"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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

Thank you, friends. We'll see you again with a new episode in March. Thank you very much.

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.

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? 

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

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

and it is

we cannot erase

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.

We'll be right back. And now an important message from the sponsor of today's episode.

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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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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?

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.

Thank you, and with you.