Children of Holocaust Survivors Come to Israel to Share Feelings

Rosie, an Australian woman in her mid-30s, told her parents she was visiting Israel this week but did not tell them why.

“It would only upset them if I told them the truth,” she said.

The truth is that Rosie was attending the second International Conference of Children of Holocaust Survivors.

The four-day conference, held July 6-9, addressed many issues through a series of workshops and seminars, among them how to best educate the younger generation, and how to fight present-day anti-Semitism.

Perhaps even more important, the participants came here to share their own unique feelings and experiences.

For more than a decade, mental-health professionals have acknowledged that many children of Holocaust survivors suffer from emotional problems associated with their parents’ experiences during the war.

Known as “Child of Survivors Syndrome,” the list of “symptoms” is long but varied. Many of the children felt they had to be perfect, so as not to hurt their already suffering parents. Most were overprotected by their parents, who had lost the rest of their loved ones. Almost all yearned to ask about the past but were afraid to hear the answers.

The result has been a generation of overachieving children, now in their 30s and 40s, who suffer the effects of the Holocaust without having lived through it.

PARENTS WILL NOT DISCUSS THE PAST

“Being a child of a Holocaust survivor isn’t easy,” said Rosie. “My parents will not discuss their past, so I feel that I am also missing a past. I came to this conference to meet other people in the same situation. In some ways, I think we are all looking for our identities.”

Ellie, who immigrated to Israel from the United States many years ago, remembers that “there was always a sense that my siblings and I were different. We always felt apart from the American Jews who didn’t go through the Holocaust.

“We and our parents had a mutual, unspoken agreement never to bring up the past,” she said, “and the house felt like it was full of ghosts. There was a sense of suffering at home, perhaps because my parents felt guilty for surviving when their families hadn’t.”

She recalled feeling “that we weren’t supposed to enjoy ourselves. Unlike my friends’ folks, my parents almost never went to a restaurant, to a movie or on vacation. They were terribly overprotective, perhaps because we were all they had.”

Ellie’s own children, she said, have been affected by their grandparents’ experiences 50 years ago. “One day my Israeli-born son said to me, ‘Mom, if we were living during the Holocaust, you would give me your last piece of bread, and I would give it back to you.’ “

Her children, said Ellie, have also served as a bridge between the generations. “My son persuaded my mother to sit down before a tape recorder so he could hear her experiences. They sat together for four hours,” she said.