Eva Hoffman, an author and professor, might have ruffled a few feathers when she said during a recent lecture that a dialogue between second-generation Holocaust survivors and second-generation Nazis could lead to some mutual understanding.
“This is not all easy,” she told the crowd at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco on Tuesday, May 3, in her Polish accent garnished with a hint of Canadian.
The focus of her lecture, called “Contested Memories, Difficult Histories,” was the meaning and use of collective memory in relation to historical atrocity. She spoke from a psychoanalytical perspective about how historical memory is created, and who owns it.
The daughter of survivors, Hoffman spoke about her own experience as a child of parents “who have been greatly wronged and hurt.” She reflected on how survivors’ trauma is passed down to their children, and how challenging this can be for children raised in a society that is in such contrast to the one in which their parents were raised.
And she questioned the value of the children of survivors feeling wrath towards the children of Nazis. Nazis themselves committed “the most heinous crimes of history,” Hoffman said, and most of them, now in their 80s, “continue to be entirely unrepentant.”
However, “in the generation after, everything changes — the children of torturers feel great anger and shame.”
She explained: “Imagine finding out in your early adolescence that your parents were responsible for the greatest human atrocity in history?”
Hoffman, who grew up in Krakow, immigrated to Canada and received her Ph.D. from Harvard University. She has written widely on cultural and political subjects, including a number of books: “Lost in Translation: A Life in New Language” and most recently, “After Such Knowledge: Memory, History and the Legacy of the Holocaust.”
The second generation must live their own lives, Hoffman said, without forgetting their parents’ history or making up myths about it. “How do we offer empathy without losing our autonomy? We have not wanted to betray our parents.”
In her observation, the second generation often responds to their parents’ experiences in one of three ways: feeling resentful towards their parents, feeling envious of their parents or feeling a need to protect their parents. Ideally, she said, the second generation will be compassionate towards their survivor parents.
“But I’ve known children of survivors who turned away from their parents because they felt stifled,” she said. “And I’ve known other children who had this need to rescue their parents.”
Referring to the second generation as “a hinged generation between the past and the present,” Hoffman said this is a tough place to be. “We need to carry our parents’ stories intact … but there is a danger with the second generation of reducing the memories of our parents.”
Nonetheless, she said they will always feel the “aftereffects” of what their parents experienced. She spoke about a daughter of survivors, for instance, who would ravage through the garbage as a child, not because she was hungry, but simply because she was acting out an experience that her parents had.
Hoffman cautioned the second generation from carrying on their parents’ memories as if they were their own, explaining that her own parents’ memories were “so powerful, they seemed to belong to me.”
She also urged them to transmit the memory of the Holocaust to their children and grandchildren by sharing the testimonies and literature of survivors. And she urged this generation to talk about the Holocaust in a broader context, relating it to genocide and war in the present-day world.
Following the lecture, Michael Krasny, host of KQED Radio’s Forum, asked Hoffman if talking about other world events in contrast to the Holocaust will “take away its uniqueness.”
She replied: “The uniqueness of the Shoah conveys itself. But uniqueness is not the most important message. It’s conveying what the Holocaust is.”
The JCCSF will host the final program in its series “Memory, Community and Identity” at 12:30 p.m. Sunday, May 15. It is organized in conjunction with the exhibit, “Scream The Truth At The World — Emanuel Ringelblum and The Hidden Archive Of The Warsaw Ghetto,” showing through June 30 at the JCCSF.
The afternoon program of panels and workshops, “A Day of Listening and Dialogue between Communities,” will include Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. as the keynote speaker.