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These stories and remembrances will remain with you forever. The courage to confront the pain and trauma, and the lifelong process of healing will inspire you.” The Ones Who Remember: Second-Generation Voices of the Holocaust provides a window into the lived experience of sixteen different families grappling with the legacy of genocide. Each author reveals the many ways their parents’ Holocaust traumas and survival seeped into their souls and then affected their subsequent family lives – whether they knew the bulk of their parents’ stories or nothing at all.
Several of the contributors’ children share interpretations of the continuing effects of this legacy with their own poems and creative prose. Despite the diversity of each family's history and journey of discovery, the intimacy of the collective narratives reveals a common arc from suffering to resilience across the three generations. This book offers a vision of a shared humanity against the background of inherited trauma that is relatable to anyone who grew up in the shadow of their parents’ pain.
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In 2004, members of Ann Arbor’s Temple Beth Emeth formed “Generations After,” a group of adult children of Holocaust survivors. They embarked on a mission to write original Holocaust memorial services to honor their parents’ voices and share their family histories with their congregation. These members became an intentional community of memory keepers. After ten years of confiding in each other within this community space, the group decided to create an anthology of their parents’ stories. In the process of developing the manuscript, they accepted the challenge to delve more deeply into their own lived second-generation experience. The result is this unique collection of 16 chapter-length memoirs in which the contributors write about the ripple effects of their parents’ suffering on their own lives as children, adults, and parents to the third generation. Along the way they discover unexpected gifts of healing, strength, and post-traumatic growth.
Meet the authors »
Meet the authors »