Tisha B'Av Generation Without Grandparents Chani Aftergut Kurtz Check out the Innernet Website Legend has it that after the Holocaust, Menachem Begin visited the great Rabbi Yitzhak Hutner, and asked which day of the Jewish year should commemorate the devastating loss of 6 million Jews. "Tisha B'Av," said Rabbi Hutner, in reference to the day of the destruction of both the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem. He explained: "The destruction of European Jewry was another in a series of systematic attempts to silence the message of our people." This year, Tisha B'Av is July 21-22, 1999. The day is marked by fasting, and chanting of the Biblical book of Lamentations. With that in mind, InnerNet presents the following essay: As the daughter of a man who went through six years in concentration camps. I view the Holocaust from a survivor's perspective. And I am not alone. The effects of the Holocaust on "the generation after" are subtle and long-lasting. They shape our thoughts, our fears, our dreams, our lives. Jewish tradition has always depended not only on the written word, but on the transmission of memories - on the wealth of customs, stories and experiences passed down from generation to generation. For survivors and their children, this process was interrupted. Ours was a generation without grandparents. Some of us considered ourselves particularly fortunate in having one grandfather or grandmother who had survived. Many of my friends had neither. Among the children I grew up with, all of us children of survivors, I can remember no one who had the normal complement of four grandparents to share her life. Instead we had photographs - if our parents were lucky. Photographs cannot tell stories. Nor can they serve as a buffer between the generations, providing you with insight into your parents' personalities and a sense of perspective on yourself. They cannot sit you on their knees when you are in trouble and tell you about the time your mother was in bigger trouble. They cannot show you how they made wicks for Chanukah by hand. And they cannot tell you about Passover in their grandparents' house, drawing you into that unbroken chain, anchoring your roots in the past. Having lost that source of memories, we depended on our parents' stories for continuity. The degree to which survivors shared their experiences differed widely. Some survivors were stifled by their inability or unwillingness to share their stories, and at times, by their children's inability to listen. Many were incapable of talking at all, finding that the only way to avoid being engulfed by depression was to seal off this part of their lives altogether. To acknowledge dead relatives, to mention their names or describe them was too traumatic. The depth of past suffering was conveyed by the melancholy atmosphere of a yartzeit, or by the tears that would flow, unbidden, at a family simcha. Tears that would never be explained in words. The burden carried by these children is a crushing one. From their earliest moments, they were aware that their parents were more vulnerable, that they had a tremendous responsibility toward them. They were their parents' justification for living. "Now I know why I survived," a father told his daughter at the Bar Mitzvah of her oldest son. "When I look at your son putting on his Tefillin, I see that there was a reason God allowed me to live when so many around me perished." They knew that their parents had already suffered too much, and felt they had to be protected from any future suffering. "I always did my homework," a friend confided to me. "I knew that if I didn't do well in school it would be very painful for my parents, and they had suffered too much pain already." At the same time, because it was imperative that they succeed, because they felt that they had to make their parents proud, because so much was at stake, many children of survivors became high achievers. Some identified with the relatives whose names they bore, internalizing the wonderful characteristics that were attributed to them. Many drew strength from their parents' experiences, inheriting their attitude that they would survive, no matter what obstacles presented themselves. Where do we go from here? At the conclusion of an intensive two-week school project on the Holocaust, my daughter said to me, "I'm not sure I can take much more of this. It's one thing to learn about the Spanish Inquisition that happened 500 years ago; it's another to realize that they're talking about your grandfather." I understood her all too well, for I still remember the day my teacher showed us a documentary, and I realized that there on the screen was the quarry in which my father had hauled rocks as an adolescent. The identification, and the subsequent pain, were overwhelming. In fact, children of survivors often show exaggerated sensitivities to objects that trigger Holocaust associations. I still have a problem with buying my children clothes with vertical stripes. Silly? Perhaps. But in my parent's photo album is a picture of my father in his concentration camp garb. I carry that photo in my mental album, too. Nor can I forget my father's reaction when I bought myself a pair of those cute little Dr. Scholl clogs that were so in style when I was a teenager. "Wooden shoes?" He stared at me, not angry, just bewildered. "Wooden shoes? I've already worn wooden shoes enough to atone for my children, and for my children's children, and for their children after them." Yet just as I can never forget the bizarre associations and the haunting stories my father has told, I hope that I will also internalize some of his remarkable strength, and his commitment to Torah and to humanity. I hope that as I raise my children, I can convey the unshakable foundation my mother's mother transmitted to me, an unwavering code that enabled her to raise two children on her own in the labor camps of Siberia, and later in war-ravaged Europe. A poster was popular when I was a teenager - a poster with a picture of a little Jewish boy with his arms up in the air in the classic pose of prisoners, with the word "Remember" emblazoned on it. We can do no less than remember because we owe it to those who perished to continue their legacy. We can do no less than remember because we owe it to those who survived to honor their greatness. And we can do no less than remember, for only in coming to terms with the past, with the portraits that stared at us from living room walls, with the tears that streamed silently at our weddings, with the stories and with the silences, only then can we see how they shaped the people we are today. Check out the Innernet Website