Life Is Beautiful for Only Some Children of Holocaust Survivors

As a child of Holocaust survivors involved intermittently in “second generation” activities over the last two decades, I’ve been struck by how few generalizations about us are valid. We have surprisingly few commonalities in attitude and life experience. Included in what we do share is a sense of growing up as “different” from others, a less secure identity as Americans, and a deep identification as Jews.

Although I would like to say that we’re all passionately interested in politics and social justice, that we are all fervently concerned and knowledgeable about Israel, that we are all tremendously accomplished or, conversely, are mostly underachievers — I cannot. The differences

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among us almost drown out our similarities. Considering that our backgrounds are so diverse, how can it be otherwise?

The points I make here are most recently substantiated by my experience as a member of a discussion group, usually comprised of eight or nine children of survivors at any given time. It met for about six months during 1998 before disbanding. References to actual individuals have been modified sufficiently to protect their privacy.

For one thing, our parents experienced the Holocaust in such a variety of ways: from surviving concentration camps, to hiding, to escaping to Russia, China, or the West. Some children of survivors are survivors themselves, as are three of our group. These are the oldest, with the rest of us being post-war baby boomers. Even among the boomers, some are in their thirties while others are in their forties or fifties.

None of us are married, but three are divorced with children. Our non-married status should not be regarded as typical of children of survivors, since our little circle is self-selected, and it makes sense that singles would be freer to get involved with a support group than those who are married. But it appears reasonable to assume that our group’s collectively poor record with marriage is associated with our upbringings in homes haunted by history.

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to regard us as a collection of pitiful, hopelessly neurotic individuals. Most of us are doing well economically and at least a couple of us are quite creative and interesting. On the surface at least, all of us seem fairly normal.

We met every three weeks for about half a year. We had decided upon seeing Life Is Beautiful as a group activity, but due to scheduling problems, saw it individually. Our discussion occupied the penultimate meeting, with only five of our usual number in attendance. Three of us were greatly impressed by Benigni’s work, while two objected to it. (At our next and final meeting, I discovered that another, absent the previous time, also liked it.)

As the three of us who admired the film made our points in a mild debate with one who disapproved, I noticed that the other sat stonily silent. When I asked what was wrong, he blew his emotional reserve and spewed forth an uncomprehending outrage as to how any of us could tolerate such an atrocious work. To him, Benigni had constructed a disrespectful farce which bore no relation to the barbarities encountered by our people at real concentration camps.

None of us on the other side of the argument had thought of this movie as particularly true to history. Clearly, the concentration camp it depicted, although by no means a pleasant place (these were not Hogan’s Heroes Nazis), had scenes which are not believable. Although we have learned recently that someone apparently survived in a way remarkably similar to the child portrayed, we know that some scenes were pure fantasy, e.g., the child moves freely around the camp to talk to his father in the midst of his torturous labors carrying anvils, and the father commandeers the loudspeaker to communicate with his wife — yet nothing happens to them in either case.

Where Benigni succeeds is in constructing, during the Chaplinesque first half, a totally engaging character with a charming little family which gets swept up in the Nazi horror. They are totally humanized to the audience before they become victims. And then he lets go of the comedy just enough to make us understand that they are confronting an unfathomable evil. The Benigni character drops his clownish demeanor but twice: once when he discovers that his old German doctor friend with a passion for riddles is truly a Nazi without any desire to save him, and then in seeing the mountain of corpses. This is presented alongside of the off-camera murder of his character, the ever devoted father, in the end. For me, and others, these scenes help elevate and transform the movie into something moving and profound.

But two of our number did not see it this way. The more emotional of the two has had a very difficult adjustment to being a child of survivors. He was brought up in Germany, unaware of his Jewish identity until a decade ago. In my view, he requires more time to mellow into his relatively new sense of himself.

The other appears to be an emotionally constricted individual, who speaks haltingly and never evinces anger or annoyance, while maintaining a remarkably neat and orderly home. Perhaps, not surprisingly, he works as an accountant. That such a person — who even found Art Spiegelman’s Maus offensive — would regard an unconventional treatment like Benigni’s improper or inappropriate, should not come as a shock.

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Still, I am comforted by realizing that I am part of a general class of people called “children of Holocaust survivors” and have benefitted from the insights gained regarding ourselves and our parents. I have drawn strength as much from our differences as our commonalities.

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