For my PhD dissertation, I have been conducting oral history interviews with grandchildren of Jewish Holocaust survivors in the United States and Germany since July 2023 with the goal of understanding how survivors and their grandchildren tell and retell stories about the Holocaust. Especially in the United States, grandchildren of survivors are typically studied based on their cultural output – that is, their memoirs, fictional novels, graphic novels, films, artworks, and the like.[1] My focus on examining grandchildren’s stories based on interviews complements this approach because, in part, in an interview, grandchildren typically do not rely on such imaginative storytelling techniques.[2]
Here, I will discuss an interview I conducted with Howard, an American grandchild of a Shoah survivor, in September 2023.[3] In particular, I will focus on a story Howard told about his grandmother Lea’s Holocaust-era romantic relationship – a topic that is often marginalized in Holocaust narratives.[4] Lea initially did not tell Howard about this relationship but eventually shared more about it over time. Analyzing this story gives a sense of what topics related to their Holocaust experiences survivors do and do not discuss with their grandchildren, how grandchildren can bring to light topics that had been previously obscured, and what kinds of ethical questions this process of retelling raises. Ultimately, it urges us to ask how grandchildren can and should be involved in the preservation and publicization of their grandparents’ Holocaust stories.
Storytelling in Survivor Families
Before delving into Howard’s story, it’s useful to consider how we can study storytelling in survivor families. It’s possible to examine the transmission of stories from survivors to their grandchildren from the perspective of either party. We can ask why survivors chose to be open about or silent on certain topics at certain times and how grandchildren receive, process, and in some cases, give voice to these silences. Though it’s been shown that survivors talked about their Holocaust experiences during and immediately after the war, they have still tended to avoid telling their grandchildren about experiences that seemed shameful, embarrassing, or particularly difficult to explain to those who were not survivors.[5] These experiences include romantic relationships, sexual violence, torture they were subjected to, “collaboration” or “cooperation” with the Nazis, and mental health struggles.[6] In the United States, this has often been the case because such topics were marginalized in public Holocaust remembrance and narratives over time.[7] As a result, survivors felt like they could not discuss them – publicly or with their families – and because of this situation, these topics came to be deemed taboo.[8]
Grandchildren also often grapple with gaps in their knowledge about the Holocaust. This is in part because they did not usually learn about taboo topics from survivors or in other contexts. But in a more general sense, many grandchildren feel like they received only fragments of their survivor-grandparents’ stories. A common refrain I’ve heard from grandchildren in interviews is that they only know “bits and pieces” of their grandparents’ pasts.[9] Scholars have noted this fact and have explained that grandchildren of survivors, much like children of survivors, typically realize that there is a limit to what they can learn from their grandparents and from archival research. As a result, they face a choice: to narrate and describe the nature of the silences and how they feel about lacking this information or to fill in the silences in with fictional and fantastical narratives.[10]
Lea’s Story and Howard’s Questions
In his interview, Howard described how his grandmother, Lea, told him a story about her romantic relationship in the Vilna ghetto differently over time.[11] Initially, she did not mention it to her family. Later, she mentioned the story but omitted any romantic element. In this version of her retelling, Lea explained that a Jewish police officer in the ghetto named Schapiro saved her life because when she was in a section of the ghetto destined for immediate death, Schapiro moved her to a different part of the ghetto, thereby saving her. She did not, however, share any further details about why Schapiro helped her.
© Howard
As an adult, prompted by his lifelong love for history, an encounter with Holocaust denial, and a trip to see his grandmother’s hometown in Lithuania, Howard decided to research his grandmother’s past. Through that process, he found her prisoner card from the Stutthof concentration camp near Danzig (today Gdańsk, Poland), where she was later deported from the Vilna ghetto, and saw that her last name on it was Schapiro – the same as the Jewish police officer. Howard hypothesized that “either they were married, but she didn’t want us to know that, or they forged it, and they were boyfriend and girlfriend, but in order for her to survive, they acted like they were married.” Lea had always told the family, however, that she had been married to her postwar husband, Howard’s grandfather, already before the war and that they had reunited in Germany after liberation. Howard initially figured she said this because she was “embarrassed” about his grandfather’s prewar history. His grandfather, Hirsch, was much older than Lea. Before the war, Hirsch had been married with a daughter, but lost his family in the Holocaust. Nonetheless, Howard thought that for Lea, saying that her and Hirsch had always been together “kind of worked for her and made sense for the family.”
Towards the end of her life, Howard discussed with his grandmother the information he had learned from her prisoner card – that is, that one of her names on it was Schapiro. As a result, Lea “open[ed] up and start[ed] telling stories about Schapiro, where in the beginning it was just someone she knew where toward the end of her life it was, ‘No, I knew him very, very well.’” She even confessed to Howard’s mother that her “one true love in her life” was a man in the Vilna ghetto, and it was clear to the family that she was referring to Schapiro. In that light, it is likely that during the war, Lea had been in a relationship with Schapiro and not with her postwar husband.
Stages of Storytelling in Howard’s Family
As part of discussing his grandmother’s relationship with Schapiro, in his interview, Howard explained very clearly how he had learned about Lea’s Holocaust experiences over time. More specifically, Howard explained that Lea had gone through what he called “three stages of Holocaust retelling.” First, he said, was “the typical scenario where a lot of the survivors were very quiet and didn’t want to talk about it.” She kept her story to herself, and Howard’s father knew little information, if any, about Lea’s experiences. The second phase of Lea’s retelling was “her starting to open up and tell stories about the Holocaust, and the stories she would share were her times in the ghetto and in the camps of specific memories of things that happened to her and ways that she had survived.” Although Howard initially trusted these stories, he later found out that some of them “were wrong,” “either because she [his grandmother] was embarrassed by it or thought she shouldn’t tell it.” Following from that, the third phase was Howard confronting his grandmother with information he found through his own research that did not align with the stories she had told him. This often led her to revise her stories and reveal information she had previously wanted to keep hidden – such as her actual relationship to Schapiro.
Discussion
This example of Howard and Lea shows that the passage of time and Howard’s pushing his grandmother to explain murky details led to her Holocaust story becoming clearer and arguably more accurate, even when it came to what Lea seemed to consider an “embarrassing,” or taboo, topic. In a broader sense, then, Lea’s different retellings show the extent to which survivors’ memories – and memories in general – are subjective, situational, and change over time.[12] They also reveal how grandchildren need to work to conceptualize their grandparents’ stories in ways that make sense for them. For Howard, this meant creating the framework of his grandmother’s “three stages of Holocaust retelling.” Thus, Lea and Howard’s story offers an example of the way that dialogic relationships between survivors and their grandchildren can lead to survivors’ Holocaust stories being revised, edited, and (re)framed by both parties.[13]
It’s worth noting that Howard was strikingly articulate about how he learned about this aspect of his grandmother’s past and exemplifies grandchildren who have pushed their survivor-grandparents to talk more about ‘taboo’ topics with them. Like many other grandchildren, Howard was interested in knowing more about his grandmother’s past because he was generally fascinated by history and because he felt it was important to be able to tell her story in detail after she passed away. That being said, many other grandchildren of Holocaust survivors did not urge their grandparents to tell them more details about their pasts. Though there are many reasons for such a choice, one possible explanation is that grandchildren were concerned that asking for the detailed stories of survivors carried the risk of their grandparents feeling traumatized from talking about this past and themselves feeling secondarily traumatized from hearing more about it.[14] But even these grandchildren still had a sense of their grandparents’ secrets and were typically willing to share them in our interviews. In that sense, grandchildren from both family contexts can play a significant role in bringing survivors’ previously unknown stories to light.[15]
When grandchildren like Howard reveal their survivor-grandparents’ secrets, however, we must consider where the limits of our knowledge as researchers lie or should lie. Indeed, we should ask if there are stories grandchildren know about their survivor-grandparents but researchers should not share because they should remain private. In the case of Howard and Lea, though Lea’s story about her relationship with Schapiro was very personal, the fact that she voluntarily opened up about it with her family and that Howard discusses it publicly as a speaker for the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center in Skokie, Illinois, suggests that my sharing it here is appropriate. In other interviews, however, grandchildren have shared information with me that I am less certain about how to use in my research. For example, one German grandchild of survivors told me about sexual violence that her survivor-grandfather was subjected to in Auschwitz – a story that her survivor-grandmother told her against her grandfather’s wishes.[16] While this is an important story to tell, especially given the growing interest in Holocaust Studies in sexual violence, the layers of secrecy surrounding it need to be considered.[17]
Moreover, we should ask what it means that there are survivors’ stories that we do not know and thus might be lost to history. After all, if grandchildren are sometimes the stewards of their survivor-grandparents’ stories, it is easy for these stories to remain within the family context and never make it to researchers’ desks even though they have the potential to enrich and complicate our understanding of the Holocaust. To return to the example of Howard and Lea, knowing Lea’s more complete story explains the unexpected presence of the name Schapiro on her Stutthof identification card and offers another example of a well-known strategy of survival: relying on a romantic or sexual relationship for protection.[18] I would not know these details, however, if I had only looked at Lea’s Stutthof identification card and had not interviewed Howard. Thus, Howard and Lea’s story asks us to consider what kind of role grandchildren can and should play in remembering, retelling, protecting, and publicizing stories from the Holocaust in the present and the future.
[1] See for example Victoria Aarons and Alan Berger, Third-Generation Holocaust Representation: Trauma, History, and Memory (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017); Victoria Aarons, ed. Third-Generation Holocaust Narratives: Memory in Memoir and in Fiction (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2016); Victoria Aarons, Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma, and Memory (Rutgers University Press, 2020); Esther Jilovsky, Remembering the Holocaust: Generations, Witnessing and Place (Bloomsbury, 2015). There are some US-based scholars who have studied grandchildren based on interviews. For instance, see Jennifer Rich, Keepers of Memory: The Holocaust and Transgenerational Identity (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2020).
[2] One of the most well-known examples of an American grandchild writing a fictional story about his grandparents’ Holocaust is Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated. Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated (HarperCollins, 2013).
[3] Howard, interview by author, Zoom, September 19, 2023. All quotes from Howard are from this interview.
[4] Anna Hájková, “Introduction: Sexuality, Holocaust, Stigma,” German History 39, no. 1 (March 2021): 4. doi: 10.1093/gerhis/ghaa033; Henry Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2010), 1-6, 227-228.
[5] On survivors’ writing about the Holocaust during the war, see for example Alexandra Garbarini, Numbered Days: Diaries and the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). On survivors’ writing about and discussing the Holocaust immediately after the war in Europe, see for example Laura Jockusch, Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe (Oxford University Press: 2012). On the subject in the postwar United States, see for example Hasia Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust, 1945-1962 (New York: NYU Press, 2009).
[6] The term “collaboration” is in quotation marks because there has been much debate over how to describe Jewish prisoners who were forced to work for the Nazis. See for example Sari Siegel, “The Coercion-Resistance Spectrum: Analyzing Prisoner-Functionary Behaviour in Nazi Camps,” Journal of Genocide Research 23, no. 1 (2001): 17-36. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2020.1768331.
[7] For example, some of the major Holocaust video testimony efforts in the United States limited what Holocaust narratives could be told. They thus enforced established narratives rather than allowing more controversial narratives to come through in the collected testimonies and shift the landscape of memory. Noah Shenker, Reframing Holocaust Testimony (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2015), 62, 81, 117-128.
[8] Walter Reich, “Unwelcome Narratives: Listening to Suppressed Themes in American Holocaust Testimonies,” Poetics Today 27, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 466, doi: 10.1215/03335372-2005-014; Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors, 3-4; Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth, “Prologue: The Gray Zones of the Holocaust,” in Gray Zones: Ambiguity and Compromise in the Holocaust and its Aftermath, ed. Jonathan Petropoulos and John K. Roth (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005), xvii-xviii; Rich, Keepers of Memory, 48, 76, 86.
[9] Noam, interview by author, in-person, July 26, 2017; Talia, interview by author, Facetime, August 2, 2017. The names of these interviewees have been changed to keep their identities anonymous.
[10] See for example, Aarons and Berger, Third-Generation Holocaust Representation, 4, 6-9, 11, 22. Also, Jennifer Rich has noted that grandchildren might understand silences from their grandparents through their grandparents’ pauses in storytelling, their lack of sufficient vocabulary to describe certain events, and their gestures and body language. Rich, Keepers of Memory, 48.
[11] When the Nazis established the Vilna ghetto in September 1941, it was divided into ghetto #1 and ghetto #2. Jews in ghetto #2 were deemed incapable of work and were murdered at Ponary. Jews in ghetto #1 were forced to work in factories or construction projects outside of the ghetto. Later, the Jews were deported to labor camps in the region or murdered at Ponary. “Vilna,” Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/vilna.
[12] Greenspan, “On Testimony, Legacy, and the Problem of Helplessness in History,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 13, no. 1 (2007): 51-52. https://doi.org/10.1080/17504902.2007.11087190; Greenspan, On Listening, 1-6, 227-228; Jürgen Matthäus, “Conclusion: What Have We Learned?” in Approaching An Auschwitz Survivor: Holocaust Testimony and Its Transformations, ed. Jürgen Matthäus (Oxford University Press, 2009), 121.
[13] Greenspan, “On Testimony,” 51-52.
[14] Amelia Klein, “Memory-Work: Video Testimony, Holocaust Remembrance and the Third Generation,” Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History 13, no. 2-3 (Autumn/Winter 2007): 138-139. https://doi.org/10.1080/17504902.2007.11087199; Aarons and Berger, Third-Generation Holocaust Representation, 19-26, 42-46, 91.
[15] Rich, Keepers of Memory, 43-48.
[16] Elena, interview by author, in-person, July 18, 2023. The name of this interviewee has been changed to keep her identity anonymous.
[17] For a general history of the growing interest in sexuality during the Holocaust, see Hájková, “Introduction.” Several articles and essays have been published about sexual violence specifically against men during the Holocaust. For example, see Dorota Glowacka, “Sexual Violence Against Men and Boys during the Holocaust: A Genealogy of (Not-So-Silent) Silence, German History 39, no. 1 (March 2021): 78-89. doi: 10.1093/gerhis/ghaa032; Robert Sommer, “Pipels: Situational Homosexuality Slavery of Young Adolescent Boys in Nazi Concentration Camps,” in Lessons and Legacies XI: Expanding Perspectives on the Holocaust in a Changing World, ed. Hilary Earl and Karl A. Schleunes (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014), 86-104.
[18] Dalia Ofer, “Gender Issues in Diaries and Testimonies of the Ghetto: The Case of Warsaw,” in Women in the Holocaust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 163.
