When I was in the seventh grade, my mother wrote a short autobiography about her childhood in Washington Heights, New York. She wrote it out of retaliation: when I received a school assignment to dramatize the life story of a family member, I bypassed her and opted to use my grandmother, a German Jew and a Holocaust survivor, as my subject matter. Had it not been for some choice words – “well, Mom, your life just isn’t that interesting” – my mother may never have felt the urge to put pen to paper. Although I continued to write my Grandmother’s story, I reluctantly agreed to read my mother’s hastily written “response” piece. To my chagrin, her life fascinated me, namely because it differed so drastically from my own fairy book childhood. My mother’s childhood always held a certain mystique, nebulous and inexplicably dark. Rather than revealing more about her life, the autobiography simply provoked more questions.
Now, several years later, as I began general research, I discovered Helen Epstein’s Children of the Holocaust. A second generation “survivor”, she describes the sensation of an “iron box buried so deep inside [her] that [she] was never sure just what it was” (Epstein 14). Perpetually conscious of this unfathomable burden of a physical manifestation of the horrors of the Holocaust, she seeks release through communal healing. She elaborates:
There had to be, I thought an invisible, silent family scattered around the world. I began to look for them, to watch and listen, to collect their stories […] I set out on a secret quest, so intimate I did not speak of it to anyone. I set out to find a group of people who, like me, were possessed by a history they had never lived. I wanted to ask them questions, so that I could reach the most elusive part of myself (Epstein 13 – 14).
Helen Epstein’s “iron box” immediately rang true for me, a member of the third generation. The haunting scenes of violence, the yellowed photographs of family that stood for so much more, the staggering numbers – these images and ideas have been a part of my history for as long as I can remember. That said, I am another generation away from the Holocaust. The additional time and generational distance from the Holocaust should result in further emotional distance. Yet half a century and two generations later, an iron box of sorts lies at the pit of my stomach. My iron box is less a vault than a thread, a tie that affects my life but does not define it. If I, the third generation, continue to feel this connection so aptly described by Helen Epstein, does my mother feel it tenfold? I wondered if there was a legitimate shared experience of the Second Generation, and perhaps more importantly, if acknowledging this common bond could encompass their diverse experiences without trivializing them. The lives of the Second Generation demand the same level of sensitivity and appreciation of the individual that legitimizes study of the “first generation” of Holocaust survivors. Certainly my mother denies this notion of a shared story, claiming that shortly after her first visit to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., she purchased a copy of Aaron Hass’s In the Shadow of the Holocaust and found it to read like a horoscope. In his attempt to encompass every unique experience, Hass succeeded only in making overly general claims. “These qualifications he made meant nothing,” my mother said. “I feel like they’d apply to anyone.” Contradicting her assertion, the book remains prominent on our shelves, and the pages are earmarked and several sentences are underlined and starred. Even if she found the actual book irrelevant, her desire to at least explore a possible common bond evokes Helen Epstein’s “secret quest.”
The stories collected by Helen Epstein span from the Americas to Israel, from the beauty queen to the scholar, from sons to daughters. Although every account differs vastly, certain commonalities persist throughout. The Second Generation appears affected by an “iron box” of some form and a need to legitimize and mitigate its presence through a sense of community. Epstein’s iron box analogy recalls Marianne Hirsch’s “postmemory,” a term she uses to describe the imaginative, but no less real, form of memory that stems from the trauma of the second generation’s parents’ lives and the “diasporic experience,” the inherited sense of exile and destruction of the home (Hirsch 663). To a greater or lesser degree, these children of survivors, “whose own belated stories are displaced by the stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events that can be neither fully understood nor re-created,” show signs of postmemory (Hirsch 662). One survivor, Rochelle, illustrates the “symptoms” of postmemory, or an iron box, quite literally, as in her art therapy class, she drew the “heavy black object weighing [her] down:” blood, barbed wire, ghostly figures, and the Star of David (Epstein 43). Another survivor, Joseph, recounts:
