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Nov. 8, 2013
Scratched, but not broken
Kristallnacht Commemoration features Second Generation talk.
CYNTHIA RAMSAY
“The first reports were bleak and pessimistic,” began Prof. Richard Menkis’ keynote address at the annual community Kristallnacht Commemoration on Nov. 3 at Temple Sholom. “In the mid-1960s, three mental health professionals from Montreal, Vivian Rakoff, J.J. Sigal and N.B. Epstein of the psychiatry department of the Jewish General Hospital, raised concerns about the mental health of the families of concentration camp survivors. They wrote that a quarter of the families they had seen over a two-year period were survivor families and, despite the superficial appearance that all was well, they stated, ‘it usually emerges that there is not only one sick member, but that the family itself is a collection of severely disturbed and traumatized individuals.’”
Fifty years later, though the field of study has grown dramatically, “the popular view of the Second Generation still focuses on its supposed struggle to cope with daily life,” said Menkis, associate professor of medieval and modern Jewish history at the University of British Columbia.
Prof. Chris Friedrichs of UBC’s department of history introduced Menkis, describing him, among other things, as the “heart and soul of Jewish studies at UBC,” noting his role in the expansion of Jewish studies at the university and the thousands of students, Jewish and non-Jewish, Menkis has taught. Friedrichs also pointed to Menkis’ wide-ranging, important body of work and his educational work within the Jewish community.
While Menkis was the keynote speaker, the commemoration presented by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre with Congregation Beth Israel and support from the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver, included brief remarks from Temple Sholom Rabbi Dan Moskovitz, Kristallnacht committee chair Dr. George Bluman, Vancouver Holocaust Centre Society president Ed Lewin and Vancouver councilor Tony Tang, who presented a proclamation from the city recognizing the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht. Beth Israel Cantor Lawrence Szenes-Strauss chanted El Moleh Rachamim and local survivors each lit a candle in memory of all those who perished.
Menkis’ address was both academic and personal. He discussed the Second Generation as a group(s), as well as his own Second Generation story. He noted, “Many of my remarks are relevant for the Third Generation, even if not always explicitly discussed.”
According to an Israeli newspaper article, said Menkis, there are more than 500 studies of the children of Holocaust survivors, making them “the most investigated group in Israel.” The early emphasis on pathology has been challenged, and some studies “have pointed out the dangers in working with just a clinical population.” Menkis gave the example of Sigal who, when he found out that sociologists William Eaton and Morton Weinfeld were going to survey the Montreal Jewish community, asked them to include questions about emotional well-being “to survivors, their children and their grandchildren and to non-survivors and their families.”
Sigal and Weinfeld found no “evidence that [children of survivors] had more difficulty [than the comparison group in] communicating with their parents, with problems of aggression or associated issues of anxiety, with depression, phobias, low self-esteem or psychosomatic complaints....” Added Menkis, “Other studies in Israel have produced similar results. In fact, there has been a tendency to see resilience rather than pathology among children and grandchildren of survivors, and with the survivors themselves.”
Nonetheless, the pathology view persists, and Menkis described his talk as a way of reframing some of this view. “The portrayal of traumatized generations does not do justice to the complex history of the emergence of Second Generation groups and their expressions of commemoration,” he said.
In addition to the aforementioned studies, Menkis noted, “there were groups with other experiences, such as the children of survivors included in a 1965 publication entitled Belsen Youth. The young editor of Belsen Youth was Menachem Rosensaft, who would later become a prominent figure among Second Generation activists.
“Menachem was the child of Josef Rosensaft, who established one of the most prominent survivor organizations, the World Federation of Bergen Belsen survivors. In 1962, Josef Rosensaft and his wife, the equally formidable Dr. Hadassah Rosensaft, invited 145 Belsen children to hold a gathering in Herzlia, Israel. The children had previously taken part in activities of the World Federation, but this was to be their own meeting. Several years later, the Belsen youth decided that they wanted to honor their parents for the 20th anniversary of liberation, that they wanted to ‘pay tribute to them in our own words.’”
Menachem Rosensaft and his friends contacted some 300 Belsen children, explained Menkis. “They received 70 items, and published 26 stories, poems and essays on the Holocaust or the post-Holocaust world. What they said is perhaps less significant than the fact of this group coming together and putting together a document of this sort. Their parents made room for them in their organization, and these children of survivors came together and expressed their reactions.”
Among the contributors was Josef Laufer of Toronto. “In 1965,” said Menkis, “the National Film Board of Canada released the Don Brittain documentary Memorandum, which followed Laufer’s father Bernard back to Europe for a reunion of the Bergen Belsen survivors. But Bernard also brought his son Josef, who travels to Bergen Belsen and to Auschwitz. In the movie, Josef talks about his attitudes towards the Germans and what he has seen. Again, what is perhaps more significant than what Josef says is the fact that he is there, further evidence of family members encouraging their children to confront and express their views, not at all like the representations of the relations between the generations in the clinical reports of the time.”
In the mid-1970s, children of survivors began to organize as groups distinct from their parents’ within the Jewish community, said Menkis. By then, some of the young Jews who had rejected their parents’ suburban religiosity “started moving back towards the Jewish community.... They would join other Jews who, under the impact of rising roots movement, or of multiculturalism in Canada, were more and more likely to define themselves as an ethnic group, and not a religious group.”
Coalescing with these changes in North American Jewish communal identity were other currents of the 1970s, such as feminism, said Menkis. “It is not an accident that the first widespread institutional expression of the Second Generation movement was the encounter group, and that the most prominent figures were women, such as the mental health professionals Eva Fogelman and Bella Savran, and the author Helen Epstein.”
During the 1980s, there was a push for the Second Generation movement to become more involved in the public arena. However, there are implications of moving Holocaust awareness into the public sphere, said Menkis. “When the Holocaust becomes commemorated in a high-profile museum in Washington, when a gathering is organized in the nation’s capital, when the Holocaust is the rationale for policies and advocacy that intersect with national politics, what happens to the immediate, private sense of the Holocaust of the survivors and their families?” he asked.
He praised the issue’s portrayal by Israeli Amir Gutfreund in the novel Shoah Shelanu, Our Holocaust. He also acknowledged that some groups have recognized the “need to keep the memories close to home.” For instance, the “Second Generation group of Winnipeg set for itself, from the outset, the task of recording the stories of survivors and, between 1988 and 1989, interviewed 53 Holocaust survivors. The Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre also addressed the potential loss of intimacy in their remarkable exhibition, Faces of Loss, where local families put up the pictures and stories of their relatives.”
Menkis related to those gathered at Temple Sholom some of what he knew of his parents’ survival story. He said he agrees with anthropologist Carol Kidron's rejection of the notion that children of survivors only learned about the Holocaust because "it was in the air.” In addition to what his parents told him directly, he said, there were other types of communication. “There was the tattoo on my mother’s arm, and I remember talking to my mother about it. I remember the many memorial candles for the dead, lit on the appropriate holidays and on the closest approximation to death dates that they knew. My brothers and I knew that we were named for relatives who had all died between 1942 and 1945, and I remember talking to my parents about whom we were named for.” These and other instances that Menkis shared illustrated his conclusion: “The past was a presence in my house, not completely visible but certainly not completely invisible.”
Referring to the work of sociologist Arlene Stein, Menkis said he appreciated her observation “that members of the Second Generation have stronger and different emotions than other genealogists when they discover family documents. The same holds true for pilgrimages to one’s roots.”
While doing research at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, Menkis was going through letters written to Rabbi Samuel Cass, rabbi at Beth Israel here from 1933-1941, who spent a year in Seattle before joining the Canadian Army, serving as chaplain. After the war, Cass received hundreds of letters from survivors asking for help in finding family members. Among them – one from Menkis’ father, writing that he had just met a woman liberated from Bergen Belsen who was looking for family members in Toronto.
“The woman was my mother,” said Menkis. “I remember just staring at the letter, not wanting to let go of it.”
Menkis also related how, on his first trip to Berlin, several years later, he visited Sachsenhausen. While reading one of the displays, a list “dated less than a week after the outbreak of the war, [it] was an order to round up a number of Berlin Jews who had been born in Eastern Europe, and to bring them to Sachsenhausen. On that list was my paternal grandfather, with the address I had just visited several days before. Never, ever, had I heard from my father any mention that his father had been in Sachsenhausen. I was trying to take a picture of the document when somebody who was on the tour with me, seeing that I was shaking, asked if she could help.
“These were more than genealogical documents for me. Each was an oud mutsal me’esh, a firebrand plucked from the fire. I knew that the first document marked a turning point in the midst of devastation. Each of my parents had learned by then that they had lost family members, but each had also found the person with whom they would build a new life. The letter also spoke to the way in which they were looking from Europe to a new land. The second document’s power was more devastating. When I saw my paternal grandfather’s name on that list, I was aware that it represented a new stage in his suffering. Sachsenhausen is also the last place where I knew he was alive. The ground I was standing on was suddenly transformed into the cemetery of a family member. In addition to taking the picture, I said the memorial prayer.”
Menkis spoke of how these documents not only affected his personal and emotional relationship with the Holocaust, but his research. He had been robotically going through the letters to Cass, yet each was of equal moment to that of his father. “If I write up this material, or if I teach this material,” he said, “my challenge is to acknowledge both the numbers affected, and to infuse them, in my recounting, with the anguish and hope behind those letters.
“But as a historian, I must also draw a line. I am not a witness to the Holocaust. I am a historian who teaches the Holocaust, and researches aspects of it. I am a witness to aspects of the postwar lives of survivors.”
Menkis said that his presentation was “an attempt to take some of the drama and exaggeration out of the study of the Second and Third generations. Any study of the children and grandchildren of survivors must indeed take into account those who sought and found help for deeply experienced trauma. But an emphasis on pathology does a disservice to the history of the Second Generation.”
He noted that an Israeli scholar, “working with a non-clinical group of Israeli children of survivors, noticed how many referred to themselves as srutim, that is, scratched. Not deeply wounded and not intact.... In my case, I would say bruised. As with many other descendants of survivors, I try to work through this pain. In my case, one of my challenges is to work through this pain and to try to become a more sensitive researcher and instructor of Holocaust history.”
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