International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2025

A Family Affair

I’ve been married for almost 30 years—THIRTY YEARS!—and until a few months ago, I thought nobody from my husband’s family had perished in the Shoah.

My husband, Tomer, lived in Israel until age ten. When his dad uprooted the family for life in New Jersey, he didn’t know English yet, and I’ve long wondered if the sudden shift in language might account for why Tomer’s autobiographical memory seems sparse. Is access to his childhood more accessible in Hebrew? Did linguistic upheaval shrink his hippocampus?

I tease him, but I’m only half-kidding. It’s hard to judge what is considered a “normal” amount of recall from his childhood because one of my personal superpowers is episodic (autobiographical) memory. I don’t know if his minimal account of things is below average or simply below mine.

In any case, Tomer recalls a lot of joy—childhood freedom, close family, delicious food. The only remnant of Jewish trauma I’ve ever heard him talk about was seeing all the tattooed arms of Holocaust survivors throughout Israel. It’s a salient detail, one I could not relate to, having grown up in a Catholic family on Long Island. What would it have been like? To be daily reminded of all that trauma engraved in the literal flesh of one’s neighbors?

I assumed it must have been a reminder of my husband’s family’s good fortune because I believed that his family, on neither side, had suffered any loss of life during the Holocaust. In fact, Tomer himself believed that everyone was safely residing in the desert long before Hitler’s rise to power.

But we were wrong.

This past June, I posted something about my husband’s family being the ONLY family of Ashkenazi Jews I’d ever met who’d suffered no loss of life under Nazism. I wrote something about how everyone was already living under the British mandate at the time.

Later that day, one of Tomer’s paternal aunts inboxed me with this message:

Hi my dear, I follow your posts with great interest and want to correct you: Tomer's family from Yossi's [Tomer’s father’s] side mostly perished in the Holocaust. Grandma Leah's family (grandfathers, grandmothers, uncles, aunts and many cousins) perished in concentration camps in Poland and Austria. Also in grandfather Eli's family (uncles and aunts) perished in the Holocaust in Russia and France.

This news shocked me. How was such an omission possible? Moreover, we had only recently discussed how Tomer’s dad’s side of the family had fled Europe early. My father-in-law had told stories over Passover. There was not a single mention of anyone left behind.

Once confronted with this revelation, Tomer tried to explain it.

“I guess my dad didn’t talk about it because it wasn’t anyone that we knew of,” he said.

I argued that this made little sense. Other Jews born after the Holocaust didn’t know their ancestors who’d died in the camps, but they still knew about them and of their tragic fate.

Why didn’t we know?

My husband said, “I never asked about people I never met or knew about, but of course somewhere in the family they died—6M Jews died from that whole area my family is from—so, surely many died but I don’t know the extent.”

I didn’t want to judge my husband or his family, and to be fair, my own family is not exactly forthcoming about familial trauma. For instance, I never met my biological maternal grandfather. I’ve never even seen a picture of him. I only know that he caused a lot of pain and suffering and nobody would share any details about it with me.

Apparently, I am an aberration in both my family of origin and in the one I’m married into, because when it comes to history, whether on the micro-family level or the broader historical one, my curiosity about what happened is large. Large like a threat. Maybe. At least, I worry it is.

But also, I suspect that untold stories linger like ghosts and can often manifest with a silent power over subsequent generations. This is my bias. I could be wrong.

It’s hard for me to imagine my husband’s grandfather not sharing more stories about those lost in the Holocaust because he was a big historian who spoke frequently about the past.

Tomer ultimately concluded that his paternal grandfather “was likely traumatized.”

As for my father-in-law, his personality is such that he doesn’t acknowledge trauma happening in real time. I thought this was a cultural trait, being an Israeli who fought in multiple wars, but perhaps it’s more specific to his individual character. Who knows?

After learning the truth about Tomer’s ancestors, several Jewish friends informed me that similar phenomena occurred in their own families. With so much trauma and little to no vocabulary to speak about it, survivors chose to push the pain away.

As I’m writing this now, I’m remembering a presentation I attended over Zoom a couple of years ago. Together, my daughter and I listened to the testimony of Holocaust survivor, Hedy Bohm.

During the Question & Answer portion, my daughter asked, “How did you keep living after experiencing so much trauma?”

Ms. Bohm said, “We didn’t talk about it. We didn’t even have the language to discuss it. We didn’t have the word, trauma. We lived our lives. But in the 2000s, I started to hear about Holocaust denial, and I knew I had to tell my stories. People need to hear what happened so that it never happens again.”

It’s a devastating irony that Jews in Israel and throughout the diaspora have suffered Holocaust inversion since October 7th. It’s the new antisemitism. While the war in Gaza has been a brutal one, a genocide it is not, and the realities of hostage taking and mass slaughter of Israeli citizens cannot be forgotten either.

What strikes me now is the ongoing tension between the past and the future.

On the one hand, we need to hear the truth of what has already happened in order to help protect future generations from genocides and massacres and hostage-takings. We need to hear from our survivors of the Holocaust and of October 7th. The stories from the released hostages are a crucial part of our shared history.

On the other hand, it does seem like a lot to ask. How can we protect the privacy and the ongoing healing of those who’ve already suffered an immense toll on their physical and psychological well being? How much suffering can/should an individual endure on behalf of the greater good?

I know that organizations such as The Dinah Project, which is committed to seeking justice for the victims of conflict related sexual violence, also emphasizes the importance of personal agency—survivors need to be in charge of their narratives going forward. Moreover, how we frame things is crucial. Even referring to a particular individual as a “survivor” creates a constraint—a potential overemphasis on victimhood.

Each person is more than what they’ve endured. The Jewish people, as a group, share more than collective suffering.

And yet, future protection demands we remember.

May we always strive to achieve a balance between remembrance and futurity. One cannot exist without the other.

If your family tends to be silent about the Holocaust, and you feel like breaking that silence today, please share in the comments section. I appreciate your voice, now and always.

All the best,

Jen xoxo