Children of Holocaust Survivors

SE was born in Munich in 1946, the only child of two Holocaust survivors, who married after a chance meeting on a train when both were travelling after their liberation to their respective home towns. His father had survived the Lodz ghetto and incarceration in the Czestochowa labor camp but lost his entire family. His mother, a native of Bedzin was taken to one of the Gross-Rosen subcamps working there as a seamstress until the end of the war. In 1949 the family immigrated to Kansas City, Missouri sponsored by a great uncle, who had settled there many years previously. His mother found work early on, using her sewing skills; his father, physically frail for the rest of his life, started a laundry and dry-cleaning business, but made only a modest living. Their social milieu consisted of other survivors and Yiddish was spoken most of the time. Distrust of non-Jews was often expressed. The recurring theme of the interview is one of non-communication and of the wide acculturation gap between him and his parents. SE's parents never told him about their experiences and he grew up knowing nothing of their suffering and little about his relatives who had perished. He accepted that they came from an entirely different, non-American world and therefore had nothing in common with him. He recalls sensitive episodes and sometimes inexplicably angry reactions to things he said or did. He also began to reject what he saw as their bourgeois and materialistic values, leaving home at the age of 17 to study psychology at Purdue University and Indiana Universities. ; Both parents had had religious upbringings but after the Holocaust were no longer observant. They were however affiliated to a synagogue in Kansas City and his mother was concerned that he should have some Jewish education. SE came increasingly religious during his adolescence. Although he claims not to have been a Zionist, he nevertheless immigrated to Israel in 1971, where he married and had three children. Until his recent retirement he worked as head of the Research Department of the Ministry of Welfare. After his father's death, SE's mother made aliyah where she enjoyed a much closer relationship with her grandchildren. She spoke about her war experiences in particular with her granddaughter, who also works at Yad Vashem. SE's late knowledge and understanding of the past is chiefly the result of his daughter's rapport with her grandmother, and of his decision to visit Poland to discover more about his family, made only after his children had been there. Looking back he makes it clear that he had to rely on himself to make his way in the world. In this interview he considers, perhaps for the first time, the impact of his upbringing on his later life and on his own role as a parent. A postscript written by SE about his mother, who is still alive, though suffering from Alzheimer's, is attached to the transcipt