When David Hershkoviz was a child, he used to wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of his mother screaming in her sleep, knowing that she was reliving the horrors of the Holocaust.
In time, he learned of the traumatic wartime experience that haunted her most being torn away from her own mother at the Auschwitz concentration camp’s selection line, where at 21 she was forced into work and her mother dispatched to death.
“That separation never left her,” said Hershkoviz, 54, his voice quivering as he choked back tears. “She said, ‘I think my mother is angry at me because I left her. ... My mother never comes to me in my dreams. I haven’t dreamed about her since we parted. How is that possible?’”
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When his mother, Mindel, died two years ago, he wanted to carry on her legacy by bearing witness to the Holocaust. He found help in a first-of-its-kind course teaching the children of Holocaust survivors how to ensure their parents’ stories live on.
The German Nazis and their collaborators murdered 6 million Jews during World War II, wiping out a third of world Jewry. Only a few hundred thousand elderly survivors remain, and the day is fast approaching when there will be no one left to provide a coherent first-person account of the ghettos and death camps.
With Israel marking its annual Holocaust remembrance day this week, that has become the central challenge for Holocaust institutes around the world as they rush to collect as many records and belongings as possible before the live testimony of survivors is a thing of the past.
Emotional experiences
Shem Olam looks to take this trend one step further, by not only recording survivors’ biographies but also the emotional experiences that can be relayed through their children.
“We are here to give a different narrative of the Holocaust. We’ve heard the story of tragedy, we want to give the story of how people coped inside this living hell,” said Avraham Krieger, the institute’s director.
Established in 1996, Shem Olam says it looks to provide an alternative to the more established Holocaust museums by providing the “story behind the story” and getting beyond the victimization to focus on issues of faith and resilience.
Krieger said “Shem Olam” derives its name from the same passage in the book of Isaiah that mentions “Yad Vashem” the name of Israel’s official Holocaust memorial. Yad Vashem is Hebrew for “a memorial and a name,” while Shem Olam roughly translates into “everlasting name.”
Shem Olam, which receives minimal state funding and mostly exists off contributions, focuses on documenting religious life in the Holocaust. It holds public lectures and arranges delegations to former Jewish communities in Europe. But its flagship project of late has been the second-generation outreach program.
“Today we, as second generation, know which camp my mother and father were in, and how much bread they got is an important story. But it is more important to find out what kind of person they were,” said Krieger, 53. “We never really asked the tough questions of how our parents coped emotionally.”
Besides finding a kinship with others who shared a similar background, Hershkoviz said the course helped him understand his mother better. She died at the age of 90 with 13 great-grandchildren, and though her biography is well chronicled, Hershkoviz is determined to keep her “emotional experience” alive as well.
“The most significant thing I have to pass on from my mom is survival and how she built a new family,” he said. “I feel a responsibility to tell her story. There is no one else to do it.”