If your parent, grandparent, or other family member was a Holocaust survivor, you may not know much about your family history. Maybe you feel guilty for not asking more questions when you had the chance. But honestly, even if you had asked, they probably wouldn’t have answered. The only way they could move forward after the war was by keeping their past in the past.
While they may not have been able to discuss their history, you can. You can have answers when your kids ask you about your family’s past. But how?
Growing up with silence is part of your family story. Finding the words to talk about the silence is where your story begins.
5 Reasons Why Your Holocaust Survivor Family Member Was Silent About Their Past
While every survivor’s experience is unique, there were historical and emotional forces in the postwar period that made it especially hard for many Holocaust survivors to share their experiences with their children and grandchildren. Here are five reasons why many Holocaust survivors were silent about their past.
We help children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors write short, meaningful family stories with wisdom and compassion. Book a call with Jill and start writing your family story today.
1. Talking Was Taboo, and the Words Weren’t There Yet
It may seem today like every Holocaust survivor told their story on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, in classrooms for educational purposes, or recorded testimonies. But most never spoke publicly, and many remained silent at home.
As historian Tom Segev explained, “Until 1961, the Holocaust was largely a taboo. Parents wouldn’t talk to their children. Children wouldn’t dare ask.”
On April 11, 1961, the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann was aired on the radio and TV. The trial included testimony from survivors, and as they shared their stories, some survivors began to talk about theirs, too. Sixteen years after the war ended, the events of the Holocaust started to enter the public consciousness.
Widespread Use of the Word “Holocaust”
The very words we now take for granted to talk about the war didn’t exist for decades. Now, just saying the word “Holocaust” brings to mind a basic understanding of the loss and suffering without the need to provide a lot of detail. But that wasn’t always the case.
Surprisingly, the word “Holocaust” didn’t enter widespread usage until the late 1970s, more than thirty years after the war. In 1978, 120 million people watched the NBC miniseries “Holocaust.” The series gave the American public a name and face for the wartime events.
The following year, Helen Epstein’s groundbreaking book Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors gave the Second Generation (2Gs) their first words to break the silence and talk about what it was like to grow up with traumatized parents. Epstein, the daughter of two survivors, wrote, “I set out to find a group of people who, like me, were possessed by a history they had never lived.”
It wasn’t until April 1994, nearly fifty years after the war, that the USC Shoah Foundation began recording Holocaust survivor testimonies. They recorded 55,000 testimonies (often referred to as “Shoah tapes”) on videotape. But still, most stories remain untold; 3.5 million European Jews survived the war.
It took decades for Holocaust survivors, their families, and the public to find the words. Silence reflected the culture around them and was also a survival strategy for the postwar years.
2. Silence Helped Holocaust Survivors Survive…Again
Many Holocaust survivors packed their traumatic past away deep inside so they could move forward to create a life after the war. It was essentially a second survival. Their silence wasn’t secrecy, but a necessary coping mechanism.
Scarce understanding and support for trauma
Holocaust survivor Leo Bretholz explains,
“There was no psychologist, there was no social worker. Today, when you have a stress syndrome after an event—a plane crash, big fire, shooting in a school—the psychologists, psychiatrists, and counselors are immediately there to tell you what to do to make it easier to cope. But we didn’t have that.”
In the 1940s and 50s, few people understood what psychological trauma was. Today, it is obvious that Holocaust survivors needed the kind of emotional support Bretholz describes, but most never received it.
They Faced Survivor’s Guilt, Shame, and blame
On top of this lack of support, many Holocaust survivors didn’t feel proud to have survived. Instead, they often carried survivors’ guilt, which is not a guilt that comes from doing something wrong, but a guilt that arises from living. They felt shame and even blame from other Jews who asked: “How did you let this happen to you, like a sheep to the slaughter?”
They Were Still fighting to Survive
And yet, even those in a loving, supportive postwar environment often found it too painful to discuss what they had endured. After the war, survivors had lost family members and faced life in a new country, with a new language and no resources. They had to rebuild everything from nothing. But silence wasn’t only about coping; it was also about protecting the next generation.
3. Holocaust Survivors Wanted to Protect Their Children
Many Holocaust survivors wanted to give their children what they themselves had been denied: safety, education, security, and belonging. That meant a nice home, a good community, access to education, and financial stability. To them, America was the goldene medina. Stories of loss and terror had no place in the life they were building for their children.
they tried, but silence couldn’t erase the past
As one child of a Holocaust survivor recalled,
“The parents of the ‘second generation’ could not bear to look back into that vale of tears. ‘We are doing it for the children,’ I can hear them reassuring each other, excusing their silence. But the children understood that they were different, saw their mothers weep, their fathers’ averted gaze, and knew not to ask.”
Intergenerational Trauma: Holocaust history passed through dna
For many families, the trauma showed up in unspoken ways. Survivors had nightmares, depression, or unusual concerns about food. Science now confirms what children of Holocaust survivors always sensed: their family’s Holocaust history didn’t disappear in the silence. Stress and trauma can leave biological imprints passed down through DNA, according to research on intergenerational trauma and epigenetics by Dr. Rachel Yehuda.
They had good intentions for staying silent, but unfortunately, that silence often made the inherited trauma worse. And for some Holocaust survivors, the silence was less about survival or protection and more about not seeing themselves as survivors at all.
4. Some Didn’t Consider Themselves “Holocaust Survivors”
For decades after the war, a (mostly) unspoken hierarchy of suffering emerged among European Jewish immigrants. It went like this: those who endured ghettos, concentration camps, or fought in the resistance were considered “Holocaust survivors.” Those who spent the war in hiding or who emigrated in the 1930s before the deportations were not.
Felice’s story shows how deeply this hierarchy shaped identity. A French family hid baby Felice during the war. Meanwhile, the Nazis murdered her parents in Auschwitz, and Nazi forces killed the rest of her family. After the war, she lived in a series of orphanages. And still Felice said, “I’m not a survivor. I didn’t go through a camp.” In time, Felice was able to say she was a survivor “in her own way” because everyone in her family perished, but many who hid or emigrated could not.The Definition of a Holocaust Survivor
Today, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum defines a “Holocaust survivor” broadly to include any person, Jewish or non-Jewish, who was
“displaced, persecuted, or discriminated against due to the racial, religious, ethnic, social, and political policies of the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945. In addition to former inmates of concentration camps, ghettos, and prisons, this definition includes, among others, people who were refugees or were in hiding.”
Children and grandchildren may be the first to use “Holocaust survivor” to describe their family member. Framing your family member’s identity in this way enables you to bring compassion to their hardships, something they may not have been able to give themselves. It may also provide you with a framework to understand your family better.
There was another group of Holocaust survivors whose silence wasn’t about survivor identity, but their hidden Jewish identity.
5. Some Holocaust Survivors Hid Their Jewish Identity
Some Holocaust survivors adopted a non-Jewish identity during the war, and for them, their silence was about never revealing that. If they had non-Jewish features (blond hair and blue eyes), they might have passed as a non-Jew during the war. They did this by purchasing counterfeit identity papers, moving to a new town, and praying no one would catch on.
Children Separated From Their Families and Their Religion
Some parents sent their Jewish children on the Kindertransport to England, through the Hollandse Schouwburg in Holland, or to live with a Christian family. More often than not, the children never saw their parents again. After the war, some of these Jewish children continued living with their adopted Christian families or in Christian orphanages.
Allan Rayburn wrote his father’s story and said “It was one of the most important things I’ve done in my life.” Read more in Writing His Father’s Story Put His Life in Perspective.
When these Jewish children grew up and had children of their own, they may not have revealed to their children or grandchildren that they were Holocaust survivors or that they were born Jewish due to a variety of confusing and conflicting emotions. They may have felt guilt for not retaining their Jewish identity (after all, their parents died for it), curiosity about it since they never got to learn as a child, and appreciation for their Christian caregivers who had risked their lives to raise them. Naturally, it was easier to continue with their new identity and never speak about their frightening past.
Many well-known people have a hidden Holocaust past. Raised as a Catholic, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright shared her hidden Jewish and Holocaust family history just before she was sworn in as U.S. Secretary of State. Playwright Tom Stoppard told the story of his discovery of his Jewish and Holocaust history in the Tony Award-winning play Leopoldstadt. There is also a generation of Jews in Poland now who were raised Catholic and are now finding out from their grandparents that they were Jewish.
Children and Grandchildren Can Break the Silence
Silence was necessary for the Holocaust survivors, but later generations can tell the stories and honor their family’s past. As Adam Ganz , the child of a Holocaust survivor, said:
“Silence seemed to be the only way to express the immensity of what had happened…but it doesn’t communicate. It isolates further…Breaking the silence isn’t the end, it’s the beginning.”
Let’s write your family story together. We help children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors write short, meaningful family stories with wisdom and compassion. Book a call with Jill and start your family story today.
