Film: Survivors' kin tell Holocaust stories

As children, Haina Just-Michael and her sister were told not to worry when their father woke up screaming. Just give him a glass of water.

"We grew up knowing Daddy would have nightmares," Just-Michael said. "Daddy never told us stories directly. All the stories we got were through Mom."

What they didn't know was why. They heard almost nothing of the horrors their father survived during the Holocaust. He lost his mother and eight of 10 siblings to the Nazis, a tragedy that eventually brought him to the brink of suicide.

"He didn't want us to feel the pain of what he went through," said Ellen Braffman, his other daughter.

How do you talk about the most painful and formative experiences imaginable when those experiences occurred before you were born? With the number of Holocaust survivors dwindling, that is one of the challenges facing their children and grandchildren as they take on the responsibility of reminding the world of the depths to which humanity is capable of descending.

"They carry a burden for their entire lives," said Millie Jasper, executive director of the Holocaust and Human Rights Education Center in White Plains.

She told of one woman who had heard her parents' stories since she was a little girl and now has nightmares as if she had personally experienced the concentration camps.

Learning to tell the story

One of the missions of Jasper's organization is to help second- and third-generation survivors learn how to share the stories. To that end, they've developed a group called Generations Forward, made up of the children and grandchildren who will take the place of survivors.

Their mission is growing ever more urgent. Some 1,500 survivors attended the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 2005 but, at this past January's commemoration, there were fewer than 300.

Carol King of New City is a social worker with Rockland Jewish Family Service whose clients include second-generation Holocaust survivors. She also serves as the academic liaison from the Rockland Holocaust Museum and Study Center; and is herself the daughter of Holocaust survivors.

She is part of a generation that did not experience the Holocaust but can be profoundly affected by it, a phenomenon known as intergenerational transmission of trauma. It is common among the offspring of survivors, she said.

"When you don't have grandparents and aunts and uncles, then you're living with very tangible results (of the Holocaust)," she said. "It's not just about seeing the sadness and depression of your parents."

A study by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the James J. Peters Veterans Affairs Medical Center in the Bronx showed that descendants of Holocaust survivors have different stress hormone profiles than their peers, which could mean a predisposition to anxiety conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder. Additionally, the August issue of Biological Psychiatry reported that a team of researchers from Mount Sinai found that trauma may be transmitted genetically.

"You may not be living those experiences, but you're living that loss," King said.

Slow Emergence

Just was born in Poland and drafted into the Soviet army in 1939, which most likely saved his life, according to his daughter, Just-Michael. He lost almost his entire family soon after the Germans invaded Poland.

His stories emerged slowly over the years, almost always coming second hand through Just-Michael's and Braffman's mother. Their father returned after the war to Rawa Ruska, the town where he grew up, they learned. After finding no Jews left in the town, and a gentile family living in his family's home, Just became suicidal.

"His world was destroyed. He felt he had nothing to live for," Braffman said.

His traveling companion, another Jewish soldier, convinced him not to take his own life.

Another story came out much later. His Soviet army unit was among those that liberated Majdanek, a German concentration camp, their mother told them. As Just was walking through the liberated camp, he saw emaciated female prisoners. He, along with other members of his unit, took revenge by shooting the German soldiers they'd taken prisoner.

Braffman said that, when they pressed him years later, asking whether the story was true, he just shrugged his shoulders.

"I don't think he wanted us to know about his revenge," she said.

Just-Michael said that her lectures at synagogues or at schools start with her father's story, because, "An individual story is extremely powerful, but then it becomes a bigger story in terms of humanity."

She recalled visiting Iona Prep High School in New Rochelle with her father, and remembers the students being awestruck just to shake his hand. She said his stories nearly brought tears to the eyes of some in attendance. She remembers one student who said he couldn't believe what her father had been though, and couldn't believe that human beings were capable of such actions.

"It's this American kid from Irish and Italian descent who just found incredible meaning in this Holocaust survivor," she said. "We were ready to cry together."

Passing the Burden on

Dr. George Burak, 75, of Edgemont, an orthopedic surgeon, was born in Vilna, then part of Poland, a month after the Nazis invaded the country in 1939. During the war his family became separated. They spent the war hiding from the Germans and were eventually reunited. He knows that, at some point, he and members of his family spent time in the Warsaw Ghetto, before the famous 1943 uprising. He also knows that his father was a member of the Polish underground, and was captured and tortured by the Germans before he was eventually released.

After the war, his family ended up in a displaced persons camp in Germany, where they stayed from 1945 to 1948 before emigrating to the United States. He remembers his family having to decide whether to settle in Israel or the United States, and his father making the decision by flipping a coin. Because so much of his experience as a child of the Holocaust remains unknown to him, he has had to piece together parts of his family's experience.

He has shared some stories with his grandchildren, including grandson Ben Brody, 16.

Shortly after the bar mitzvah celebrations of his grandchildren, he took them to Poland to trace the family's roots and visit concentration camps, an experience that Brody, a sophomore at Scarsdale High School, said changed his life forever. Seared into his memory was the sight of two tons of human ashes piled high at Majdanek.

"Seeing that makes me want everyone on this planet to know the atrocities that happened in Europe," he said.

Brody had shown an interest in the Holocaust as early as third grade, when he did a school project on his family's history. That was when he first encountered the stories that would become his passion throughout his adolescent and teen years. He participated in a project called "Remember Us," in which children preparing for bar or bat mitzvahs honor a specific child killed in the Holocaust. At the Treblinka concentration camp in Poland, he lit a candle in memory of Joseph Lissak, a 9-year-old boy from Poland who was killed there in 1943.

This past winter, he completed a monthlong internship at the Holocaust and Human Rights Education Center. He cites his family's direct involvement, as well as the existence of Holocaust deniers, as reasons that he continues to be passionate about Holocaust education.

"The stories should continue to be passed from generation to generation", he said.

"I'm super proud of him," said his grandfather, who considers what his grandson is doing as providing another link in a long chain.

"As long as that link is there and that chain still exists, then the world can understand," Burak said.

'The Voice of the Voiceless'

King believes that the desire of second- and third-generation survivors to continue to tell the horrific stories they have heard is woven into their DNA, both as survivors and as Jews. She talks about how Jews are reminded at the Passover seder to never forget their history, and she believes that, if those being led to the gas chambers could have sent a final message, it would have been: Don't let them forget us, don't let the world forget what happened to us.

"You're supposed to tell the story, and out of that story comes lessons," she said. "It's not just our own parents' stories, but it's the voice of the voiceless. When there are no more survivors, we tell their stories. We're the closest to the flames next to them.

"What's the ultimate goal?" she asked. "I want people to treat each other differently. I want the world to be hyper-vigilant. I don't want this to ever happen again."

Jacob Breitstein was 17 when he and his brother, after surviving several Nazi labor camps, arrived at Auschwitz in 1943. There, they found themselves standing before Dr. Josef Mengele.

His brother Wolf, a year younger, was sent to be with other children, while he was sent to a barracks for those deemed able to perform labor. That was the last time he saw his brother. When he was told by other prisoners that smoke pouring from chimneys of nearby buildings was from human incineration, he argued that what he believed to be the most civilized nation in human history could never do such a thing — until he learned better.

Breitstein's daughter, Grace Bennett of Chappaqua, said she first learned of the Holocaust after seeing a film as a 7-year-old in school. She understood how her father got the tattooed number on his arm, and she started to ask him questions. The rest of her life has been about making sense of what happened.

"I still have a lot of trouble, as does my Dad, processing how anybody can reduce themselves to such bestial behavior," she said. "It's incomprehensible."

For her, the stories are a constant reminder of "the evil that lurks in mankind."

"Whether every human being is able to sink that low, I'd like to think not," she said.