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January 30, 2023 12:07 pm
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When a Holocaust Survivor’s Memories Strike Her Daughter’s Soul

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avatar by Lucy Lipiner

Opinion

Purim, 1939. Lucy Lipiner and her sister, who also survived the Holocaust, Frieda, are on the far left next to the teacher. Lucy is the one on the far left next to the teacher. Everyone else in the picture were killed in Auschwitz. Photo: provided.

For me, each day is Holocaust Remembrance Day. The memories come to me at night in my dreams, and upon waking, the first blurred images to cross my closed eyes are those of my many aunts, uncles, and little cousins, all murdered in the gas chamber at Auschwitz. During my waking hours, sometimes the sight of a small child holding the hand of her mother brings a collective image to the front of my brain of the 1.5 million children and babies murdered in the Holocaust. Murdered with less compunction than the swatting of a fly.

My daughter Rena was six, and I a young mother of 27, when the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem,” was televised internationally from Israel. Together we watched the slight, balding man with glasses and heavy headphones deny what he had done. Today, I am mortified that I allowed my child to see the trial, and that I answered her questions truthfully. What was I thinking? How could I not have understood that a child’s innocence could not resuscitate itself from such horrific knowledge? And in fact, Rena has spoken of our time watching the Eichmann trial together as a kind of screen memory, a moment when her consciousness of the past as a prelude that impacts the present, was born.

In Rena’s memoir, “A Life Inherited, Unraveling the Trauma of a Second-Generation Holocaust Survivor,” she writes: “The trial seemed to go on forever as survivor after survivor was given the chance to speak, and through testimony, could bear witness and salvage a fistful of justice. From the hours spent in that world, I believed that I had absorbed the whole of Adolf Eichmann much the way the whale had swallowed Jonah. A specific place in my brain seemed to hold the physical and moral embodiment of Eichmann, so that later whenever I thought of the Holocaust, he stood at the gate to that vast, unseen world. His eyes were impassive, seemingly unseeing, and his mouth, set straight, was a black hole that had swallowed six million universes. Eichmann’s expression was devoid of everything, and it was not human, … but because of his and the Nazis’ incompetence, my parents had survived, and my brother and I had been born. This is what I knew then, at six.”

I did not know how to hide my story from my daughter; it did not occur to me that it should have been concealed or at least revealed when she could better understand and assimilate it. There was a particular story I told Rena, more than once, about how my own mother would push her bread rations into my hands, telling me she was not hungry.

Rena writes: “Whenever my mother told me this story — I cannot remember a time when the stories were new, when I had not known everything, when the life my parents had lived was not my everything — her eyes would flood instantly. She was helpless to control tears that came from the place that had only ever held her mother. ‘How could I possibly take my mother’s piece of bread if I thought she was hungry?’ she asked me, her eyes widening at my obtuseness. ‘I had to believe her!’”

Many years later, Rena told me how she wondered as an adult how I might have diverged from the person I was had I not lived the Holocaust. She spoke empathically, but analytically, about how the emotional apparatus I needed to endure the war, and later mother her, had to form and reform.

I have come to understand in this light that both through nurture and nature, the Holocaust has gone on to affect the descendants of the survivors, often endowing them with a legacy of pain and inconsolable loss. It is with great sorrow that I have seen my daughter bear that burden, mothering her own children with heightened fear and anxiety. She knows that the most unlikely and impossible to imagine events have happened and can happen again. Snaking through the generations like the siren that wails throughout Israel each year on Holocaust Remembrance Day, and every day we think about the Holocaust, the impact on humanity of children never to be born is incalculable.

It is to this end that we remember, some of us every day, others less frequently, but remember we must, and treasure the state of Israel, our ancient homeland that affirms with its very existence: Never Again.

Purim, 1939 Lucy and her sister, who also survived the Holocaust, Frieda, are on the far left next to the teacher. Lucy is the one on the far left next to the teacher. Everyone else in the picture were killed in Auschwitz.

Lucy Lipiner is an 89-year-old Holocaust survivor and a social media content creator with the Tel Aviv Institute. Her story is told in her memoir, “Long Journey Home, A Young Girl’s Memoir of Surviving the Holocaust.”

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