Daniel Grynberg, b. 1969, grandchild of survivors

“One Sunday morning when I was ten, my grandfather died, keeled over and had a heart attack. He was 66. The family lore was that my grandfather had died too soon, that his four years in the camps had aged him and robbed him of his strength. Everybody thought Opi to be ‘as strong as an ox’. I remember trying to imagine how strong he would have been had his strength not been sapped. Hitler killed my grandfather, on 6 July 1980, in North Bondi.

Soon after the funeral I discovered that my grandfather had left behind his memoirs. I asked my mother for the manuscript to read, but she refused point blank and said that I wasn’t old enough. The Holocaust for me had become indelibly linked with maturity; I understood it as my own rite of passage. Unlike other rites of passage, initiation into the Holocaust tribe is an individual thing, marked not by public ceremony; rather by silent realisation.

By the time I had finished primary school, I was pretty clear about the fact that there had been a major tragedy in Europe during the Second World War, and that my family had been directly affected by it. I probably knew that my mother’s parents were concentration camp survivors and that my father’s were wartime refugees (I remember thinking that this wasn’t quite as exciting!). It was probably at this time that I first rattled off the line that my four grandparents were from ‘Russia, Poland, Latvia and Germany’. For some reason I always left Germany to last - I still do.

From this point on, the Holocaust flooded in. Parallel with my progression from childhood to adolescence (or perhaps causing it) I began to think much more about the Holocaust and how it affected my family. The Judaism of my youth with its colourful symbols and biblical heroes and religious festivals began to give way to a history of persecution and bloodshed. I gradually began to comprehend what had been hidden from me for all those years when I ‘wasn’t old enough’.

Over the past few years I have also begun to be very conscious of my life stages as compared with those of my grandmother. My grandmother was a German. She fled with her family to Vienna, and then to Brno in Czechoslovakia, sometime after the Nazi rise to power. Whilst her family then moved on to Palestine, she had just turned eighteen and was thus too old to travel on the family papers and remained behind. When my grandmother was eighteen, she was put on a train and deported to the ghetto in Terezin. When I turned eighteen I got on an aeroplane and left for a year of study and travel in Israel. For the past five years I have thought of how my grandmother spent her years 18 to 23. While I’ve been out being self-indulgent, self-obsessed, exploring my world physically, intellectually, emotionally and sexually; she was trying to survive.

I think about the Holocaust every day of my life. It is my bedrock, it is my touchstone. When I think about anything it is coloured, or overshadowed by it. My political and philosophical attitudes are constantly being measured by its enormity. If I am a liberal, it challenges me with the impotence of liberalism. If I am an elitist, it frightens me with the result of unchecked power. If I am an efficient bureaucrat, it fills me with the fear of what an efficient bureaucracy can achieve. If I am a nationalist or a patriot, it sickens me with a mirror which magnifies but does not distort. If I think about ethics, or food, or responsibility to other human beings, or responsibility for my own behaviour, or reconciliation, or the Republic, or the Olympics, or law, or anything, I start somewhere in Europe, between the years 1933 and 1945.

Earlier this year I met up with my sister in Europe. She had just turned eighteen. We met in Amsterdam and went to the Anne Frank House and the Jewish Museum. From there we went to Prague and our train stopped in Frankfurt. At the train station she told me she felt strange being a Jew on a train in Germany. I told her I knew how she felt. In Prague we visited the old Jewish quarter and from there we went to Terezin. It was a cold and grey day and Jessica and I were silent as the bus pulled into the strange Austro-Hungarian fortress town. We knew that our grandmother had been here half a century earlier in such a different situation as to have been on another planet. At Thereisenstadt, Jessica being eighteen and female, felt the parallel to my grandmother particularly strongly.

I began to understand that my little sister also thought about the Holocaust every day. So does my brother, and a generation of young Jewish people who without realising it have formed ideas on Israel and religion and politics and philosophy and ethics and family, based firmly in their parents’ and grandparents’ survival of the Holocaust. It has become an impetus for the maintenance of their Judaism, ‘they must have survived for something’, and for some it has become the basis for a conception of justice.”

(This essay was written in 1994)