For our children sake

My perceiving:
you've monopolized grieving.
Please awake
for our children sake.

Warm feelings

My parents had a good marriage. My father the kind soul chairman with inflexible principles and my mom the somewhat naughty businesswoman with slightly flexible morals. There is hardly ever a day going by that I don’t think about them. Good people they were.

I think that in the hereafter my father is enjoying himself as main chairman of the board of chairmans and my mother is having a heck of a time selling at the market.

Loneliness

Missing a parental shoulder to cry on.

Holocaust survivors, second generation (8)

The relationship between the two sisters was tensed for as long as I remember. They even didn’t talk for a while. The contact was renewed only shortly before my mother passed away.

I understood from my cousin that his mother wouldn’t mind telling me about what happened to them in the war, so I decided to call her.

I could almost touch the tension between the two sisters in the intonations of the few polite distant words she spoke. The silences in between were yelling at me; telling me even more. It was if like she was using me to communicate with my mother, as if I had inherited my mother’s role. Then she told me that if she had time she would call me back, and we hung up.

I felt dismissed, abandoned and I cried.

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Holocaust survivors, the second generation (6)

Beach fun

I remember my mother in her early forties, playing in the sand at the beach with an unfamiliar child of around 10. They had fun as kids can have while playing with each other...

She was happy and it made me sad.

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Holocaust survivors, the second generation (1)

My mother...

Chicken soup on Friday night and feeling Jewish mostly because of the deep sorrow we had to carry... not very inspiring. My mother (may she rest in peace) suffered from KZ syndrome as Bergen-Belsen survivor. I was named after her father, who was murdered in front of my mother's eyes, a few months before liberation. I remember her lying on the ground, foaming... I must have been three years old.

I grew up in the sixties in a little town and vividly remember the anti-Semitic aggression I encountered. Whenever I was confronted with anti-Semitism - in my recollection almost weekly - it felt like “they” were attacking my mother and by fighting “them” I felt like defending her. I remember my anger just because of the fact that I wasn’t born earlier so I could have protected my mother.

Sorrow and pain, a lot of pain… that’s how I remember my youth. I must have had nice moments too, but looking back they seem to be covered by a blanket of dark memories.

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