TO BE CONTINUED...Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors

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1. Daniel Rachel: How Do We Confront the Hatred in Rock Music? from TO BE CONTINUED...Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, opens in a new tab

   Sep 8, 202649 min

   In this episode, TO BE CONTINUED... steps outside its usual format for a podcast exchange with Martini Judaism, also hosted by Rabbi Jeff Salkin. He speaks with author Daniel Rachel about This Ain't Rock 'n' Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika and the Third Reich, a history of something that has been hiding in plain sight for more than 60 years. The conversation runs from the Beatles and John Lennon's private Nazi memorabilia collection, through David Bowie's years-long obsession with the Aryan ideal and Eric Clapton's admiration for Enoch Powell, to the punk scene's casual use of Holocaust imagery — the Sex Pistols' "Belsen Was a Gas," and Joy Division taking their name from the women forced into brothels in the camps. Rachel and Salkin also work through the paradox of Jewish musicians, from the Ramones to Blondie to Kiss, using the same symbols, and consider how gaps in Holocaust education on both sides of the Atlantic help explain it. They turn to Roger Waters, Michael Jackson, and Kanye West, and ask why it took governments rather than rock fans to finally draw a line. Rachel's answer to the silence is unsparing and includes himself: "I think we're all complicit." Daniel Rachel was born in Birmingham, England and raised in a progressive Jewish household. He wrote his first song when he was sixteen and was the lead-singer of Rachels Basement, which he formed in his early twenties. He released two solo albums in 2001 and 2006. Daniel is also an award-winning and bestselling author. Isle of Noise: Conversations with Great British Songwriters was his first book. His latest book, published in early 2026, This Ain’t Rock ‘n’ Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika and the Third Reich, has received rave reviews and standing room only appearances. Daniel co-authored several other books as well. He has served as a consultant and appeared in several cultural documentaries. Daniel lives in north London with his partner and three children. Transcript: Today’s episode is a little different—and there’s a reason. TO BE CONTINUED... is participating in a podcast exchange with Martini Judaism, which is another podcast I host. Podcast exchanges are a popular way for podcasts with related subject matter to introduce their audiences to conversations they might not otherwise hear. Most episodes of TO BE CONTINUED... explore the Holocaust through the experiences of 2G and 3G descendants and how that history has shaped their lives. But countering Holocaust denial and distortion, and the trivialization of Nazi history, that's also an important part of our mission. So today, we’re stepping outside our usual format to explore how Holocaust history and Nazi imagery have entered popular culture. Daniel Rachel is the author of This Ain’t Rock ’n’ Roll: Pop Music, the Swastika and the Third Reich. And he asks a rather provocative question: How do we confront hatred in rock music? This is a different subject for us, but it is really very much part of the conversation we’re continuing here on TO BE CONTINUED.. And we return in October with a new episode featuring award-winning journalist and filmmaker Marisa Fox, a 2G descendant and the writer, producer, and editor of her new film, My Underground Mother. The Stones put it this way. "It's only rock and roll, but I like it." Oh, I really like it. You know that. If you've been reading my column for any length of time, you know that I am a serious rock and roll fan. Oh, it starts with the Beatles, it goes into the Stones, David Bowie, The Who, Dylan, obviously, always Dylan. You know, when I was a grown up, I learned how to interpret sacred texts, but when I was a teenager, the only sacred texts I was interpreting were Dylan lyrics. It's only rock and roll, but sometimes I don't like it. From the Religion News Service, this is Martini Judaism. For those who want to be shaken and stirred, and I'm Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin. And today we're doing something a little different. We're not going to be talking about Torah, or theology, or Israel, or even the crisis of American Jewish identity. Though I promise you that these topics will sort of show up in some form or another. They always do. Today we're talking about rock and roll. Specifically, we're talking about a remarkable, disturbing, and overdue book called "This Ain't Rock and Roll, Pop Music, the Swastika, and the Third Reich” by Daniel Rachel. The book documents something that's been hiding in plain sight for more than 60 years. Here's the quote: "For over 75 years, musicians have been drawn to the language and provocative imagery of Nazism, fascinated by its power, menace, and underlying sexuality. They have flirted with the theatrical spectacle of the Third Reich, displayed the swastika, flaunted memorabilia, wore Nazi uniforms, and marveled at the grandiose rallies of 1930s Germany." Let me put it to you this way. Decades ago, the American folk singer Woody Guthrie had a guitar with these words inscribed on it -- "This machine kills fascists." Who could have ever thought that future rock stars might have had guitars upon which could have been inscribed the words, this machine celebrates fascists? You want to know what the worst part is? The entire rock music industrial complex spent seven decades looking the other way, and so did the audiences, including me. I don't get it. Rock music, stands against racism, it's against oppression, it's against injustice. So why, when it came to Nazism and its symbols and its rituals and its hatreds, why did those get a pass? So today we're going to talk to Daniel Rachel about the great moral paradox that turns out to be rock music. Daniel, welcome. It's great to have you here. Yeah, thanks so much. Daniel, tell us about your own background and your own Jewish journey. It's very strange because I haven't really spoken about my Jewish upbringing in decades. It's only since writing this book it's become something I've had to talk about again. It's very strange. I mean, yeah, it's brought up in the faith, but as an adult, I didn't pursue it. And did this book and its research connect you in any way to that faith and that heritage? I mean, I'm always connected because it's such one and because it's part of my upbringing. And, you know, there's always a waft of chicken soup somewhere coming beneath my nostrils. But, you know, there's also a persecution of Jewish people for, you know, as you well know, for thousands of years. But because of the content of this book and the persecution in the 1930s in Germany, and then the road and the path to the so-called final solution, I think that because I knew about that from, being a young teenager, that it's not anything I can ever let go of or, you know, push to one side. It's part of my personality as much as Rock and Roll is part of my personality. Well, the two of us have that in common. For me, my Jewish heritage, my Jewish commitments and my love of rock music are intertwined together. So tell the story, please. Rock stars, mostly Brits, but not all of them, fascinated by Nazism and or fascism, who use those symbols and aesthetic in their music. Can you give us some examples? Yeah, of course. I mean, the book is a catalog of examples. It starts with The Beatles, Zeke Eiland at the premiere of "A Hard Day's Night" in Liverpool and in Australia; John and Paul being told off by Ringo. There's various John Lennon's Nazi memorabilia collection. We go through the stones being depicted and flirting with images of Nazism, whether it's Brian Jones or Mick Jagger. It takes us through Roxy Music and Brian Ferry and Jimmy Page and Zeppelin. It goes through early punk in the States with Iggy Pop and the Stooges and various lesser known bands on the New York scene, even the Jewish musicians like Chris Stein and Blondie. It's in the managers of the Clash and the Sex Pistols, both Jewish, both by mitzvah'd. One using the Swastika, one against it. It carries on in the 80s. You can see it in the work of Madonna. You can see it in the work of Lady Gaga. [It] takes us through to the current debate around Kanye West and his denial to enter Australia, to now, not be allowed to enter Great Britain, various European countries banning him. I mean, the story that I start in the late 1950s, with the Jewish heritage of Elvis Presley, carries on to this very day. Oddly enough, there's now more controversy and press globally around this issue in the last, probably, six months than ever before, I would say. And obviously, I was writing this before October the 7th. And then suddenly there's an explosion of Jewish anger, of an increase of antisemitism. And yeah, I mean, it felt like...it's all over the place. It's about to happen. So here's what I find very interesting. I want to start with the Beatles, of course, because for me, it all starts with the Beatles. Fab. Well, imagine John admiring Hitler. It isn't hard to do. You know, the gap between this public persona that he had, and he was not a nice person. Did you know him? What's that? No, I did not. But everyone who did, or his report on the fact that he had rather misogynistic and antisemitic tendencies. He used to torment the late Brian Epstein, who was both gay and Jewish. Yeah, I don't think that's true. You don't know him and I don't know him, and I've never read those accusations that you're saying. I mean, he would mock Brian Epstein and use Jew as a joking derogative term, but that doesn't make him antisemitic. Ah, thank you. I'm really glad that you clarified that. Actually, I will agree with you. Might we say that he used antisemitic language, therefore? We don't know what's in his heart. We can't know, by the way. We know that the Beatles were managed by a Jewish guy for more than seven, eight, nine years. And you hear from all four Beatles, a great love for Brian Epstein. And that's important." And I think that, I also have got no sense that John Lennon was misogynistic. He had, he beat women in his early years. And, and he was in many ways repentant once he met Yoko Ono. And Yoko Ono did incredible things to make John publicly acknowledge the man or the boy, the teenager he had been with girlfriends and with his first wife and set him on a different course. And I don't think there's anything Yoko Ono has ever said that suggests John Lennon returned to those ways about him, which is as violent, despicable as they were. And his behavior was, he changed, is what it seems. And what I do applaud John Lennon for in the context of this book, is that many, many musicians, Jewish and non-Jewish, have Nazi memorabilia collections and have made parallels between being a rock star and the magnetism that Adolf Hitler had in the context of a Nuremberg rally. But John Lennon kept that private. He didn't share that in the public domain. He didn't share his collection. He didn't share his drawings. That's unlike other musicians who did share their collections. They did speak out about Adolf Hitler. John Lennon's way of doing it was mocking and playing with the tropes of the Third Reich and Nazism. I think when you look into that, if we don't reduce this, the simplistic accusations and we look at his behavior and where and the context and the time, it's understandable. For other musicians in the book, you begin to struggle to make the connection that John Lennon would have had with these ideas and thoughts. So what I find fascinating about what you're saying is of course a rather well-known paradox. We have otherwise intelligent, humane people who, as you wrote, were kind of susceptible to the aesthetics of fascism. There's a fascinating bit in your book a lot about Lenny Riefenstahl, one of the most fascinating and troubling artistic figures of Germany and of general culture. Mick Jagger seems to have had some kind of fascination with her. What was this all about? Was it merely spectacle? Is that where they saw the parallels? Largely so. I think you're right to say that spectacle is the attraction. I mean, through the lens of Leni Riefenstahl's camera, and let's not forget she was a hugely influential and magnificent filmmaker, but as I think you're alluding to, compromised for her involvement with leading figures of the Third Reich, her complicity in atrocities that happened in use of actors that went on to be gassed, I believe, at Auschwitz, and I think you pronounced it Tiefland, extras from that film, and saw an atrocity herself in Poland. But what she was capturing on film that we see in "Triumph of the Will" is actually the brilliance of Hitler's architect Albert Speer, again, a Nazi in denial of knowledge of the persecution and eventual annihilation or attempted annihilation of Europe's Jews. He was in denial for most of his life, but it became obvious and clear, not least because of the historian Gitta Sereny, who discovered his knowledge. But what Speer was brilliant at, and what we see at Nuremberg, is theater. And he created theater. He creates it in the hundred foot golden eagles, in the use of flags, the positioning of members of the Nazi party, the staging of Hitler and speakers, etc., etc. All of that is the mind of a theater magician, in many ways. And what I see in rock and roll is many artists admiring what they see through, in Riefenstahl's films, as the work of Speer and saying, that's what I experienced at a rock concert. Even in Kiss, what's his name, the lead singer, Kiss, Gene Simmons, again Jewish, born in Israel, in Haifa. He admired that theater of a Nuremberg rally in the same way Brian Ferry did, as Mick Jagger did, as David Bowie did. Because they saw the power that Adolf Hitler had, literally in the palm of his hand, over thousands of people, and they thought, that's the power I hold when I'm in a stadium setting. We see it at Live Aid with Freddie Mercury and 80,000 people clapping, arm in arm. I always thought that "We Will Rock You" was somewhat fascist. Well, it has fascistic tendencies in the theater, the way it looks, but that doesn't mean that he is a fascist. No, no, no, no, not, but just the, again, we're talking now, not ideology, we'll get back to that. We're talking aesthetic. Yeah, aesthetics, that's how I agree entirely, yeah. Now, you mentioned Bowie, so let's do a little bit of a sidebar here. With David Bowie and with Eric Clapton, we actually have two British performers who seem to have sympathized with Enoch Powell and the English right wing, which was anti-immigrant and racist. Am I correct in assessing it that way? Well, Eric Clapton, absolutely. I mean, he was quoted at length that Enoch is a prophet, and Enoch Powell, let us not forget, was responsible for the rivers of blood speech in 1968, and calling for the voluntary repatriation of British citizens to places where they come from back to the motherland, as it were, from undisgraceful racist rhetoric, which he has never satisfactorily or explicitly apologized for to this day. David Bowie is far more, he's deeper into the well of right-wing thinking in as much as he extolled the brilliance of Adolf Hitler as rock and roll's first superstar, and had at least a 13-year obsession with Nazism, that infiltrated his songwriting, his stage act, his costumes, his set design, his lyrics, his reading, his interviews. He was deep deeper into not only the aesthetics, but the ideas behind the Aryan, the Aryan ideal, the search for the Aryan man, which let us not forget is what Himmler instigated for the SS to be able to prove that the right to exterminate European Jews is in the basis of an Aryan man, an Aryan person, and that took the SS all the way back to Atlantis and in that search to justify what was unjustifiable ultimately. Well, my goodness me. Let's cross the pond, if we can. Let's go to the Ramones, Joey and Tommy Ramone, Jewish, okay? Family perished in the camps, and yet the Nazi imagery is there in the lyrics. How do you explain this? Look, I don't ever like to accuse people of being self-hating Jews. Is it ignorance? Is it mischievous? Is it just being outrageous? Is it something else entirely? What are we seeing and what are we not seeing? In England, we only taught the Holocaust from 1991. It wasn't taught in Scotland, Wales, or Ireland. And as we know, the Holocaust Memorial Day, it was only brought to the US and the UK in the early 2000s. So therefore, in England alone, if you're born any time before 1977, 1978, and later if you're a US citizen, your understanding and knowledge of the Third Reich and the persecution of Jewish people and the road to the Holocaust is hearsay or self-educated knowledge, not from a trusted source, perhaps like yourself, a rabbi, or a teacher, or in a school. There's many incidents of American musicians, British musicians etching the swastika into their school desk, writing it on their school satchel bag. Not really understanding what that is, but thankfully Adolf Hitler makes that explicitly clear for us. He tells us in Mein Kampf what this swastika is, in the context of the Nazi party. He took that from thousands of years old cultures across different continents, meaning peace a symbol of goodwill, took it, added the white and the red around it, which was to express the nationalistic idea and the social idea, and the swastika itself as an explicit symbol of antisemitism. But where's that education? That's what we have to look at when we think about the Ramones. Just as a base for conversation. But what kills me about this, is that the Ramones themselves were Jewish. They had this story in their family. And so I'm just wondering, how did this become a tool for outrageous behavior? Well, we don't know that the families within, talk to their kids. We know from understanding of the post-holocaust years that many survivors and families didn't share their knowledge. And it almost became verboten, did it not, in Israel, where there was an almost divide between those that had come from Europe and those that hadn't experienced the hand of Hitler. So we don't know what happened and didn't happen. But yeah, it is mystifying. And that's what I do. Within the book, and that's one of the questions, is to answer these questions. We obviously go back to the source and we say, well, what did the musicians say at the time? And what were journalists asking of the musicians at the time? What were, what was the record industry allowing at the time? And, and so on and so on. And what I'm finding or did find in the research of this book, is the answer was...very little. Because people could get away with using symbols, using Nazi terminology, and it was largely either ignored or laughed at, or just an accepted trope of rock and roll. We're going to get to the response to this after our break, but, you know, the whole punk thing. Now, I realize that punk aesthetic is about chipping away at, and willfully destroying social norms. But, you know, you have the Sex Pistols recording "Belsen Was a Gas", and Bergen Belsen was one of the most notorious concentration camps, and you have the late lamented rock critic Lester Bang saying that this is just cheap nihilism. You have Joy Division, which, a group named for the Jewish women who were kept in concentration camps, in the brothels, for the sexual pleasure of Nazi soldiers. This has all been hiding in plain sight, and you're absolutely right. People just didn't talk about it, or they blew it off, or they excused it. Yeah, I mean, some did talk about it. I mean, we have to be careful with the brothels across the Nazi network. There were some in concentration camps, there were some in extermination camps. Of course, SS soldiers weren't officially allowed to sleep or have sex with Jewish women because that would be against the blood/the rules of the Third Reich. Hitler actually introduced brothels as an incentive for workers because he feared homosexuality in his words. And so it was initially aimed at Russians and Poles. And then outside of the camps, there were wider brothels. I mean, that whole story is,

2. Judy Batalion: Trauma Moves Through Generations — But So Does Strength from TO BE CONTINUED...Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, opens in a new tab

   Aug 10, 202646 min

   This episode is generously sponsored by Gail and Dennis Roth in loving memory of Gail's parents, Frances and Meyer Weisman who were both born in Czechoslovakia. Frances survived both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and Meyer endured various hard labor camps. They were thrilled to arrive in New York in 1949, to begin a new life together. New York Times bestselling author Judy Batalion grew up in a house in Montreal that was filled to the brim: her mother and grandmother had suffered from compulsive hoarding. It could in part be attributed to years they spent as nomads, fleeing from the impact of the Holocaust. "One of the metaphoric poetic real reasons that I instinctively feel with my mother was that her stuff was security. It was safety. She literally formed barricades around her with stuff. She was holding on to something." In this conversation with Rabbi Jeff Salkin, Judy Batalion pieces together what she knows of her grandparents' survival and her mother's childhood. She also discusses her own lifelong anxiety along with her interpretation of her father's belief that anxious people were the ones who survived the Holocaust. As a young adult, Judy left home for Harvard and then London, deliberately escaping that landscape and building the opposite kind of life: minimalist, orderly, white-walled. She became an art historian working in the British museum world, as far from her family's history as she could get. Years later, she found herself writing three books about exactly the world she had left behind. Judy Batalion is a New York Times bestselling author of award-winning nonfiction and fiction. She is the author of The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in Hitler's Ghettos, for which Steven Spielberg's Amblin Partners has optioned the film rights, and White Walls: A Memoir About Motherhood, Daughterhood, and the Mess in Between, optioned by Warner Brothers for development as a television series titled Cluttered. Her latest novel, The Last Woman of Warsaw, is a story of friendship, love, and home set in Warsaw on the eve of World War II. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Vogue, among other publications. She earned her bachelor's degree at Harvard and a PhD from the University of London, and has worked as a museum curator, a university lecturer, and a stand-up comic. The granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, she grew up in Montreal and now lives in New York City with her husband and three children. Transcript: [00:00:08:02 - 00:00:19:11] This episode of To Be Continued is sponsored by Gail and Dennis Roth in loving memory of Gail's parents, Frances and Meyer Weisman who were both born in Czechoslovakia. [00:00:20:21 - 00:00:41:11] Frances survived both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and Meyer endured various hard labor camps. They were thrilled to arrive in New York in 1949, to begin a new life together. Welcome to To Be Continued..., Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors. I'm your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin. [00:00:43:05 - 00:00:51:08] In this podcast, we explore how the Holocaust continues to shape the lives of the children and grandchildren of survivors. [00:00:52:26 - 00:01:10:03] Our conversations begin with stories of survival, but beyond those experiences to examine the profound impact the Holocaust has had on the generations that followed, their identities, their relationships, their choices, and their sense of responsibility. [00:01:11:17 - 00:01:16:26] Jewish tradition teaches us the importance of l'dor v'dor, from generation to generation. [00:01:18:10 - 00:01:26:20] Each generation receives a story, but also has the opportunity to interpret it and to give that story new meaning. [00:01:28:15 - 00:01:38:20] Through conversations with descendants of survivors, we explore the intersections of memory, identity, and resilience, asking how did those memories form you? [00:01:39:28 - 00:01:46:29] How did resilience shape the person you became, and what legacy will you leave for those who come after you? [00:01:48:11 - 00:01:56:02] My guest today is Judy Batalion, a New York Times bestselling author of award-winning nonfiction and fiction. [00:01:57:11 - 00:02:03:04] Her work has brought powerful stories of Jewish courage and resistance to readers around the world. [00:02:04:05 - 00:02:26:03] Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, The Washington Post, and Vogue, among other publications. She earned her bachelor's degree at Harvard and a PhD from the University of London, and she has worked as a museum curator and university lecturer. Today, Judy lives in New York City with her husband and her three children. [00:02:27:25 - 00:02:42:10] As the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, Judy grew up in Montreal with her parents, her younger brother, and the house that was overflowing with the possessions her mother struggled to part with. [00:02:43:22 - 00:03:04:24] Her family was shaped by the experiences of her maternal grandparents, Holocaust survivors who endured displacement and hardship before rebuilding their lives. Like many children and grandchildren of survivors, Judy inherited not only their history, but also the questions that come with growing up in the shadow of that history. [00:03:06:25 - 00:03:08:15] That journey has informed her writing. [00:03:09:20 - 00:03:21:06] She is the author of White Walls, A Memoir about Motherhood, Daughterhood, and the Mess In Between, which Warner Brothers has optioned for development as a television series called "Cluttered". [00:03:22:12 - 00:03:45:14] She also wrote the New York Times bestseller, The Light of Days, the untold story of women resistance fighters in Hitler's ghettos, for which Steven Spielberg's Amblin Partners has optioned the film rights. And now her newest novel is The Last Woman of Warsaw, a story of friendship, love, and home set in Warsaw on the eve of World War II. [00:03:46:24 - 00:03:57:13] Judy Batalion's work spans history, memoir, and fiction, but at the heart of it all is a question that feels especially relevant to our conversation today. [00:03:58:25 - 00:04:55:02] How does the past continue to shape us? Judy, welcome to TO BE CONTINUED..., and it's really a privilege to have you with us. Well, thank you so much for inviting me to be here today, and thank you for that very gracious introduction. Thank you. Well, it's well earned. I should tell you, by the way, that I absolutely loved your book, The Light of Days, and it's a really compelling, compelling read, and I can't wait for it to reach a wider audience because it so deserves that. Fingers crossed. Yes, thank you so much. Stardom being what it is. Let's start this way. I'd like to begin with the story of the generation that came before you. Your family has deep roots in Poland, and your paternal grandparents' journey is an extraordinary one. It goes from Poland to Siberia, their return, the birth of your mother during that journey. [00:04:56:06 - 00:04:57:17] Would you tell us that story? [00:04:59:17 - 00:05:43:16] Sure. You know, I always feel like I need to preface my own story by saying, you know, I've spent now 19 years professionally researching and writing about the Holocaust, and yet my own personal story is still very vague. There's so many ruptures in my own family narrative, but I will share with you what I know, or at least what family lore has been. My maternal grandparents, Bubbe and Zadye, they were living in Warsaw in the late 30s when the Nazis occupied Warsaw. They were in their mid- and late-20s. They were married. [00:05:45:18 - 00:06:00:22] The story from my grandmother is that she had seven siblings, and of all of them, she looked the least Jewish. She was most able to pass as a Christian Pole. [00:06:02:11 - 00:06:17:11] Early on in the war, there were lines for food rations. Food was hard to retrieve food, and it was my grandmother who would go out and get food for not just my grandfather, but her siblings, her parents. [00:06:18:14 - 00:07:08:06] She was sort of the one that went outside, and she would tell that during her time waiting in those lines, she heard stories. She heard Nazis asking Polish Poles where Jews live, what addresses are, what names, they list names and addresses. And she heard her neighbors, she heard, as she told them, her neighbors turn on them and report names. And this is what she felt was her moment where she knew this was, she was doomed, and they had to leave Warsaw. There was something very frightening in that for her. And several of her siblings did leave, not all of them. Her parents stayed with her three younger sisters. [00:07:09:07 - 00:07:14:19] They were all eventually brutally murdered, I believe at Treblinka. [00:07:16:02 - 00:08:11:01] But my grandmother and her husband, my grandfather, they left. They, early on in the war, and my grandfather had a brother who lived in eastern Poland, and so they decided to go east, which is ultimately the decision that saved them. They went to my grandfather's brother's town, and there was fighting at the time, and there's fighting between the Russian soldiers and the Germans. And my grandfather and his brother got caught in crossfire. I believe it was a Russian shot. And my grandfather was very, very short, and the bullet grazed his neck, and it hit his brother who was standing behind him in the heart. And his brother was killed immediately. And I know this story because my grandfather had a scar on his neck, and I had asked him as a child what it was from. [00:08:12:02 - 00:08:36:05] And it was from this bullet that had killed his brother. My grandparents decided to continue fleeing east. This is where the story gets confusing to me. My grandmother would tell me bits and pieces. I was very close with her, but it never always, it never seemed to add up to the full narrative. But there was some bit about riding or hiding in a truck with fruit. [00:08:37:18 - 00:09:19:06] There was a story about hiding in a convent where they'd been taken in. I remember hearing about swimming across a river as part of an escape. And I also remember hearing a story about a Nazi who turned a blind eye and let them pass. And they eventually made it to the Russian border and crossed into Russia, and along with many of the Jews who made that crossing, they were forced into Siberia. They were sent up to Siberia and forced to work in work camps in Siberia. [00:09:20:16 - 00:09:24:24] I know very little about those camps. I know very little about what they went through. [00:09:26:04 - 00:09:31:22] The only anecdote I ever recall my grandfather telling me was that they had to eat horses. [00:09:34:16 - 00:10:10:11] They left, those camps. I think, I'm not even sure when, but they went on a, I don't know, journey, which only recently did I look at a map and it didn't even, they went extremely far east. They went to Kyrgyzstan. I only, again, I only recently realized how far east that was. And my grant, they stayed there for a little bit. My grandfather was, I found some photo before my mother died. I asked what this was. She said it was my grandfather working as a mechanic in Kyrgyzstan. [00:10:11:18 - 00:10:46:29] And my mother was born there in 1945 while they were stopped temporarily in Kyrgyzstan. And then they continued on the route and it came back to Poland where they lived. Jews were resettled into Western Poland. They lived in Wroclaw for a few years, trying to build a life there and seeing if anyone survived, if any of their many siblings had survived the war, trying to put their lives back together. [00:10:48:19 - 00:12:55:24] And I believe my grandfather was uncomfortable with the political life in Poland, with the communism. He was afraid. And they ended up in '49 leaving Poland, and moving to Israel where they stayed in, my mother tells story. I mean, they were, they had nothing. They were basically refugees and they stayed in a chicken coop. And my mother would tell a story about the chickens would peck at her toes at night. And they were displaced people and they lived in these camps for some time. And then eventually in the early 50s, they came to Canada where my grandmother's sister, one of her sisters had survived and was living in Montreal, and helped my grandmother come over to Montreal. What do you know about your mother's childhood, drawing up as the daughter of two Holocaust survivors? And how did that impact to shape the home that you grew up in? I mean, my mother's childhood was very nomadic. They lived in Western Poland for some time. I believe my grandfather had work there and they survived there. But it was, I always talk about my mother's childhood, as she was a refugee before knowing what a home was. She was born while they were on the run in Kyrgyzstan. They came back through all the way to Poland. They lived there for a couple of years. My grandmother actually had another child who died shortly after childbirth. And that was very traumatic for the whole family and for my grandmother and for my mother. And then they moved again to Israel and they moved to Canada. So, before she was six years old, she lived in, I mean, four continents. And I think that that instability and nomadism and being born into such a difficult and traumatic [00:12:57:15 - 00:13:09:14] moment certainly had its impact on her and successively on me. What do you remember most about the way that she loved and protected and raised you? [00:13:10:24 - 00:13:21:04] My mother? Yeah. Oh, my mother. That's a very moving question. My mother really loved me. [00:13:24:05 - 00:13:49:09] My mother really is very absorbed. She loved art, art of all forms, writing, literature. She wrote poetry. She was an amazing, a draftsman, draftsperson. She drew. She was an artist. She really had a very artistic temperament...theater, TV, any kind of fiction narrative story. [00:13:50:16 - 00:17:47:25] And I really think she, she passionately shared that with me. And we really connected through literature, through stories, through fiction, through most of our lives, starting when I was young. She would read Amelia Bedelia books to me and we would analyze the puns and then she would teach me how to make my own puns and how to play with language all the way through. Even as an adult, she would call me, we would have long discussions about television shows, and the choices the characters were making. She was very moved by art and we connected through that as well. You've written rather openly about your anxiety. Looking back, where do you think it comes from? And how does it relate to what your father often said, that anxious people were the ones that left? They were survivors. Well, I don't know...if you could explain my anxiety, that would be great. I'm not sure I know exactly where my anxiety comes from. Probably comes from many places, like most things--genetics, environment, catalysts. I am a very anxious person. It's something I've struggled with my whole life. Yes, my father used to say that anxious people were the ones who ran and survived. And I think that idea lives in me. I think I inherited this notion, not consciously, but that anxiety serves a purpose. Anxiety saves you. Hyper-awareness saves you. You need to be aware of what's going on. And the worst-case scenario can happen. And that's sort of in my blood. And I think that causes a lot of my anxieties, is this almost a burden of awareness and keeping eyes open. And there's no delusions that everything's going to be great. No one ever, that's not an idea I grew up with. It's all going to be okay. I don't know if that answers your question. Well, it certainly begins to, but let's go to food. All right. For many Holocaust survivors, food became more than food. It represented security. And many children and grandchildren remember that they were taught never to waste food and always to have enough. In your memoir, "White Walls", you are remarkably candid about your grandmother's and your mother's compulsive hoarding. As you try to understand it over the years, did you come to see those patterns as rooted in that same sense of scarcity and security, or did you come to understand them as something different altogether? Yeah, that's a great question. I, okay, so I've given hour-long lectures on this subject, so I'm trying to think about how to be succinct and interesting in a very short period. Okay. So first of all, let me say the research...there's no studies that I ever found that said many Holocaust survivors suffer from hoarding disorder or their offspring suffers from hoarding disorder in a greater prevalence than other populations. However, I would say anecdotally, when I've spoken to audiences across the country about hoarding disorder and Holocaust trauma, and I've had many, many people reach out to me to say that they lived a similar experience, that there were members of their survivor families who were also [00:17:50:21 - 00:18:02:27] pathological hoarders and compulsive hoarders. I did find one. Judy, I will say I know at least three children of survivors who are hoarders. [00:18:04:16 - 00:19:15:09] Any talk I gave, I would be inundated afterwards with people coming up to me to personally tell me stories. However, even when I spoke outside Jewish communities, many people told me their stories too. So, but certainly within Jewish communities, I heard many, many stories from survivor families. I did find one data point or research study that talked about how children who had nomadic childhoods often went on, had a higher prevalence of suffering from hoarding disorder later in life. So that's certainly something my mother had. She really, as I said, lived in four continents before she was six years old. So that is...According...it's genetic, it's environmental, it's set off by some kind of traumatic catalyst. And it's a very complicated disorder that often is accompanied or comorbid with other psychological and psychiatric conditions from depression, anxiety, paranoia, suspicious behavior, social isolation, addiction. And hoarding disorder comprises [00:19:16:25 - 00:21:42:09] intensive attachment to objects, also for some people and need to continually acquire objects. And for others and many, it's also a disorganization with the objects. So, there's all three components. And so, there are many different understandings, explanations, reasons that someone might suffer from a hoarding disorder, which is partially why it's so hard to treat, really. But I would say, as you were asking, one of the maybe metaphoric poetic real reasons that I instinctively feel with my mother was that her stuff was security. It was safety. It was she literally formed barricades around her with stuff. She was holding on to something. She was, you know, there was also, as I was saying before, this hyper awareness, she kept newspapers, and this is common with hoarding disorder. And I wanted to ask her, why do you need all the news? Why do you print out websites and keep stashes of the web? And she didn't want to miss anything. She didn't want to miss any information. She couldn't miss anything. There was such a need to cull and contain the information to make sure everything was assessed, everything was seen. And these barriers, these barricades, I really do think provided her with almost a security blanket, a literal sense of physical security. And in fact, I think that's why, you know, when you see these reality television shows hoarding disorder, which by the way, is how most people know about hoarding disorder, it's through reality TV, through, you know, people come in and they try to get rid of all the stuff. That's the worst thing, because the stuff is the security. It's not the problem. It's the solution for people who suffer from hoarding disorder to some people and to some degree. And so, getting rid of that is worse. And that's what I felt with my mother. While your relationship with your mother is a dominant st

3. Dara Bratt and Michelle Rose: Tattoos, The Evolution of Holocaust Remembrance from TO BE CONTINUED...Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, opens in a new tab

   Jul 6, 202642 min

   The real question isn't simply whether Judaism prohibits tattoos. We know the Torah speaks against them. Holocaust survivors imprisoned at Auschwitz II-Birkenau did not choose their tattooed numbers — they were an act of degradation and dehumanization. But what happens when descendants of Holocaust survivors choose to use that traditionally prohibited practice as an act of sacred remembrance? Is this a break with tradition, or an attempt to fulfill one of Judaism's greatest commandments: Zachor— to remember? In this powerful episode of TO BE CONTINUED..., Rabbi Jeff Salkin sits down with award-winning documentary filmmaker Dara Bratt and third-generation Holocaust descendant Michelle Ekstein Rose to explore one of the most unexpected and moving expressions of Holocaust remembrance today: commemorative tattoos. Dara shares the story behind her acclaimed short documentary Inked: Our Stories Remarked, which follows children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors who have chosen to etch their family's Holocaust legacy onto their bodies. Michelle opens up with her grandmother Anita Ekstein's extraordinary story of survival in Nazi-occupied Poland, and the deeply personal tattoos she carries in her grandmother's and her great-grandfather's honor. Together, they challenge us to ask what it truly means to remember, to reclaim, and to pass a legacy forward, and whether something some consider religiously prohibitive can become an act of devotion. This is an episode about "ink", identity, resilience, and the evolving ways each generation carries the legacy of the Holocaust. It will spur conversations; it will stay with you long after you listen. Michelle Rose is a third-generation descendant of four Holocaust survivors and a passionate community activist dedicated to Holocaust remembrance, education, and justice. Raised with the stories of her grandparents woven into the fabric of her identity, Michelle was particularly shaped by her grandmother Anita Ekstein, a prominent Holocaust educator and survivor who escaped Nazi persecution through extraordinary acts of courage and kindness from righteous gentiles. Michelle lives in Toronto, Canada with her husband and two young sons. Dara Bratt is an award-winning director and film producer whose work has screened at prestigious festivals around the world, including Tribeca, SXSW, and the Abu Dhabi International Film Festival. Known for shining a light on extraordinary and unconventional stories, Dara was drawn to the powerful and little-known phenomenon of Holocaust commemorative tattoos after a conversation with a professor researching how tattoos can heal trauma. That curiosity led her to create Inked: Our Stories Remarked, a short documentary exploring how grandchildren of Holocaust survivors are etching family memory onto their bodies as acts of identity, resilience, and education. In June 2024, the film took first place in the Claims Conference Emerging Filmmaker Contest, chosen from 35 submissions across nine countries. Since its 2025 premiere, the film has screened at festivals and cultural institutions across North America. The film has received Best Female Director at the Istanbul Women Film Awards, Best Short Documentary at the New York Women Film Festival, and Best Historical Documentary at the Milan Indie Film Festival. It has also been featured in university classrooms at Loyola University New Orleans and Tulane University, where Bratt has guest lectured on Holocaust memory, identity, documentary storytelling, and intergenerational legacy. TRANSCRIPT: This episode is generously sponsored by Susan Singer in honor of her parents Yolanda and Siegmund Joseph, courageous Holocaust survivors from Czechoslovakia, who kept the memory of their lost families alive. You've heard it your whole life. If you get a tattoo, you can't be buried in a Jewish cemetery. That might, or it might not, be true. Yes, of course, the prohibition is real. It's right there in the Book of Leviticus. It's unambiguous to not cut your bodies for the dead, or put tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the Lord. But the cemetery thing -- in all likelihood -- it is probably a piece of communal folklore. It was a cautionary tale, most likely. The Jewish authorities invented it in order to keep Jews away from the needle and the ink. And yet, it hasn't exactly worked as a deterrent. It did for a while, but not in our time, tattoos have become something we could not have imagined a generation ago. The tattoo has become a fashion statement. and makes the body a canvas for identity. But you see, for Holocaust survivors... tattoos were not a choice. They were a mark of degradation. People decided that Jews were not people, but rather commodities, and they etched those numbers into their flesh. But for some of their children and grandchildren, that same act, marking the body, has become something almost unrecognizable. It has become a way to remember, a way to reclaim, a way to carry stories that might otherwise disappear. So you might ask what happens when an ancient prohibition meets a modern hunger for memory? What does it mean when the very medium that Jewish law discourages becomes, for some descendants of survivors, a powerful and indelible act of bearing witness? It makes the body into a canvas of Jewish memory. Welcome to our podcast TO BE CONTINUED... Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors. where we explore the intersections of memory, identity, and resilience. Our goal: to lift up the experiences of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, and to ask, how do those memories form you? How did resilience create you as the person you are today, and what is the legacy that you will leave to those who come after you? I am your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin. Today, we're speaking with Dara Bratt, producer of the short documentary "Inked, Our Stories Remarked". And Michelle Ekstein Rose, a third generation descendant, whose own experience appears in the film. But before we start our discussion, let me tell you about our guests. Dara Bratt is an award-winning director and film producer. Collectively, her films have screened all over the world, including the Tribeca Film Festival, SXSW, Canne, the Abu Dhabi International Film Festival, and more. She is the recipient of many awards and grants. In June 2024, out of 35 submissions from nine countries, Dara took the first place prize in the Claims Conference emerging filmmaker contest, which focused on films about the Shoah, for her proposed documentary, "Inked: Our Stories Remarked", which is the basis of our conversation today. Gregory Schneider is the executive vice president of the Claims Conference, and this is what he said, "Dara has not only created a film, but she sparked a conversation into a movement few knew about. A conversation that has quietly unfolded within families". Now, there may be some of you who don't know what the Claims Conference does, so let me tell you. They are an international nonprofit organization that secures material compensation for Holocaust survivors around the world, and also seeks the return of Jewish property that was stolen during the Holocaust. Michelle Ekstein Rose is the granddaughter of four holocaust survivors. She is a passionate voice for remembrance, education, and justice. While all four of her grandparents embody resilience, it was her grandmother, Anita Helfgott Ekstein, who devoted her life to Holocaust education, and she inspired Michelle's own calling. Anita's dedication, her courage, her unwavering commitment to "Never Forget" became the foundation for Michelle's life's mission. which is to assure that we never repeat the past. Michelle is a community activist. She works tirelessly to combat antisemitism. She works to promote Holocaust education. She fosters understanding across generations. Michelle lives in Toronto, Canada with her husband and her two young boys. Welcome to both of you. It's so great to have you here. Thank you so much for having me here. I am very excited. Dara, Inked: Our Stories Remarked is such a perfect title for this film, and I have to tell you, I've watched this film. I have found it very moving. It's really a very important piece of work. I wish, I wish we could just make sure that everyone, who is concerned with Holocaust memory, gets to see it, 'cause this film is an exploration into a very complex phenomenon. Wherein children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors are processing this intergenerational trauma by getting tribute tattoos. And so the documentary explores this decision. What does it mean to etch history onto the body? It's an act that invites us to confront essential questions about memory, Jewish identity, and self expression. The movie really, as I said, moved me. So let me ask you, what first inspired you to create this documentary? Was there a particular moment when you realized that this is a story that you needed to tell? Well, first of all, thank you so much for the kind of words and for watching the film. I think, for myself, as a filmmaker, regardless of the film that I'm making, I'm always interested in ideas that are a little bit out there, like, shining a light on something a little out of the ordinary, and letting it sit with audiences, and letting them decide if it's extraordinary, or what they, what the takeaway is. And for me, this is one of those ideas. It was not something I knew about that much. Um, I have a friend who's a professor who was studying how tattoos heal trauma. And she was looking at the wide scope of what that encompasses, whether it was women tattooing their breasts after mastectomy, whether it's LQBTQ getting the pink triangle. It was reclaiming something that was traumatic and turning it into a story of positivity. One of the areas that she was focused on was commemorative Holocaust tattoos. And so that was my first introduction to the topic. At the same time, I saw that the Claims Conference was having their annual submissions for the grant, for a short document, documentary or narrative, that explored Holocaust education. And I thought, well, I'll apply, but this idea is so out there, I doubt they'll choose mine. Because I always have a little bit of the wild ideas. And so, first, I made it to the finals, and there was round two, and I had to speak about my project, to the jury, and then I found out that I won. So that's kind of how it came to fruition. And after that, it became this rabbit hole of just meeting people that would become the subjects in the film and learning so much more about it. And the whole story around it, the different points of view, which, as you know, I try to include in the film, which I'm sure we'll talk about. I really need to ask you, how and why do tattoos become such a powerful way for people to express the inheritance of these memories and these traumas? Well, I think it's a couple things. Firstly, I'm very interested in storytelling and how we tell stories, and I think, you know, looking back in history, we've gone from oral storytelling to written storytelling. Younger generations are visual, they're more graphic. I mean, we literally text people in just emojis, and it makes sense. So I think tattoos are a natural progression of a graphic, more visual language. And I also think it's with time changing the narrative. You know, tattoos, especially ones that were forced on prisoners, reclaiming that, you know, having some time to look back on something, saying, you know what, I'm gonna change the narrative of this, instead of being a victim, I'm gonna be a survivor. I'm gonna use this; I'm going to show it proudly. And I'm gonna embody memory with this. So I think, for me, those were the things that interested me, that I wanted to explore more, how tattoos tell stories, how they carry legacy forward. And I also, like I said, when I first started, I was not aware that this was a thing, and I think post October 7th, I started getting all these friends, um, sending me, um, stories about people in Israel, tattooing themselves, like, "We Will Dance Again". Um, it didn't fit into the scope of what the short film was about, and I stayed in my lane of, like, we were talking about the Holocaust here. But I do think that tattoos have become more prevalent. as a way of reclaiming trauma into a story that is healing. It's funny that you mention Israel, because the first Jews, whom I ever encountered, who had tattoos, were, in fact, Israelis. So, Michelle, you're a third generation descendant, a 3G. And so, I'd like to ask you, what role did Holocaust memory play in your childhood and your family life? Tell us a little about your grandmother, Anita Eckstein, who I believe is the grandparent that you were closest to. Um, okay. Let's dive into it. So, I never have a memory where I didn't know that I was the child, the grandchild of Holocaust survivors. There was never a moment where I didn't know who I was. All four of my grandparents were very vocal on what they endured, what they had been through, and what we were the product of. That being said, I don't necessarily say that my grandmother and I were the closest. She's just, God bless, the one around the longest. Um, but she is the one who was the most vocal about her Holocaust, um, story, and she's the one that fuels my reason for doing what I do. I believe that I picked up a torch that my soon to be 92-year-old grandmother has put down, but not turned off. Um, about my grandmother, so she was born in July of 1934, in Synowodzko Wyzne. She was an only child to Ethel and Fischel Helfgott. The first time she actually was in hiding was in the summer of 1941. There was a Ukrainian pogrom happening where she was, and her family's landlord said, "Come, and I will hide you in the hayloft, in the barn behind our house". His wife never knew about it. People came and went, and for two weeks, my grandmother hid and played hide and seek with her mom and dad for the first time in her life. That was when, um, she... heard the phrase, "This too shall pass", for the first time, um, and that is now actually one of the tattoos that I have on my body. After the pogrom was finished and she came out of hiding, that's when the anti-Jewish laws started happening in her town, and after a little while, they were deported as a family to the Scole ghetto. Once they were in the Scole ghetto, conditions were awful. She lived in a house with three bedrooms, with 18 other people. Um, wasn't very, uh, a good place to be. And in 1942, she was going to go to the market one day with her mother, and at the last second, her mother said, "It's a nice day out. Go play with your neighbor instead." And on her way to the market, her mother was picked up by truck and taken directly to Belzec, and that was the last we ever saw of her. Um, out of desperation, my great grandfather Fischel, he became friends with a local shopkeeper, a Catholic gentleman, um, and basically did the unthinkable, and said, "Can you help?" And this Catholic man, this righteous gentile, um, did the one thing that has left a ripple effect in my family line, and he decided to help. He smuggled my grandmother in a sack of potatoes, and then a buggy, um, a horse and buggy, took her out of the ghetto, into his home, where they gave her a new name, and a name with Catholic identity. She was there for about six months before she was denounced by a neighbor. Um, it was February. It was winter in Poland, and she was home with the niece of the Catholic savior Joseph, and this niece picked my eight-year-old grandmother up, and threw her out a second-floor window, and said, "Run". My eight-year-old grandmother, in the snow, no shoes, and just a nighty, ran into an outhouse where she hid until it was dark. While she was in hiding, the house was ransacked, as well as, she heard lots of gunshots. She found out that the house had been ransacked, and they didn't find anything, and the gunshots were other hidden Jews that they had found during that day in the town that had been murdered. At this point, Joseph and his family knew they couldn't keep Anita, keep my grandma anymore, out of their own safety. So Joseph actually brought my grandmother back to my great-grandfather the same way she was brought in -- in the sack of potatoes, in the horse and buggy, back to the slave labor camp, where my great-grandfather now was. Um, the town of Scole had been liquidated from about 2,000 people to 20. And my great-grandfather was one of those 20. Now, being as it was a slave labor camp, there was nowhere to hide my grandmother. Um, out of fear of her being found. They had a little bunker, the police, house, if you will, and had an armoire in it, and my grandmother spent seven weeks, day and night, in the armoire, locked away out of fear of being found, while her dad went to work. Um, it was awful conditions. There were dead bodies some days thrown into the room. She never knew if her dad was going to come back or not. It wasn't the place that an eight-year-old should be for that length of time. Again, knowing that this wasn't the way to do it, um, my great-grandfather reached back out to Joseph and said, "Please, help me again, find something different", and Joseph managed to get a local parish priest to fake some birth certificates, and my grandmother's identity now became Anna Jerowska. Um, and then my grandmother and her father said their final goodbyes. And it was during their final goodbye, my great-grandfather said to my grandma "You must be good, you must be independent, and you must always remember who you are. And, um, "Always Remember Who You Are" is my second tattoo, and that commemorates, um, the Holocaust for me. So she lived, my grandmother lives with this priest. Um, she learned, relearned schooling. She learned Catholicism, but she always kept her promise to her father that, you know, I am a Jewish girl. I will survive. I will do everything. Um, when she was finally liberated, once the war ended, she was reunited with Joseph's family, where she finally learned the fate of her father, who, unfortunately, um, when he was done working for the Germans, they shot him. She did have a happy reunition with my Aunt Sally, who herself has her own story. She was saved by Oskar Schindler. And together, the two of them started the next phase of life. They moved around Poland for a bit, finding other family members. Um, and then moved to Paris, where my great aunt met a man, um, who also survived with his two-year-old daughter, and now my grandma finally had a family. She had, more or less, two acting parents and a sister. Um, they left Europe, they came to Canada. She was 14 years old, with very little education, started schooling here. At about 17 or 18, she met my grandfather. She married Frank. Together, they had three kids. All together, they have eight grandchildren, plus spouses, and all together, we all have 11 great grandchildren to give to my grandma. Um, she is a Holocaust, until she was unable to, she was a Holocaust educator, she went on the March for Living 20 times. She's a very prominent survivor here in our Toronto community. And her legacy, at the end of the day, isn't just her story. It's all of us. Dara, we heard about Michelle's tattoos. and both of which carry very powerful messages. Can you tell us about some of the other 3G, third generation tattoos that the film would show to us? Yeah, so when I started the research to find their generations, descendants, and I knew I wanted to focus on the grandchildren. It seemed like it was the grandchildren who were more open to tattooing, I think, with a little bit more time. Um, it's easier for them to kind of, kind of, um, interpret the stories and bring them to life more than, like, 2Gs. So, I focus on 3Gs, and initially, I was looking for commemorative Holocaust tattoos, that's subjects who have the numbers, the Auschwitz numbers, re-tattooed on their arms. And what I realized,

4. Charlie Scheidt & Kat Rohrer: Holocaust Descendants on Different Sides of History from TO BE CONTINUED...Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, opens in a new tab

   Jun 8, 202648 min

   What happens when the son of a Holocaust survivor meets the granddaughter of a Nazi officer? In this powerful episode of TO BE CONTINUED... Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, host Rabbi Jeff Salkin sits down with Charlie Scheidt and Kat Rohrer, co-authors of Inheritance: Love, Loss, and the Legacy of the Holocaust . Charlie grew up in a German Jewish household on New York's Upper West Side, surrounded by family members who had fled Nazi Germany, and a silence about the past that was deafening. When his mother died in 1988, she left behind an armoire filled with nearly a thousand documents: letters, visas, identity papers, and more. It would take Charlie twenty years before he could bring himself to open them. Kat is an award-winning Austrian filmmaker and the granddaughter of a devoted Nazi officer. Haunted by her family's role in one of history's darkest chapters, she had spent years grappling with what it means to carry that legacy. When they met, an extraordinary partnership was born. Over fifteen years, four trips to Europe, and hundreds of conversations, they pieced together a story of loss, memory, and unexpected connection. Together, they reflect on the silence that shaped them, the documents and discoveries that changed them, and why they believe that breaking that silence is the only way to ensure the oppressors don't own the story. TRANSCRIPT: This episode of our podcast is generously sponsored by Irene and David Beyth, in memory of David's parents, Hannah and Werner Beyth, who were both fortunate to escape Nazi Germany before the war. Let us start with a German lesson. The word is Erbe. It means both inheritance and legacy. Today's guests have spent more than a decade sitting with that word. One of them grew up in a German Jewish household on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, surrounded by relatives who had fled Nazi Germany in a family where the unspoken motto was "Forward, never back." The other grew up in postwar Austria. The granddaughter of a man who volunteered for the Wehrmacht, Hitler's united armed forces of Nazi Germany, and a family that kept its silence about what that meant and why. And yet remarkably these two people found each other. They traveled together through Germany, France, Austria, and the Netherlands on a joint journey of discovery and empathy. The result is a book called Inheritance - Love, Loss, and the Legacy of the Holocaust, a memoir unlike almost any other in the crowded literature of Holocaust memory because it is written across the deepest moral divide of the 20th century, between the descendants of victims and the descendants of perpetrators. Welcome to this podcast, To Be Continued... Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, where we explore the intersections of memory, identity, and resilience. Our goal is to lift up the experiences of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and to ask how did those memories form you? How did resilience create you as the person you are today? And what is the legacy that you will leave to those who come after you? I am your host Rabbi Jeff Salkin, and our guests are Charlie Scheidt, born in New York City, the son of German Jewish refugees. His father Bruno fled Frankfurt in 1933. His mother Sous followed, as did many other close family members. But unfortunately others did not and became trapped in the Nazi Weis in Germany, Holland, and France. And when Charlie's mother died in 1988, she left behind an armoire containing nearly a thousand documents, letters, visas, identity papers, a baby's autopsy report...that Charlie could not bring himself to absorb and deal with for 20 years. Kat Rohrer is an award-winning Austrian filmmaker whose films include "Back to the Fatherland," a documentary about Israelis living in Germany. Her maternal grandfather was a devout Nazi officer, a true believer who died fighting in Yugoslavia before her mother was born. Her family, her mother, her grandmother, her great aunt -- who by the way married a Jew and escaped to Australia -- did not speak of him. Charlie and Kat met almost by accident when Kat was filming the 75th anniversary of Charlie's company, Roland Foods. He noticed she spoke German. A few months later he asked if she might help him translate some papers. She said yes because, as she told him, she had a personal interest in that period of history. It would be some time before he understood what that meant. Eventually she sent him an email. It was time she said that he knew her story. She told him that she had been haunted all her life by the same patch of ash that haunted his family. What followed was 15 years of research, four trips to Europe, hundreds of conversations with strangers who turned out to be guardians of forgotten memory and a book that refuses easy comfort, tidy conclusions, or the warm illusion that history is over. Today they are here to talk about all of it. Charlie and Kat welcome. It's good to have you here. Both of you grew up in families where the war was present but almost never spoken of. Charlie, in a German Jewish home in New York; Kat, in post-war Austria. What did that silence sound like? What did it teach you even when nothing was being said? This silence was pervasive. It was, the past was a taboo subject. And as you said, it was a matter of constantly looking forward. That generation and my parents and the people I grew up around were focused on creating a new life and thinking back and living in the past was painful to them. And they tried by being silent to spare me from the knowledge and the horrors of what they had witnessed and what the family had lived through. It was a way of protecting the next generation, but frankly it didn't work because the anxiety was so pervasive and the sense that the subject was a taboo was something I could not avoid and that affected the relationships in the family. And I was aware of something strange in some of the relationships so that the silence didn't work. And to grow up around the silence does not solve the issue of the past and is frankly one of the reasons for the spoke to break open that silence. What's it like for you Kat? It's a different kind of silence because my family did talk about what my grandfather was and that he volunteered and that he was a devout Nazi. So I can't tell you a time where I didn't know this fact. What we didn't talk about is him as a person because in actuality my grandmother died when I was three so I couldn't ask her. My great aunt who became my de facto grandmother, who had fled to Australia. I was too young to ask her questions about why she came back in the summers to Austria to a society that didn't want her, that she had to flee. So that I don't know, and that was just because she had passed away when I was old enough to ask. But the minute I asked about why my great aunt was living in Austria my mom told me why. So it was less of a silence. It was more of a we know this is a fact but we don't need to know more. And because I'm a third generation I have the benefit of time and being more removed. I started to ask questions, you know, what my grandfather had done and where he had been. Charlie you don't have to be silent anymore, luckily. And I want this to make sense to our listeners. So could you give us a brief synopsis of your family's Holocaust experience? The Holocaust experience is in several countries. So let's start with Germany where much of the family left but part of the family did not and he in fact was injured in the First World War and for the longest time thought they would be safe. Unfortunately that did not turn out to be true. Then we had family in Holland. There again Holland had been neutral in World War I and many people in Holland not just Jews thought that they would be safe in World War II as a neutral party and that turned out not to be true. And then we had family in France. France, of course, there was the fake war. There's a French expression, but in the Droit des Gares, there was a period from the declaration of war in September 1939 until the Blitzkrieg in April that people could have the illusion that this too would pass and unfortunately it did not. And of course we ended up with family in Vichy France in the southern France. And that's a difficult story. So it's really a story in those three countries and how people coped and tried to save themselves and hoped for the best. And for some unfortunately what actually did happen. Let's talk about a piece of furniture. A week before your mother died in 1988 she told you about the papers in the armoire. She had kept those papers hidden for decades and then at the very end she told you where they were. What was she saying to you? What was she giving you permission to do and why do you think she kept them hidden for more than 50 years? My parents, like so much of that generation and as we said before, simply looked forward. The past was scary, was upsetting and creating a life in a new country is not easy. It's not easy for any refugee or immigrant. So they worked very hard. They tried very hard to give me everything they possibly could in terms of education and a good solid life. So that's the ethos that they embraced and I was the beneficiary of. But by the time my mother was later, in her later years, and so ill in those final years, a couple of years, she must have come to the conclusion that the time had come for me to what that history really was. She didn't have the time or the energy to really dissect it all and tell me everything. But she wanted me to know that she had hidden all those documents and that she had saved them and she encouraged me to look at them and then decide what I wanted to do with them. In a sense, she bequeathed them to me. Kat, your mother was born after her father was killed in Yugoslavia and like Charlie's family, she didn't want to linger in the past. But there's a difference between not talking about it and not being affected by it. Those are two very different things. When did you first find out about your grandfather? Who told you? And what happened inside you when you learned? Honestly, I can't remember. I think there's not a time that I remember growing up that I didn't know. The reason, I imagined, I asked that question pretty early was because my great aunt who had immigrated to or had fled to Australia came every summer to take care of me, because my mom was a single mom, and was working. So I guess, at one point, I asked why she wasn't living in Austria and my mom told me. And then, obviously in school, when you go through the history, it all started to be pieced together. I think when I was first affected or really started in my adult life, [to] grapple with it was when I moved to New York. When I moved to New York and I had a colleague in university that was Israeli and we had a conversation. We're talking about Austria and he was saying he made a joke and said he didn't mean it as a joke. I didn't find it particularly funny. He said, "Your grandparents killed my grandparents." And I swallowed and I took a deep breath and for a long time I didn't want to introduce myself as being from Austria. Because it was hard to admit that. But with years and with me learning more about the history and also learning more about my family history and with Charlie's project and with making the movie, I became more forward and just telling the story because there's no point in hiding it. Charlie, you asked Kat to help you translate documents. You knew she was Austrian. You knew she was a filmmaker. You knew that she spoke German, but you didn't know her full story yet. So when she finally sent you that email telling you that she had been haunted by the same patch of ash, what did that moment do to you? What did it mean to you? She really asked the question how that would affect my willingness to work with her. And I simply answered that we don't know what we will find in the papers that I had inherited. Who knows what's there? And in fact, how will that affect anything? Because she is who she is and I am who I am. And each of us is responsible for ourselves. And I believe I even said the sins of the father or grandfather in her case are not her sins. So for me, it was a matter of starting to work together, getting to know each other better and getting to appreciate each other. And if it works, great. And if it doesn't work, well, then we'll go on with our lives. Fortunately, it did work. I guess I'd say, 15 years down the road, I think it works. Yes. Yes. And in a way, it's a deep friendship partially because of those differences and an appreciation, which I also gained, of what it means to be in her position. You know, you have to deal with a certain reality that I don't have to deal with. I think by naming the teaching that the sins of the parents do not fall upon the children, which is from the book of Ezekiel, you're actually naming one of the great internal reforms of the Hebrew Bible, which is that rather than visiting the sins of the parents upon the third and fourth generation, that this doesn't exist anymore. And it's how we are able to move forward. So the question is, this is a collaboration between the child of victims and the grandchild of a perpetrator. This is not a symmetrical relationship, I think it would be wrong to pretend that it is. So how did you navigate that asymmetry? Were there moments when it felt impossible to stand on equal ground? To finding out the truth, to finding out history, and to learning from history, and understanding the reality of what past generations have gone through, what they have dealt with, how they have dealt with the realities, and what that teaches us in terms of what we do with our lives. I mean, there's so many other aspects of us potentially not being on equal ground. I mean, Charlie is older. I'm younger, he's an accomplished businessman. I was just starting out with my business. So there's many, many other things. I think that history, despite it being that family history, despite it being very different, it's the lingering grasp this history has on our lives in a way, or be very, very different. That actually puts us on equal footing because I understand where Charlie is coming from. Another person may not have understood it as well. So I think in that respect, we were very complimentary to each other and with each other. And we had conversations that were very important for both of us, but also expanded our horizons when it comes to understanding. For me to understand Charlie or Charlie understanding me, and together understanding history. This is such an interesting relationship to me. To our viewers and listeners, how does each of your pasts help you understand the other? And were there moments when your opposite inheritance has actually clarified something that neither of you could have seen on your own? I think the perspectives, I mean, more important than being from different sides is that we're from two different generations. Charlie, because he knew his parents and he grew up with them and was so adamant about looking forward because that's what he had been taught, was in occasions afraid to ask questions. Me being the third generation being removed, not having a relationship with my grandparents because they were both dead, and having had a very open discussion with my mother and seeing some of the not wanting to look back, but forward for a different reason, but the same mechanisms allowed me to know how to approach certain subject matters with Charlie and to maybe nudge him into looking in certain areas that he maybe didn't want to look into. Nudge is a gentle word, I would say push, but I was willingly pushed because what I realized over time, and you mentioned earlier, Jeff, that for 20 years I really could not deal with the inheritance. Now, I rationalized that by saying I was busy building and running a business, raising a family, living in the present, but I think emotionally what I realized in the course of working with Kat was that I was also protecting myself emotionally from the past and that the world in which I had grown up had taught me that, had taught me to do that, to live in the present, and that the time had come really for me emotionally to deal with it, to understand it, and to understand how it has affected the world in which I grew up. Kat, you were a very important part, really an integral companion, and something harder to name -- was any part of this work for you a way of trying to make amends, and if so, can amends actually be made across a divide this wide? I don't think I can make amends for something that happened 40 years before I was born that, you know, by someone I didn't even know. So I don't think amends, I can make amends for anything. And what I can do, and I think that is the responsibility for the descendants of the perpetrators, is to take responsibility, or in my case, help Charlie, you know, go on this journey with him and have this amazing experience of finding out about this family history and preserving it, because very often family histories are not preserved, and I could use my knowledge, I mean Charlie speaks perfect German, but you know, let's say my talents in an archive and my talents in, you know, looking for the needle in the haystack to help him find the answers that he was looking for. So I think that is making amends. No, it was helping along and, you know, taking ownership or responsibility for the history that my grandfather somehow was a part of. You stayed overnight at La Ricoquette, the house in Normandy, where your Uncle Max, Charlie, and Aunt Erna lived before Max was sent to an internment camp. You wrote that you felt you were inhabiting the present and the past simultaneously. What does that actually feel like? Can you take us into that house and into that moment? It was not only in that house that I had the experience. The very first time was quite by serendipity when we luckily were invited into, or convinced somebody to let us into an apartment in Germany that my maternal grandparents had lived in. And suddenly being in that space and imagining them in that space really changed the way we approached future trips. And you mentioned the experience in Normandy. That was living in the present, because here, and I'll just mention, for example, sitting in the garden, and it's a beautiful Sunday morning and enjoying it and appreciating it. And then at the same time remembering and hearing my aunt and uncle's letters that they had written from that backyard. And for example, imagining my uncle chasing his cat, his tomcat, I would like to climb a tree. So I was living in that past and appreciating it in a way by just being there. And it was quite an overwhelming feeling. And I think it enriched our experiences immensely. Now, Charlie, in terms of these journeys that you took, you also went to Paris with Kat to trace your family's footsteps. And you found the streets and the apartments where they had lived. But when you traveled to Paris with your parents when you were growing up as a child, they never took you to those neighborhoods. So what did it mean to walk those streets now without them and without ever having been taken there? The first thing that came to mind is, "Why didn't you take me here? What's going on? You took me to see some sights. You introduced me to a cafe and a croissant in Paris, but you didn't show me where you had lived and why?!" And I could think that it was, in a way, painful for them. They seemed to have been very happy there. They were newlyweds. They were living in Paris. For example, when my father loved Charlie Chaplin movies and when we came out of a place that they had lived, I looked to the side and there was the Chaplin Movie House. It still has that name on it. So I was sorry that they hadn't. And yet, I think it was part of that pattern of not going back because I'm sure their memorie

5. Nick Winton: Inheriting Moral Clarity from TO BE CONTINUED...Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, opens in a new tab

   May 11, 202635 min

   What does it mean to grow up in the shadow of an extraordinary father — one whose secret acts of heroism saved 669 mostly Jewish children from the Holocaust, yet never spoke a word of it to his family? In this episode of TO BE CONTINUED... host Rabbi Jeff Salkin sits down with Nick Winton, son of Sir Nicholas Winton, the quiet, unassuming British stockbroker who, beginning in late 1938, organized the rescue of hundreds of mostly Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Over the course of several months, he arranged eight transports from Prague to Great Britain — until September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, the borders closed, and a ninth train carrying 250 children never left the station. NOTE: This dialogue did not make it into this episode, but is important to know: "Most of the children were Jewish, but there were non-Jewish children as well. How did they get involved in this story? Why was it necessary that they be safe as Hitler threatened anybody who was against his regime? Well, obviously, the Jews were primary targets, but there were also writers and people who had spoken out against Hitler, and they were also on his hit list. As well as...colored people...gypsies. So there were whole groups who were at threat. And my father wasn't there to save Jews. He was there to save children. So, some of the children on the transports were not just Jewish. So your father is a part of Jewish history, European history, world history, and moral history..." The story remained hidden for 50 years, until Nick's mother discovered a dusty scrapbook in 1988. Nick reflects on learning of his father's legacy as an adult, the weight of carrying such an inheritance, and the question at the heart of this conversation: if second-generation survivor descendants inherit trauma, do children of rescuers inherit moral responsibility? Nick Winton grew up near Maidenhead, England. He graduated from Imperial College Business School, London. After brain tumor surgery and with a five-year prognosis, Nick earned his MBA. Nick Winton is now an international speaker, storyteller, and company adviser. His stories are inspired by his father. Nick now channels his legacy and personal stories into powerful speeches that inspire change. Learn more at https://nicholaswinton.org/ . TRANSCRIPT: This episode is generously sponsored by Karen and George Goldberg in honor of their children and three grandchildren who are all descendants of Karen's mom, Ilona Medwied, a Holocaust survivor and the inspiration for this podcast. Also in honor of George's dad, Staff Sergeant Frederick Goldberg of the U.S. Army Air Force, who flew 35 missions as a B-17 side gunner, fighting the Nazis. We often speak about children of Holocaust survivors inheriting trauma. As our first guest, Elizabeth Rosner, had put it, "We are experiencing post-traumatic stress as if we too went through those experiences. We know that we didn't. I know that I was not there physically. I wasn't even a witness to their experience.” But in this podcast, we are meeting a different kind of a child, a different kind of second-generation descendant. This is a story you need to hear. Welcome to this podcast, To Be Continued... Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, where we explore the intersections of memory, identity, and resilience. Our goal, to lift up the experiences of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and to ask, How did those memories form you? How did resilience create you as the person you are today? And what is the legacy that you will leave to those who come after you? I'm your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin. You are about to meet a man named Nick Winton. In the Jewish tradition, to bear someone's name is to perpetuate their memory, to make sure that the good deeds that they did will survive them. Nick Winton bears the name of his father, Sir Nicholas Winton. It starts in December 1938 with a man named Martin Blake, who was a friend of Nicholas Winton, and who was an instructional master at the Westminster School in London. Nicholas was about to take a ski vacation to Switzerland, and his friend invited him instead to visit him in Prague, Czechoslovakia, where he had traveled in his capacity as an associate of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia. This committee had been established in October 1938 to provide assistance for refugees created by the German annexation of the Sudeten regions of Czechoslovakia under the terms of the Munich Pact. Convinced that a European war was imminent, Winton decided to go to Prague. What happened? Winton immediately established a children's section, and using the name of the British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, initially without authorization, he began taking applications from parents at his hotel in Prague. Soon, thousands of parents lined up outside of Winton's children's sections office, seeking a safe haven for their children. Ultimately, Nicholas Winton saved the lives of 669 children, most of them Jewish, who have multiplied to more than 6,000 survivor descendants. What a story. And you can watch this story, as I recently did in the movie One Life, that stars Anthony Hopkins, which is a very powerful film. But there is so much more that you should hear from Nicholas's son, Nick Winton. And true to this podcast, we will explore the question of, if many second- and third-generation survivor descendants do inherit trauma, do children of rescuers inherit moral responsibility? That is our question, among others, for Nick Winton, the son of the man dubbed Britain’s Schindler. Nick Winton grew up near Maidenhead, England, one of three children born to Sir Nicholas Winton and his wife, Grete. Nick graduated from Imperial College Business School in London. After brain tumor surgery, and with a five-year prognosis, he earned his MBA. Nick Winton is now an international speaker, storyteller, and company advisor. His stories are inspired by his father, Sir Nicholas Winton, MBE, a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. And Nick now channels his legacy and personal stories into powerful speeches that inspire change. Nick Winton, I have to say to you, it is truly an honor to meet you. Nick, your father's story is extraordinary and his decision in 1938 to act, before World War II, had even begun, well, that decision reflects a moral clarity and foresight that far too few people recognized or possessed at that time. Please, for all of us, continue the story of your father's rescue of 669 children, starting with what happened after all those parents came to the hotel in Prague, seeking refuge for their children. Well, the first challenge he had, Jeff, was to find out whether the country, our country, would accept any children at all. And while he was in Prague, he got in touch with his mum back in London, who he encouraged to go to find out from the British government whether she could actually get any children out of Prague and into London. And there had been some debates, and it was finally agreed that unaccompanied children would be allowed into the United Kingdom under certain circumstances. So, he started trying to put together a project to make that possible, make that happen. And it was quite daunting because the conditions were quite challenging. I mean, first he needed a foster family that would accept a child and look after them for the duration of what at the time was called the "Emergency,” because we weren't at war. And in fact, the British government didn't think we would ever go to war. So this was considered a sort of a temporary refuge that may never actually be needed. So having found foster families, he then needed a guarantor of 50 pounds to repatriate them back to their country when the problem had been resolved. It doesn't sound like a lot in Britain today, but it's equivalent to about $5,000 per child to resettle them after the emergency. So that's quite a substantial commitment to get somebody to make, to get a child into the country. Then he had to pay for their transport from Prague to London. They needed a visa from the British home office. And when the Germans finally marched into Czechoslovakia to take management responsibility for it, the government more or less abandoned Czech, he needed an exit permit from the Gestapo. So it was quite a process that he had to go through, the most difficult one being to find families quickly that will be willing to take a child. I'd like to shift the focus now to your experience. You didn't grow up knowing your father as a public hero. His story didn't come out until 1988 when your mother discovered a scrapbook with memories, photos, and risks to children. And you were already in your late 30s, and your sister was slightly older. I'm wondering, why do you think he kept silent for 50 years? Did you experience moments growing up when you sensed that he carried memories or burdens that he did not or couldn't have fully shared? I'm often asked, and in fact, my father was asked, "Nicky, why did you keep it a secret?" And he said, "I didn't keep it a secret. I just didn't talk about it." And I guess it was emblematic of that generation. Many of them didn't talk about their experiences if it wasn't relevant. It was a nine-month part-time project for him. It had ended unhappily for him, and he wasn't proud of it. So I guess that was why it was never a topic of conversation in his mind. But it showed up in other ways. For instance, when he was knighted, he didn't tell me about it. I was away at a hotel for the New Year's Eve celebration, and the next morning, the list is published in the New Year's Honors List, and I was just reading the paper, and I scanned it. There was my father's name in the paper, and I couldn't believe it. So I phoned him up, and I said, "But you're in the Honors List?" And he said, "Yeah." "Well, why didn't you tell us?" "Oh," he said, "Well, they asked us if we were offered it, would we accept it? And please don't tell anyone." I said, "Yeah, but that's journalists, so they don't publish the list before it's official, not the family." And he said, "Well." So he was quite private in many aspects of his life, even with the family. Quite extraordinary man. Well, especially with a family. So, it's 1988, and you and your sister hear this story for the first time. What was that like for you emotionally? I mean, he'd done so many things in his life, and this was just another thing. And I sometimes wonder if I'm a bit unimaginative, but does anybody know anybody who would like the scrapbook because we're looking to place it? And what scrapbook? I don't know anything about the Holocaust? No, I didn't know anybody. It was only when the That's Life program broadcasted that exhibit, where half the audience stood up as people he'd rescued, that it actually connected. And even then it took some time for me to process the implications of what I'd just seen. And even now, I'm still getting to grips with this whole aspect of my father's life that was completely hidden until it came out so long ago now. But it still seems to me, quite extraordinary. Well, that moment, the great reveal, as it were, was a very powerful scene in the movie and must have been even more so in real life. When the world began celebrating your father, did you ever feel that you were sharing him with history? It never really occurred to me. I mean, he was still my father. He was still Pa. He was the same man he always was. He always found it extraordinarily embarrassing the way he was so acknowledged, even revered in Czechoslovakia. He was sort of a national hero. He always found it very uncomfortable, I think partly because when the story became public knowledge, he was the only person left alive in that project, in that rescue mission. And although he was the instigator, he certainly wasn't at risk in the way that some of the people in the Prague office were. So, he felt a little embarrassed that he was getting so much attention because it was, you know, as I say, although he was the instigator, it was a team effort. There were others involved, some in far greater danger than he was. Yeah, yeah. So, the conditions for getting the children into the United Kingdom were quite challenging, but having got the agreement, he then had to find foster families who would be willing to look after them. And he spent a great deal of time trying to find families, usually by getting articles in newspapers, magazines, trying to encourage people to put their name forward. But then because he was convinced that this was an immediate threat, he did something which today would certainly be illegal as a quick solution. He had cards of children. So if a family says, I'll take a seven year old, he'd have cards of seven year olds and he'd send them off to the families and say, pick one a bit like you might pick a puppy at a kennel. Because he said, you know, they'd look at the face and say, oh, yes, that's sweet. We'll have that one. And, you know, there was some due diligence on the foster family to make sure that they were acceptable. But then having got a foster family to accept a child, he then put together the program so that they could be released from Czechoslovakia, get the immigration permit, get the paperwork in order, get the exit visa, put them on a train and have them brought over to to Britain. And over the course of the spring and the summer, he managed to organize eight transports with a total, as you say, of 669 children on it. And he was working on the largest. Up till then, the largest had been in July with 241 children. He was working on the largest, which had scheduled 250 children to bring to Britain to safety. And it was scheduled for the end of August and actually turned out to be the first of September. And the train was more or less ready to go with 250 children, which means 250 foster families, 250 immigration visas, 250 guarantors, which is a million and a half dollars of guarantees, 250 exit permits from the Gestapo. And according to five in the morning, the German army marched into Poland. It was the trigger for the outbreak of the Second World War. The borders to Germany were closed and the train never left the station. And almost all of those 250 children were killed in the Holocaust. And whenever my father was asked to talk about it, he always reflected on the train that didn't leave, which haunted him. And you can imagine why, Jeff. I mean, he must have thought, if I just worked an hour or two harder that day, if I had not taken one day off to do whatever I needed to do, if that train had left a day or two sooner, all of those children would be alive. And that just stuck with him for the rest of his life. And I think that's another reason why he just didn't want to talk about it, because that failure to him eclipsed the successes. So if I hear you correctly, he expressed what we might call survivor's guilt? Not overtly, but I can see why whenever he was interviewed about it, he always, always talked about the train that didn't leave, not the transports that did. I'm wondering, there's something about your father that was unique. We honor and we remember rescuers like Oscar Schindler and Raul Wallenberg, but your father's story is very different. He wasn't a diplomat. He wasn't a business owner. He wasn't a political leader. He was a quiet, private citizen who organized the rescue of hundreds of children. He didn't just save lives, as we've said. He created generations. And there are children and grandchildren of these children who exist because one man chose to act. How does that make you feel? As you sort of alluded to, he was a very ordinary man, Jeff. He wasn't anything special. He didn't have any authority or permission or titles or anything. And I was brought up in pretty much that style by an ordinary man who had many different jobs, doing many things with a great interest in what was going on in the world. To me, he was just an ordinary, I only ever had one father and that was him. And he was okay as a father. I sometimes say he didn't beat me. But we had interesting conversations and he brought me up to think for myself. And we would talk about a whole range of topics. I even went back to live with him for the last few years of his life for a variety of reasons. And we were still having really fascinating conversations. He was 104 when I moved in to live with him. And we had still quite difficult conversations in the sense that he didn't let me off by just saying platitudes. He expected me to stand my arguments up and make them fly, which was quite a good upbringing. Have you met any of the descendants of these families? Firstly, I met many of the children he saved with him on many of the different trips that he made. And what struck me is how many of them have made major contributions to the communities that they settled in. We've got award-winning war correspondents and award-winning film directors, and leading lights in science and technology. It's just remarkable how much the people who he rescued have contributed and still do, those who are still alive. And I've met some of their children and some of their grandchildren and friends with many of them. And in fact, I'll be meeting a few of them in May in the spring in Czechoslovakia, where we're going to speak at another Congress together. I'm wondering, has your father's story shaped your own sense, your worldview about humanity, the meaning of moral responsibility? Can you tell us what that legacy has been like for you? My upbringing, I guess, I feel it was quite normal because I only have one to judge by. And it involved my own contribution to the community. And that's the way I was brought up, that if you see a problem, you get involved and be a part of it rather than expect somebody else to fix it. So it's kind of hard to separate. In later life, I'm now on my fifth career. I've decided that my role is to use my father's story to help show people the impact they could be making on the world, as I say, rather than getting somebody else to fix it for them. And I have some concerns about the way the world is going. And this is a great example to others of how much impact they can make if they choose to act rather than being passive. At the risk of being overly political, or even political at all, we avoid politics here. What are your general humanitarian concerns about where the world is today? I'm a fan of democracy. I like the idea that we have a certain amount of freedom to choose how our lives pan out. And democracy is quite a precious and finely balanced organization, which has a number of pillars. And I've seen in Europe a number of those pillars being eroded. And that troubles me. So, for instance, in some countries, we've seen the press being... not dismantled, but weakened... and a growth in, what can I call it, in the sort of social media source of information to people, which has no real bearing on truth. There's no publisher in social media. Everybody is a publisher. So, the idea that we have a press that we can rely on, that tells us what our politicians are saying and will do, is being eroded. In some cases, we've been seeing an erosion of the political system to encourage or allow extreme parties to have some greater say than I feel comfortable with. And once in power, they've been dismantling some of the checks and balances to make them able to be removed from power. Just recently, we've seen one of the European leaders who've been in power for 16 years losing the election, which is, to me, something of a relief. Because it does seem that he had been organizing the country to make it harder and harder for him to be removed. And I've seen signs that some of the other countries are also been organizing their system to make it harder to have them removed. I'm a fan of democracy, and I feel that it's our duty to be informed so that when we vote, we know wh

6. Leora Einleger: Granddaughter of Dr. Ruth, on Resilience and Connection from TO BE CONTINUED...Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, opens in a new tab

   Apr 6, 202636 min

   A deeply personal conversation with Leora Einleger, granddaughter of Dr. Ruth Westheimer, groundbreaking sex therapist and Holocaust survivor is featured on this episode of TO BE CONTINUED...Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors. The conversation reveals how Dr. Ruth’s experiences of profound loss fueled a lifelong commitment to joy, human connection, and combating loneliness and antisemitism, offering a powerful meditation on how trauma can be transformed into meaning, and how legacy lives on through the choices and voices of future generations. This episode is generously sponsored by Karen and George Goldberg, in honor of their children and three grandchildren, who are all descendants of Karen's mom, Ilona Medwied, a Holocaust survivor and the inspiration for this podcast; and also in honor of George's dad, Staff Sergeant Frederick Goldberg of the US Army Air Force, who flew 35 missions as a B-17 side gunner, fighting the Nazis. TRANSCRIPT: I once ran into her in the gift shop at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. She was very easy to spot—a diminutive woman who spoke with a German accent anyone would recognize. I introduced myself. She introduced herself. We exchanged pleasantries. It was all lovely. Then, a few years later, I was in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel, and I saw her again. I reintroduced myself. Whether or not she really remembered me, she acted as if she did. Then she asked me a few questions about how I was doing. For some reason, I told her that I had become newly single again—and then her eyes sparkled. I could tell that she would have given me advice if only I had asked for it. I am talking about the late Dr. Ruth Westheimer. Welcome to our podcast, To Be Continued… Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, where we explore the intersections of memory, identity, and resilience. Our goal is to lift up the experiences of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and to ask: How do those memories shape you? How did resilience create you as the person you are today? What is the legacy that you will leave to those who come after you? Before we begin, this episode is generously sponsored by Karen and George Goldberg, in honor of their children and three grandchildren, all descendants of Karen’s mother, Ilona Medwied, a Holocaust survivor and the inspiration for this podcast. Also in honor of George’s father, Staff Sergeant Frederick Goldberg of the U.S. Army Air Force, who flew 35 missions as a B-17 side gunner fighting the Nazis. I’m your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin. Because this episode is released in early April—close to Yom HaShoah—its relevance is particularly poignant. Before Dr. Ruth became a cultural icon, she was Karola Ruth Siegel, a Jewish child in Nazi Germany who escaped on the Kindertransport, a rescue effort that saved thousands of Jewish children from Nazi Europe. She lost her parents in the Holocaust and grew up as an orphan in Switzerland. Ruth would go on to become an Israeli soldier. She would come to the United States, earn a doctorate, and eventually become one of the world’s most recognizable and authoritative voices speaking openly about sex, relationships, and human intimacy. Today’s guest is Leora Einleger, the proud granddaughter of Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer—may her memory be a blessing—whom she calls Omi, a self-described orphan of the Holocaust. Leora had a rare blessing: she had Omi in her life for 28 years. Omi’s story of survival, resilience, and joy profoundly shaped Leora’s career and personal pursuits. She is a New York attorney specializing in commercial litigation and white-collar defense and investigations. In Omi’s memory, she maintains an active pro bono practice focused on reproductive rights and combating antisemitism. Leora represents the third generation—carrying forward both the memory of loss and the extraordinary resilience that followed. Before we go further, this is Women’s History Month. When we think of history-making women, Dr. Ruth is near the top of my list—not only because she carried grief, displacement, and survival, but because she refused to let loss define her. She used her life to help others live more fully and honestly. Leora, welcome. It’s great to have you with us. Rabbi Jeff Salkin: Thanks so much for having me. Rabbi Jeff Salkin: Let’s start simply—what was it like growing up with Dr. Ruth? Leora: It was the best experience ever. I had the best grandmother in the world. She was way cooler than I’ll ever be—went out more than I did, had more friends than I did—and she was truly one of my closest friends. I was lucky to grow up near her. I saw her at least once a week, and when I got older, we spoke almost every day. People always ask if she talked to me about sex—not really. She kept her home life and work life separate. But what stood out was seeing people stop her on the street. There were two types: people who wanted photos, and she’d say, “Today I’m just Leora’s Omi.” And then there were often gay men, usually middle-aged, who would tell her that her advocacy during the AIDS crisis saved their lives. That really stayed with me growing up—and I think not enough people know about that part of her work. Rabbi Jeff Salkin: How old were you when you first understood her Holocaust story? Leora: Pretty young. I noticed she didn’t have family like other people. That made me start asking questions. She was born in Frankfurt and had a happy childhood until she was about ten and a half, when the Nazis took her father away. She was sent on a Kindertransport to Switzerland. She didn’t want to go, but she somehow understood it was necessary. She lived in an orphanage there for seven years, often treated like a second-class citizen. After the war, she moved to what was then Palestine, fought in the Haganah, later lived in Paris, and eventually came to New York. What always struck me was that at ten and a half, she had to leave her family forever. They told her they would see her again—but they were all murdered. I remember being ten and a half myself and realizing, “I made it past that age. I still have my family.” That awareness shaped me deeply. Rabbi Jeff Salkin: Why did she go to Israel after the war instead of the U.S.? Leora: Zionism was central to her identity. After everything she experienced, she believed deeply that Jews needed a homeland. She wasn’t treated well in Switzerland, even though it saved her life. Israel represented rebuilding—community, family, belonging. Her life became about creating what had been taken from her. Rabbi Jeff Salkin: She didn’t consider herself a Holocaust “survivor.” Why? Leora: She was very intentional about that. She felt the term belonged to those who were in camps. She saw herself as lucky—saved by others—and didn’t want to center herself in that narrative. It reflects her humility. Rabbi Jeff Salkin: She was known for her joy and positivity. Where did that come from? Leora: I think it was her way of surviving. She chose not to dwell in grief, even though she absolutely carried it. I never saw her cry. She filled everything with humor, energy, and appreciation. Even small things—like mashed potatoes—became the best thing she’d ever had. That joy drew people to her. Rabbi Jeff Salkin: How did her story shape your family? Leora: Education was everything to her—because she was denied it. She prioritized it for my mom, for me, for all of us. I became a lawyer, my cousin is becoming a doctor—it meant so much to her. She also instilled this incredible appreciation for life, and an energy—no laziness, no wasting time. Always learning, always moving. Rabbi Jeff Salkin: How did that shape your own path? Leora: I think about what she would do all the time. At one point in law school, I panicked and thought I should switch careers. I called her, and she immediately said, “No—you’ll make the biggest impact through law.” That clarity stuck with me. Rabbi Jeff Salkin: What would she say about the rise in antisemitism today? Leora: She was already warning about Holocaust denial years ago. For her, the answer was education—always. Bearing witness, learning, teaching. That’s why things like visiting Auschwitz or studying history mattered so much to her. Rabbi Jeff Salkin: Does she still feel present in your life? Leora: Every day. I have a sign on my desk that says “It Can Be Done”—it was on her desk too. She believed in action, urgency, making things happen. Rabbi Jeff Salkin: So let me ask the final question. If your grandmother could give one message to your generation and the generations to come, about resilience, joy, what do you think it would be? Leora: I think it would be the importance of finding joy in daily life—no matter how small. And I think it would be that family can be made from nothing. You can create your own family, biologically or not. When things are taken away from you, it's not the end. And something can always come out of nothing. Rabbi Salkin: It's a powerful message and what a blessing you had. We're all blessed to have our grandparents and yours gave you a unique blessing, which I can tell has a way of reverberating every day on a daily basis. Leora: Absolutely. We'd like to thank our new friend, Leora Einleger for joining us today. This episode is a production of the 2G-3G Project, produced and edited by Eli Hershko and co-directed by our podcast founder, Sheryl Hoffman. And once again, I'm your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin. And you can find the To Be Continued… on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Audible, wherever you get your podcasts. And if you believe that these 2G and 3G voices are important, you can support us in several different ways. First, hit the follow button, this way you won't miss an episode. Second, please help us spread the word. Please share an episode with friends and family and on your social media pages. And third, would you please consider supporting this podcast. We are fiscally sponsored by Jewish Creativity International, a 501(c)3 nonprofit. We rely on donors for their generosity and their vision, to help us keep producing our show. Please contact us at info@ToBeContinuedPodcasts.org info@ToBeContinuedPodcasts.org. Until next month, thank you for your support, thank you for listening.

7. Dina Kraft: The Legacy of Anne Frank’s Best Friend from TO BE CONTINUED...Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, opens in a new tab

   Mar 10, 202645 min

   Anne Frank's best friend survived to tell the story Anne could not. Journalist Dina Kraft and Hannah Pick-Goslar’s daughter, Ruthie Meir, reflect on friendship, survival, and the weight of carrying memory forward in this episode of TO BE CONTINUED... They discuss what was lost, and what was rebuilt through resilience, testimony, and hope across generations. TRANSCRIPT: This episode of TO BE CONTINUED… is sponsored by Vicki Robinson and Michael Robinson in honor of Morton Kess, who helped liberate the concentration camps in Germany, and in memory of all those who died at the hands of the Nazis, and by Carl Fremont and Joanne Fremont Burns in loving memory and in honor of their parents. Ted Fremont, born official Fischel Friedman, who was a Holocaust survivor from Vilna, Poland. Ted lost his mother and seven siblings. He married Helen Garfield from the Bronx, and together they built a welcoming and loving home. Both Ted and Helen were beacons of hope and inspiration. Today's conversation is about friendship, survival, and what it means to carry memory forward, not as history alone, but as life. When we think of Anne Frank, we often think of her diary, her hiding, her tragic death. But Anne Frank was also a girl with friends… friends who loved her and who laughed with her, and who survived her. One of those friends was Hannah Pick Goslar. Hannah survived Bergen-Belsen, where she and Anne had a final heartbreaking encounter through a fence. Hannah lived. Anne did not. And that single fact shaped Hannah's life and the lives of her children and grandchildren, to be continued for generations. Welcome to this podcast, TO BE CONTINUED…Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, where we explore the intersections of memory, identity, and resilience. Our goal is to lift up the experiences of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, and to ask, How did those memories form you? How did resilience create you as the person you are today? And what is the legacy that you will leave to those who come after you? I'm your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin. Today we're joined by Dina Kraft, a journalist and veteran correspondent who has written for the Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and the JTA, among others. Dina is the co-author of My Friend Anne Frank, who writes not only as a storyteller, but as a third-generation descendant of a Holocaust survivor. We also welcome Ruthie Meir, Hannah Pick Goslar's daughter, a second-generation descendant who grew up in the shadow and the strength of her mother's experience. Ruthie was her mother's right-hand assistant before and during the writing of the Anne Frank book. All of them live in Israel. And that matters. Because this is not only a story about what was lost, but about what was rebuilt. It's about how trauma travels through generations, yes, but also how resilience makes that same journey. How survivor's guilt lives alongside gratitude. How memory gives birth to responsibility. And how Jewish life continues publicly and unapologetically after catastrophe. This is a conversation about intergenerational trauma, but it's also about intergenerational strength. It's about the burden of telling the story, and it's also about the moral courage that we need to carry that story forward with honesty, compassion, and humanity. Welcome, friends. It's great to have you on To Be Continued. Ruthie, your mother, Hannah Pick Goslar, wrote in her book, My Friend Anne Frank, that “Anne Frank had become a symbol in many ways of all the hope and promise that was lost to hatred and murder.” I would certainly agree that she has become the overriding symbol of the Holocaust…”Talking about her story, our story would later become a thread that bound me to her and kept our friendship alive long after she was gone.” So tell us a short version of your mother's story, from her birth in Berlin to the Netherlands, how she met Anne Frank and their last meeting in Bergen-Belsen. My mother was born in 1928 in Berlin. She had a lovely childhood. And her father was a very high official in the German Otto Braun government. In 1933, when Hitler came into power, her father understood immediately that he cannot stay anymore in Germany because he also wrote against Hitler, and he went to England. So, we didn't go and stay in England, and he went to Holland. And my mother had to go to school. And so on the first day they would go to the grocery. Her mother sees another woman that comes from Germany. Of course they started to talk and they came from Frankfurt. They came from Berlin. And then she saw a small girl, this woman, and they started to talk. And the day after, my mother had to go to the kindergarten first day, without knowing the language, without knowing anybody. And she sees the same girl as she saw the day before in the grocery shop. She was ringing the bells in the kindergarten. And they saw each other, ran into the arms and began a big, big friendship, till the end. Then, they had a nice childhood till 1939. And in 1940, the Germans invaded Holland in five days. The families were very much very friendly. So every Shabbat, the Frank family came to my grandfather's home. And every Sunday, my mother used to go to the, what is today, the Anne Frank House. It was the office of Mr. Frank. Mr. Frank decided that all the family will go to hiding in his office. The school, now it was the Jewish school, every day one of the pupils or more were just gone. And you didn't ask what happened. Either they went to hiding, or they were caught by the Germans. Now in 1942, once again, her mother, my grandmother, had to give birth. And she didn't go to a hospital in Amsterdam, because she was already afraid from the Germans. They could take you from the hospital. So she gave birth at home. And she died two days after the birth. And the baby also died. It was a very hard delivery. And my mother was at home at that time. And since this day, she was like the mother for her sister. And (she) took her all the way to concentration camps, on and on. Let's see, they had the Paraguayan passport. And they were also on a list that was named the List of Israel. So as if to be exchanged in the future against German soldiers. But it didn't help them and they had to go to Bergen-Belsen. The situation was very hard and it became harder every day. Now, one day there was a rumor that a women from Holland come to the camp. And my mother was very curious to know who are these Dutch women. So somebody told her, you know, your friend Anne Frank is over the fence. My mother was in shock because she thought Anna is in Switzerland. And Anna was in a very, very bad shape. It was after Auschwitz. So Anna said, I have nothing to eat. My mother went to all her friends. All of them didn't have what to eat. All of them were hungry and didn't have what to wear. But everybody, everybody gave her something. And she made a ball with cracker and a sock and a glove and something. She made it like a ball, came to the fence and said, Anna, be careful. And she threw it over the fence. So it was really the last time that my mother saw Anna when she threw the ball with the food to her. And she didn't know what happened to her. Afterwards, my mother was liberated. And then after that, Mr. Frank came to visit her and arranged everything, that she can go to Switzerland. And then she went to Israel because this is how she was raised. She was a nurse in Israel. Then my mother got married and had three children. She became a nurse and was doing a very good job. This story is about an iconic Jewish figure, perhaps the most iconic Jewish figure of our time. So I need to ask you, as you were growing up, how present was Anne Frank in your family life? Not as an icon, not as a historical figure, but as your mother's childhood friend. Tell us briefly about the presence of Anne Frank in your family when you were growing up. It was from the beginning. From the beginning, when I was one-year-old, my mother went already to the United States to talk about Anna, to talk about the Holocaust with my father. And since then, all the time, it was like a sister of ours, like an aunt of ours. And Mr. Frank was like the big, big uncle that was in the picture all the time with writing and with sending people all the time. It was just one of the family all the time, true today, even for my children and grandchildren. I can imagine that's true. Dina, as you worked with Hannah on My Friend Anne Frank, how did she describe the way her friendship with Anne lived on inside her, not just as a memory, but as responsibility? How did it shape how family understood loss and remembrance and moral obligation? Yeah, I mean, for her, you know, the last time she saw Anna, of course, was at this very dramatic moment where these two girls on either end of a fence, crying in this freezing rain on other, you know, at Bergen-Belsen. And they were still so hopeful. They talked about meeting at school the next fall. That's how, like, sort of, where their heads were. They were still optimistic they would come out of this hell. Of course, Anne didn't come out of this hell. And she only, and she didn't get to tell the story of, really, before or after the Annex. She told the story of being inside the Annex. And that's a very kind of, like, small prism. Of course, you'd read into Anne's, like, deep inner world. But all of that life that came before, that incredibly rich dynamic of a German Jewish enclave in Amsterdam, where they lived as the daughters of German immigrants, and the games they played, and the life that they lived, and the shadow of this war that was approaching all the time. And then, of course, afterwards, you know, what was happening outside, the roundups, and being taken first to Westerbork, and then to, and then in Anne's case to Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen, and in the case of Hannah, all of that horror Hannah witnessed and was able to tell, because she lived to tell the story. So, she felt this obligation to sort of carry on, you know, where Anna couldn't. And I think because, you know, from very early on, the diary became a huge success, and then it was a Broadway hit, and there was a film…she had cache because of Anne's story. She had legitimacy. So at a time when people didn't even have a name for the Holocaust, as Ruthie referenced, her mother went off in the 1950s on an 18-city tour, speaking tour of America, talking about her experience in Bergen-Belsen, and talking about her friendship with Anna. It was a time when there wasn't even a name Holocaust or Holocaust survivors. I think she was probably one of the very first survivors to publicly tell her story. And it was always very, very important to her to share that story and tell the world. And until she was, you know, I was interviewing her when she was 93 years old. She was using oxygen to breathe. She wasn't in good health, but she was very, very sound of mind. She was incredibly sharp and incredibly funny still, as well, I might add. And she felt this obligation to keep telling her story, even though these were like her last days. Why do you think, that already being beyond 90 years old, that Hannah felt it was essential to tell her story now to this generation? Well, you know, it was interesting. It wasn't her idea to tell the story. It was a Netflix film came out, based on her life, and that generated a lot of interest and conversation. And then a publishing house in London reached out to her, and that's how this began. From our very first meeting, she would say, "Who is going to be interested in my story? You know, who's going to be interested?" I think the answer came in the fact that it became a New York Times bestselling book. It's in over a dozen languages, from around the world now. But she was so modest. I think she couldn't really imagine the reach that it was, you know, she wasn't just writing on the tales of Anne Frank's story. She herself had an incredibly rich and interesting story to tell, you know, from the very beginning. From her father, who was one of the few Jews in the Weimar government in Berlin, and a very outspoken force against Hitler, and had to flee, to the story of what it was like growing up, and again, in this very close-knit, beautiful place, that felt very safe in Amsterdam. And, then she always talked about how that safety and that feeling of being cocooned was suddenly washed away, you know, as a Nazi grip got tighter and tighter. And you live with her. I mean, part of the challenge of writing this book and trying to make it, you know, it was not to write it from the point of view of a 93-year-old woman looking back, but being with her in real time as the noose was tightening and tightening all the time around, not just her, but the Jews of Amsterdam. You know, as Holocaust denial continues to grow exponentially, this narrative is extremely important. I was in a used bookstore this past summer in the Berkshires, and I found an old Life magazine from the early 1950s with artist's renditions of what Anne Frank went through. This is such an important historical document that we have to keep alive. Now, let me ask you, you've said that Hannah's accent was familiar to you. Tell us about your family's Holocaust experience and how hearing Hannah's accent affected you. Well, she immediately reminded me of my own grandmother who was born in Salzburg in Austria, ended up, was living in Italy, in her 30s. And that's where she was when the war broke out, before the war broke out, as the Nazis began to take over Europe. And my family, they were living in Italy, but they were not citizens of Italy. And according to Mussolini's anti-Jewish laws, all Jews that were not of Italian descent had to leave the country. Of course, this was sort of a blessing in disguise. They couldn't wait around and hope for better times. They had to figure out what was what. And so my grandmother furiously wrote for affidavits and letters and visas across the world. And the one place they finally got a visa to was a place that my grandfather had singled out in a map of the world. He saw that New Zealand was the furthest place in the world from Europe. And he said, "I'd like to go there." And indeed, they got a visa to New Zealand. And they left shortly before the war broke out in Europe. They arrived in September 1939, just days before the war broke out, and had this safe refuge in New Zealand. But very, very far away, and very cut off from the rest of the family, and didn't know for years what happened to the fates of their own families back in Europe. Literally at the end of the world. The very end of the world. The very end of the world. And it was extremely stressful. They were treated as enemy aliens because they spoke German. Their mail was gone through by the government and censored. And in fact, it was only in 1944 when Italy was liberated. And one of my cousins whose name is Jana and is 98-years-old, and lives in Tel Aviv to this day. And I'm actually working on a book with her about her life now. She's actually a year older than Hannah. And she was a 17-year-old girl, and spotted a New Zealand soldier in the square in Florence the day that Florence was liberated. And she went up to him and said, "I have an aunt in New Zealand. Can you please pass on word that our family is alive and well?" And that is the first news that my family got, that part of their family survived. You said in The New York Times article about Hannah…this is the quote, "When you look at history backward, she was living history forward." What did you mean by that? And how does it relate to Hannah's enduring friendship and memories of Anne Frank and her own family who perished? Yeah, I meant by that is, you know, we look at history and we know how it ends, you know, or you know how the story unfolds. She didn't know how the story was unfolding. And she had to live every single day sort of in that sort of, as I was saying, this noose tightening, that sort of gradual understanding of what was going on for her. And so keeping, you know, she lost her parents during the war. And she was like the guardian of her little sister, who's only four years old. Imagine she was taking care of her little sister basically from the age of two to four in the most horrific of conditions. And so, she was living it forward and not knowing what one day would bring to the next. And that was sort of, you know, in the challenge of writing this book and trying to make it captivating to people to make it sort of feel like a thriller as it was and keep people's attention. I wanted to keep the camera as it were on Hannah as she was experiencing it, as she was going forward and not knowing what was going to be what was happening, not knowing what was going to be next. But Hannah had incredible determination and focus. And also she talks a lot about, you know, survival was a group activity, you know, as it is today. You know, as we saw now in the stories of the hostages coming out of Gaza and those that were with others, you know, really talk about how they leaned on each other and the story, you know, of real, like female solidarity. And the barracks at Bergen-Belsen that when she sees Anne Frank and her friend Anna, you know, cold and shivering and starving in Bergen-Belsen and begging her for some food, she goes back to the barracks and is able to collect food from all the people who had barely had no food themselves, but had hidden a little crust of bread here and a little bit of dried fruit there and a wool sock here. And they were able to sort of together, you know, help this young woman they didn't even, who they didn't even know. So I think, you know, part of the story of survival is community and how Hannah found community even when her own blood family was gone. So this is for both Ruthie and Dina. Anne Frank's story, of course, is for many people, the story of the Holocaust. As we all know, that story ends too soon to fully embrace the horror. And I'm wondering, to what extent do you now see yourselves as guardians of not Anne's iconic story, but the human story? I think, first of all, that you cannot separate the iconic and the regular life. She was just this. She was Anna and she was the best friend of my mother. And my mother wanted, really to tell about her, and that everybody will know her, will know her life and really her legacy, because she was not the regular girl. She was very, very talented. When she was very small, she wrote lovely stories. I don't know why it is not so famous, but she wrote the tales from the secret Annex. And she wrote about poor people, about really how the life is hard for them. And she did it so nicely with such messages that we really should go on with all that she wrote about the poor people. And of course, about all that she wrote about, all the, she is the symbol of all the children in the Holocaust. One and a half million. Millions. So as my mother used to say, you cannot perceive six million. You cannot perceive one-and-a-half million. But when you see one story, and of course, if you see some more stories, but when you see one story, you can identify with all that happened. I understand. Dina, how about for you? Yeah, I mean, I think this story, what I got from Hannah is a sort of feeling of passing of a torch in a way, passing on a story. It was difficult when she died. She died before the book came out. And I felt like I was doing, wrapping up the interviews with her. And it was her health sort of deteriorating, even more after that. And I felt this sort of almost like guilt, like, oh, my gosh, like, is she stopping to tell the story? Is this sort of the beginning of her descent? And then someone, from actually Yad Vashem, told me maybe she felt like now that her story was in good hands, she could she could have her final rest, as it were. And I hope that is somewhat, somewhat true. And I felt like this s

8. Jacki Alexander: De-Jewifying the Holocaust: Why Naming Jews Matters from TO BE CONTINUED...Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, opens in a new tab

   Feb 12, 202644 min

   "De-Jewifying" the Holocaust is the concerning trend our host Rabbi Jeff Salkin talks about in this episode of TO BE CONTINUED... with Jacki Alexander, CEO and President of HonestReporting. We are witnessing the media, politicians, religious institutions, and others talk about "6 million who died" while erasing the Jews. This episode explores this trend of Holocaust distortion including minimalization, inversion and denial, and examines how it threatens both accurate historical memory and contemporary Jewish safety. Is this a form of antisemitism? Listen to find out. 🎧Listen now on your podcast streaming service of choice, and watch on YouTube. Here is a related article by Rabbi Jeff Salkin: The Many Forms of Holocaust Distortion: https://religionnews.com/2026/02/03/the-many-forms-of-holocaust-distortion-and-why-jd-vances-remarks-matter/ TRANSCRIPT: Usually on this podcast, we sit with the sons, daughters, and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. We listen carefully as they reflect on memory, legacy, intergenerational trauma, resilience, and what it means to carry stories and experiences that were never meant to survive, but did. This is Sheryl Hoffman, podcast founder and co-director, and this episode of TO BE CONTINUED… Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors is a little different. Not a departure from our mission, but in many ways a descent into its deepest urgency, because in recent years, the Holocaust is increasingly being remembered without Jews. Please listen and share on social media and with your family and friends. This is "To Be Continued." We discuss the implications of trauma and resilience for second and third generation Holocaust survivors. And where we are in the calendar right now is very important. We are now following up on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and we're talking about what it means to remember the Holocaust, to remember the Shoah, and what that memory entails, and how sometimes bad actors abuse and distort that memory. I'm Rabbi Jeff Salkin, I'm your host. And we're talking today to Jacki Alexander. She is the CEO and president of HonestReporting. I've been a big fan of HonestReporting for quite some time. So Jacki, this is really a treat for me. And so thank you for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me to talk about this incredible, important topic, and one that's really personal to my heart, giving my background. Well, I want to talk about why that is in fact the case, but I want to go right to something you wrote. I want to talk about something that I wrote. I want to talk about your background as well. You know, what you did this past week was, you used a term and I love it. In fact, I've been quoting you over the last several days to friends of mine. The “De-Jewifying” of the Holocaust. In simple terms, what that really means is that when people discuss Holocaust today, and specifically in the media, within religious institutions, political realm, what happens is that there has been a diminishing of what is central to our understanding of the Holocaust and that is its Jewish component. You cannot understand this without its Jewish component, without the Jewish component, we wouldn't be having a conversation. So let me ask you a simple question, a pointed question. Is this a new phenomenon or is history simply repeating itself? History doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes, right? That was Mark Twain, however many years ago. And I think for our entire history, we have always been targets of, the Jewish people have always been targets of bad people and then we have always been identified with then the bad people, right? So how does that rhyme today? Israel and the IDF are the new Nazis. Jews were the victims and now we are the oppressors. Yossi Klein Halevi had a great speech about this a couple of years ago, going through history and saying, when the communists were the bad guys, the Jews were the communists. When the capitalists are the bad guys, the Jews are the capitalists, right? Today, Jews are the oppressors, Jews are the colonialists, Jews are, you know, white people has become a four letter term now, Jews are the white people. So I think that this is just erasing Jews from something that can bring sympathy or an understanding is just the next step in a long history. So your article, Jacki, uses this wonderful phrase, you really are very good at turning phrases and creating them, "Erasive Jew hate," as if it were the children's game Etch-A-Sketch, where you draw something, you turn it over, you shake it and it's gone. So let me ask you, how is erasing Jews from Holocaust narratives different from overt antisemitism? Is it the same and is it just as dangerous? So erasing Jews from the Holocaust takes the biggest trauma, the biggest generational trauma that Jews have had in the last hundred years and makes it not about Jews. And if you follow the discourse around this specifically, what's happening is, is Jews are constantly online being told, "Stop making the Holocaust about you. You're erasing how horrible this was to the Roma, to the Sinti. You're erasing how horrible this was to gay people and to trans people and to black people and to political prisoners. This wasn't just about you." And I do think that that is a new form of antisemitism, which is again, another word which we can't even use anymore because that has been weaponized against us. And as soon as you say antisemitism, people stop listening to it. But people forget that it wasn't just the final solution, right? It was the final solution to the Jewish question. Jews were the problem. Hitler wrote an entire book about Jews. This started not with the stab in the back of the Sinti. And again, this is not taking away the horrible history that happens. This was the stab in the back of the Jews. But for what the Jews did on the homefront in Germany, Germany would have won the war and therefore they are the bBreiggest scapegoats. And I think that by removing Jews and erasing our history, it allows it, as you said, to repeat. So I published an article this week in the wake of a very famous American politician omitting the Jews from the Holocaust narrative by talking about the taxonomy of Holocaust distortion. Where people minimize the Holocaust, where they say the numbers were not as high as they say, or they universalize it as if to say, as you've said, the Roma, gay men, labor leaders, Slavs, Poles, Jehovah's Witnesses, they were also victims. Or worse, inversion, which is what you just talked about, which is the Jews are the new Nazis, which by the way, works very well in Europe because that's an excellent way for contemporary Europeans to erase the burden of guilt that they may or may not have inherited from their grandparents. So it feels to me that when we do this, Jacki, that we are entering a very savage new world of Jew hatred. So where do these distortions fit into the framework of antisemitism? So the way that antisemitism today is manifesting is in the very nature of information itself. We're not being told not to believe what we're seeing, what we're being taught is a brand new history that didn't exist before. We're seeing it in academia, we're seeing it in the nonprofit industrial complex, we're certainly seeing it on social media and in AI, where you have the Jews are responsible for the Holocaust, but also the Holocaust didn't exist, but also Hitler is amazing and he should have finished the job, but also only 271,000 Jews were killed. And all of these things exist at the exact same time. And the people that are putting it out there have no problem with the fact that they don't align with each other because it doesn't matter. They want to put out whatever they can in order to change what the status quo is. And the reason why that's dangerous is because you and I grew up in where we knew what the bottom line facts were. We were taught the same things in school. When we had to write a paper, we went to a physical building called a library that had physical books called encyclopedias. We got our baseline information there. And then we started looking at secondary sources, tertiary sources and understanding how information evolved. What's happening today with the manipulation of Wikipedia and how all of these information sources are then feeding social media and online information sources is that what people are being taught from the very beginning has no basis in reality. And yet that's the new status quo. This is so dangerous for Jews, for the Jewish people. And if I may be so bold as to say, the only universalization that people should take from the Holocaust is that what starts with the Jews does not end with the Jews. This is a very important point. And by the way, I got into an argument that was a foolish thing for me to do with a Holocaust denier. And kids, do not try this at home. It's not worth your time or your energy. It's like what Brett Stephens said at the 92 Street Y the other night. “Here, we don't care. There's some people who are not worth our emotional investment.” And I said, “This is the most documented crime in human history, documented by survivors, documented by their descendants, and documented by the perpetrators themselves.” And I said, “Isn't it interesting that no one ever denies the fact that there was slavery in the United States?” Right. Now, what they are doing with slavery, is saying that some of the slave owners were good, right? As though you could have that. So you are, again, what starts with the Jews doesn't end with the Jews, but you're right. The way that Jewish history is erased and made acceptable, it cannot be compared to anything else. There's something else as well about this universalization of the Holocaust. I wrote about that this week in ReligionNews.com in my column, "Martini Judaism." I have been accused by some Jews of engaging in the macabre game of comparative victimology. Or forgive me, of hogging the Holocaust. It's as if Jews, this is terrible, cannot name their own particularity and believe that in order to sit at the cool kids' table, they have to shed this. I find this problematic. What do you think? I think that we should follow what Elie Wiesel said about centering Jews, which is that, I am Jewish and therefore, I am going to worry about Jews above and beyond everyone else. And that doesn't mean that I can't have compassion and worry for other horrible things that are happening in this world. And we Jews are our own worst enemies. If we think about the universalization of the Holocaust, which has been so detrimental to Holocaust education, that isn't driven outside of our community. It's driven by our community. And the article that you're speaking about that we published this week, by the way, is written by one of our fabulous, fabulous writers, Ben Freeman. He focused on that. He focused on the fact that Jews need to be comfortable being the center of a horrible thing in history and not having to make our trauma about other people to get them to care. We shouldn't have to say we weren't the only ones murdered, for you to care about learning about it. This is a class, first of all, it is unique in its history of evil, the Holocaust is. And, it is also a case study in what happens to those parts and those elements of society that are not protected when the socioeconomic framework of a country fails. Right? The Holocaust didn't arise out of a wonderful place. It arose out of the fall of democratic Germany, the fall of the Weimar Republic. As the socioeconomic safety net failed, the othering of the Jew got bigger. Again, it didn't start there. It started way earlier. The immune system crashed. The what? The immune system. The immune system crashed. People didn't have money anymore. There was 4,000% inflation. In order to buy bread, you had to take a barrel full of cash. We don't even use cash anymore, but you have to take a barrel full of cash to the bank and to the grocery store to buy bread. There are things that happen when, like you said, the immune system of a country fails. That's the universalization that we need to be studying, not that Jews weren't the only victims, because the fact is, that, again, as Elie Wiesel taught us, this was the only genocide specifically of the Jewish people, the only targeting of the Jewish people, where you couldn't convert your way out. If you were Jewish, if you were one quarter Jewish, you were going to the ovens along with everyone else. It doesn't matter if you had been converted to Christianity for a few generations. If they could trace your Judaism, you were going alongside everyone else. There was nothing you could do to escape it. That is not true for any other community. And that's an evil and a hatred that we need to teach because that can rhyme again in the future. And many people are hearing that rhyme right now. My friends say to me that when we make the Holocaust more universal and more inclusive, we're saying that the lessons are more universal and more inclusive. So where is the line between drawing these universal lessons, which by the way, I believe, and I have a list of universal lessons that is actually rather long. What's the boundary between that and the deliberate distortion of history? I think it all goes back to how we teach it. And it goes back to the Holocaust museums and the Holocaust education that's out there. We get a very limited amount of time to teach Holocaust history, forget to Jewish students, but to Americans, regular community members. Maybe if you're a public school, you get a single field trip. So what do we do? When that happens, we teach concentration camps. And if it's not concentration camps, then it's not, this is what genocide looks like. And we don't teach everything that led up to it, right? The Holocaust did not begin with Auschwitz. The Holocaust did not even begin with World War II. We count the Holocaust as starting in 1933 when Hitler rose to power and within six months had a watertight dictatorship and the first concentration camp, to be fair for political prisoners, but the first concentration camp opened. That's when it happened. That's when Jews started not being allowed to go to school, not being allowed to be teachers anymore. All of these things started early. And that's where our issue comes, because once you understand what the Holocaust was, what discrimination looked like, then it's a lot harder to then take the universalization of those messages and say, the IDF are Nazis, or this person who I don't like is a Nazi, or that person who I don't like is a Nazi, or this horrible war is a genocide. No, you have to understand the totality. And we need to go back to figuring out how to reteach Holocaust education so that it's actually impactful. It's so important what you're saying. I was having this conversation with someone just the other day. I think part of the challenge here, Jacki, is that too many people look too narrowly at the Holocaust and they look at the camps. And you correctly named very important historical fact, which is that the original occupants of the concentration camps, the original occupants of Dachau, were political prisoners. Mind you, by the way, in a bizarre early form of intersectionality, you had political prisoners who were Jews and were also labor leaders and also gay men. People could occupy, as it were, several categories. But people forget that even before the final solution, even before the conference Wanasee, you had the Holocaust by bullets. You had the mass executions, people digging their grave in the Soviet Union, executed by the Einsatzgruppen. And this happened to no other people. And the ghettos also, by the way, the war in Gaza, the war with Hamas, has pulled out so many, antisemitic microaggressions, right? Gaza is this great concentration camp. There are parts of Gaza that no one would want to live in. And there are also beautiful parts of Gaza. There is incredible income disparity that exists there. There was no income disparity that existed in the ghettos. So important. Multiple families in single-family apartments. There was disease in the streets, stepping over dead bodies. I mean, the ghettos, you had kids going out and stealing food if they could get out to come back in. And that's before right, the Holocaust by bullets. And again, all of this came after six years of Jews being shunted out of society. They were not allowed to take part in society. And everyone likes to say, for 10 years I've been hearing, this reminds me of Germany in 1933. Nothing reminded me of Germany in 1933. I will tell you now I'm starting to get echoes. Echoes… nothing that's saying this is happening, right? I don't think the Holocaust as an industrial, like killing machine is going to repeat itself any time ever, but certainly not in the near future. But the saying Zionists aren't welcome here. Saying it's okay to have clubs where Zionists aren't here. Things like that, once it's acceptable to take someone out of polite society and make them your scapegoat, bad things tend to follow. It's a really amazing situation in which we find ourselves. Again, just this past week, someone asked me if I thought that America in 2026 is tantamount to Germany of 1936. And I said, there's one thing that is separating America from Germany. And that is that Americans are responding very differently right now than the way the Germans did. And there's something else as well. I was just talking today to someone who was a professor of German history. And he reminded me of something that should be so clear to everybody. America is a democracy. And Germany was not, Hungary was not, Poland was not. It had, in these situations, there was a very thin veneer of democracy. What we're experiencing now, while there have been totalitarian impulses in American history, to be sure, what we're experiencing now is a deviation from the norm, which makes that deviation even sharper. So, you know, that's so important, because people don't think about that, right? I mentioned Weimar Germany before. Weimar was the name of the republic, the democracy that existed in between the two world wars, right? So think that it's 1918 to 1933. That is not a long time. That's less than 20 years that Germany experienced a democracy. Before that, there were kings. Then before that, you know, they had only become an actual country in 1891, I think. Before that, you had these separate kingdoms. You had Saxony, you had Bavaria. So you didn't have this sense. America's celebrating 250 years of democracy, right? We have a strong emotional connection to democracy. We understand what democracy looks like. Germany did not have that. With Admiral Horthy in Hungary, you did not have that. Across Europe in general, you didn't have that. Democracy was very, very young in most of the countries that it were able to fall to this. And that piece of history is actually really important to understanding why it was so unique at that moment in time, versus anything that could possibly happen in America today. By the way, since you mentioned the unification of Germany, which happened, I think, in the 1870s, if I remember my 10th grade history well, around the same time. Was that 1870 or 1891? I always get it confused with Italy. What's a couple of decades between friends! But, the point is that neither was there a unified German national identity. There was German language, there was a literature, but the Nazis were able to create a false sense of German unity. Yes. Again, without going too deep into my historical background, the fact that Prussia was the largest state, it was a very militaristic state, that overwhelmed a lot of the other pieces of Germany that came in and Hitler played to that very much. That's also why they were able to bring Austria into this. There's so many unique elements of what happened that allowed for Hitler to take over and to create this wate

9. Menachem Rosensaft: Living With Ghosts from TO BE CONTINUED...Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, opens in a new tab

   Jan 26, 202657 min

   Menachem Rosensaft is an attorney, law professor, poet, and one of the most influential voices of the second generation. Born in the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp to parents who survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, he has spent his life engaging questions of memory, justice, and moral responsibility. In this episode of To Be Continued… Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, Rabbi Jeff Salkin speaks with Rosensaft about what survives survival itself: exploring inherited trauma, the “ghosts” carried by children of survivors, and the obligation to remember in ways that demand action. Speaker Bio: Menachem Z. Rosensaft is an attorney, general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) and a lecturer in law at Columbia Law School. He is also adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School. Menachem is also a poet, and one of the most prominent voices of the second generation. He was a founder and first chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors a past president of Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City. Menachem has published several books of poetry, including Poems Born in Bergen-Belsen (2021) and Burning Psalms: Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz (2025). TRANSCRIPT: This episode is sponsored by Barbara Kaufman Simon, in loving memory of her parents, Blanche, (also known as Blima), and Max, (who was also known as Moniek) Kaufman, who were both born in Poland. Blanche survived numerous labor and concentration camps, and Max survived Auschwitz, the death march, and Mauthausen/Ebensee. May their memories be for a blessing. Today's episode is about what survives survival. Many children and grandchildren, Holocaust survivors, grew up with what our guest calls ghosts, not as metaphors, but as real presences, or as the author Thane Rosenbaum puts it, they grew up with secondhand smoke. The ghosts live in questions that were never answered. They live in names that are spoken carefully or not at all, in absences that somehow take up space. Welcome to our podcast, To Be Continued, Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, where we explore the intersections of memory, identity, and resilience. Our goal is to lift up the experiences of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and to ask, how did those memories form you? How did resilience create you, the person you are today, and what is the legacy that you will leave to those who come after you? I'm your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin. Our guest today is a man who has been described by the New York Times as one of the most influential sons and daughters of survivors. Today we're speaking with Menachem Rosensaft, an attorney, a professor of law, a poet, and one of the most prominent voices of the second generation. He was a founder and first chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. He is general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress, and he has one of the most coveted positions in the Jewish world. He's the past president of a synagogue, the past president of Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City, but the titles, the rest of them, they really don't matter because they don't capture the work he's done or the ground that he stands on. Menachem was born in the displaced persons camp at Bergen-Belsen in Germany. His parents survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Delsen. His grandparents and his five-and-a-half-year-old brother Benjamin were killed in the gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau. I am a fan of his writing. He is a wonderful poet. There are several books of poetry. There is the most recent book, Burning Psalms, Confronting Adonai after Auschwitz, and in his poetry, Menachem confronts not only memory and inheritance, but the tender topics of God, faith, anger, and moral responsibility after Auschwitz. He asks what it means to pray when consolation feels impossible and what it means to remember if remembrance does not lead us to act. And so, this conversation is about trauma, resilience, rage, moral clarity, and the refusal to look away. Menachem, welcome. It's great to have you. Jeff, rabbi, thank you very much. Thank you very much for having me and thank you for this most gracious introduction. Well, we've already said and we know that you were born in the DP camp at Bergen-Belsen a few years after the war ended. But I'd like our listeners to know a little bit more about you, so let's just rewind. Let's go back a few steps. And can you give us some more background on your father's remarkable story of survival and what he did in Germany after the war and who your mother was as a doctor worked for in Auschwitz, and finally how they met exactly 80 years ago in 1946. Well, they actually met 80 and a half years ago in 1945, a couple of weeks after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. Going back a bit…my mother was a dental surgeon. She had studied medicine in France and at Nancy, before the war, and she arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau on the night of August 3rd to 4th, 1943 with her parents, her first husband, and her five-and-a-half-year-old child. They were immediately sent to the gas chambers. My mother was sent into the camp itself, and there she was assigned by the chief doctor of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele, to work in the camp infirmary. And there she was able to save the lives of countless women by performing rudimentary surgeries, by sending them out of the infirmary, even with high temperature ahead of selections by the SS and the like. I know that not from my mother who rarely spoke about it, but from women who came up to my mother at survivor reunions over the years saying, "Dr. Bimko," my mother's maiden name, "Dr. Bimko, you don't remember me, but you saved my life." In the fall of 1944, my mother was sent to Bergen-Belsen to set up, with a group of other women, to set up an infirmary there. And at Bergen-Belsen, she and a group of other women were able to keep 149 children, many of them orphans, alive through the bitter winter of 1944 to 1945 through the liberation, including through a raging typhus epidemic. At the time of liberation, the British chief doctor of the chief medical officer of the Second Army of the Rhine, Brigadier H.L. Glenn Hughes, appointed my mother to head a team of doctors. There were 20 or 28 doctors and several hundred nurses, nurses meaning individuals who didn't have any medical training, but were strong enough, given the horrific health condition, to work alongside the skeleton British military medical team, to try to keep as many of the desperately ill survivors at Bergen-Belsen alive. And that was what she did for the first two months following liberation. And subsequently, she was the chief witness for the prosecution at the first post-war trial of Nazi war criminals, which was the Belsen trial, for reasons we can go into at greater length if you want. It was just not only the command and the administration of Bergen-Belsen, but many of them had previously been in Auschwitz-Birkenau, so it was really the first Auschwitz trial, as well. And that was, that's in a nutshell, my mother's background. My father meanwhile had escaped several times from Nazi captivity, including once from a train carrying him, his first wife, and her daughter to Auschwitz. He was able to dive out the window of the train, it was a passenger train, rather than a cattle train that time, into the Vistula River. He was hit by three bullets, was able to get back to the ghetto of his hometown of Benjen, where he was reunited with his father, and he found out that the entire transport, just about, including his wife and his stepdaughter, had been murdered upon arrival in one of the gas chambers. He then, was at Birkenau, attempted to escape, was caught, was sent to a transfer to a labor camp, escaped again, was caught again, spent about six months in the notorious Block 11, where he was tortured at great length because the Germans wanted him to give up the name of the Polish friend who had hidden him for several weeks, something he refused to do, in which I believe saved his life. Upon liberation at Bergen-Belsen, he emerged as the leader of the Jewish survivors of Bergen-Belsen, and he held that position and was repeatedly elected and re-elected for that position, as well as head of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the British zone of Germany, where Bergen-Belsen was liberated. And he was in that position from the time of liberation, April of 1945, until the Displaced Persons Camp of Bergen-Belsen was closed in 1950. And during that period, he had numerous, not particularly amicable confrontations, with the British military government over such things as recognition of the Jewish DPs, as Jewish DPs, rather than nationals of their country of origin, insistence on having the human right respected, being one of the witnesses before the Anglo-American Commission and then the UN Committee on Palestine, demanding the right of the DPs to go to Palestine, which the British had kept closed until the establishment of the State of Israel. And so that in a nutshell is the background into which I was born. So, for me, my parents were not just parents, they were role models. They were examples of what one can do and one should aspire to do with one's life if one is given the opportunity. A remarkable story. You've written, Menachem, that children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors live with ghosts. What or who are those ghosts for you? And when did you first become aware of them? Well, the first thing many of us, myself included, became aware of, were the absences. My parents, I had no grandparents. I grew up without grandparents. Other children, classmates in Switzerland, which were where we lived after Germany, and then in the United States when we came when I was 10-years-old, others had grandparents. I didn't. Parents had siblings. There were uncles and aunts. I had none. Our family was a family of three. And a child is aware of the absences, is aware of the fact that we are not necessarily the same as other families. And for a child that is not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing, it's just a reality. And as one grows up, as I grew up, I started putting some kind of names and faces and imagined faces to the absent ghosts, as you call them. I knew that my mother had had a child before the war. I don't remember. I don't remember when and how I knew it. What I found out much later was that my mother actually had a photograph of her son. I'm not quite sure how it survived. It may have been sent to a friend in Palestine who gave it to her after the war, but she had that photograph. And I am quite certain that she looked at it every single day of her life. But I never saw that photograph until I was probably in my teens, because my mother did not want me to feel that I was a replacement, that I was somehow filling a void. And so that little boy whom I knew about but had no image of, and subsequently did have the image, became the preeminent ghost in my life because he never got to be more than five and a half years old. He never got to grow up. And there was always in my imagination, in my thoughts, what would he have done? What could he have done? And then, of course, at a given point, the reality sets in of how he was murdered. And that reality becomes a mainstay of one's rationale, because at that point, the Holocaust is no longer “just”, and I'm using just in quotation marks, it's no longer “just” the annihilation, the mass killing, the genocide of six million. It becomes the deliberate murder of one child, of my brother, and of my grandparents, my mother's parents. And that personalizes the experience in a way that the abstraction does not. So that's the... And I think that for many children of survivors, the story is not the same but similar. The ghosts, the absent individuals, the absent faces, the absences, the fact that at a Seder or at a celebration, there are very few family members. For my parents, their friends from the DP camps, their colleagues from the DP camps, became family. And some of my closest friends are the other children who were born in Bergen-Belsen, whom I knew growing up. And we became each other's family because of the absence of the biological families. As a child, I'm curious, how you experienced your parents' survival? Was it protection? Was it a burden? Was there some kind of an expectation imposed upon you? Well, first of all, I've learned about and knew about the displaced persons camp of Bergen-Belsen, about my birthplace, long before I found out about the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz and the horror that preceded the DP camp. Which is natural because those were effectively adventure stories. They were stories of triumphs. They were stories of how my father managed to circumvent British orders, how people related to each other, and friendships. And so, in a very strange way, when I found out about the horrors of the Holocaust, I also knew that certainly for my parents, the Holocaust was not the end. This was not a darkness from which there was no escape, there was no coming out of. Which of course there was a darkness for all those who perished. But in a way, I also knew that there was a subsequent chapter to it. And I think that made it not easier, but it made it more processable, if you will, to understand the Holocaust in the context, not just of the life that had existed before, but of the immediate aftermath. And that put it into context. And it also meant that I understood, certainly for myself, from a very early time, that I could not view my parents as victims, because they were not victims. They were role models. They were individuals who had reclaimed not just their identities, but the control of their own lives almost immediately afterwards, and had then contributed tremendously to protecting the other survivors at Bergen-Belsen, to helping forge a political path, which at that stage was a Zionist political path. And that cast the experience, not into a different life, but in context. One of the things I've always admired about you, since we've known each other, is what seems to be your ability to have taken this experience that you've inherited and to translate that experience into the very thick, complex tests of confronting racism, genocide, and oppression well beyond Jewish history and well beyond the Jews. Am I right in seeing this as a moral inheritance of the Shoah, of the Holocaust? How has that played out for you? You've written that we have no right to criticize the world's silence during the Holocaust unless we get rid of our own silence, unless we fight injustice today. What was the genesis of these convictions in your life? Well, in large part, it was my parent's example. My parents did not judge people based on their ethnicity or based on their religion, but on what was happening to them and who they were. Empathy and compassion and a willingness to help, was for those who were in need, and not because of who they were. And then, of course, we came to the United States and I had the enormous privilege of growing up in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-Vietnam War Movement and understanding the contemporary realities. And it becomes, you know, you cannot, I cannot, deal with racism emanating from Nazi Germany and then not recognize racism in Selma or Birmingham. They're not comparable, but on the other hand, they are analogous. They are parallel tracks. I remember the first time when I walked through the permanent exhibition of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, that was in 1993 when the museum was first opened. My mother was a member of the council. She had been a member of President Carter's commission. I had served on numerous committees, but that was the first time, just when the museum opened when I walked through it. And I remember walking past in the first gallery, artifacts from the 1930s in Nazi Germany. And I remember seeing a sign from clearly a German hotel. It was in German, saying, "Jewish guests are requested to eat their meals in their rooms." And that was clearly at a time when the process of discrimination was ongoing, but clearly German Jews were still able to go to a hotel and stay there, but they were being segregated away from the good German population, good German customers, clients in the hotel. And I remember thinking that this was very much what a colored person, a black person would have found in many parts of the American South. In the 1950s into the 1960s, the idea of, "You are not welcome here." And that became a guiding principle for me of looking at suffering and looking at discrimination and fighting it regardless of who the victim is, and more importantly, not prioritizing oneself over others. I'm going to dip my toe into some very hot water right now. We talked about Birmingham. Let's talk about America today. I'm wondering if you sense the echoes. And what are the echoes? The echoes are frightening. The echoes are frightening on both extremes, on both political extremes. The echoes are frightening in hearing people praise and identify with terrorist organizations, such as Hamas, that want to destroy the State of Israel, and that basically want to eliminate a Jewish presence in Israel in its entirety. And when you hear calls like "Globalize the Intifada," those have consequences. And they have consequences not just in rhetoric and, quite frankly, not just in encampments on universities that can be controlled. But they have consequences, as we saw recently, at Bondi Beach in Australia. These are very dangerous. And the fact that there are any number of political figures, on the American left, in the party with which I identify, who either espouse it or do not condemn it, is extremely worrisome. At the same time, we have the other extreme, the Tucker Carlsons, the Nick Fuentes, the personalities on the ideological right, who are white supremacists and, effectively, fascists, in the traditional sense of the term. And there are so very few in the Republican Party who have the courage to call them for what they are. I am not and have not been over the years a particular fan of Senator Ted Cruz. But Senator Ted Cruz has taken the courageous stance of calling them out for what they are, and basically saying they have no place in mainstream politics. Unfortunately, he is rare in that connection. And what is most worrisome to me is that the center seems to be shrinking. And those political figures whom we need going into the future, of bringing us together and basically bringing us back to a working relationship, with people with whom we do not necessarily agree, are becoming fewer and fewer. My favorite bookstore in Washington, D.C. is called Politics and Prose. So, if I could start a new bookstore, it would be Politics and Poetry. So, let's move from politics to poetry. You're not only an activist, you're not only a reservoir of memory and memories, but you're a poet and you're a rather good poet. In fact, you'll recall that we did a podcast on Martini Judaism about your most recent book, Burning Songs, Confronting Adonai After Auschwitz. But there was a previous book as well and it's rare, I think, that we can find someone who can combine all of these different aspects of human experience, politics, prose, and poetry. Would you share with us a poem from that previous book? …which is called Night Fragments and it encapsulates the identity of the children and, to some extent, grandchildren of survivors, but especially the children of survivors. night fragments created in fire shadows we are the last and the first: the last to taste ashes from the cursed century valley of unwilling paths through where God revealed his face to them alone; and the first transfixed by still burning yesterdays to reach beyond heaven and its clouds beyond crimson ghost illusions into ourselves imploding in search of memory. An

10. Elizabeth Rosner: What Children of Survivors Carry Forward from TO BE CONTINUED...Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, opens in a new tab

    Jan 23, 202640 min

    In award-winning author Elizabeth Rosner's book Survivor Cafe: The Legacy of Trauma, and the Labyrinth of Memory, she confronts what it means to live in the aftermath of the Holocaust — not as a direct witness, but as a child of survivors. In this episode, our host Rabbi Jeff Salkin discusses with Rosner: How do we carry inherited pain? What role does storytelling play in transforming trauma into meaning? And how can remembering help us heal? Elizabeth Rosner has published six books with a new book of poetry, Gravity, coming out in March 2026. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, Elle, and others. Speaker Bio: Elizabeth Rosner is the acclaimed author of six books, including three novels, two nonfiction books, and a poetry collection, of which all are full or part memoir. Her latest two nonfiction books are Survivor Cafe: The Legacy of Trauma and The Labyrinth of Memory , and Third Year, Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening. Hew newest book of poetry, Gravity , was released in March 2026. Her essays and poetry have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Elle, Hadassah Magazine, CNN Opinion, the Forward, and many anthologies. Her works have been translated into 12 languages and have received many literary awards. TRANSCRIPT: Everyone has five senses. Taste, smell, touch, hearing, and sight. But for Jews, there is one more sense. Memory is a sense. The author, Jonathan Safran Foer, writes that for Jews, memory is no less primary than the prick of a pin, or its silver glimmer, or the taste of the blood it pulls from the finger. The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins. Welcome to this podcast, TO BE CONTINUED…Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, where we explore the intersections of memory, identity, and resilience. Our goal is to lift up the experiences of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, and to ask, how did those memories form you? How did resilience create you as the person you are today? And what is the legacy that you will leave to those who come after you? I am your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin. Our guest is Elizabeth Rosner. She is the acclaimed author of six books, including three novels, two nonfiction books, and a poetry collection, of which all are full or part memoir. Her latest two nonfiction books are Survivor Cafe, The Legacy of Trauma, and The Labyrinth of Memory, and Third Year, Reflections on the Art and Science of Listening. Her essays and poetry have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Elle, Hadassah Magazine, and CNN Opinion, the Forward, and many anthologies, and her works have been translated into twelve languages and have received many literary awards. In Survivor Cafe, this deeply reflective and poetic work, she confronts what it means to live in the aftermath of the Holocaust, not as a direct witness, but as a child of survivors. She asks, "How do we carry inherited pain? What role does storytelling play in transforming trauma into meaning? And how can remembering, rather than forgetting, help us heal?" So, we're going to be talking about the enduring power of memory, the role of narrative and survival and what resilience looks like across generations of Jewish memory and of Jewish identity. Jewish insights are abundant in her work, and she reminds us of William Faulkner's quote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." So welcome, Elizabeth. It's great to have you here. Thank you, Rabbi. That was a beautiful introduction. I have to say that I reread your book, Survivor Cafe. I can't begin to tell you how many pages have little post-its in them because there are things that I wanted to remember, and it's a book about the burden and the gift of memory. And so, you struggle in this book with whether or not you, as a daughter of survivors, and the rest of us who are witnesses to so many survivor stories, have a right to tell their story. So, I'm going to ask that you briefly tell us about your family's story of survival and loss. Yeah. You know, that could easily take up the entirety of our conversation depending on how much detail I fill in. But I first want to say thank you for having me in this conversation and for giving me the chance to talk about things I care about so much, and that really, as you say, have shaped almost everything about me. I have always felt that the gift slash burden of inheriting my parents' histories is something I think of as a loved obligation, that I recognize it's something I didn't necessarily choose, but that I have come to really honor it as something that really gives shape and purpose to my life. And so, by telling their stories, even in brief snippets like I'll try to do right now, it keeps them alive. They've both passed away. And it also keeps me focused in a way on what I believe is so important about keeping memory in the present, recognizing that it has affected the present and that therefore naming it is just an acknowledgement of what's true. So, my mother was born in Vilna, which was at the time Lithuania/Poland. It was changing nationalities in some ways throughout its existence. She, in 1939, when Hitler invaded Poland, she was an only child with her parents. They were herded into the Vilna Ghetto, where they remained until just prior to the liquidation of the ghetto, when they were able to arrange to be hidden by a Polish peasant in the countryside outside of the ghetto walls. And they survived the war that way. In 1944, when the Russians liberated Poland, my mother and her parents realized that Poland was still not in any way a safe place to remain as Jews. And so, they made their way, first to Sweden, while they were waiting for visas to come to America. And it was in Sweden, as a refugee, that she actually met my father, whose story goes like this. He was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1929. My mother was born in 1930. My father was the eldest of three children, all born to a German Jewish family that was very assimilated. My father's given name was Karl Heintz. His next brother was named Wolfgang. And the third child was named Helmut, which I think is a really strong... These are good Jewish names. Good Jewish names. I mean, it's such an indicator of how his parents felt about being German. They were Jewish, but they really, really felt very Germanically identified. And even though they themselves were not German born, but their sons were. And yet they were divorced in 1936 during the time of the establishment of the Nuremberg Laws. They had a small shop that was repossessed by the Nazis. And my grandmother, who was basically abandoned by my grandfather, who went back to Romania where he was from, and she put the children in an orphanage because she didn't know how to take care of them without any means of support. The youngest uncle, Helmut, was on a Kindertransport to Sweden. My grandmother somehow managed to smuggle herself into Sweden to be closer to him. And because she thought from there, she'd be able to get her other two sons out of Germany. She was not able to do that in time. This is such a fast telling of the story, of course, but my father and my other uncle, Wolfgang, were in a Jewish orphanage for a little while. The entire orphanage was deported, except my father and my uncle, who were considered Romanian because of their father. But eventually they too were deported to Buchenwald. My father and my uncle both managed to survive Buchenwald, a year in Buchenwald concentration camp until liberation. They made their way to Sweden. This is where Sweden comes back into the story. And that's where my parents met as teenagers. They were married in Israel. And then they came to the United States where my older sister and I, and my younger brother, were all born and raised. When I hear your story, Elizabeth, it makes it very clear to me why you use the metaphor of labyrinth. Yeah. Yeah, I mean... To talk about memory. Right. You know, the imagery of the wandering Jew, of course, is, you know, far predates the Holocaust and is all the way back to dispersion and diaspora and, you know, all kinds of labyrinths for Jewish journeying, I think, exist already. But memory itself, you know, each time I tell this story, I'm trying in every way to be faithful to the facts as I know them. And yet even my father, even my mother, as they narrated their stories, there would be slight adjustments, slight modifications every time. And when I was writing Survivor Cafe and I began to really study memory as a subject itself, you know, what are memory studies? What are people who understand the way neurological wiring works? It turns out that every time we retell a story, we are actually rewriting it, even in small, kind of almost molecular ways. And so, it opens this huge, you know, chasm of questions. How do we know what the true stories are? How do we know what we're holding on to? If not to simply surrender, as I try to do, to being imperfect in the retelling, to accept that this labyrinth, this image, if you've ever walked a labyrinth or really looked at even a visual depiction of a labyrinth, every time we think we're getting closer to the center, we actually may be drifting farther to the outer rim and vice versa. We do the best we can to follow the path, but we do it imperfectly. It is such a powerful image. So, you actually taught me so much about the dynamics of memory in this book. And I never considered how when we remember and when we tell the story, we become a text. We shape it and we create it. So, I'd like you to share with us a little bit about the difference, if there is one, between personal memory and collective memory. What does that mean? Such a complicated question, really. And thank you for your kind words about my work. I'm really touched to know that it impacts you the way it does. It means a lot to me. This morning, I was thinking about the idea of repetition and the importance in Jewish tradition of telling and retelling stories. The Passover Seder is a perfect example of this, but really, the Book of Esther, everything is a text, as you said, including ourselves, including our own lives. And so, the repetition, even when it feels personal, I think is inevitably collective because we are so connected with one another. In literal ways, I am made of my parents' DNA as they were made from their parents' DNA. So, I've got generational cells. And I want to say that the word epigenetics, which now a lot of people seem to be familiar with in ways that weren't... When Survivor Cafe first came out in 2017, and I would give presentations and talks, and I would ask people, "How many of you are familiar with the word epigenetics?" And very few people would kind of timidly raise their hands. But this idea that memory and the transmission of experience actually is in our bodies, it's not that the DNA itself is changed. Like epigenetics, for some people, makes them think that trauma changes their genes. It's not actually modifying the DNA, but trauma, for example, is modifying the expression of certain parts of our DNA. For example, how we process stress. So, the stress hormone cortisol. Some Holocaust survivors, in fact, probably many Holocaust survivors, their stress system, their adrenal glands, their cortisol production was so massively engaged, sometimes for years on end, that of course it modified their entire nervous system and their physiology. And it turns out that now we can measure this scientifically, right? Second, third, maybe fourth, we don't even know how many generations later, we are experiencing post-traumatic stress as if we too went through those experiences. We know that we didn't. I know that I was not there physically. As you said earlier, I wasn't even a witness to their experience. I was born 15 years after the end of the war. But I knew even as a child that there was something about what happened to my parents that lived inside of me. And for a long time, I was told I was just being too sensitive or I had too vivid an imagination or I was making it up. But now science is sort of bearing out what those of us who were that generation after know to be true. We feel it. We sense it. We're hypervigilant. We overreact. We underreact. Some people are just numb. Their cortisol levels don't do anything because they've been so extremely modified. So, it varies from person to person. But getting back to your question about collective memory, that's already collective, right? That's already something that I feel personally, but it refers to an entire generation and multiple generations. And I want to say one other thing, which is this isn't just a Jewish experience. And I spend a lot of time in Survivor Cafe and in fact in all of my work, without comparing and without doing some kind of victim hierarchy or I do believe that it is collective in the human experience. There are other atrocities that we know of in human history that also bear this out. Generational inheritance, generational trauma, generational resilience is true in the African-American community. It's true in the Asian-American community. It's true in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's true in Rwanda. It's true in Cambodia. It's true among all veterans of war and their descendants. This is the human experience. What's powerful about this is that it plays off of that wonderful line that says that in every generation, everyone must see themselves as if they had gone forth out of Egypt. And now you're making me really understand this in a whole new way. It says, Chayav Adam Lirot et Tatsmo. It says, "The human being must see himself or herself as if they'd gone out of Egypt." It doesn't say the Jew. So, this is now a universal experience, and what you're teaching us has even that much more power. It also, I think, illuminates something else. You mentioned how this plays out in the African-American experience. I don't know to what extent African-American leaders and healers have spoken about the epigenetic effects of slavery and on their being in terms of lynchings, et cetera. But I will say this. Correct me if I'm wrong. Is this a possible conversation piece that different groups could be having with each other? Is this a topic of dialogue, of how we have braved these straits in our own way, and what can we learn from each other? Absolutely, yes. The answer I would give is an emphatic yes. I reference those cultures, those histories, those atrocities in my work because I feel they are part of a big conversation. There are people like Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative that absolutely address this question of how the history of slavery and the history of lynching and the Jim Crow era and segregation, all of those things are carried in the bodies of their descendants, and the bodies of those who witnessed and who lived alongside those experiences. The collective American experience, which we don't name very often because we have a lot of amnesia, as President Obama famously said, that Americans are famously amnesiac. We have a very hard time acknowledging our own perpetration on the Native American people, the indigenous people of this continent, this country. What we need to do, I believe, is to recognize that these are shared legacies. These are experiences that don't actually differentiate us. They make us alike. For example, Ken Burns' recent documentary about America and the Holocaust, he really called out the way that the race laws of the Nazis were imitating American race laws. They were looking at us and seeing what we were doing to dehumanize black people, and they were imitating our horrific white supremacy. It does start in places that you don't think it starts, and then you have to acknowledge the ripple effects that we share. Absolutely, I welcome those dialogues. I think they're hard to have because sometimes people get very possessive of what they consider to be their tribal history, their unique history. I think what is important to me is to acknowledge the uniqueness of each experience and yet to recognize the echoes, recognize what's familiar and retain your sense of identity. It doesn't have to threaten your sense of self to acknowledge something familiar in the other. It's not as if memory is a finite resource. It's not as if compassion is a jar of water which, once it's poured out, will not be renewed. I remember years ago I was in a social situation and I met a woman who was of Armenian descent. I can't begin to tell you how many times I walked through the Armenian Quarter in the old city in Jerusalem, and I said to her, "Ah, you're an Armenian. I'm a Jew. I always felt a kinship,” and she just said, "I know." In that moment of encounter, what Martin Buber would call the "I thou experience,” our souls were able to touch each other. I know. It didn't even have to be spoken of. I really do believe that we as Jews have a mission to the world. You've really, I think, lifted this up for us already, Elizabeth, which is that it's not only that we need to perpetuate our own memory, but we need to be the technicians of memory for other people to teach them how to remember their own stories, their own narratives. Let me shift, since we're talking about stories, let me shift over into movies. How have movies shaped our way of experiencing this trauma? Another tricky question. When I was revising Survivor Cafe, I was doing a word search and I found that the word "complicated" appeared like 87 times in the book. It was incumbent upon me to find some other synonyms for that word and also to recognize that each situation I used that word and I had to carefully consider what did I mean specifically here. There's a chapter in Survivor Cafe that has the phrase "the paradox of artifice." And I quote Elie Wiesel who said in his usual incredibly eloquent and very succinct way, he said, "A novel about Majdanek is either not a novel or not about Majdanek." And this pointing to the paradox of how you represent something that is so beyond belief and that you use a fictional device like film, for example, to try and represent something that defies imagination is inevitably, I think, going to fail and yet it has to succeed in some way. It has to succeed by trying to represent and yet also to acknowledge it's always going to fall short. And that's how I feel about all of my writing. I too have tried to write fiction that includes the Holocaust and I struggle all the time with how to honor it, without distorting it, without sentimentalizing or making something even more melodramatic, exploiting this material. So, I've struggled with films like Schindler's List that I think have had a huge impact on people's understanding of the Holocaust emotionally, visually, epically. And yet it's a movie. It's not a documentary. It's a feature film with distortions and exaggerations and dramatizations. It's such a rich and important question to ask. And I feel like the more and more we do this, because the farther removed we are from the actual events of the Holocaust, the closer we are to this reinventing of things, the losing of the firsthand witnesses as the survivors themselves pass away. How do we stay authentic? How do we stay true to the facts? It's a really tricky subject. And I only want to say that really, that I honor the complexity of it and the struggle of it. I think that in a very lowbrow, let me venture to say almost vulgar way, whether he knows it or not, that's what Jerry Seinfeld was pointing to in that infamous episode on Seinfeld where he is spotted making out with his girlfriend Rachel in the movie theater during a showing of Schindler's List. And what I always believed to be funny and telling, about that was that his parents were as offended by him making out during a feature film about the Holocaust as if he had been making out at Auschwitz itself, where the representation of this becomes itself wholly. Oh my gosh. There are so many current