The importance of recording testimony of Holocaust survivors is well understood. While empowering the survivor and adding another layer of documentation about the cataclysm, it also serves as a bulwark against Holocaust denial. The same holds true for helping survivors pen their memoirs, or when writing their history. At the same time, this process also impacts upon the person recording the testimony, assisting the survivor in writing his or her memoirs, and certainly upon those who write about the survivors.
What happens when the interviewer, biographer, translator, or memoir transcriber is a child or grandchild of that survivor? This book is based on the premise that a collection of personal narratives of descendants of Holocaust survivors who interviewed their parents\grandparents, wrote their history, or helped them with their memoirs, narratives in which they describe and analyze the impact of these activities on their personal trajectories, can greatly contribute to our understand of the Holocaust and, particularly, its aftermath. Each of the book's 14 chapters is a personal narrative by a child or grandchild of Holocaust survivors who analyzes the impact that their interviewing, writing about, or writing with their surviving parents\ grandparents had upon their lives.
This book is based on the premise that that a collection of personal narratives of descendants of Holocaust survivors who interviewed their parents\grandparents can greatly contribute to our understand of the Holocaust and particularly, its aftermath.
Introduction
Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz and David Clark
The Second Generation
Chapter 1
"Buffalo Bill from Bochnia in Auschwitz": A Performative Memoir in Four Acts
Judith Tydor Baumel-Schwartz
Chapter 2
Scraps and Souls
Anita Grosz
Chapter 3
Witness By Proxy
Jacqueline Heller
Chapter 4
Mir Zennen Do: The Memory Motto of a Living Family
Ruchel Jarach-Sztern
Chapter 5
Passing the Baton: My Parents, Our Family Holocaust History, and Me
Naomi Levy
Chapter 6
My Mother's Memoirs: A Joint Effort
Marian Liebemann
Chapter 7
Homemade Testimony Researching and Processing My Greek Parents' Holocaust
Testimonies
Shmuel Refael
Chapter 8
Letters, Life, and Legacies Writing the Story of My Mother, Karen Gershon
Naomi Anne Shmuel
Chapter 9
Grateful Every Day
Ruth Finkel Wade
Chapter 10
First, Second, Third Generation
Dov Eichenwald
The Third Generation
Chapter 11
Conversations With My Dead Grandfather
Madelaine Wolf Bukiet
Chapter 12
Remember and Not Forget? The Study of Jewish Law and Theater and the
Holocaust
Yaniv Shimon Goldberg
Chapter 13
Inherited Courage: A Third Generation Perspective on my Partisan
Grandparents
Daniela Ozacky Stern
Chapter 14
Connecting the Dots: Talking to My Grandparents About the Holocaust
Gadi Winter
Chapter 15
Epilogue
David Clark
Judith Tydor Baumel- Schwartz is the Director of the Finkler Institute of Holocaust Research and Professor in the Israel and Golda Koschitzky Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry, Bar- Ilan University, Israel. She has written and edited numerous books and articles about the Holocaust and its aftermath.
David Clark completed his PhD on Jewish museums (London Metropolitan University). He co- edited, together with Maria Kousis and Tom Selwyn, Contested Mediterranean Spaces (2011). He also co- edited with Sommaruga Howard The Journey Home, Emerging out of the Shadow of the Past (2021).
