WARSAW — Ruth, a young American journalist, the heroine of the film Treasure, takes photos of one of the pre-war tenement houses in Łódź, the city in central Poland. She hesitantly climbs the stairs to the second floor, and enters the apartment that belonged to her grandparents several decades earlier.
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It turns out that there are memories from her ancestors preserved there: a silver bowl, porcelain dishes, clothes. Ruth buys the items from their new owner: after all, they are part of the family history to which she had no access before.
The temporal distance which divides us from the events of World War II is so great that now, those speaking about the Holocaust are mainly the children and grandchildren of the victims. The youngest of the victims are now all over eighty years old.
Today’s filmmakers are looking more and more often not at the tragedy itself, but at the impacts it had on the following generations. Even though the Holocaust now seems distant, it still affects the lives of thousands of people alive today.
First there was Auschwitz
The first generation, those who survived the Holocaust themselves, or those who spoke about the Holocaust immediately following the war, focused on transmitting the facts. The films and literary works from that time period were in a certain sense a testimony to the history. They contained real archives and interviews with witnesses of the events. One of the most emblematic works of film from that time is the nine-and-a-half-hour documentary Shoah, by French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, which includes the director’s interviews with survivors during visits to Holocaust sites.
The second generation, or children of the survivors, also felt the direct impact of the Holocaust on their lives. Its events were close enough to them that several said they were personally traumatized by them. “If a chasm had opened in the lives of the first generation, they could still remember the life Before. For the second generation, there is no before. In the beginning there was Auschwitz,” wrote Melvin Jules Bukiet, the son of a survivor, in 2001.
Despite the lingering presence of the Holocaust, it wasn’t a topic that they often spoke about.
The Polish-American historian Eva Hoffman, who has a Jewish background, marks the “beginning” of the second generation as the year 1979. A groundbreaking book by the U.S. writer and daughter of survivors, Helen Epstein, was published at that time, titled Children of the Holocaust. It was one of the first books to explore intergenerational trauma.
Also representative of this second generation is Lily Brett, an Australian writer who has been living in the United States for over 30 years, and the author of the autobiographical novel Too Many Men. In the book, Brett described the experiences of living in a family scarred by the Holocaust. The heroes are Ruth Rothwax and her 80-year-old father Edek, a Holocaust survivor, who travel around Poland.
In interviews, the writer recounts that her parents had terrifying nightmares: her mother screamed in her sleep, as her dreams were interrupted by images of children with bullet holes in their cheeks. Despite the lingering presence of the Holocaust, it wasn’t a topic that they often spoke about openly as a family.
Overcoming the silence
In the stories of the second generation, silence is a common theme. The survivors were reluctant to speak about their experiences, or instead brought up only fragmentary memories. The role of their descendants, studying the history of their families, in a sense, was to fill in the gaps of the incomplete stories they heard at home.
During the Warsaw Jewish Film Festival (WJFF), we will be looking closely at the film Treasure, by German director with Jewish roots Julia von Heinz, which brings Lily Brett’s novel Too Many Men to the screen.
The film takes place in post-transformation Poland in 1991. Ruth (played by Lena Dunham), who is 36, and her father (Stephen Fry) visit important places from the man’s younger years: his family home, well-known hideouts in Łódż, and the Auschwitz extermination camp. This is a story of a complicated identity and the attempt to understand oneself.
In one scene, Ruth tattoos a number on her thigh resembling those worn by Auschwitz prisoners on their forearms.
This brings to mind a drawing created by Art Spiegelman, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning comic book “Maus”, about how the experience of the Holocaust shaped his parents and, consequently, himself. In the section about his mother’s suicide, Spiegelman drew himself, a young man in 1960s America, wearing concentration camp patches.
Obsession with the past
Jesse Eisenberg, an actor perhaps best known for playing Mark Zuckerberg in the 2010 film The Social Network, also takes on the theme of post-Holocaust trauma in his newly-directed film A Real Pain, which opens during the Warsaw Jewish Film Festival, and will be in theaters from Nov. 8. The Hollywood star, just like Lily Brett, has Polish roots. Before World War II, his grandfather’s family lived in Krasnystaw, a town in Eastern Poland. They left Poland in 1918, and those that survived the war later moved to the city of Szczecin, in North-Western Poland.
Eisenberg is an example of the third generation, made up of the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. These are people who have watched their parents struggle for years as they try to cope with the death of their loved ones.
I wanted to have ties to something greater than myself.
A Real Pain tells the story of David (played by Eisenberg) and Benji (played by Kieran Culkin), two cousins from New York traveling through Poland. The two protagonists struggle with trauma on a more personal level: the sentimental journey is an excuse to honor their recently deceased grandmother. A trip to their ancestors’ home country, as in the case of Treasure, is intended to allow them to understand their own identity.
“When I was 20-something years old, I became obsessively interested in Poland, because I wanted to have ties to something greater than myself,” Eisenberg said in an interview. “I was in America and I felt a little isolated from the world.”
The actor, who has been delving in-depth into his family history for years now (in 2013 he staged a play about his ancestors called The Revisionist, is even aiming to obtain Polish citizenship, in order to, as he admits himself, be able to live here.
Back to the roots
Bren Cukier, a young American film director and granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, was met with similar emotions. She opted to come to Poland to study at the famous Łódź film school, known for producing great directors such as Krzysztof Kieślowski. She filmed a few shorts in Poland, and is now working on her feature film debut, which will be focused on the theme of inherited trauma.
“When I was a child, I didn’t entirely understand what exactly happened in our family,” she said in an interview with Gazeta Wyborcza. “It interested me, why I don’t have so many relatives and why they were murdered. I was obsessed with the idea of death. I began wondering, for example, how I would feel if my sister died. I looked at my own life through a prism of imagination about the Holocaust.”
Alisson Nazarian, a journalist and granddaughter of survivors, wrote the book Aftermath: A Granddaughter’s Story of Legacy, Healing, and Hope, which tells the story of the destructive impact of the Holocaust on three generations of her family. The writer came to Poland in the 1990s with her mother, whose mental health began to decline after that trip. She eventually died by suicide at the age of 51. Nazarian said that genocide was “one her family members.”
“My mother was the only child of two survivors, and she was so affected by the Holocaust that she could never come out of its shadow. Her whole life was finding out secrets that she took to be strikes against her,” she said in an interview with The Times of Israel.
Holocaust from a distance
The grandchildren of Holocaust victims, inspired by works such as Steven Spielberg’s 1993 Schindler’s List, began to come to the fore in the early 2000s. Now the perspective of the third generation is taking a central place in art devoted to the Holocaust.
In recent years, the impact of the Holocaust on the lives of its descendants has been discussed by, among others: the film Everything is Illuminated (2005), the series Transparent (2014-19) and Russian Doll (2019-22) or the books The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer (2010) and Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind by Sarah Wildman (2014).
But is there a significance in going back to the Holocaust in the present moment?
The perspective of the third generation is specific because the creators are so far removed from the events of World War II that they have no personal emotions towards them. These stories contain a certain distance from the Holocaust: a privileged isolation and a grotesque fascination. Certain themes are repeated: problems with establishing interpersonal relationships, mental health problems such as depression, and recurrent anxiety or eating disorders.
The works of third-generation artists differ significantly from the works of previous generations. Artists are increasingly experimenting with form, putting stories about the Holocaust into genre frames, and even making jokes. In Real Pain, we will hear, for example, jokes about train travel, which is clearly associated with forced transportation to camps.
The series Transparent featured a kitschy, bizarre song called “Joyocaust”, which had a comedic overtone. The characters sing about how “Jews have a painful history, but they need joy.”
But is there a significance in going back to the Holocaust in the present moment?
Surely these works help us reconsider the past and what it means here and now. But they also play a key role in keeping alive the memory of the Holocaust, giving survivors peace of mind that their story will not be forgotten.
