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September 13, 2002
Parents filled with pain
An upcoming 11-part TV series explores the family life of Holocaust
survivors.
PAT JOHNSON REPORTER
Daniel Leipnik is the grandson of Holocaust survivors on both his
maternal and paternal sides. He has seen in the pain of his grandparents
the terrible legacy borne by survivors. But he has also seen close
up another legacy – the effects on parent-child relations in
the immediate families of survivors and, now, in members of the
third generation, to which he himself belongs.
Leipnik was born into this troubling, emotional terrain and now,
as a filmmaker, he has created a monumental documentary series on
the subject. The series chronicles 11 families who have struggled
to assimilate the scars left on those who lived through the horrors
of the Nazi regime and to come to terms with the way the survivors
raised their families. It begins this month on television stations
available in the Lower Mainland.
The filmmaker, a native Australian (his mother is Canadian), is
now based in Vancouver and is developing a successful career in
the local production industry with his firm, Vibrance Alive Entertainment.
The Holocaust series, My Mother, My Hero, is a deeply personal
testament. He has included in the program interviews with his mother,
Norma, and her mother. Leipnik's grandmother passed away just weeks
after the filming.
In the series, Leipnik's mother explains how she always struggled
to provide in her mother's life something irreplaceable that the
Nazis had taken away.
"I almost felt like I had a debt to pay," she said. On
the other hand, Norma Leipnik held her mother in awe, never fully
aware of what her mother had gone through early in life. The series
title comes from one of her comments.
"My mother is my hero because she set me an example,"
she said. Faced with unimaginable setbacks, Norma's mother, Michelle,
survived, successfully raised a family and made the most of her
remaining years.
Though every Holocaust story is different, Leipnik said his exploration
has shown some common threads. An aspect of his own family's story
that is similar to those of others is that his grandmother imparted
things to him that she never shared with her own daughter. It has
been common, Leipnik said, for survivors to keep their Holocaust
experiences from their own children but – whether because time
has made it easier to discuss or because advancing age makes the
act more urgent – many survivors share stories with their grandchildren
that they withheld from their children. In Leipnik's case, one of
his first memories is of his grandmother explaining, in a manner
a child could understand, that almost all of his family had been
killed barely two generations earlier.
Asking anyone to comment on how they succeeded or failed as a parent
is challenging enough, but asking a Holocaust survivor invites particular
difficulties. In many cases, survivors had their parenting role
models ripped away from them and were at the mercy of Nazis and
the culture of concentration camps during their formative years.
But Leipnik asked aging parents and adult children to discuss their
family structures. The filmmaker appreciates that some people, like
his grandmother, became parents within a few short years of liberation,
barely having time to absorb the events that would imprint their
lives forever before being overwhelmed with diapers and midnight
feedings. Leipnik said some survivors, when asked if they were good
parents, respond with a variation of "We did what we could."
Having gone through more than any human should endure, many survivors
have apparently denied that the terror they endured had a significant
effect on their later relations with their children. On more than
one occasion, Leipnik heard parents direct blame for relationship
problems elsewhere. "She was a difficult child," said
one parent.
Leipnik thinks his own experience was pivotal in the success of
the television series. Survivors and their families tend to open
up once they know Leipnik's own family history. He is far enough
removed to be a relative stranger, but close enough to the larger
issue to understand the nuances, although he admits he was not the
dispassionate interviewer, frequently sharing tears with his interview
subjects.
Being careful not to generalize, Leipnik noted that there are some
recurring themes in the parenting practices of Holocaust survivors
– far from all of them detrimental.
There is a definite bent to overprotectiveness, obsessiveness with
food that sometimes leads to eating disorders in the second generation,
and sometimes an innate mistrust of non-Jews. The Jewish emphasis
on marrying other Jews is telescoped in survivor families by both
a distrust of outsiders and the imperative of both literal and figurative
Jewish survival, said Leipnik. Some households have what Leipnik
refers to as a "curfew on joy" – a limit on the amount
of happiness they feel they are allowed to experience. And some
adults are scared to socialize, depriving the next generation of
standard models of integrating into society.
On the other hand, the survivors have frequently inculcated in their
children the very traits that helped them survive: expertise in
a useful field of endeavor, hard work and seemingly superhuman tenacity.
Of the 11 families presented in the series, five are from Vancouver.
The intimate family stories are gently interspersed with expert
commentary from some faces familiar to Bulletin readers,
including Dr. Robert Krell, Prof. Chris Friedrichs, Prof. Richard
Menkis and Dr. Aline Wydre.
My Mother, My Hero runs Sundays at both 9 a.m. and 9 p.m., beginning
Sept. 22 through December, on Shaw Multicultural (Channel 20 in
Vancouver; check local listings in other areas) and Delta Cable
(Channel 51).
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