Passing the flame to our children's children - The Jewish Chronicle

It took decades for the silence to be broken. Sometimes 50 years passed before Holocaust survivors could speak their unspeakable truths. Often it was their children who gently eased out their bitter secrets. They needed to fill the void of their parents’ broken lives, to enable them to tell their stories so that such evil would never happen again.

Once the survivors yielded their stories, willing ears came to listen; willing hands offered the technology of the modern era to record, to shock and to engage. Steven Spielberg launched his Shoah Visual History Foundation during the 1990s, and created an archive of over 55,000 video testimonies from Holocaust survivors and witnesses between 1994-99.

There are nearly 2,000 recordings of survivors in the British Library, and the Association of Jewish Refugees (AJR) has testimony from those who sought refuge in the UK through its Refugee Voices project.

But now it’s the turn of the children and grandchildren.

Generation 2 Generation (G2G) was launched at a time of increasing antisemitism, racism and discrimination to focus on presenting the testimony to second and third generations, explained Anita Peleg, chair of its Board of Trustees. “Three people got together and recognised that the future needed to be thought about,” she said.

Despite the volume of testimony available, they needed fresh voices to tell younger people about the experiences of two generations ago. They are now recruiting students and young professionals with a survivor grandparent to become part of their Third Generation educators.

In the drive to recruit the children’s children, G2G helps them research their family history and find relevant resources and imagery, using workshops, mentors and historians to create a professional presentation. “Some speakers come to us knowing very little of their family story and need guidance with research,“ said Ms Peleg. Target audiences are universities, churches, synagogues, schools, civic authorities and teachers interested in hosting HMD events.

Speakers must learn to deal with hostility and adverse comments, although reaction from students and teachers, said Ms Peleg, has so far been positive. A student from Villiers School in Ealing wrote: “Thank you for opening our minds and sharing your mother’s journey with us and helping with our understanding about the difficulties the Jews faced.”

Due to Covid much of the training is offered online. Speakers tell their stories at monthly events where Holocaust and human rights experts discuss issues of the day. In December 2019, they presented at Limmud. They also participated in Kristallnacht and Armistice Day events.

This year’s Holocaust Memorial Day theme is ‘Passing the Baton: Holocaust Survivors in Conversation with Second and Third generations’.

Louisa Clein, of the TV show Emmerdale, will discuss this with two Holocaust survivors and their descendants. Participants will include Avital Menahem speaking with her grandfather, Yisrael Abelesz and Susanna Rosenberg with her father Sacha Kester, born Graber.

Ms Peleg, the daughter of the late Holocaust survivor Naomi Blake, a sculptor, presented her mother’s story on Zoom on Yom Hashoah last year. “My mother was initially shy about including the video testimony,” she said.

In 2020, G2G held ten introductory evenings and recruited 26 prospective speakers, face to face or online. They are currently developing 30 speakers, five from the third-generation. So far, in the last year, despite the virus, speakers delivered 38 presentations to some 3,000 people.

Katie Palmer is third generation leader for the G2G committee, responsible for speakers and social media. Their Twitter account was launched early last year and had retweets from such celebrities as Emmerdale’s Louisa Clein, who featured in Rob Rinder’s recent documentary, My Family, the Holocaust and Me and children’s author Michael Rosen, whose recent illustrated book, On the Move, is a poetic account of his grandparents’ memories.

Ms Palmer said she had never met her grandmother, Ursula Adler. But “as a naturally curious person with a passion for history,” she kept asking questions about her. She insisted on finding out more. She knew Ursula had had an idyllic and privileged childhood in Breslau, then Germany, (now Wroclaw, Poland) with a loving father, Heinrich, a successful international businessman, surrounded by close family members, but none of this could protect her from the rise of Hitler.

Ms Palmer’s research revealed how Ursula reached the UK on her own on a sponsored domestic visa in 1939. Ursula’s communication with her parents stopped in 1941 and all post-war attempts to reach them via the Red Cross failed. Ms Palmer persisted and uncovered the terrible truth; her great grandparents Heinrich and Rosa were deported to Lithuania and on the 29th November, 1941. They and four cousins were shot by the Lithuanian Einsatkommando, a mobile killing squad, into a mass grave, willingly assisted by local volunteers.

Ursula joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service ATS, entered a brief and disastrous marriage to a British soldier, and finally moved to London where she married Ms Palmer’s grandfather, Robert Palmer, in 1949.

“It’s incredibly painful to think that Ursula never knew what happened to them and she lived with the void until her death in 1980,” said Ms Palmer. Supported by G2G she is developing her presentation, which will be recorded as a testimony to her grandmother and her family.

What was “most special” to Avital Menahem was that it was her grandfather, Yisrael Abelesz, a survivor from Hungary, who suggested she get involved in G2G. Abelesz was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau at the age of 14, lost his parents, was liberated by the Russian army in January, 1945 and reunited with his siblings after the war. “I am proud to be my grandfather’s granddaughter,” said Avital. “His experience and choices have taught me how to recognise and identify what is meaningful for a successful life.

“Even with the emotional pain and physical challenge of recounting his story, my grandfather never refuses to discuss his experience and it’s clear that he tries to bring an element of humour to his life. The key messages of my presentation are education, positivity and reflection.”

The testimonies share a common theme of displacement, state-sponsored murder and enduring emotional scars, but the need to speak and in some way make peace with the past is vital for those prepared to undertake the journey. At last month’s Limmud, Ms Palmer interviewed two 3rd generation representatives. Jacqueline Luck and Dalya Wittenberg, asking them why it was important for them to tell their grandmother’s stories.

Jacqueline Luck feels a great sense of responsibility to tell her late grandmother Lela Black’s story: “From a teacher’s point of view, I feel it is essential to bring these stories to life and for there to be a tangible personal connection to them. Something like this should never be simply confined to the pages of a history book. Having someone in the here and now to say, ‘This happened to my Grandma’, is a powerful thing, especially in the face of rising antisemitism and misinformation on social media. I am grateful that G2G has offered me a platform to be able to do this.”

Lela Black, her husband Joseph and six year old daughter Marcelle were deported from Athens to Auschwitz in 1944. Her parents and two sisters had been already been deported from Salonika . “Early in 1945 my grandma was lucky enough to be put on a train out of Auschwitz. She was sent to a munitions factory in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, still a prisoner of war, although it was an immense relief from the terror of Birkenau. She was fully liberated by the Russians on May 5, 1945.”

Dalya Wittenberg is a civil servant currently working in the Vaccines Taskforce. Her paternal grandparents, Cilla and Yaakov Laifer, grew up in Sochaczew, near Warsaw and at the outbreak of the war, as teenage sweethearts, they sought refuge in Warsaw, only to find the situation even more dangerous than in their home town. They returned to Sochaczew and fled by foot towards Russia.

They married en route in Bialystok before being arrested by the Soviets and transported to a labour camp in Magnitogorsk in the Ural Mountains. Remarkably they survived slave labour, horrific living conditions and many traumatic events, including the loss of their first child, a daughter called Batsheva, and were liberated in 1945.

“I was delighted to be approached to join G2G, and to work with an organisation that will ensure that my family’s story will continue to be told and preserved as part of a wider Holocaust memorial and educational initiative,” said Ms Wittenberg.

She added: “Through my involvement with G2G, I hope to ensure that what my grandparents endured, and what it signifies about the persecution of the Jewish people, will never be forgotten. I hope it will also encourage other grandchildren to connect with their family histories, particularly while their grandparents are still around to answer their questions.

“It feels meaningful to work with other third-generation peers to pass on our grandparents’ stories to future generations, bring to life the history of the Holocaust and, in doing so, promote a greater understanding of the impact of racism and intolerance.”

For more details about G2G visit www.generation2generation,org.uk