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Kristallnacht Commemoration To Sound New Voices of Holocaust

by Lillian Rappaport

The 2019 Kristallnacht program will take place on Sunday afternoon, November 3 at 3:00 pm in the Mary Sachs Auditorium of the JCC. 

The program is entitled, “New Voices of the Holocaust: Reflections of the Third Generation. How Do You Cope With Trauma You Didn’t Experience? This year, we will be extending our timeline to focus on the experiences of the Third Generation, the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors.

An article in Tablet Magazine, A Traumatic Legacy by Adam Kovac, deals with this topic and excerpts are included below to provide background for our program.

“I knew my grandparents had gone through something terrible—we talked about it at home, the confusing family tree that was missing entire branches, with distant cousins strewn across the Diaspora. As a very young child, I remember asking about the tattoo on my grandpa’s forearm. But it was so long ago and very far away. Nazi troops and scrambling for fake papers seemed utterly disconnected from my reality—the elderly man with the thick Slovak accent who would kick a soccer ball with me and wore suspenders every day, the tough Hungarian woman who made the best chicken paprikash.

My parents never told about my grandpa’s nightmares, or my grandma’s antidepressants. Why would they? I was a kid and all I needed to know was that they survived, and they loved me. We were a close family and I was proud of my heritage, but conversations about trauma and horror and depression were best whispered, if held at all.

Over two decades after their deaths, I now wish I had known more.”

The full article is available on Tablet Magazine’s website. We look forward to a very stimulating program and invite the entire community to join us on November 3.