Second Generation

Holocaust Stories > Second Generation

Second Generation

Second Generation Background

Deborah Knowles explains what it means to be a member of the Second Generation. Her personal view first appeared in the book, ‘Mixed Blessings: New Zealand children of Holocaust survivors remember’ published by Tandem Press in 2003.

In our Auckland Second Generation Group, we are all children of survivors and refugees from the Holocaust and we try to make sense of our unique family backgrounds.

Ben Wichtel

There were two sides to my father. I called them Daddy Mad Face and Daddy Angel Face. Daddy Angel Face was the one who would come home from work at his tailor shop in Pender Street, late on a still-light, Vancouver summer's evening, and enhance our standing with the neighbourhood kids by magically producing nickels and dimes from their ears.

Joe Grossman

DEBORAH KNOWLES speaks of family dislocation as a result of the Holocaust. She remembers her father with affection and tries to see him as he was - rather than how she wanted him to be. The recipes included in the book Mixed Blessings, are the cherished connections with the European past.

Avrom-Osher and Beila

HANNAH BRODSKY explains how handicapped she felt because she had no grandparents.

'Some of my friends (not many) had grandparents with whom they used to talk, play, go for a walk, go visiting, etc. I looked at them and felt very strange; as if I was missing some part of my body. It wasn't an arm or a leg. It was something much more important, something from inside me, from my soul. In simple words - I felt handicapped.

Morris Morrison

IAN MORRISON writes his first-ever poem about his father’s experience. As Ian looks at himself in the mirror he sees his father. As he thinks about his father’s family loss, he too feels the effects, ‘and so he stares back at me, reminding me of who I am’.

In June 1993, on a flight from Auckland to London, I wrote a poem. To be more precise, I wrote most of it in that iconic New Zealand place of half-rest, the transit lounge at Los Angeles International Airport.

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