5 Reasons Why Holocaust Survivors Were Silent About the Past

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

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 even if you had asked, they probably wouldn’t have answered. For many Holocaust survivors, silence was a way to move forward after the war. 

Their silence is part of your family history. Understanding that silence can help you find words for their story, and yours.

Growing up with silence is part of your family story. Finding the words to talk about that silence is where the story begins.

Understanding Holocaust Survivors’ Silence

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 silence is so common in survivor families.

1. Talking Was Taboo, and the Words Weren’t There Yet

It may seem today like personal Holocaust survivor stories are everywhere. Fewer are shared in person than they once were, but many live on through video. They are shared on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, taught in classrooms, and preserved in recorded testimonies. But most survivors never spoke publicly, and silence was also the norm 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 survivor testimony, and as those voices entered public life, other survivors began to talk about their experiences, too. Sixteen years after the war ended, 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. Today, 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. Holocaust survivors’ 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 and build a life after the war. It was, in many ways, a second survival. Holocaust survivors’ silence wasn’t secrecy; it was a necessary coping mechanism.

Scarce understanding and support for trauma

Few Holocaust survivors received postwar trauma support. As 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.” -Leo Bretholz

In the 1940s and 50s, few people understood psychological trauma. Today, it’s clear 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 that lack of support, many Holocaust survivors didn’t feel proud to have survived. Instead, they often carried survivors’ guilt, not because they had done something wrong, but because they were alive when others in their family were not. Some also 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

Even in a loving, supportive postwar environment, many survivors found it too painful to revisit what they had endured. They had lost family members and faced life in a new country, with a new language and few 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 Merilyn Moos, whose parents were survivors, wrote:

“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.” -Merilyn Moos

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. Research supports what many children of Holocaust survivors already know: 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 their silence often made the inherited trauma worse.

However, for some Holocaust survivors, 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 many European Jews who emigrated to the U.S. 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 Felice as a baby during the war. Meanwhile, the Nazis murdered her parents in Auschwitz-Birkenau, 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 can also give you a framework for understanding your family.

And yet, for some Holocaust survivors, silence wasn’t only about trauma. It was also tied to a hidden Jewish identity.

5. Some Holocaust Survivors Hid Their Jewish Identity

Some Holocaust survivors adopted a non-Jewish identity during the war. For them, silence was about never revealing that hidden identity. If they had features that drew less suspicion (such as blond hair and blue eyes), they might have passed as non-Jewish. 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 the Netherlands, 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 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 even that they were born Jewish. The reasons were often complicated. 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 deep gratitude toward Christian caregivers who had risked their lives to protect them. For many, it felt easier and safer to keep living inside the identity they had adopted and remain silent about their frightening past. 

Many well-known people have described discovering a hidden Holocaust past later in life. Raised as a Catholic, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright learned of her Jewish family history just before she was sworn in. Playwright Tom Stoppard told the story of uncovering his Jewish family history in the Tony Award-winning play Leopoldstadt. There is also a generation of Jews in Poland who were raised Catholic and are now learning from grandparents that they were Jewish.

Children and Grandchildren Can Break the Silence

For many Holocaust survivors, silence made life after the war possible. But it also shaped the families they built. Later generations can carry the story forward with compassion and honesty. And often, it begins by finding words for the silence you know so well.

Adam Ganz, grandson of a Holocaust survivor, wrote that the silence “which each Second Generation family knows” seemed to be “the only way to express the immensity of what had happened.” And yet:

“Silence doesn’t communicate. It isolates further….If speaking is to take on the same specificity and eloquence as the silence, then breaking the silence isn’t the end, it’s the beginning.” -Adam Ganz

We help children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors write short, meaningful family stories with wisdom and compassion. If you’d like support, book a call with me. We’ll talk through what you know and where to start. 

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Photo credits: Hero image: Sasha Mateeva (Unsplash). Inline image: Lauren Mitchell (Unsplash).