Tunnels to the past Perceptions of second generation ‘outsiders’

So many of us, the children of the refugees from Nazism, feel overwhelmed by our parents’ experiences. Ask a member of the ‘second generation’ about themselves and they will tell you about their parents. ‘But I want to know about you,’ I insist, and the reply will come back: ‘Oh, but it’s my parents who are interesting.’ So I decided to find out about the second generation in their own right. Indeed, I discovered that the second generation had never been systematically studied in the UK. I interviewed 12 people whose parents had as adults fled Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Did the people born to refugee parents from Nazism have shared experiences? What rapidly emerged from the interviews was the importance of the absence of grandparents, the refugees’ parents, and sometimes the parents’ other relatives. For almost everybody, the absence, and too often murder, of their grandparents, even though they never knew them, was of profound – even overriding – concern. Almost nobody’s parents had told their children in any detail about their grandparents, a silence which intensified the second generation’s sense of disjuncture and loss. Another issue which emerged was the very different meanings and significance of Jewishness. Though the majority of the sample’s parents had fled because of anti-Semitism, the meaning of Jewishness varied profoundly. Only one person stated that their faith was the most important part of them; for others, being Jewish was one among other attributes; and for some what being Jewish meant was unclear. Here is the reply of one person when asked whether his persistent and heartbreaking search for any record of his grandparents was to do with his search for Jewishness: Yes, I think it was. It was about I have a right to this stuff .… At that time too, it felt quite ideological ….. Very little of it was about finding out about Jewishness as a religion or a cultural tradition …. For me, it was a moral issue …. I could not swallow this idea that you suppress your Jewishness because it is too dangerous to be different …. I suppose the Holocaust was something in which 6 million people died but in which there was hardly any concept of my own grandparents …. The fact that they [the grandparents] died in their 40s looms as the one large fact about their lives …. I don’t think I could tell you one story about either of them …. Unexpectedly, most (though not all) of the second generation’s parents who had fled anti-Semitism were also political. But what was noticeable was that the second generation children of the committed ‘politico’ parents, who had chosen to oppose the Nazis rather than fleeing because they were being persecuted for an ascribed and insane ‘eugenic’ reason, did generally appear to be a bit surer of who they were. There is no room in this article to go into the many other patterns which emerged. Mental health issues, on occasion explicitly connected to the families’ traumatic past, cropped up in many of the interviews. Parents’ country of origin was linked to whether anybody in their families had survived and therefore made a profound difference to the second generation’s sense of dis/location and otherness. Many of the interviewees felt a deep attachment to the few belongings they had of their murdered families, though a few expressed the opposite sentiment: that mere objects would not bring the lost ones back to them. Almost none of the male interviewees had been circumcised. Almost nobody felt they were English/British. ‘Outsider’ is how many described themselves. Sometimes it is almost unbearable for the children of refugees from Nazism to enter those tunnels of the past without feeling we will be crushed into oblivion. At least, our parents knew more than we did. We may find names and dates and places but we will never find our grandparents or hear their stories. Though our parents struggled hard in order that we should feel secure, even assimilated in the country of our birth, Nazism’s long arm still bears down on our sense of who we are. Merilyn Moos The author’s study of the second generation, ‘Breaking the Silence’, is currently being considered for publication.