's guilt. She didn't have guilt. We talked about that. And I think she felt that God was with her. She was also a religious Jew. It's important to note. And her faith was always sort of like a North Star for her.
And so I think she sort of saved time, as it were, you know, sort of psychologically. In fact, that she didn't have the survivor's guilt. That she felt like she had a mission. She had a purpose. She had to take care of her sister, which she did very admirably and very beautifully.
And so she was sort of spared that agony, I think, of survivor's guilt. And I think also having this very clear vision of her life passed down from her father, who was an ardent Zionist, that the land of Israel, that was the goal.
And then she came to Israel as a young woman, and she built up her life and career as a nurse. She was always giving back. She also was very much the story of Israel's creation and Israel's development, working as a nurse specifically for young children and for babies and for immigrant families from all over the world, and was part of that melting pot story. So she always had meaning and purpose. And she had a very good marriage, and she had a beautiful family, and she poured her heart and her love into that. And again, I think because she was sort of singled out early on as this friend of Anne Frank's and was sort of given this mission from Otto Frank to tell the story that Anne wasn't there to tell anymore, that that gave her meaning and purpose. And so she was unburdened with that terrible burden of survivor's guilt.
Dina, what do you hope our listeners, and especially the children and the grandchildren of survivors, will take away from Hannah's story? How can stories like this help counter denial and antisemitism? What's its role?
I think its role is to tell a very gripping and very real story through a child and then sort of an adolescent's eyes. So again, it's sort of making it feel more real and more immediate and not sort of some sort of abstract thing. You know, when you hear about, for example, you know, she witnesses an older woman being deported, you know, being deported, being taken off the streets and thrown into the back of a Nazi vehicle, you know, and she's seeing her neighbors disappearing. And I'm sorry to say that like today we have, you know, in America, for example, we have people being disappeared into ICE vans.
And I think, you know, when I was growing up, this sort of this time felt very distant and very far away that we were in this sort of era of progress and liberalism and the world was going, had sort of, had learned the lessons of this terrible, you know, this terrible, you know, unprecedented slaughter, right, of millions and millions of people. And now we're in an age where, you know, totalitarianism and wanton destruction are sort of, you know, the warning calls around us, right? So I hope this sort of tells the story of what happened before and the brave people who did speak out and the people who did help each other out in different ways.
And it reminds us that, you know, the Holocaust wasn't something that was some sort of, you know, a blip, some sort of historical accident, like people can do this, people can do terrible, terrible things to each other, you know. We have to be on guard and we have to be vigilant all the time. It's not paranoia to be vigilant. It's important to know our own history. If we don't, if the grand, yes, but the grandchildren, the children of Holocaust survivors, like, this is a legacy nobody asked for, right? Nobody wanted this sort of very heavy history to have to like, drag around you like a ball and chain, but it has doesn't have to be a ball and a chain. It can be like this is, this is your sort of gift to the world, just be able to tell people how low humanity can go. And it's important for you to be able to tell the story, so others can't twist it and doctor it. And we're seeing in the age of social media, these sort of quick clips in this terrible antisemitism being spewed by various influencers that has incredible reach.
And it's really important to know that our story, but this is also a human story. This is also a broader story, you know. Genocides don't only happen…Jewish people aren't the first and the only people to experience a genocide. So we have to be very, very vigilant and very, very on guard. But we also have to be, we have to be proud of the survivors that risked so much both to survive and to tell their story, so people will know. Hannah has told her story so people will know and we can't throw that away. We have to do something with that legacy.
I'm very curious. How did being a third generation descendant influence the way you listened to Hannah's story, not only as a descendant, but also I'm very curious as a journalist and as a writer.
I mean, I felt, I guess as a third generation, you know, it felt like I was able to sort of have this conversation with Hannah that was so, it was a really beautiful task. It was a really hard task. It was really painful at times. You know, sometimes Hannah and I would meet and we would both describe how we'd had nightmares the night before. And it was almost like our, you know, she was re-conjuring up these stories and I was hearing them and I was sort of taking them on.
And it was very different task than being a regular journalist as a journalist, the story, you have a certain remove, you're telling the story in second person, you know, third person, you know, this happened to this person and this happened to them and she said, and he said, now I was not just asking Hannah questions and interviewing her and maybe I want to go to very, very deep detail with her. But I was also having to inhabit her story when I was on the, at the computer writing. I had to become Hannah in a way. I had to, sort of imagine, I was to take on her emotions and her feelings and her impressions and sometimes imagine them and she couldn't even imagine them. She had trouble sort of tapping those emotions herself.
And so it was painful and it was difficult. I remember one particular time I'd come across, you know, in my internet sleuthing, a list of all the children that were at the birthday party at Anne…I call her Anna because that's what Hannah called her. They were Anna and Hanna, and they had another good friend Sanne. They were Hannah, Anna and Sanne. And Sanne was also murdered in the Holocaust.
And so Sanse was one of the girls that was at this birthday party and girls and boys, and this list on the internet described the fate of each of these children, which very much mirrored the fate of Dutch jewry -- 75% of Dutch Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. That was the biggest number in Western Europe.
And there's a lot of, we can go and go into sort of why and how that may have happened. And of course, that story was glossed over by the story of Anne Frank. Even Hannah didn't realize until recent years that the actual data, you know, the actual numbers behind it and, you know, the story of people, think, oh, the Dutch just were constantly hiding people. No, Anne Frank's family story was a complete anomaly. Most Jews were not hidden, you know, in Holland or protected by their neighbors…the opposite.
And so, yeah, so taking on her story in that moment of reading the fate of all these different children, you know, most of them slaughtered. I remember just like collapsing into a heap and just sobbing, you know, it was just so painful to sort of realize what and I decided that that should be the very end of the book, an elegy for a birthday party, you know, what happened to these different children. And I also paired it with what Anna herself wrote about these children. She had, like in her diary, she had like a, what we call like in more modern parlance, a slam book about what she thought of them.
This one was a gossip, this one was it flirt, this one was this, this one was that. But the toll of how many people were lost and again, the loss as Ruthie talks about these incredible people that were lost to us, like, you know, what Anne Frank would have become, what you could have become.
So as a journalist, it felt like a very, it was a very beautiful task and a very difficult task, but it felt really like something borderline of obsession. Like I wanted to get my hands on every scrap of paper and every, you know, letters she had written in every sort of photograph I could get from her, but also tales of others who've gone, who had gone through simultaneously what she was going through, diaries and lots of testimonies of people from her neighborhood in Amsterdam, and people who were in the barracks with her. And also she tells a story, one of the things she was doing in the last months of her life, besides talking to me, was speaking to a German documentary crew about the lost train. This is this train, this journey of 13 days, the very, very last days of the war, careening through the Eastern German countryside. And while bombs were falling, and it was really clear what the goal of this train was, I mean, eventually I think the idea was to bring them to some sort of, to Theresienstadt and killing them there.
But, you know, in telling her story, you know, in telling all these moments,I felt like it was an amazing opportunity to sort of like, be inside the story, but it was also painful. It was also difficult. But also incredibly important. It was a mission of a lifetime, really.
Dina, it's hard to imagine this, of course, and is there something almost psychological about imagining it? I wonder had Anne survived, had Margot survived, would they have wound up in Amsterdam, London, Melbourne, or perhaps in Tel Aviv?
Yeah, it's impossible to know. But what we do know is that Anne felt very, very Dutch, you know, and she imagined that this book would come out in Dutch after the, you know, she'd read a novel based on the secret Annex. And she felt herself very much to be Dutch. I don't know, you know, how she would have come out of, you know, no one can know how she would have come out on the other side of things. But I think she would have told her stories. I think that's, that was so central to her. She was such a writer. And it's sort of a misnomer, we call it like the diary of a young girl, you know, she was a young girl, but she really matured, like as if she was in a hot house inside the Annex. A teacher of Hannah and Anna's, later was asked by Hannah, Anna seemed to, you know, not be like an extraordinary kid, she was a kid who was very, very, you know, smart and witty and always kept a notebook by her side and would’t let anybody read it on the playground. But she didn't seem extraordinary. She exhausted the adults around her. She was today's, in today's language, we be called “a spirited child”, you know, it's very intense and kind of overwhelming. And so Hannah's teacher, Hannah and his teacher after the war said that, you know, she didn't seem like she was a special smart girl, but no one, you know, the sort of extraordinary ability she had to sort of put emotions to words and to express what she was going through.
She was described this way because she was, you know, in this little hot house of intensity inside the Annex for those two years. And I think, in the fact that she didn't just write her story, you know, in real time, she goes back and she edits and she revises. That's what makes it even more of an interesting story. She hears…so there was a radio address. Everyone in the attic was listening to this radio address from this Dutch minister in exile saying Dutchman, please, please keep your diaries in your letters so that after the war, people know what happens. And then she goes through and she starts adding background material about the Jews of the neighborhood, about the Jews of the anti-Jewish law, adding context like a real journalist was what an adding sort of suspense and and, you know, key pivotal moments in the story, to make it, you know, to make it even more engaging. Again, imagining this will be the basis of a novel when she comes out. So we don't know where she would have physically landed. But I think we know that she would have been an incredible storyteller, had she lived.
You know, Hannah had a dose of prophecy in her and she prophetically worried. And she was right, that as time passed, people would care less about the Holocaust. I have seen this in my own lifetime. In fact, I think I've seen it more in the last several years than I ever dreamed I could have experienced this. And to be true to our mission, this is one of the main purposes of this podcast. We stand up for memory, to make sure that this amnesia, this moral amnesia, does not happen. So is this book a warning? Is it a bridge? Or is it both?
Bridge, because it shows, you know, that it didn't have to be this way. You know, it didn't have to. If, you know, if various things had happened differently, you know, Hitler could have been stopped, and all of that. But, it's a voice from time. You know, it's a voice from the past that bridges us to this current moment and tells us, and whispers in our ear very, very loudly. Don't forget. Don't forget. And remember what happens, when when when hatred and racism and cruelty and totalitarianism run amok. This is not a good formula. Stop. Stop. And we're in this time in the world now where we're seeing really terrible things, you know, happening and on the brink of happening, as well.
You just said something very powerful, Dina, and I want to underscore this. Evil is always a matter of human choice. People choose to do evil. They choose to do good. At every step of the way, this unfolded in history and now, people have choices and they make those choices. And we are the beneficiaries or the victims of those choices.
And, as we move towards our conclusion, I just need to ask, in what way does Hannah's resilience live in your lives? And what about that? We always have to end on hope. Every Jewish message ends with hope. How do we get hope from this story?
Dina, how about you?
I think, you know, to quote Mr. Rogers, always look for the helpers. And I think there's a lot of stories of helpers in this, in this book. There's a story, you know, of Hannah's father herself who sets up with a fellow refugee friend, an agency to help fellow German Jewish refugees who are trying to find their way, you know, in Amsterdam.
There's a story of their neighbor, Mrs. Goudsmit, who's a Christian woman who's married to a Jewish man who tries to, when they tried it, when they come to deport the family in June of ‘43, she tries to take the little girl, tries to take Gaby for herself. And one of the Dutch Nazi policemen, the Green Policemen, says to her, "How dare you? Aren't you ashamed of yourself?" You know, a Christian woman trying to take a Jew. And she says, "I'm not ashamed of myself."
And she reminds them of the humanity. And so these various times, the sort of, the humanity comes through. It turns out, as I found out after writing the book, I think, speaking to her son, she hid Jews in the basement in a crawl space during the deportations. She was very, very brave. And there's lots of these stories of bravery and camaraderie and specifically female solidarity, and female friendship and connection.
And so that gives me a lot of hope. I'm currently working on a project with Emily Damari, who's a hostage who came back from Gaza. And she also very much has a very recurring theme of, like, the power of friendship and connection in these very dark times in the Hamas tunnels and the apartments in Gaza. And the power of not losing yourself. And I think that's from the story of Emily and also from the story of Hannah. Hannah always kept sort of her moral compass and her true self. And that helped her later on in life as well. But she always cared deeply. In the last weeks of her life, she was following the protests in Iran. Again, we're having another round of revolution, another round of street protests in Iran. And she was, kept asking me, "What's going to happen to those girls and those women who are protesting in the streets of Iran?" Again, like, her care was very much about the Jewish people, but about people writ large. She really cared deeply about people and humanity. And that's what we need is people to care about humanity, in order to stop atrocities.
You know, Dina, you just said something very powerful, and I'm going to leave it at this.
What's amazing to me, both disquieting and inspirational, is that our generation will now have its own stories of resilience, bravery, and courage to add to this Sefer Torah, as it were, that we are writing of Jewish courage. And those are the stories from Gaza, from the tunnels, etc. And those are stories that are going to endure.
And I would like to think that future generations will read those stories, will read your work, will imbibe the memories that Ruthie has shared with us, and that they will become the storytellers as well. There is a profound responsibility for us, not only to share the horror, but to share the hope. I think sometimes we have to make those choices, those two "H" words. It's either horror or hope, and I always want to go for hope. I'd like to say that hope is the biggest invention of the Jewish people.
We'd like to thank our friends who are with us today. We want to thank Dina Kraft. We want to thank Ruthie Meir.
This episode has been a production from The 2G-3G Project, produced and edited by Eli Hershko, co-directed by our podcast founder, Sheryl Hoffman, and I'm your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin.
Friends, you can find TO BE CONTINUED on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on YouTube, wherever you listen. But you need to be part of this story. You need to download it. You need to listen to it. And you want to do us a real mitzvah? Leave us a five-star review so that other people will be able to be part of this lasting, ongoing conversation.
So to you, Ruthie, and to you, Dina, your time is precious. Your memories are sacred. Thank you for sharing those with us today.
I'm Rabbi Jeff Salkin, I'm your host. And we're talking today to Jacki Alexander. She is the CEO and president of HonestReporting. I've been a big fan of HonestReporting for quite some time. So Jacki, this is really a treat for me. And so thank you for joining us today.
Thank you so much for having me to talk about this incredible, important topic, and one that's really personal to my heart, giving my background.
Well, I want to talk about why that is in fact the case, but I want to go right to something you wrote. I want to talk about something that I wrote. I want to talk about your background as well. You know, what you did this past week was, you used a term and I love it. In fact, I've been quoting you over the last several days to friends of mine.
The “De-Jewifying” of the Holocaust. In simple terms, what that really means is that when people discuss Holocaust today, and specifically in the media, within religious institutions, political realm, what happens is that there has been a diminishing of what is central to our understanding of the Holocaust and that is its Jewish component. You cannot understand this without its Jewish component, without the Jewish component, we wouldn't be having a conversation. So let me ask you a simple question, a pointed question. Is this a new phenomenon or is history simply repeating itself?
History doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes, right? That was Mark Twain, however many years ago. And I think for our entire history, we have always been targets of, the Jewish people have always been targets of bad people and then we have always been identified with then the bad people, right? So how does that rhyme today? Israel and the IDF are the new Nazis. Jews were the victims and now we are the oppressors. Yossi Klein Halevi had a great speech about this a couple of years ago, going through history and saying, when the communists were the bad guys, the Jews were the communists. When the capitalists are the bad guys, the Jews are the capitalists, right? Today, Jews are the oppressors, Jews are the colonialists, Jews are, you know, white people has become a four letter term now, Jews are the white people. So I think that this is just erasing Jews from something that can bring sympathy or an understanding is just the next step in a long history.
So your article, Jacki, uses this wonderful phrase, you really are very good at turning phrases and creating them, "Erasive Jew hate," as if it were the children's game Etch-A-Sketch, where you draw something, you turn it over, you shake it and it's gone. So let me ask you, how is erasing Jews from Holocaust narratives different from overt antisemitism? Is it the same and is it just as dangerous?
So erasing Jews from the Holocaust takes the biggest trauma, the biggest generational trauma that Jews have had in the last hundred years and makes it not about Jews. And if you follow the discourse around this specifically, what's happening is, is Jews are constantly online being told, "Stop making the Holocaust about you. You're erasing how horrible this was to the Roma, to the Sinti. You're erasing how horrible this was to gay people and to trans people and to black people and to political prisoners. This wasn't just about you."
And I do think that that is a new form of antisemitism, which is again, another word which we can't even use anymore because that has been weaponized against us. And as soon as you say antisemitism, people stop listening to it. But people forget that it wasn't just the final solution, right? It was the final solution to the Jewish question. Jews were the problem. Hitler wrote an entire book about Jews. This started not with the stab in the back of the Sinti. And again, this is not taking away the horrible history that happens. This was the stab in the back of the Jews. But for what the Jews did on the homefront in Germany, Germany would have won the war and therefore they are the bBreiggest scapegoats. And I think that by removing Jews and erasing our history, it allows it, as you said, to repeat.
So I published an article this week in the wake of a very famous American politician omitting the Jews from the Holocaust narrative by talking about the taxonomy of Holocaust distortion. Where people minimize the Holocaust, where they say the numbers were not as high as they say, or they universalize it as if to say, as you've said, the Roma, gay men, labor leaders, Slavs, Poles, Jehovah's Witnesses, they were also victims. Or worse, inversion, which is what you just talked about, which is the Jews are the new Nazis, which by the way, works very well in Europe because that's an excellent way for contemporary Europeans to erase the burden of guilt that they may or may not have inherited from their grandparents. So it feels to me that when we do this, Jacki, that we are entering a very savage new world of Jew hatred. So where do these distortions fit into the framework of antisemitism?
So the way that antisemitism today is manifesting is in the very nature of information itself.
We're not being told not to believe what we're seeing, what we're being taught is a brand new history that didn't exist before. We're seeing it in academia, we're seeing it in the nonprofit industrial complex, we're certainly seeing it on social media and in AI, where you have the Jews are responsible for the Holocaust, but also the Holocaust didn't exist, but also Hitler is amazing and he should have finished the job, but also only 271,000 Jews were killed. And all of these things exist at the exact same time. And the people that are putting it out there have no problem with the fact that they don't align with each other because it doesn't matter. They want to put out whatever they can in order to change what the status quo is. And the reason why that's dangerous is because you and I grew up in where we knew what the bottom line facts were. We were taught the same things in school. When we had to write a paper, we went to a physical building called a library that had physical books called encyclopedias. We got our baseline information there. And then we started looking at secondary sources, tertiary sources and understanding how information evolved. What's happening today with the manipulation of Wikipedia and how all of these information sources are then feeding social media and online information sources is that what people are being taught from the very beginning has no basis in reality. And yet that's the new status quo. This is so dangerous for Jews, for the Jewish people. And if I may be so bold as to say, the only universalization that people should take from the Holocaust is that what starts with the Jews does not end with the Jews.
This is a very important point. And by the way, I got into an argument that was a foolish thing for me to do with a Holocaust denier. And kids, do not try this at home. It's not worth your time or your energy. It's like what Brett Stephens said at the 92 Street Y the other night. “Here, we don't care. There's some people who are not worth our emotional investment.” And I said, “This is the most documented crime in human history, documented by survivors, documented by their descendants, and documented by the perpetrators themselves.” And I said, “Isn't it interesting that no one ever denies the fact that there was slavery in the United States?”
Right. Now, what they are doing with slavery, is saying that some of the slave owners were good, right? As though you could have that. So you are, again, what starts with the Jews doesn't end with the Jews, but you're right. The way that Jewish history is erased and made acceptable,
it cannot be compared to anything else.
There's something else as well about this universalization of the Holocaust. I wrote about that this week in ReligionNews.com in my column, "Martini Judaism." I have been accused by some Jews of engaging in the macabre game of comparative victimology. Or forgive me, of hogging the Holocaust. It's as if Jews, this is terrible, cannot name their own particularity and believe that in order to sit at the cool kids' table, they have to shed this. I find this problematic. What do you think?
I think that we should follow what Elie Wiesel said about centering Jews, which is that, I am Jewish and therefore, I am going to worry about Jews above and beyond everyone else. And that doesn't mean that I can't have compassion and worry for other horrible things that are happening in this world. And we Jews are our own worst enemies. If we think about the universalization of the Holocaust, which has been so detrimental to Holocaust education, that isn't driven outside of our community. It's driven by our community. And the article that you're speaking about that we published this week, by the way, is written by one of our fabulous, fabulous writers, Ben Freeman. He focused on that. He focused on the fact that Jews need to be comfortable being the center of a horrible thing in history and not having to make our trauma about other people to get them to care. We shouldn't have to say we weren't the only ones murdered, for you to care about learning about it. This is a class, first of all, it is unique in its history of evil, the Holocaust is. And, it is also a case study in what happens to those parts and those elements of society that are not protected when the socioeconomic framework of a country fails. Right? The Holocaust didn't arise out of a wonderful place. It arose out of the fall of democratic Germany, the fall of the Weimar Republic. As the socioeconomic safety net failed, the othering of the Jew got bigger. Again, it didn't start there. It started way earlier.
The immune system crashed.
The what?
The immune system.
The immune system crashed. People didn't have money anymore. There was 4,000% inflation. In order to buy bread, you had to take a barrel full of cash. We don't even use cash anymore, but you have to take a barrel full of cash to the bank and to the grocery store to buy bread. There are things that happen when, like you said, the immune system of a country fails. That's the universalization that we need to be studying, not that Jews weren't the only victims, because the fact is, that, again, as Elie Wiesel taught us, this was the only genocide specifically of the Jewish people, the only targeting of the Jewish people, where you couldn't convert your way out.
If you were Jewish, if you were one quarter Jewish, you were going to the ovens along with everyone else. It doesn't matter if you had been converted to Christianity for a few generations. If they could trace your Judaism, you were going alongside everyone else. There was nothing you could do to escape it. That is not true for any other community. And that's an evil and a hatred that we need to teach because that can rhyme again in the future.
And many people are hearing that rhyme right now.
My friends say to me that when we make the Holocaust more universal and more inclusive,
we're saying that the lessons are more universal and more inclusive. So where is the line between drawing these universal lessons, which by the way, I believe, and I have a list of universal lessons that is actually rather long. What's the boundary between that and the deliberate distortion of history?
I think it all goes back to how we teach it. And it goes back to the Holocaust museums and the Holocaust education that's out there. We get a very limited amount of time to teach Holocaust history, forget to Jewish students, but to Americans, regular community members. Maybe if you're a public school, you get a single field trip. So what do we do? When that happens, we teach concentration camps. And if it's not concentration camps, then it's not, this is what genocide looks like. And we don't teach everything that led up to it, right? The Holocaust did not begin with Auschwitz. The Holocaust did not even begin with World War II. We count the Holocaust as starting in 1933 when Hitler rose to power and within six months had a watertight dictatorship and the first concentration camp, to be fair for political prisoners, but the first concentration camp opened. That's when it happened. That's when Jews started not being allowed to go to school, not being allowed to be teachers anymore. All of these things started early. And that's where our issue comes, because once you understand what the Holocaust was, what discrimination looked like, then it's a lot harder to then take the universalization of those messages and say, the IDF are Nazis, or this person who I don't like is a Nazi, or that person who I don't like is a Nazi, or this horrible war is a genocide. No, you have to understand the totality. And we need to go back to figuring out how to reteach Holocaust education so that it's actually impactful.
It's so important what you're saying. I was having this conversation with someone just the other day. I think part of the challenge here, Jacki, is that too many people look too narrowly at the Holocaust and they look at the camps. And you correctly named very important historical fact, which is that the original occupants of the concentration camps, the original occupants of Dachau, were political prisoners. Mind you, by the way, in a bizarre early form of intersectionality, you had political prisoners who were Jews and were also labor leaders and also gay men. People could occupy, as it were, several categories. But people forget that even before the final solution, even before the conference Wanasee, you had the Holocaust by bullets. You had the mass executions, people digging their grave in the Soviet Union, executed by the Einsatzgruppen. And this happened to no other people.
And the ghettos also, by the way, the war in Gaza, the war with Hamas, has pulled out so many,
antisemitic microaggressions, right? Gaza is this great concentration camp. There are parts of Gaza that no one would want to live in. And there are also beautiful parts of Gaza. There is incredible income disparity that exists there. There was no income disparity that existed in the ghettos.
So important.
Multiple families in single-family apartments. There was disease in the streets, stepping over dead bodies. I mean, the ghettos, you had kids going out and stealing food if they could get out to come back in. And that's before right, the Holocaust by bullets.
And again, all of this came after six years of Jews being shunted out of society.
They were not allowed to take part in society. And everyone likes to say, for 10 years I've been hearing, this reminds me of Germany in 1933. Nothing reminded me of Germany in 1933. I will tell you now I'm starting to get echoes. Echoes… nothing that's saying this is happening, right? I don't think the Holocaust as an industrial, like killing machine is going to repeat itself any time ever, but certainly not in the near future.
But the saying Zionists aren't welcome here. Saying it's okay to have clubs where Zionists aren't here. Things like that, once it's acceptable to take someone out of polite society and make them your scapegoat, bad things tend to follow.
It's a really amazing situation in which we find ourselves. Again, just this past week, someone asked me if I thought that America in 2026 is tantamount to Germany of 1936. And I said, there's one thing that is separating America from Germany. And that is that Americans are responding very differently right now than the way the Germans did. And there's something else as well. I was just talking today to someone who was a professor of German history. And he reminded me of something that should be so clear to everybody. America is a democracy.
And Germany was not, Hungary was not, Poland was not. It had, in these situations, there was a very thin veneer of democracy. What we're experiencing now, while there have been totalitarian impulses in American history, to be sure, what we're experiencing now is a deviation from the norm, which makes that deviation even sharper.
So, you know, that's so important, because people don't think about that, right? I mentioned Weimar Germany before. Weimar was the name of the republic, the democracy that existed in between the two world wars, right? So think that it's 1918 to 1933. That is not a long time. That's less than 20 years that Germany experienced a democracy. Before that, there were kings.
Then before that, you know, they had only become an actual country in 1891, I think. Before that, you had these separate kingdoms. You had Saxony, you had Bavaria. So you didn't have this sense. America's celebrating 250 years of democracy, right? We have a strong emotional connection to democracy. We understand what democracy looks like. Germany did not have that. With Admiral Horthy in Hungary, you did not have that. Across Europe in general, you didn't have that. Democracy was very, very young in most of the countries that it were able to fall to this. And that piece of history is actually really important to understanding why it was so unique at that moment in time, versus anything that could possibly happen in America today.
By the way, since you mentioned the unification of Germany, which happened, I think, in the 1870s, if I remember my 10th grade history well, around the same time.
Was that 1870 or 1891? I always get it confused with Italy.
What's a couple of decades between friends!
But, the point is that neither was there a unified German national identity. There was German language, there was a literature, but the Nazis were able to create a false sense of German unity.
Yes. Again, without going too deep into my historical background, the fact that Prussia was the largest state, it was a very militaristic state, that overwhelmed a lot of the other pieces of Germany that came in and Hitler played to that very much. That's also why they were able to bring Austria into this. There's so many unique elements of what happened that allowed for Hitler to take over and to create this watertight dictatorship. If Russia hadn't had their March and October revolutions at the end of World War I, and the fear of communism that was happening across Europe, there are so many things that had to have come together in order for Hitler to rise. That being said, how we teach what happened and how it happened is so important to it not repeating itself.
So the eyebrow-raising event that happened, let's just name names here, was when Vice President JD Vance avoided mentioning Jews. And just turn this back a little bit. Why did that raise alarm? And it's just one speech. Why does it matter?
So, first I would say that it wasn't just JD Vance. It was the British Royal Family. It was the BBC. There were numerous elected officials in America, on both sides of the aisle, that erased Judaism and Jews from the Holocaust. And there are a couple of problems with that. Everyone listening to this podcast knows that we commemorate the Holocaust Remembrance Day later on in the year, April or May on Yom HaShoah, right? That is when Jews typically do this. This is a day for International Holocaust Remembrance Day, bigger than the Jews, that was only created about 21 years ago by the UN.
Do you know why?
You know, I actually don't tell me.
Yes, I'm gonna tell you.
It was done in order to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet army as a way of exculpating the former Soviet Union from its crimes against the Jewish people.
Of course, but that makes perfect sense, including the timing, perfect sense. Thank you.
So here's my thing about the three remembrance days. I just wrote about it. Kristallnacht is about what they did to us. International Holocaust Remembrance Day is what they did for us. And Yom HaShoah is what we did for ourselves.
That’s beautiful.
Commemorating the Warsaw ghetto uprising, right?
That is beautiful. And with your permission, I'm going to steal that with full credit. I will let everyone know it came from you.
S-A-L-K-I-N. (Laughing)
But, you know, the fact that even though it is meant to be, like you said, this universalization to bring everyone into it, bringing other people in does not mean taking Jews out. So now you have, if people say, millions were killed in the Holocaust, it's bad.
Especially by the way, because Holocaust specifically is the Holocaust of the Jews, right? Genocide is the larger term. Holocaust is the Holocaust of the Jews. So it's bad when they say millions were killed.
No, I know what I hate. I hate the passive language anyway.
Though that's a given. But when they say 6 million people died, there's a famous TV show where they were interviewing a guy who was found with Hitler paraphernalia, World War II paraphernalia. And they wanted to make sure he wasn't a Nazi. So they started asking him questions and they said, what do you think the worst part about World War II was? And he said the millions of people who died said, great, who are those people? Just to check, says, oh, well, 5 million Germans and 6 million Soviets, or I'm getting the numbers wrong, but all these things. And he goes through all of the various people that died in the war, doesn't mention the Jews at all, to which the interviewer then says, I'm adding up the till here and I think you're a couple million short, right? That was a joke five years ago when it aired. Today it is reality. And when the Vice President of the United States, and elected officials in the United States, and the British Royal Family, and the BBC, and other outlets start talking about millions who died without referencing the Jews, when again, it was the final solution to the Jewish question, that is problematic. That goes back to what we were talking about, that there is a new status quo of information that people are learning and it's becoming acceptable to remove Jews from that. And that makes it easier to put us into that category of colonialists, white, and again, I'm not saying white is a bad thing, but in the vernacular of how people speak today, calling Jews white is essentially a slur, putting us into all of those categories that make us the evil villain. And whenever we are made the evil villain, what comes next is we become the victim of something. And the only thing giving me hope that that doesn't happen again, is that with the existence of the State of Israel and the IDF, we are no longer a group of people that history happens to.
We are a group of people that are in control of our own destiny.
So Jacki, let me pick up on something, because you mentioned something when we first started talking, I don't wanna let it slide. Why does this matter so much to you?
So my great uncle, escaped Auschwitz, was a partisan. And I grew up with, I guess a fascination with the time period. I was a history major. I ended up getting my master's degree in the Fall of Weimar Germany and the Rise of Hitler. And my first born son was born on Yom HaShoah and he had his bris on Yom HaAtzmaut. And to me, that is the journey of the Jewish people from victim to victory. And Holocaust history in general, I think it is so important that we honor those who were murdered. They didn't die, right? Every single one of them was murdered. It is a genocide our people still have not recovered from, which is so important for people to know as we throw those words like genocide around.
Gad Saad was on Joe Rogan's podcast and asked him how many Jews do you think there are in the world? And he said a billion, no, you know what? I'm gonna revise that, half a billion.
We are not even where we were in January 1933. That's how much our people were decimated. This is incredibly important to me. And again, I think that 80 years after the Holocaust, we are now understanding and accepting that we didn't get it right when it came to Holocaust education and it is critical to get it right going forward, especially in a post-October 7th world.
Especially in that world. I sometimes mused Jacki that I don't believe that Holocaust education has done anything to ameliorate Jew hatred, but I will say one thing, especially as we look at what's happening in America today, false comparisons, shoddy comparisons, and hearing the echoes. I do think that Holocaust education might have successfully inculcated within people a sense of what an early warning system must look like in order for a nation to protect its democratic institutions. What do you think of that?
I think that's spot on. Look, on the one hand, I will say that having survivors around was the best Holocaust education that we could have had, speaking to those people one-to-one. As they are dying off and the Holocaust becomes something of history, if I remember, my math is right -- right now, the Holocaust is as far away from us, as the Civil War was away from them, when it started, right?
Ancient history, ancient history, and it shouldn't be, because that is the personification of evil, and it's less than 100 years old. So yeah, I agree with you. We did not get Holocaust education, right? And there are still Holocaust museums out there that are getting it wrong. And for me, I have a lot of unpopular opinions. One of mine is, you mentioned Brett Stephens at the 92nd Street Y. I agree with him wholeheartedly that we have to stop worrying about getting beyond the choir and we have to focus on our choir. Where I would take it a step further is that I don't think our Jewish day schools, and I am a paying parent of three children at Jewish day schools, are doing a good enough job doing that education, whether it's Holocaust related, Israel history related, the Palestinian conflict, anything like that. And I think that we have to do a better job preparing our own future leaders with our own history as information is being poisoned, and then they will be the bulwark against everyone else that needs to hear it.
And while you're talking about our young people who are attending Jewish day schools, that is a drop in the communal bucket, realizing that the overwhelming majority of non-orthodox Jewish young people in this country, end their Jewish education sometime around puberty. We are sending kids out into the Jewish world who have not gotten their vaccinations.
Yes, and they don't get it at home. Jeff, you're putting me on the spot. These are all of the opinions that get me in trouble.
Go ahead. Hey, you've got nothing popular to say, say it to me.
And how many of our friends are listening?
Let's compare our battle wounds, come on.
So look, I think I wanna start by saying you can do everything right, and your child can still grow up to have very different beliefs than you and very different values from you, right? So that is a given, and if your child has strayed, that does not mean that you were a bad parent or you did it wrong. That being said, I think that there are a lot of parents who, well, let me say it this way. I have a nine, a seven, and a two. They go to Israel every single year. Every single year, and they went in utero, every single one of them. I want to make sure that my children understand the values. They are in Jewish day school. We are not Orthodox. My children are in Jewish day school. We live in a Jewish community, so that my children can understand, or maybe don't understand, but have the privilege and the luxury of living among other Jews and feeling like a majority, because they won't feel like that for long. There are things that we need to do at home that are uncomfortable conversations that can help make sure that our children are imbued with the values that we have. I never wanted to have a conversation about October 7th with my children, and I had no intention of doing it until I realized that other parents were doing it, and they were gonna hear about it from someone else or from me. And then when we went to Israel after October 7th, and the hostages still weren't home, I couldn't protect them from that. So I took a deep breath, and I leaned into the conversation, and we had a conversation about the bad people that exist out there, and the fact that there were hostages being held, and then we celebrated at home once they came home.
So I think that we need to, we need to invest in our children. Our children are going to be the shining leaders of the future. I have no doubt about it. But we can't rely on other people to do it. We can't say, okay, my kid had their bar mitzvah, then they graduated public school. Now they're on a college campus, and I'm afraid of losing them. So hey, legacy organization that has a student program, why aren't you doing more to make sure that my kid comes to Chabad or goes to your events? Well, because there's only so much people can do on the back end, and there are a lot more that needs to happen on the front end. Again, this is where I get in trouble, because I think a lot of parents are doing really as much as they can, and Jewish education is expensive, and trips to Israel are expensive. But sometimes we have to make value judgments and priorities in our lives, in order to make sure that we are, let's put it this way, every Jewish trip I've ever been on, when you ask the madrich what the point of the trip is, they say to make Jewish babies, right? We have to do everything we can to make sure that we're putting those Jewish babies out into the world and that they will make more Jewish babies.
And what saddens me, Jacki, about what you just said the last 10 seconds, is that in some circles in which I hang out, even the phrase “making more Jewish babies” has become controversial. I once said to a Jewish leader who was offended by this, I said, "We need more Jews." I said, "Either through conversion, adoption, or childbirth. I don't care how we get them, but we need more Jews." What is wrong with this? Unless we are the stamp collecting club, which if it went out of business, no one would really notice.
There is a beauty to being part of this weird and eclectic community, right? How many other communities are there where the jokes are two Jews or two x three opinions? We are a community that thrives on arguing and fighting and trying to use Talmudic logic to become the best and most educated people we can, to not accept any sort of status quo. That's why we excel so much beyond our numbers. And I think you're right, we need more Jewish babies. I will never apologize for saying that. And we need more people in the world who are Jewish adjacent and just think like us, right? Our haters have done a great job of stealing our history and turning it against us, right? Zionist is a bad word now.
They use “goy” against us, as though we're these horribly racist people who talk about “the other” as though that word doesn't exist in every single community, that there is a word for “the other” and it doesn't have to be derogatory, right? But if we have other people who are just thinking around, and by the way, we do have those allies. I will single out Van Jones because he is brilliant. He is, and not just him, but people like that, that just think the way that we do in terms of questioning everything and figuring out how to tikkun olam, right? In the non-bastardization-way of saying that word.
You know, I along with several other alumni of my university formed a group to essentially support Jewish students, staff members and faculty who are experiencing antisemitism on the campus. When we got started, someone joined our group, is very active in that group, and I said to him, "You know, it's great to have you here, but I remember going to college with you decades ago. It was not my experience of you back then that you were Jewish." That's something very powerful, and I've been quoting this all over the country. He said, "Oh, no, I'm not. I'm an Irish Catholic kid who grew up in the Bronx. When I married a Jewish woman, we have Jewish children. What happens to you, happens to me. I am your ally."
Amazing.
And while we talk a lot about the challenges of intermarriage, I certainly did in my career. One of the things that I have come to understand, didn't take me that long, is that when people are part of a Jewish family… look, the Torah portion this week is Yitro…Jethro, the Midianite, father-in-law of Moses. Tomorrow morning, I'm gonna be giving a sermon about it. If you happen to be Wichita, Kansas friends, I’ll be there. And he was an ally. And it's time for us to realize that we have Jews by Velcro, who are part of our extended community. Everyone who's married to a non-Jew, and that non-Jew has a family, those are candidates to be our allies and to carry our story for us.
Yes.
So, I got one last question for you, Jacki. We're in a time machine, we go to 2036.
Okay.
I'm 10 years older, but you're the same age.
Fantastic, I'm loving this already.
Already, it's fantasy, right?
So in media, politics, education, popular culture, what would you like to see Holocaust remembrance look like a decade from now?
I think it needs to be centering Jews, not because Jews need to be the center of everything, and not because there's any sort of hierarchy of horror, but because in the future, in 10 years time, I hope that there has been a great balancing of information and media and news. Right now, what the statistics are telling us is that 93% of all of the information on the internet next year will be false or fake, whether it is AI-generated or something not true. And that is terrifying for the future of democracy, that is terrifying for the future and stability of the Western world. And how goes Western democracy, so goes the Jews.
So in 10 years time, if we are having an honest conversation about what the Holocaust meant and the horrible things that happened around it, where we center the Jewish experience, that will have meant that everything else will have balanced out as well.
We have been hanging out with Jacki Alexander, who is the CEO and president of HonestReporting. Friends, I hope you're all reading HonestReporting. I do, forgive me for using the metaphor, almost religiously, and I've been a fan of Jacki for a long time. So it's been a total gift for me to be able to spend time picking your brain and your soul.
I'm Rabbi Jeff Salkin and this has been TO BE CONTINUED…Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors. This episode is a production of The 2G-3G Project, produced by Eli Hershko, co-directed by our founder, Sheryl Hoffman.
Once again, I'm your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin. Please do us a mitzvah. Give us a five-star rating, wherever you listen to this podcast via Apple, Spotify, YouTube or Audible. And please go one step further and share this podcast, share it to be continued with your friends and family. And if you would like to sponsor an episode, please send us a note to info@ToBeContinuedPodcast.org.
Thank you, friends. We'll see you again with a new episode in March. Thank you very much.
Thank you so much for having me, Jeff. This was great.
I'm your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin. Our guest today is a man who has been described by the New York Times as one of the most influential sons and daughters of survivors. Today we're speaking with Menachem Rosensaft, an attorney, a professor of law, a poet, and one of the most prominent voices of the second generation. He was a founder and first chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. He is general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress, and he has one of the most coveted positions in the Jewish world. He's the past president of a synagogue, the past president of Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City, but the titles, the rest of them, they really don't matter because they don't capture the work he's done or the ground that he stands on.
Menachem was born in the displaced persons camp at Bergen-Belsen in Germany. His parents survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Delsen. His grandparents and his five-and-a-half-year-old brother Benjamin were killed in the gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau. I am a fan of his writing. He is a wonderful poet.
There are several books of poetry. There is the most recent book, Burning Psalms, Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz, and in his poetry, Menachem confronts not only memory and inheritance, but the tender topics of God, faith, anger, and moral responsibility after Auschwitz. He asks what it means to pray when consolation feels impossible and what it means to remember if remembrance does not lead us to act.
And so, this conversation is about trauma, resilience, rage, moral clarity, and the refusal to look away.
Menachem, welcome. It's great to have you.
Jeff, rabbi, thank you very much. Thank you very much for having me and thank you for this most gracious introduction.
Well, we've already said and we know that you were born in the DP camp at Bergen-Belsen a few years after the war ended. But I'd like our listeners to know a little bit more about you, so let's just rewind. Let's go back a few steps. And can you give us some more background on your father's remarkable story of survival and what he did in Germany after the war and who your mother was as a doctor worked for in Auschwitz, and finally how they met exactly 80 years ago in 1946.
Well, they actually met 80 and a half years ago in 1945, a couple of weeks after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen.
Going back a bit…my mother was a dental surgeon. She had studied medicine in France and at Nancy, before the war, and she arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau on the night of August 3rd to 4th, 1943 with her parents, her first husband, and her five-and-a-half-year-old child. They were immediately sent to the gas chambers.
My mother was sent into the camp itself, and there she was assigned by the chief doctor of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele, to work in the camp infirmary. And there she was able to save the lives of countless women by performing rudimentary surgeries, by sending them out of the infirmary, even with high temperature ahead of selections by the SS and the like. I know that not from my mother who rarely spoke about it, but from women who came up to my mother at survivor reunions over the years saying, "Dr. Bimko," my mother's maiden name, "Dr. Bimko, you don't remember me, but you saved my life."
In the fall of 1944, my mother was sent to Bergen-Belsen to set up, with a group of other women, to set up an infirmary there.
And at Bergen-Belsen, she and a group of other women were able to keep 149 children, many of them orphans, alive through the bitter winter of 1944 to 1945 through the liberation, including through a raging typhus epidemic.
At the time of liberation, the British chief doctor of the chief medical officer of the Second Army of the Rhine, Brigadier H.L. Glenn Hughes, appointed my mother to head a team of doctors. There were 20 or 28 doctors and several hundred nurses, nurses meaning individuals who didn't have any medical training, but were strong enough, given the horrific health condition, to work alongside the skeleton British military medical team, to try to keep as many of the desperately ill survivors at Bergen-Belsen alive. And that was what she did for the first two months following liberation. And subsequently, she was the chief witness for the prosecution at the first post-war trial of Nazi war criminals, which was the Belsen trial, for reasons we can go into at greater length if you want. It was just not only the command and the administration of Bergen-Belsen, but many of them had previously been in Auschwitz-Birkenau, so it was really the first Auschwitz trial, as well.
And that was, that's in a nutshell, my mother's background. My father meanwhile had escaped several times from Nazi captivity, including once from a train carrying him, his first wife, and her daughter to Auschwitz. He was able to dive out the window of the train, it was a passenger train, rather than a cattle train that time, into the Vistula River. He was hit by three bullets, was able to get back to the ghetto of his hometown of Benjen, where he was reunited with his father, and he found out that the entire transport, just about, including his wife and his stepdaughter, had been murdered upon arrival in one of the gas chambers.
He then, was at Birkenau, attempted to escape, was caught, was sent to a transfer to a labor camp, escaped again, was caught again, spent about six months in the notorious Block 11, where he was tortured at great length because the Germans wanted him to give up the name of the Polish friend who had hidden him for several weeks, something he refused to do, in which I believe saved his life. Upon liberation at Bergen-Belsen, he emerged as the leader of the Jewish survivors of Bergen-Belsen, and he held that position and was repeatedly elected and re-elected for that position, as well as head of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the British zone of Germany, where Bergen-Belsen was liberated.
And he was in that position from the time of liberation, April of 1945, until the Displaced Persons Camp of Bergen-Belsen was closed in 1950. And during that period, he had numerous, not particularly amicable confrontations, with the British military government over such things as recognition of the Jewish DPs, as Jewish DPs, rather than nationals of their country of origin, insistence on having the human right respected, being one of the witnesses before the Anglo-American Commission and then the UN Committee on Palestine, demanding the right of the DPs to go to Palestine, which the British had kept closed until the establishment of the State of Israel. And so that in a nutshell is the background into which I was born. So, for me, my parents were not just parents, they were role models. They were examples of what one can do and one should aspire to do with one's life if one is given the opportunity.
A remarkable story. You've written, Menachem, that children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors live with ghosts. What or who are those ghosts for you? And when did you first become aware of them?
Well, the first thing many of us, myself included, became aware of, were the absences.
My parents, I had no grandparents. I grew up without grandparents. Other children, classmates in Switzerland, which were where we lived after Germany, and then in the United States when we came when I was 10-years-old, others had grandparents. I didn't.
Parents had siblings. There were uncles and aunts. I had none. Our family was a family of three.
And a child is aware of the absences, is aware of the fact that we are not necessarily the same as other families. And for a child that is not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing, it's just a reality. And as one grows up, as I grew up, I started putting some kind of names and faces and imagined faces to the absent ghosts, as you call them.
I knew that my mother had had a child before the war. I don't remember. I don't remember when and how I knew it. What I found out much later was that my mother actually had a photograph of her son. I'm not quite sure how it survived. It may have been sent to a friend in Palestine who gave it to her after the war, but she had that photograph. And I am quite certain that she looked at it every single day of her life. But I never saw that photograph until I was probably in my teens, because my mother did not want me to feel that I was a replacement, that I was somehow filling a void. And so that little boy whom I knew about but had no image of, and subsequently did have the image, became the preeminent ghost in my life because he never got to be more than five and a half years old. He never got to grow up. And there was always in my imagination, in my thoughts, what would he have done? What could he have done? And then, of course, at a given point, the reality sets in of how he was murdered. And that reality becomes a mainstay of one's rationale, because at that point, the Holocaust is no longer “just”, and I'm using just in quotation marks, it's no longer “just” the annihilation, the mass killing, the genocide of six million. It becomes the deliberate murder of one child, of my brother, and of my grandparents, my mother's parents.
And that personalizes the experience in a way that the abstraction does not. So that's the... And I think that for many children of survivors, the story is not the same but similar. The ghosts, the absent individuals, the absent faces, the absences, the fact that at a Seder or at a celebration, there are very few family members.
For my parents, their friends from the DP camps, their colleagues from the DP camps, became family. And some of my closest friends are the other children who were born in Bergen-Belsen, whom I knew growing up. And we became each other's family because of the absence of the biological families.
As a child, I'm curious, how you experienced your parents' survival? Was it protection? Was it a burden? Was there some kind of an expectation imposed upon you? Well, first of all, I've learned about and knew about the displaced persons camp of Bergen-Belsen, about my birthplace, long before I found out about the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz and the horror that preceded the DP camp. Which is natural because those were effectively adventure stories. They were stories of triumphs. They were stories of how my father managed to circumvent British orders, how people related to each other, and friendships.
And so, in a very strange way, when I found out about the horrors of the Holocaust, I also knew that certainly for my parents, the Holocaust was not the end. This was not a darkness from which there was no escape, there was no coming out of. Which of course there was a darkness for all those who perished. But in a way, I also knew that there was a subsequent chapter to it. And I think that made it not easier, but it made it more processable, if you will, to understand the Holocaust in the context, not just of the life that had existed before, but of the immediate aftermath. And that put it into context. And it also meant that I understood, certainly for myself, from a very early time, that I could not view my parents as victims, because they were not victims. They were role models. They were individuals who had reclaimed not just their identities, but the control of their own lives almost immediately afterwards, and had then contributed tremendously to protecting the other survivors at Bergen-Belsen, to helping forge a political path, which at that stage was a Zionist political path. And that cast the experience, not into a different life, but in context.
One of the things I've always admired about you, since we've known each other, is what seems to be your ability to have taken this experience that you've inherited and to translate that experience into the very thick, complex tests of confronting racism, genocide, and oppression well beyond Jewish history and well beyond the Jews. Am I right in seeing this as a moral inheritance of the Shoah, of the Holocaust? How has that played out for you? You've written that we have no right to criticize the world's silence during the Holocaust unless we get rid of our own silence, unless we fight injustice today. What was the genesis of these convictions in your life?
Well, in large part, it was my parent's example. My parents did not judge people based on their ethnicity or based on their religion, but on what was happening to them and who they were. Empathy and compassion and a willingness to help, was for those who were in need, and not because of who they were. And then, of course, we came to the United States and I had the enormous privilege of growing up in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-Vietnam War Movement and understanding the contemporary realities. And it becomes, you know, you cannot, I cannot, deal with racism emanating from Nazi Germany and then not recognize racism in Selma or Birmingham. They're not comparable, but on the other hand, they are analogous. They are parallel tracks.
I remember the first time when I walked through the permanent exhibition of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, that was in 1993 when the museum was first opened. My mother was a member of the council. She had been a member of President Carter's commission.
I had served on numerous committees, but that was the first time, just when the museum opened when I walked through it. And I remember walking past in the first gallery, artifacts from the 1930s in Nazi Germany. And I remember seeing a sign from clearly a German hotel. It was in German, saying, "Jewish guests are requested to eat their meals in their rooms." And that was clearly at a time when the process of discrimination was ongoing, but clearly German Jews were still able to go to a hotel and stay there, but they were being segregated away from the good German population, good German customers, clients in the hotel. And I remember thinking that this was very much what a colored person, a black person would have found in many parts of the American South.
In the 1950s into the 1960s, the idea of, "You are not welcome here." And that became a guiding principle for me of looking at suffering and looking at discrimination and fighting it regardless of who the victim is, and more importantly, not prioritizing oneself over others.
I'm going to dip my toe into some very hot water right now. We talked about Birmingham. Let's talk about America today. I'm wondering if you sense the echoes. And what are the echoes?
The echoes are frightening. The echoes are frightening on both extremes, on both political extremes. The echoes are frightening in hearing people praise and identify with terrorist organizations, such as Hamas, that want to destroy the State of Israel, and that basically want to eliminate a Jewish presence in Israel in its entirety.
And when you hear calls like "Globalize the Intifada," those have consequences. And they have consequences not just in rhetoric and, quite frankly, not just in encampments on universities that can be controlled. But they have consequences, as we saw recently, at Bondi Beach in Australia. These are very dangerous. And the fact that there are any number of political figures, on the American left, in the party with which I identify, who either espouse it or do not condemn it, is extremely worrisome. At the same time, we have the other extreme, the Tucker Carlsons, the Nick Fuentes, the personalities on the ideological right, who are white supremacists and, effectively, fascists, in the traditional sense of the term. And there are so very few in the Republican Party who have the courage to call them for what they are.
I am not and have not been over the years a particular fan of Senator Ted Cruz. But Senator Ted Cruz has taken the courageous stance of calling them out for what they are, and basically saying they have no place in mainstream politics. Unfortunately, he is rare in that connection. And what is most worrisome to me is that the center seems to be shrinking.
And those political figures whom we need going into the future, of bringing us together and basically bringing us back to a working relationship, with people with whom we do not necessarily agree, are becoming fewer and fewer.
My favorite bookstore in Washington, D.C. is called Politics and Prose. So, if I could start a new bookstore, it would be Politics and Poetry. So, let's move from politics to poetry. You're not only an activist, you're not only a reservoir of memory and memories, but you're a poet and you're a rather good poet. In fact, you'll recall that we did a podcast on Martini Judaism about your most recent book, Burning Songs, Confronting Adonai After Auschwitz. But there was a previous book as well and it's rare, I think, that we can find someone who can combine all of these different aspects of human experience, politics, prose, and poetry. Would you share with us a poem from that previous book?
…which is called Night Fragments and it encapsulates the identity of the children and, to some extent, grandchildren of survivors, but especially the children of survivors.
night fragments created
in fire shadows
we are the last and the first:
the last to taste ashes
from the cursed century valley
of unwilling paths through
where God revealed his face
to them alone;
and the first
transfixed by still burning yesterdays
to reach beyond heaven and its clouds
beyond crimson ghost illusions
into ourselves
imploding
in search of memory.
And it's a poem that I wrote at a given point, saying that we, in turn, need to find the memories. We need to come to terms with the memories that we have inherited. We can't just take them for granted. They are our parents, our grandparents, the survivors' memories. But we have to transfer them into ourselves and then be able to transmit them into the future. And that is a massive task for us because we are at a particularly sensitive moment when the survivors are dwindling from the scene. And we need to make sure that their memories, their collective and individual memories, are made part of our collective consciousness, not just for the second and third generations, but for all of us. But before we go away from poetry, if you'll allow me a second, there was a poem which was in the coda of burning psalms. And it is one which I wrote a year and a half into the Gaza war, or about a year into the Gaza war, when we're already becoming very problematic. And from a human rights perspective, the accusations of genocide were being thrown around. I do not believe that Israel was or is perpetrating a genocide. On the other hand, I do believe that the human rights condition of the Palestinians in Gaza is horrific. And whether or not other crimes were committed in the matter for the courts and historians to determine. But that doesn't take away from the human catastrophe that was taking place.
And so, I wrote a poem which I believe is essential for us in this conversation. It's a poem called "The Child."
murdered children
emaciated children
must awaken us
before it is too late
to who we are
to why we are
The starving child
in the Warsaw ghetto
Bialystok ghetto
Bedzin ghetto
was created
in the same divine image
by the same god
the same Adonai
the same Allah
as the starving child
in Gaza city
Khan Yunis
Rafah
is cried over
with the same tears
by the same God
the same Allah
the Same Adonai
as the dead child
in Kfar Aza
Nahal Oz
Be'eri
The child
Israeli child
Palestinian child
Jewish child
Muslim child
is innocent
always was
always will be
innocent
and it is
for the not yet dead child
Palestinian child
Israeli child
Muslim child
Jewish child
that the killing must end
the war must end
the terror must end
the hatred must end
we cannot erase
the horrors of October 7
we cannot erase
the images of shrouded infants
in the rubble of bombed hospitals
but despite an ending anguish
Adonai's anguish
Allah's anguish
our anguish
Israelis and Palestinians
Muslims and Jews
must now look into the sunrise
to create a beginning of hope
however elusive
if not for themselves
if not for ourselves
then for the child
the Israeli child
the Palestinian child
the Jewish child
the Muslim child.
And as I was writing it, the image I had in my head repeatedly hovering over the writing of that particular poem was the image of my brother. And it was the fact that he was a child just as so many children in this present conflict are in pain, are being killed, are starving, and if we don't do it for political reasons, if we can't get on the same page ideologically, and you know this is not a conversation which we bring in either Israeli or US politics, but at least let's try and get back to some kind of empathy and understanding and feeling for the innocents who are being killed on both sides.
This is as if you were saying that we on both sides are passing a goblet of tears, warm salty tears back and forth to each other, and there is a universality there.
Yes, and we need to be able to recognize that pain. Well, there are two things that are to me critical. One is to feel the pain of the other, and the other, and this is something I have felt, and this is what caused me to get involved. One of the things that caused me to get involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, going back 40 years as an activist, we must stop demonizing each other. Which doesn't mean that there aren't people on both sides who deserve demonization. Hamas deserves demonization. Individuals in Israel such as ministers Ben Gvir and Smotrich deserve demonization. But on the whole, we can't have Jews, Palestinians, Israelis, Zionists, immigrants, migrants, being demonized, and that is what is happening far too frequently, and we must get that control of the dialogue, that control of the rhetoric back, and perhaps get it muted.
Menachem, it's almost as if you're seeing something that I've perceived for much of my life in terms of the trauma response. Among the second-generation survivors whom I've known in my own life, starting with my childhood, I would say that politically and morally, ethically, they fall into two particular camps. One is in speaking of our enemies. The first camp is they should go to hell. The second camp is no one should go to hell. The first camp, of course, is a kind of a belligerent, pugilistic thing that can go through themselves. And the second one, which I think you embody, is no, this experience has taught us empathy. The first group says this experience has taught us how to fight back. And the second group says, yes, that is true, but also a sense of empathy with the others.
Yes, and let me just qualify. The murderers, the killers, they should go to hell, and I am more than happy to help them along the way. You know, they belong in the category of people who, if they are hanging off a cliff by their fingertips, the dilemma is whether to keep walking or to step on their hands. There is nothing redeeming about a Nazi who operated a gas chamber, about a Nazi who herded people into a train or from the train to the selection. And there's no point of talking about redemption. There is no redemption possible for the Hamas killers of October 7. There simply isn't. They were killers, they were rapists, and they are not part of the civilized human family but, the settlers who rampaged through Palestinian villages on the West Bank are in very much the same category. But they are not representative of all the settlers. When you go to Efrat, you have individuals who want to live together with their Palestinian neighbors and who want to have relations and who are looking for a constructive solution to the conflict. And we have to be aware of both sides, but the vast majority are the innocents. They are the ones who did not do anything to anyone. And we simply cannot afford to get ourselves into the rhetoric that you hear far too often, including from some of your colleagues in the rabbinate, in which there is no empathy given to Palestinian civilians, to women, to children. I am horrified when Doctors Without Borders are excluded from Gaza because it means that there will be inevitably, people dying because they're not getting the medical care that is provided by Doctors Without Borders. And the Netanyahu government does not appear to be replacing those NGOs with others who are providing the same humanitarian help.
It is impossible for me to disagree with you there. It's as if you reached into my soul and you're reading it out loud. I want to go back to, well, let's talk about soul for a moment here. You and I have chatted about this and we have said that one of the failures of liturgy, I'm sure at Park Avenue synagogue, as is true in any synagogue that I've served, is that we have not fully admitted the Shoah or anger at God into our liturgy. And by the way, in this sense, we are not true in a Jewish history, because our ancestors in the Middle Ages were quite comfortable admitting their anger at God over the outrages of the Crusades, let us say, into the way they prayed. Why do you think there is still that resistance about admitting anger at God and the totality of the modern experience into how we pray?
Look, there are very few theologians, Jewish theologians, who have actually confronted the problem in a satisfactory way. The God is dead and we have killed him, the Nietzsche approach, exemplified by Richard Rubinstein, is not, it doesn't work. And the problem that we have is that if we were to reflect and express our anger in the liturgy, which is what, as you know, I want to see happen, we also have to call into question the rest of the liturgy. We have to call into question the praise we give to God. If we talk about God as Avinu Malkenu, our parent and our sovereign, and we thank him for inscribing us in the book of life, in the book of health, in the book of sustenance, we also have to recognize that the same Avinu Malkenu, the same parent and sovereign, did not do so, during the years of the Shoah, during the years of the Holocaust. And it's not that we should break relations with God. We don't break relations with a parent, but we confront the parent and we say, "Where were you? What did you do? Why were you absent?" And that is a dimension that I believe is critical if we are to put Holocaust memory, Shoah memory into the consciousness of the Jewish community going forward, because it's not going to come from academic courses at universities. It is not going to come from books and films; however good they are. It is something that has to be part of our intuitive religious liturgical experience. And, that's the task that lies ahead. And, I'm hoping that at some point it will resonate.
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And now back to our insightful conversation with Menachem Rosensaft, a second-generation descendant of Holocaust survivors.
This is To Be Continued. I'm your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin. We're talking with Menachem Rosensaft. Menachem, I'm wondering if you worry, as I worry, about what will happen to Holocaust memory when your generation is gone. What will remain and what responsibility will remain?
We have to transmit it in a format that resonates with today's teenagers, with today's 20- and 30- and 40-year-olds. We cannot convey it, transmit it, in the same way that it was transmitted to us, because they are living a different existence than we did, and we have to give it in a form that will resonate with them. And that includes putting it into the liturgy, as we discussed, in a format that makes them understand when they come to a Shabbat service or a Rosh Hashanah service, that there is something there that they need to think about. There is something there that will cause them to read a book, to read a memoir, to delve deeper into it, because if it's only an academic exercise, then it's not going to make it. It's not going to stand the test of time.
No question. I have two final questions that touch on tender spots. When you think of Benjamin today, and Benjamin would now be in his mid-80s – what do you hope he would understand about the life that you've lived in his shadow?
I would hope that he, just like my parents – my mother died in 1997, my father died in 1975 – I would hope that they would recognize themselves in me. I would hope that they would think that I am carrying on their tradition, and I am hoping that Benjamin would in some way identify with what I have tried to do with the legacy I've received, which includes Benjamin.
The final question. Is there anything you wish that you had asked your parents about their inner lives or their families before the war that you never got around to asking?
Well, actually, yes. My mother died at the age of 85, and she had been ill. She had written her memoir. And yes, there are questions, specific details that I would have liked to have asked her, but I think there was closure. My father died very young, and I never got to ask him a lot of things. We talked about it, but there was always time. He was 64-years-old when he died, and there's an enormous amount that I wish I had had the opportunity to sit and talk to him about, to know more, to know more about his childhood, to know more about some of his experiences during the war and afterwards. But unfortunately, you have to play the card you are dealt. And in this respect, my goal is to make sure that I live a life of which they would be proud.
No doubt you have. This has been such a gift. Thank you, Menachem. Thank you for what you have given all of us and the generations today. We thank you again, our guest and our friend, Menachem Rosensaft.
This episode has been a production of the 2G-3G Project, produced by Eli Hershko, co-directed by our podcast founder, Sheryl Hoffman, and I'm your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin.
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I am your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin.
Our guest is Elizabeth Rosner. She is the acclaimed author of six books, including three novels, two nonfiction books, and a poetry collection, of which all are full or part memoir. Her latest two nonfiction books are Survivor Cafe, The Legacy of Trauma, and The Labyrinth of Memory, and Third Year, Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening. Her essays and poetry have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Elle, Hadassah Magazine, and CNN Opinion, the Forward, and many anthologies, and her works have been translated into twelve languages and have received many literary awards.
In Survivor Cafe, this deeply reflective and poetic work, she confronts what it means to live in the aftermath of the Holocaust, not as a direct witness, but as a child of survivors.
She asks, "How do we carry inherited pain? What role does storytelling play in transforming trauma into meaning? And how can remembering, rather than forgetting, help us heal?"
So, we're going to be talking about the enduring power of memory, the role of narrative and survival and what resilience looks like across generations of Jewish memory and of Jewish identity.
Jewish insights are abundant in her work, and she reminds us of William Faulkner's quote, "The past is never dead.
It's not even past." So welcome, Elizabeth. It's great to have you here.
Thank you, Rabbi. That was a beautiful introduction.
I have to say that I reread your book, Survivor Cafe. I can't begin to tell you how many pages have little post-its in them because there are things that I wanted to remember, and it's a book about the burden and the gift of memory.
And so, you struggle in this book with whether or not you, as a daughter of survivors, and the rest of us who are witnesses to so many survivor stories, have a right to tell their story. So, I'm going to ask that you briefly tell us about your family's story of survival and loss.
Yeah. You know, that could easily take up the entirety of our conversation depending on how much detail I fill in. But I first want to say thank you for having me in this conversation and for giving me the chance to talk about things I care about so much, and that really, as you say, have shaped almost everything about me. I have always felt that the gift slash burden of inheriting my parents' histories is something I think of as a loved obligation, that I recognize it's something I didn't necessarily choose, but that I have come to really honor it as something that really gives shape and purpose to my life. And so, by telling their stories, even in brief snippets like I'll try to do right now, it keeps them alive. They've both passed away. And it also keeps me focused in a way on what I believe is so important about keeping memory in the present, recognizing that it has affected the present and that therefore naming it is just an acknowledgement of what's true.
So, my mother was born in Vilna, which was at the time Lithuania/Poland. It was changing nationalities in some ways throughout its existence. She, in 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland, she was an only child with her parents. They were herded into the Vilna Ghetto, where they remained until just prior to the liquidation of the ghetto, when they were able to arrange to be hidden by a Polish peasant in the countryside outside of the ghetto walls. And they survived the war that way. In 1944, when the Russians liberated Poland, my mother and her parents realized that Poland was still not in any way a safe place to remain as Jews. And so, they made their way, first to Sweden, while they were waiting for visas to come to America. And it was in Sweden, as a refugee, that she actually met my father, whose story goes like this. He was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1929. My mother was born in 1930. My father was the eldest of three children, all born to a German Jewish family that was very assimilated. My father's given name was Karl Heintz. His next brother was named Wolfgang. And the third child was named Helmut, which I think is a really strong...
These are good Jewish names. Good Jewish names.
I mean, it's such an indicator of how his parents felt about being German. They were Jewish, but they really, really felt very Germanically identified. And even though they themselves were not German born, but their sons were. And yet they were divorced in 1936 during the time of the establishment of the Nuremberg Laws. They had a small shop that was repossessed by the Nazis. And my grandmother, who was basically abandoned by my grandfather, who went back to Romania where he was from, and she put the children in an orphanage because she didn't know how to take care of them without any means of support.
The youngest uncle, Helmut, was on a Kindertransport to Sweden. My grandmother somehow managed to smuggle herself into Sweden to be closer to him. And because she thought from there, she'd be able to get her other two sons out of Germany. She was not able to do that in time.
This is such a fast telling of the story, of course, but my father and my other uncle, Wolfgang, were in a Jewish orphanage for a little while. The entire orphanage was deported, except my father and my uncle, who were considered Romanian because of their father. But eventually they too were deported to Buchenwald. My father and my uncle both managed to survive Buchenwald, a year in Buchenwald concentration camp until liberation. They made their way to Sweden. This is where Sweden comes back into the story. And that's where my parents met as teenagers. They were married in Israel. And then they came to the United States where my older sister and I, and my younger brother, were all born and raised.
When I hear your story, Elizabeth, it makes it very clear to me why you use the metaphor of labyrinth.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean...
To talk about memory. Right.
You know, the imagery of the wandering Jew, of course, is, you know, far predates the Holocaust and is all the way back to dispersion and diaspora and, you know, all kinds of labyrinths for Jewish journeying, I think, exist already. But memory itself, you know, each time I tell this story, I'm trying in every way to be faithful to the facts as I know them. And yet even my father, even my mother, as they narrated their stories, there would be slight adjustments, slight modifications every time. And when I was writing Survivor Cafe and I began to really study memory as a subject itself, you know, what are memory studies? What are people who understand the way neurological wiring works? It turns out that every time we retell a story, we are actually rewriting it, even in small, kind of almost molecular ways. And so, it opens this huge, you know, chasm of questions.
How do we know what the true stories are? How do we know what we're holding on to? If not to simply surrender, as I try to do, to being imperfect in the retelling, to accept that this labyrinth, this image, if you've ever walked a labyrinth or really looked at even a visual depiction of a labyrinth, every time we think we're getting closer to the center, we actually may be drifting farther to the outer rim and vice versa. We do the best we can to follow the path, but we do it imperfectly.
It is such a powerful image. So, you actually taught me so much about the dynamics of memory in this book. And I never considered how when we remember and when we tell the story, we become a text. We shape it and we create it. So, I'd like you to share with us a little bit about the difference, if there is one, between personal memory and collective memory. What does that mean?
Such a complicated question, really. And thank you for your kind words about my work. I'm really touched to know that it impacts you the way it does. It means a lot to me.
This morning, I was thinking about the idea of repetition and the importance in Jewish tradition of telling and retelling stories. The Passover Seder is a perfect example of this, but really, the Book of Esther, everything is a text, as you said, including ourselves, including our own lives. And so, the repetition, even when it feels personal, I think is inevitably collective because we are so connected with one another. In literal ways, I am made of my parents' DNA as they were made from their parents' DNA. So, I've got generational cells.
And I want to say that the word epigenetics, which now a lot of people seem to be familiar with in ways that weren't... When Survivor Cafe first came out in 2017, and I would give presentations and talks, and I would ask people, "How many of you are familiar with the word epigenetics?" And very few people would kind of timidly raise their hands. But this idea that memory and the transmission of experience actually is in our bodies, it's not that the DNA itself is changed. Like epigenetics, for some people, makes them think that trauma changes their genes. It's not actually modifying the DNA, but trauma, for example, is modifying the expression of certain parts of our DNA. For example, how we process stress. So, the stress hormone cortisol. Some Holocaust survivors, in fact, probably many Holocaust survivors, their stress system, their adrenal glands, their cortisol production was so massively engaged, sometimes for years on end, that of course it modified their entire nervous system and their physiology.
And it turns out that now we can measure this scientifically, right? Second, third, maybe fourth, we don't even know how many generations later, we are experiencing post-traumatic stress as if we too went through those experiences. We know that we didn't. I know that I was not there physically. As you said earlier, I wasn't even a witness to their experience. I was born 15 years after the end of the war.
But I knew even as a child that there was something about what happened to my parents that lived inside of me. And for a long time, I was told I was just being too sensitive or I had too vivid an imagination or I was making it up. But now science is sort of bearing out what those of us who were that generation after know to be true. We feel it. We sense it. We're hypervigilant. We overreact. We underreact. Some people are just numb. Their cortisol levels don't do anything because they've been so extremely modified. So, it varies from person to person. But getting back to your question about collective memory, that's already collective, right? That's already something that I feel personally, but it refers to an entire generation and multiple generations. And I want to say one other thing, which is this isn't just a Jewish experience. And I spend a lot of time in Survivor Cafe and in fact in all of my work, without comparing and without doing some kind of victim hierarchy or I do believe that it is collective in the human experience. There are other atrocities that we know of in human history that also bear this out. Generational inheritance, generational trauma, generational resilience is true in the African-American community. It's true in the Asian-American community. It's true in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's true in Rwanda. It's true in Cambodia. It's true among all veterans of war and their descendants. This is the human experience.
What's powerful about this is that it plays off of that wonderful line that says that in every generation, everyone must see themselves as if they had gone forth out of Egypt. And now you're making me really understand this in a whole new way. It says, Chayav Adam Lirot et Tatsmo. It says, "The human being must see himself or herself as if they'd gone out of Egypt." It doesn't say the Jew. So, this is now a universal experience, and what you're teaching us has even that much more power. It also, I think, illuminates something else. You mentioned how this plays out in the African-American experience. I don't know to what extent African-American leaders and healers have spoken about the epigenetic effects of slavery and on their being in terms of lynchings, et cetera. But I will say this.
Correct me if I'm wrong. Is this a possible conversation piece that different groups could be having with each other? Is this a topic of dialogue, of how we have braved these straits in our own way, and what can we learn from each other?
Absolutely, yes. The answer I would give is an emphatic yes.
I reference those cultures, those histories, those atrocities in my work because I feel they are part of a big conversation. There are people like Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative that absolutely address this question of how the history of slavery and the history of lynching and the Jim Crow era and segregation, all of those things are carried in the bodies of their descendants, and the bodies of those who witnessed and who lived alongside those experiences.
The collective American experience, which we don't name very often because we have a lot of amnesia, as President Obama famously said, that Americans are famously amnesiac. We have a very hard time acknowledging our own perpetration on the Native American people, the indigenous people of this continent, this country. What we need to do, I believe, is to recognize that these are shared legacies.
These are experiences that don't actually differentiate us. They make us alike.
For example, Ken Burns' recent documentary about America and the Holocaust, he really called out the way that the race laws of the Nazis were imitating American race laws. They were looking at us and seeing what we were doing to dehumanize black people, and they were imitating our horrific white supremacy. It does start in places that you don't think it starts, and then you have to acknowledge the ripple effects that we share. Absolutely, I welcome those dialogues. I think they're hard to have because sometimes people get very possessive of what they consider to be their tribal history, their unique history.
I think what is important to me is to acknowledge the uniqueness of each experience and yet to recognize the echoes, recognize what's familiar and retain your sense of identity. It doesn't have to threaten your sense of self to acknowledge something familiar in the other.
It's not as if memory is a finite resource. It's not as if compassion is a jar of water which, once it's poured out, will not be renewed. I remember years ago I was in a social situation and I met a woman who was of Armenian descent.
I can't begin to tell you how many times I walked through the Armenian Quarter in the old city in Jerusalem, and I said to her, "Ah, you're an Armenian. I'm a Jew. I always felt a kinship,” and she just said, "I know."
In that moment of encounter, what Martin Buber would call the "I thou experience,” our souls were able to touch each other. I know. It didn't even have to be spoken of. I really do believe that we as Jews have a mission to the world. You've really, I think, lifted this up for us already, Elizabeth, which is that it's not only that we need to perpetuate our own memory, but we need to be the technicians of memory for other people to teach them how to remember their own stories, their own narratives. Let me shift, since we're talking about stories, let me shift over into movies.
How have movies shaped our way of experiencing this trauma?
Another tricky question. When I was revising Survivor Cafe, I was doing a word search and I found that the word "complicated" appeared like 87 times in the book. It was incumbent upon me to find some other synonyms for that word and also to recognize that each situation I used that word and I had to carefully consider what did I mean specifically here.
There's a chapter in Survivor Cafe that has the phrase "the paradox of artifice." And I quote Elie Wiesel who said in his usual incredibly eloquent and very succinct way, he said, "A novel about Majdanek is either not a novel or not about Majdanek."
And this pointing to the paradox of how you represent something that is so beyond belief and that you use a fictional device like film, for example, to try and represent something that defies imagination is inevitably, I think, going to fail and yet it has to succeed in some way. It has to succeed by trying to represent and yet also to acknowledge it's always going to fall short. And that's how I feel about all of my writing. I too have tried to write fiction that includes the Holocaust and I struggle all the time with how to honor it, without distorting it, without sentimentalizing or making something even more melodramatic, exploiting this material. So, I've struggled with films like Schindler's List that I think have had a huge impact on people's understanding of the Holocaust emotionally, visually, epically.
And yet it's a movie. It's not a documentary. It's a feature film with distortions and exaggerations and dramatizations.
It's such a rich and important question to ask. And I feel like the more and more we do this, because the farther removed we are from the actual events of the Holocaust, the closer we are to this reinventing of things, the losing of the firsthand witnesses as the survivors themselves pass away. How do we stay authentic? How do we stay true to the facts?
It's a really tricky subject. And I only want to say that really, that I honor the complexity of it and the struggle of it.
I think that in a very lowbrow, let me venture to say almost vulgar way,
whether he knows it or not, that's what Jerry Seinfeld was pointing to in that infamous episode on Seinfeld where he is spotted making out with his girlfriend Rachel in the movie theater during a showing of Schindler's List. And what I always believed to be funny and telling, about that was that his parents were as offended by him making out during a feature film about the Holocaust as if he had been making out at Auschwitz itself, where the representation of this becomes itself wholly.
Oh my gosh. There are so many current echoes of that. I never played Pokémon or really understood what Pokémon Go was about, but they had to put up...
Talk to my grandkids. Talk to my grandkids. Certainly true.
I'll check in with them later. [They apparently…]
Auschwitz, the memorial site at Auschwitz had to put up signs everywhere telling people they could not play Pokémon Go on the grounds of Auschwitz-Birkenau. There are people taking selfies at Auschwitz now. There are people posing, "What do we do with this? What do we do except to acknowledge that our culture is continuously sorting through what's sacred? What's..."
It gets worse. It gets worse. And here's how it gets worse. It gets worse because as people are taking these photographs through AI, they can now manipulate these images. They can distort these images. They can create new images that are fictional.
And that brings in an entirely larger subject, a bulging file folder, of what the ethics of memory and representation really are. I mentioned my grandchildren and how they could tutor you in the artistry of Pokémon, which brings up a really interesting subject. How do we see the language of trauma evolving as we move further away from the events themselves? So, I'm going to ask you, does intergenerational trauma epigenetically have impact on the grandchildren and now, the great-grandchildren of survivors?
Absolutely. In my experience and in the research studies that are continuously appearing, I do believe that each generation is having its own experience. Each generation... Of course, there's so many differences across a generation. I don't mean to generalize even about a single generation, but the first people who were considered to be 2G were the ones born right after the end of World War II.
I mentioned earlier, I was born 15 years after the end of World War II because my parents were actually teenagers at the end of the war.
And yet, I am part of that generation of the ones born after. And by the way, there's even a term for that in Germany, the "nachgeborenen," the ones born after. And we haven't really talked about how these burdens are carried by the descendants of perpetrators, but there's a tremendous parallel there as well. But talking about now the 3G, and my generation now is the 2G generation named that way really because 3G came along and started calling themselves 3G in this abbreviation that seems so kind of clever and strange to me at first.
What I've noticed, and I don't know how many people have written about this, is that it seems like within families, there's often one person who takes on the role of the story keeper, the story teller, the memory keeper. I mean, there are different, you know, the memorial candle, people call that role different things. But I believe that I am that in my family. And I also believe now that my, one of my nephews, I have two nephews and four nieces, of those six, one nephew so far has been that for his generation, my nephew Ezra, my sister's son, he has been trained now as a 3G speaker.
And he was very close to his grandfather, my father. And one of the things I noticed about the differences between him and me is that he created a PowerPoint presentation. He's very tech savvy, you know, he's very interested in this presentational style and he's not a writer, he's a wonderful speaker. So, he has a script and he has a script and he has his PowerPoint. And yet when I talk, I am feeling, I think more, well, first of all, I'm a more spontaneous speaker but also, I think my generation tends to carry more of the, let's say the emotional texture of our parents' experiences. And we felt what they couldn't allow themselves to feel. Whereas the next generation has a little more distance, some of them, some of them are really, really disturbed by hypervigilance and physical ailments of all kinds of nightmares. So again, it varies. But sometimes that distance allows them to kind of hold the story in a more frameable way, like it's a story they're telling, you know? And it's an honoring of their grandparents. But it's also that generation who found, for example, that they could tattoo, some of them have tattooed their grandparents' prison camp numbers. My generation would never have done that. We would never have done that. It would have been too direct a violation of some unwritten or spoken aloud code about, you are not to carry my nightmare on your body, in your body, and yet we did anyway. But the grandchildren could declare it as, yes, this is my way of honoring you, Grandma, or this is my way of showing you I'm never going to forget you, Grandpa. It's a very different approach.
Since we are speaking personally, what has it been for you to bear that trauma in your generation?
You used the word "evolving" earlier, and I do feel like it has evolved for me. I know that when I first started writing my family stories, I was writing fiction and poetry, and I was wrestling with this whole question of, if I'm going to be an artist, if I'm going to be myself, then I have to somehow find my own stories to tell. And yet over time, I gradually understood that this was mine. It was me telling. And so, I became more and more able to embrace it as my own identity, that I wasn't just my parents' daughter, but that I was myself an artist, a writer, a wrestler with history and meaning. Each time I thought I had finished that work by completing a book or completing a cycle of poems, I would find, "Oh, there's another layer, and another layer, and another layer." And I think it has simply deepened for me the mission of it. I think you used that word earlier, that I trust more in what I've been given as a gift, as a beautiful gift.
Which brings me to the beginning of the sounding of the notes of hope. You wrote, "The more I delve into my personal experience, the more I recognize intergenerational reverberations of global violence, persecution, displacement, annihilation, and also resilience."
So, Elizabeth, what does resilience look like to you? Not as a concept, but as a lived daily practice?
Thank you for waiting this long to get to that word and that concept, because I think sometimes, we're overeager. It's understandable, but sometimes I feel we're racing ahead of ourselves to get to the hope part and get to the resilience part. And I am firmly of the belief that we have to really sit with the hard parts first. We really have to sit with pain. We really have to sit with unbearable sorrow, unspeakable loss, the names of people we will never even know how to speak. And that, again, isn't just a Jewish experience, it's a human experience. And so, I've noticed that in speaking about trauma, there's this tendency to want to skip ahead to the healing. And I understand it and I really do respect that longing and that wish, but I think that there's a lot of hard work that has to come first. And the resilience actually only rings true for me because it's hard won, because we had to get there by way of really walking through the desert.
To borrow again this biblical Passover imagery, which is not coincidentally related. What does it mean to endure suffering and feel carved by it, feel really taken down to your bones with it? And then to ask yourself, who are you now? So, losing both of my parents, losing other loved ones, going through, I've had breast cancer twice, I've been through some of my own dark nights of the soul for sure.
To believe that I am who I am now as a more fierce and also more tenderized kind of human being, I think that's a good thing. I wouldn't wish suffering on anyone, but I recognize that suffering is what makes us who we are ultimately. And I don't want to simplify that. I use the image of Kintsugi in the book, as other people are now using too, the image of shattered pottery that has been mended with the seams and the broken places actually highlighted in gold. And it's a beautiful image about how brokenness can still be beautiful because it shows us where we've mended. It shows us that we are put together by glue. We are put together by the work of mending.
But I also discovered later after I published Survivor Cafe, there was a Korean man at one of my presentations who told me that the Japanese shattered Korean pottery when the Japanese invaded Korea in the 1500s or 1600s. I'm sorry, I can't remember. And that image for Koreans is actually an especially painful image because it's a reminder of their stolen art. So, I thought, who am I to borrow that image? But we each get to decide, I guess, what it represents for us. So, for me, resilience represents that I have really looked at the darkness. I have really looked at the sorrow. I have tried in my heart of hearts to bow to what is beyond understanding about what human beings can do to one another. I mean, when I was writing this book, I was steeped in nightmare day after day, genocide stories and images. And I had to take breaks a lot because it was sort of too much to take in. But I wanted to take it in to the point where I could say, I have been with this pain enough to know that I can only just hold so much of it. And then I have to try and also live with joy and live with beauty and live with hope. You know, that really hard, hard to invent word. And yet who would we be without it?
It reminds me of the quote by the late, lamented Leonard Cohen, who I think we must view as a post-Holocaust literary figure, that there's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. And that we are all shattered vessels.
No, I'm sorry to interrupt. It's that same imagery, right? The shattering and the beauty that comes from the brokenness. So, he was getting at that same thing, absolutely yes.
The straight line from the shattering of the primordial vessels, the breaking of the idols by the young Abraham, the shattering of the tablets, the breaking of the glass at Kristallnacht, the shattering of the glass beneath the foot of a person getting married. It all ties in together. So, as we close today's conversation, I keep going back to what you taught me. That memory is not just something that happens in the past. It's really about how we choose to live now. In fact, I would say that in Hebrew, when we deal with this verb zechar, zachar, to remember, it always implies an action that we take. It's not merely a mental experience. It has to do with our passions and our commitments.
And in your writing, you remind us that remembering is also an act of courage and that to tell the story is a form of survival. We carry the stories of our parents and our grandparents and our ancestors and our communities with us.
And what I love about what you have had to teach us today is that we live in a world where amnesia is the cultural illness. We're being taught and urged to forget and to move on, to let it go. And your work calls upon us to pause, to bear witness, to honor, and to keep telling these stories that matter as we're addressing our trauma, but also, yes, our resilience and our hope.
And so, we thank you for your words and your witness and your wisdom. And I'm going to end on this note because when you told us the story of your parents, I remembered what I remembered upon reading your book. You tell the story about how your mother's family was from Vilna, Vilnius, Vilna, however we want to pronounce it, Lithuania, Poland, making a shuttle between those two countries and how they were in the ghetto. And so, I'm going to thank you for a gift that you just gave me personally, whether you know it or not. You see, my family members were also in the Vilna Ghetto and I know for sure that they were victims of the Shoah. And in fact, years ago I found a sketch that a Jew made of a family with my family's last name hanging from gallows in the Vilna Ghetto.
And I haven't really processed it. So, if it is possible for such a thing to occur, what you did in reciting your own memory was that you gave me permission to open the gates of my own. So, it was as if I could tell my family's story through hearing your story. And that's really an amazing gift that we get to give each other.
And that's what we are hoping to do on this podcast, TO BE CONTINUED…Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors. And I'm Rabbi Jeff Salkin.
TO BE CONTINUED is a Blue Jay Atlantic Production, and we give special thanks to our producer, J Woodward and our co-producer Eli Hershko. And you can be part of this transmission of memory, and of resilience, and of hope, by believe it or not, downloading TO BE CONTINUED on Audible, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And you would honor us and those whose stories we try to tell, by doing us a big favor. Leave us a 5-star review. We’ll see you soon everyone, and thank you for being part of TO BE CONTINUED.
Thank you so much Jeff. It’s been a real privilege to speak with you today.
