Whose memory is it? This is the question we are asking this morning.

I want to begin by asking you, in the audience, a few questions. Firstly, who identifies here as a second-generation Holocaust survivor? Second question. When did you start to identify under that particular title, which incorporates the word survivor? Were you a teenager? Because I didn’t. Is it something that you adopted later in life? I did. You wouldn’t have called yourself that when you were a child. No. Would you have called yourself a survivor when your parents were alive? I wouldn’t have. And when did you become aware of being part of what I call a shared group identity? That you were part of something bigger than yourself? Is it, do you think, a factor of age? Because I think identity, as we know, is something that evolves over time. Our sense of self when we’re younger is very different to how it is when we’re older. And so it is with our identity as the child or children of survivors. As living survivors diminish in number, we know that a new space emerges. Are we then compelled to step into that space? And why?

Today we want to explore the emergence and the shaping of a second-generation Holocaust consciousness and how it manifests itself through the broader context of Jewish history and memory and how it has been shaped within contemporary society. Because I’m a historian and I can tell you that context drives everything.

Let’s look at where this has its beginnings. This idea of who we are. Where this sense of belonging to a shared identity, I think, starts to emerge.

And I want you to put yourself back into 1970. Where I think there was a time of general awakening, in general, of this sense of self. Because as we were coming through the 1960s, we have stories of oppression being articulated and validated. In America, we have the heightened interest in the heritage of African-American slavery. And we all remember “Roots”. This was a relatively new phenomenon. We came through a period of the women’s liberation movement, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam anti-war demonstrations, and we believed that we were entering a whole new era. Oral histories were taking their place in the history of humanity for the very, very first time. New audiences were emerging to hear stories of minority groups and victimisation. These stories were being told, and these stories were giving us permission to speak about ourselves in a way that had never, ever happened before.

And how old were you in 1970? Because I was in my late teens. My brother and sister, who were born straight after the war, were in their mid-twenties. I want you to think about how old you were in 1970. And I want to introduce you to a figure, a person, who at that time began to investigate just who we are as children of survivors. And I want to introduce you to her because she started to shape the ideas around the commonalities that we shared as the children of survivors, that had never been shared before.

And this is where we come to the work of Helen Epstein, the child of two Holocaust survivors who was born in Prague in 1947, and grew up in New York City. She became a distinguished, well-known journalist, an academic, and the first tenured professor of journalism at New York University. She has become an eminent thinker, writer, and most importantly, a social investigator, who first and foremost was the child of survivors, and who always was conscious of her difference. And she wanted to know if there were others who felt like she did. She described herself as living in two different worlds, her home with its own particular conversations, its silences, its unspoken pasts, the fact that when she was five, she knew her mother had a number on her arm, but never ever dared ask her why, or what that number meant. And the different world she encountered when she left that home and she entered the American world of baseball games, school proms, homecoming queens, people with vast extended families, the awkward ‘Uncle Arthur’ that was always turning up at your front door. She had none of it. So, in 1970, at the age of 23, as a young fledgling journalist, she set out on a journey to understand other children of survivors. Were they the same? Were they different? And over seven years, she travelled extensively, interviewed hundreds of children of survivors. Some would not speak to her, some couldn’t stop speaking to her, and mostly they said they had never spoken to anyone.

In 1977, she published an article in the New York Times called Heirs of the Holocaust. And from these hundreds of people that she interviewed, she singled out, because she’s an extremely good journalist and knew how to write a story, 25 of those that she had interviewed, all of whom were in their 20s. And she arrived at the conclusion that there were many commonalities and she wanted to share five distinctive characteristics.

Number One, a sense of isolation. They were unlike any other American families.

Number Two, shared affinities. Everyone she’d interviewed, including herself, was named after a dead person. Not just any dead person, but people who died because they were murdered. That’s some legacy. She also understood that these children of survivors had an affinity with the pain and suffering of their parents. ‘You can’t say that about my mum. You don’t know what she went through when she was  your age’. She heard so many of those comments.

There was, thirdly, a legacy that she called of ‘anxiety’. Survivors were already, in 1970 and 1977, forming their own social networks, their own self-help groups, Landsmanschaften, for example, Katzetnik groups, commemorative organisations, welfare groups. The children of survivors, however, still existed in a social vacuum.

Fourthly, the ‘challenge’. Would we, the children of survivors, have survived if we were in their position? Were we as tough? Did we have the same ingenuity? Their survivor stories loomed large over the head and heart of every single child of a survivor. Some went on to try to prove that they could survive. One, she spoke to, challenged himself in the jungles of Vietnam. Another challenged himself after the Six-Day War by volunteering on a border town kibbutz. But all of them felt perhaps diminished rather than enlivened by their parents’ experience.

And lastly, the obligation begins to emerge to speak, to preserve what had been attempted to be destroyed.

In 1979, Epstein took this article and developed it into a book that she published that I think is something of a ground breaker called Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors. Published in 1979, it’s a little tiny book. It’s extremely relevant and I think it stands up today as good as it did then. And this is what I want to draw your attention to.

To quote Epstein, ‘Our parents were not like other parents and we children were not like other children’. That is a statement of affirmation. That is who we are.

‘There had to be’, she said, ‘other people like me’. She talked about this closed tin box that sits inside her chest. ‘There had to be other people like me who shared what I carried. I set out to find a group of people who, like me, were possessed by a history they had never lived’. I think this is really what we have to unpack today, because this implies a shared history, a memory, and the transference and transmission of that from one to the other.

Let’s jump forward to 2003 and the work of Eva Hoffman. Born in 1945 in Krakow, Eva immigrated to Canada at the age of 13 and received her PhD from Harvard University in English and American Literature. She is an astounding, renowned writer and editor, and she is also the child of survivors. And in her book, After Such Knowledge, published in 2003, she now calls us second generation survivors, something which Helen Epstein doesn’t actually articulate back in 1977 and ’79. We are, she says, ‘the hinge generation’. We are that connection between one and the other. ‘We are the hinge generation in which received, transferred knowledge of events is transmuted into history or into myth. It’s also the generation in which we can think about certain questions arising from the Shoah with a sense of living connection. We are the living connection’. How, though, do we transmit this knowledge and why do we feel compelled to do so?

For the Jewish people, this sits within a much broader framework, and the work of the great professor of Jewish history, culture and society, the late Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, whose meditation on the tensions between collective memory of a people and the factual record of the past is particularly important for providing us with greater context. Remember what I said about context? It drives everything. This intergenerational Holocaust consciousness is all part of something far greater.

‘For the Jewish people’, Yerushalmi tells us, ‘memory remains an active lived experience where the past remains present’. If you’re not familiar with Yerushalmi’s work, I really recommend it. His book Zachor is also a ground breaker. In essence, what Yerushalmi poses to us is a bit of a dilemma, because if the past is an active lived experience and always remains present, in essence, the past is never past. And this helps us to understand what Eva Hoffman talks about us as being this ‘hinge generation’. Those who are, as Helen Epstein says, possessed of a history we never lived. It’s predetermined inheritance. It’s transferred. It’s never past. This is what helps shape us as to who we are as the Jewish people. It’s in our DNA. It’s inescapable and the past will always remain a lived experience.

I want to bring another view of this. The late Mark Baker, a very dear colleague of mine at Monash, wrote a beautiful book in 1997 called The Fiftieth Gate about his relationship, as the child of survivors, with his parents. and he undertakes a journey with them to find out, if you like, that intersection between what Yerushalmi calls memory, the tension between memory and history. Mark saw his relationship with his parents’ past, not just as transference or transmission, but as transactional. He demands possession of their memory. He wants it, and he’s going to strike a deal with them.

‘I’ll give you my history’, because he was a historian of the Holocaust, ‘and they would give me their memory, an exchange of pasts’. Again, a living past, not a dead past. So, I want to go back another step. For the Jewish people, the act of remembrance is enshrined in the biblical injunction Zachor. It’s the commandment to always remember. It’s a commandment that we know is repeated over 200 times in the Hebrew Bible.

Elie Wiesel, in his famous book Night, which he actually published first in the post-war years in Yiddish, and it was a 500-page book called Un Die Welt Hot Geschwigen, (And The World Was Silent) and it was unsuccessful. He was told to go away, edit it, rewrite it, which he did, and he wrote it and republished it in 1958 as La Nuit in French, and then it becomes Night as we know it in 1960.  Elie Wiesel tells us that the future is contingent upon the past, and that the past lives within us. Memory becomes the foundation stone of our civilisation. And we’re not just commanded to remember; we’re commanded to never forget. And this is how we, as a nation, survive. Not just possessed by a history that we have never lived, but we are commanded to never forget it.

Now, remembrance and the act of bearing witness are also inextricably linked. Both are a compulsion and a moral obligation that is encoded into the fabric of Jewish tradition. Elie Wiesel tells us that for the dead and the living, we must bear witness.

That compulsion, that transmission from one to the other is the act of witnessing. And we as second generation, and I’m also including the third generation, are compelled to be the witnesses.

Again we see that link between what is past and what must live on. It is again the history we have never lived. To transfer it, to transmit it, means to bear witness to it. We’re going back another step. Because we know that the Judaic tradition of recording, narrating and bearing witness is not a new phenomenon, and it’s not isolated to the aftermath of the Shoah.

If we go back to the biblical stories of the Tanakh, we see that there is a very strong precedent for the act of witnessing. I had to use Charlton Heston as Moses in this pictorial representation, because he’s the only Moses photo I could find.

We know that as a nation we were collective witnesses for the receiving of the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai and that moral obligation to speak for those who cannot speak or who can no longer speak is depicted in the story of Aaron who was asked to speak for Moses and again, in this pictorial representation, a very handsome and young Charlton Heston and John Carradine as his brother Aaron. Now we know that biblically in the story of Moses, he did speak to Pharaoh. But when Moses first confronts the burning bush and he’s commanded to speak to Pharaoh, he hesitates, doesn’t he? He says, ‘I’m not a speaker’. And God tells Moses that Aaron will speak for him.

Holocaust memory has become a major component of contemporary Jewish culture and it’s a defining point, sadly, of Jewish identity. Our group identity, our collective identity as second-generation Holocaust survivors is part of the broader understanding of our Jewish identity.

Yerushalmi reminds us that Jews are beings of memory, so we shouldn’t feel surprised that we feel compelled to pass on the stories of our parents most of whom are now no longer alive, to bear witness to their witnessing, their experiences, and for us to retell and re-engage in their past as it is now our past, which remains a living past, ‘zachor’ to always remember, from generation to generation, ‘l’dor, v’dor’.

Elie Wiesel, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, said, ‘I believe firmly and profoundly that whoever, whosoever listens to a witness becomes a witness. So those who hear us, those who read us, must continue to bear witness for us’.

That continuity, that lived experience, it goes on. We are the Aaron to the Moses. We become the witnesses as we are compelled to do so. The Aaron to the Moses lives on within us. It’s never ending.

And Yerushalmi again tells us in Zachor, that little book with a whole lot of meanings in it, that Jewish memory has historically been sustained through rituals, storytelling, and liturgy, rather than formal historiography. So, I now want to move us into the more contemporary scene.

We’ve talked a little bit about memory, the issues of transmission, how locked in we are as a Jewish people into sustaining history and sustaining memory.

I want to look at how the ways in which this intergenerational transference of memory, this living past which lives within us, manifests itself in today’s popular culture and in contemporary society.

Now, there are many ways in which intergenerational survivors, second generation, and now we know third and fourth, engage with their Holocaust heritage. And if I was to go around and ask each of you, who kindly put your hands up and said that you were second generation survivors, you owned up, you would each have different ways of telling me how you engage with that heritage.

And that engagement does express itself in many ways, but I’m just going to look at a few. Films, books, physical journeys to the landscapes of destruction, commemorations, public events, and ritualisation. Firstly, films.

Films about the Holocaust probably run into the hundreds if not thousands, but the earliest ones, the first wave of Holocaust films were documentaries.

And I’m not talking about the newsreels that were being shown during the war, or the film that was used at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. I’m talking about constructed documentaries.

The first one in 1944 was Majdanek, Cemetery of Europe. It was a Soviet-produced documentary about the Majdanek camp. It was filmed by the Polish Army film unit between July 24th and July 25th, 1944, while the war was still raging.  The Lodz Ghetto hadn’t yet been liquidated. It was produced just days after Majdanek’s liberation by Soviet forces on July the 23rd 1944. Its running time is about 24 minutes and it premiered in Lublin on the 1st of November 1944 to show those around by the Soviets what the Nazis had been capable of. You’ve got to remember the Nazis left Majdanek intact. It was the only death camp left intact. The film’s maker, Alexander Ford, was born Moishe Lipschitz in Lodz, just as a point of interest.

The second one was specifically intended for German audiences in the US occupation zone to confront them with the crimes that they had committed. It was directed by Billy Wilder. I don’t know if you’re all fans of 1950 films like I am, but if you’ve seen Some Like It Hot or Seven-year Itch both with Marilyn Monroe, that’s Billy Wilder. But he was born Schmuel Wilner in Galicia. And it was produced by the US government, and it runs for 22-minutes. It deliberately confronted audiences with footage from the liberated Nazi concentration camps, and it served as a crucial and immediate record of the atrocities.

Now, Holocaust films span a whole range of genres from this period up until the present. We have these early documentaries, we have survivor accounts, we have docu-dramas, we have narrative films, fiction, non-fiction, war films, action films, love stories, psychological dramas, comedies, and we even now have revenge fantasies. How many of you saw Inglorious Bastards? And every one of you thought, Gee, I wish I’d had that machine gun, you know. So we have a range of them.

But I want to focus on a new particular subset of film that has emerged. The more recent emergence of the intergenerational Holocaust film. And I’ve got a small sampling. They keep emerging now at film festivals. You could probably add a lot. I’ve just randomly selected four, which I think are pretty interesting.

A real pain was produced in 2024. Third generation first cousins who take a road trip to Poland in memory of their grandmother.

Treasure, made in 2024, based on a novel by Lily Brett called Too Many Men, and it’s a father-daughter story. You can see Stephen Fry plays the father figure.

The Dancing Dogs of Dombrova, 2018, a Canadian production, an estranged sister and brother who travel to Poland at the request of their dying grandmother to retrieve an object from her past.

And Everything is Illuminated, 2005, I suppose a lot of you saw that, it’s a bit of a favourite, it’s quirky. It’s based on a novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, a third generation grandson who goes to the Ukraine. He blends humour and magical realism, as it follows a young American Jew who searches for the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis in the Ukraine. And the narrative sort of shifts between the quest and this fictionalised history of a little shtetl, a little town.

What do these films all have in common? What is it that they don’t focus on? I could hear you say, they’re not really traditional Holocaust films.

They all tend to revolve around central themes, road trips, around a personal or physical discovery, a quest, a reconciliation between individuals, because you’ll notice that in A Real Pain, the two first cousins do not get on.

The Dancing Dogs of Dombrova, the siblings don’t get on either. In Treasure, the father and daughter, they don’t get on. And of course, this poor character, in Everything is Illuminated he’s in a loss completely. He doesn’t get on with anything.

These films often present a reconnection between individuals and events, and they often pose sometimes as tragic and comic. Tragedy and comedy often mirror each other in strange ways, and many of them are just plain old quirky films.

But I would venture to say that mostly, many are firstly relationship films that employ the Holocaust to explore other issues that confront the descendants of survivors, these new second generation, third generation, and even fourth generation survivors. They move beyond a narrative of the Holocaust into the realms of intergenerational effects of the Holocaust on descendants and this emerging, changing sense of self. Remember I’ve said that identity is always evolving and emerging and changing. It’s never static.

So we’re going to look at books now. There are hundreds of intergenerational books, hundreds.And here’s just a random selection of ones that I particularly like, no other reason. Some are very recent. Some date back to the 1980s. Lily Brett’s Auschwitz poems, that’s her dedication to her late mother. That was in 1986. We have that beautiful book by Arnold Zable, Jewels and Ashes, his journey to Poland to rediscover his roots.

Some are historical, some are semi-fictional, some are autobiographical, and some of them really take us into a different realm. Bram Presser’s book, which I love, The Book of Dirt, he says is fiction, because it’s based on his grandfather, his journey to try to understand who this grandfather, this survivor was, and what he told me was, ‘Well, what I couldn’t find, I made up’. It’s a work of fiction. He doesn’t claim that it is in any way biographical.

So, nearly all of these, and if you haven’t read The House on Endless Waters by the beautiful Israeli writer, Emuna Elon, it’s an absolute gem. And it really encapsulates this finding out of something by accident. A young man is in the Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam and he sees this photograph and he’s shocked because he says, ‘Who’s this person I’m looking at?’ It’s a beautiful, wonderful book.

And some of them, like A Brilliant Life is more recent, or the graphic novel Maus, or The Piano Player of Budapest, then there is David Slucki’s beautiful book, Sing This at My Funeral, which is about  three generations of men in his family.   In The Postcard, again it is about a mysterious object that’s found and needs to be unravelled. They all are personal journeys of discovery that revolve around a problem that needs to be solved. They pose unanswered questions about a past or it’s a visitor who interrupts something or unsettles what’s known, what has been the conventional wisdom, and becomes disrupted. And I have already had mentioned and quoted The Fiftieth Gate, which is also still a beautiful book, one of my all-time favourites, published in 1997.

These are about personal discoveries, personal journeys, if you like. And again, it’s who really am I? What’s my relationship with this past that lives within me? And that’s the quest. This is this new age of book that has come out very much like the films.

And now I want to talk about the journeys we undertake to landscapes of destruction. This is a relatively recent phenomenon and it’s not just about transference or transmission. This is when we have descendants of the Holocaust who have the urge to capture, recreate and inhabit a past that’s deeply embedded in place. The need to journey back to the sites of destruction, to tread the earth, to breathe the air of a murderous past that is entrenched in the earth upon which it happened. It’s where the descendants of survivors engage directly with the past through physical immersion.

It’s relatively recent. The Adult March of the Living, and I’ve used photographs from my own trip here taken back in 2005, so anyone that’s in these films, sorry, I didn’t ask permission, but you can live with it. The Adult March of the Living began over 20 years ago. It follows years of a student program that had started in 2001, as a student journey. But the Adult March of the Living started over 20 years ago and it follows the years of these student programs. It’s a highly structured program that begins in Poland and ends in Israel, deliberately so. We feel the binary effects of tragedy and redemption, of destruction and rebirth. And it is a paradigm that is, for some, a contentious paradigm, but for most, it becomes a very meaningful experience. And on top of this, there are personal intergenerational families that undertake group journeys with a guide. And these are curated specifically to take in that family’s particular heritage.  And what’s interesting is that we say we’re going back to Poland. I went back to Poland, but I’d never been to Poland!  It’s because the past lives within me. I don’t have to have been there. I am there.

My parents didn’t have to go because they never left in their nightmares and in their constant discussions. They were always back there. Now this is part of a far bigger phenomenon. Now I said context drives everything. We have seen sites of destruction and tragedy transformed into pilgrimage sites.

The writer who writes beautifully about this phenomenon is Maria Tumarkin, and she published a book in 2005 called Traumascapes. Think of Kokoda. Even our Prime Minister had to schwitz and schlep himself up the Kokoda Trail. Remember, we saw lots of pictures of that. Then there is Gallipoli on ANZAC day. We know that some actually go to Gallipoli earlier. They used to try to climb the cliffs, but they’re not allowed to anymore. The Bali bombing sites, all are pilgrimages. So, we could call this trauma tourism, we can call it dark tourism, or is it a heritage journey? Or for some, for those who undertake the Kokoda Trail, many of whom are not descendants of the Kokoda survivors, is it a rite of passage?

Remember I said that Helen Epstein talked about challenging yourself. Am I as tough as they were? Could I have survived as they survived? I don’t think I could. I remember once asking my mother, ‘How did you survive like that?’ I don’t think I could have done it. When she was confronted by an SS officer who put a gun to her head and asked her who she was. And I said, ‘How did you do it? You stood in front of him and you didn’t blink. You said if you’d blinked, he would have shot you’. And she said to me, ‘Hatred. Hatred makes you so strong. And I hated him more than anything else. They’d taken everything away from me’. And I looked at her and I said, I still don’t think I could have done it. That challenge, that immersion, that rite of passage.

And then, of course, as we have grown older and as the second generation and now the third generation is emerging, we look at the particular commemorations that our parents, as the original survivors, instigated early on, back in the ’60s, events like the Lodz Ghetto commemorations, Yom Hashoah, and  International Holocaust Commemoration. These events are often highly ritualized. We light memorial candles, we sing the partisan song, we hear from survivors. Most of these events were started by the survivor communities very early on.

The Lodz Landsmanshaft began in 1953. And that was one of the later ones, because they started well after the Bialystokers in 1928. They were the first to do anything, they will tell you. Now, if you go to the Lodz Ghetto commemoration, it’s a sellout. There were about 200 people, I think, last year. We couldn’t get any more people in. These were not survivors, rather they were the generations that followed. These were the second and the third generation who were now taking that space and transmitting it, transferring it. This is an act of transference and transmission. The Yom Hashoah commemorations began as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising commemoration. That was its origin. The first one in Melbourne occurred in 1944.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which we commemorate in January, also organised now largely by the descendants of these survivors. And we have Kristallnacht commemorations, too. And we have commemorative lectures, like this one. And we have educational programs. And I should also mention the way in which our now aging second generation survivors (and the younger third generation who are mostly in their 30s and 40s now), express their shared past is continually evolving and now embraces areas such as volunteering because we’re of an age where we’re retiring and we can shift into that space.

I think there are about 183 volunteers at this museum, and a lot of them are, most of them are of survivor heritage. That’s incredible and very, very powerful. We also have the Courage to Care community who do incursions into schools. Mostly, not all, are the descendants of as well as first generation Holocaust survivors.  The Jewish Museum of Australia and The LAMM Library, both of whom have expanded into educational programs, also have a whole cohort of volunteers with a deep connection to the Holocaust.

Now I want to end with the question I began.

Whose memory is it? It’s all of ours. No one in particular. Not singling out you or you or you. It now belongs to all of us and we will continue to transmit it because it will continue to live within us.

Thank you.

Dr Margaret Taft