Children and Grandchildren of Survivors
The children, grandchildren and more recently great-grandchildren of those who survived the Shoah are collectively called “descendants”. The oldest children of survivors are now in their middle fifties while the youngest are in their twenties, and thus younger than many of the grandchildren of survivors. Yet they have more in common psychologically with the children of survivors ( the second generation) than they have with what has sometimes been called “the third generation.”

Many survivors did not speak about their experiences to their children, in an attempt to protect the children from the horrors they had experienced. But even if the survivors did not speak, their children knew that there were differences in their families from those of their friends. One child of survivors describes the awareness that unlike others, she had no photographs of her grandparents.

Often what happened was that the survivors began to tell their grandchildren parts of their stories and the children heard from their own children the stories of their parents. There have been some major events in the past two decades which have given the survivors the opportunity to tell their stories. These include the establishment by filmmaker Steven Spielberg of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. This foundation allowed survivors to record their stories, often for the very first time. Since then the stories have been shared with the survivors’ children and others, including a wider international audience.