„I felt compelled to write Children of the Holocaust.“ Although Helen Epstein was born after the war and did not directly experience the Holocaust, it has haunted her and many other ‘children of the Holocaust’ since childhood, like a curse that they do not understand and cannot name. It weighs on them like an overwhelming burden…
Helen Epstein was born on November 27, 1947 in Prague into a Jewish family that was persecuted for racial reasons during the war. Her father, Kurt Epstein (1904–1975), a Czechoslovak water polo representative, was imprisoned in Terezín and Auschwitz, and her mother, Frances, also went through concentration camps. After February 1948, the family emigrated to the United States. Helen studied journalism at Columbia University in New York, and also studied at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She became famous for her pioneering work on the transgenerational transmission of Holocaust trauma. Her books Children of the Holocaust (1994, 2023), The Found Past (2000, 2005), and What is Not Spoken (2018) have been published in Czech. She is currently working on a book of her memoirs.
You were born in Czechoslovakia after World War II. How and when did your parents meet?
My parents met at the Barrandov swimming pool when my mother was 13 and my father 29. He was a swim coach and my mother Franci and her cousin Kitty trainees. Because of the 16-year age difference, their social circles did not overlap. They met again in the spring of 1946 on the street in Prague. He had been liberated by the Russians; she by the British. My father asked: ‘Why haven’t you been swimming?’ She was very depressed and not going anywhere but she went, and it changed her life.
What happened before your parents met again in 1946? What was their war story?
My father was born in Roudnice nad Labem. His family was a pillar of the Jewish community and had lived there for three hundred years. He became a swimmer and an Olympian in water polo (Amsterdam 1928, Berlin 1936). He was also a reserve lieutenant in the Czechoslovak Army; Terezin was his garrison. He was deported there in December 1941, to Auschwitz in 1944, and then to labor camp. He was the only person in his family to survive. My mother was a Prague girl who was baptized Catholic at birth. She attended the French lycee, dropped out of school to join her mother’s fashion salon, and was focused on clothes. She was deported to Terezin with her parents in the summer of 1942, then to Auschwitz, then to labor camp in Hamburg, then to Bergen-Belsen.
Do you remember the first time you heard your parents’ story? Did you hear it from them first?
There were many camp stories and pre- and postwar stories. I learned most from them but growing up in New York City in the 1950s, there were many Auschwitz survivors with numbers on their arms. My mother had one but my father did not (he was there for only two days).
I do not know when I first understood my parents‘ war history. My mother said she began telling me when I pointed to her tattoo – very early, as a toddler. She said she answered my questions. I have no recollection of what happened. But when my first child asked about the tattoo at the age of three, I had a very strong emotional reaction. Tell him the minimum. I did not want my son to be scared (I infer that I had been scared).
So the tattooed number, which was visible on the wrists of most Auschwitz survivors, raised questions?
Her tattoo invited questions from everyone – my school friends who came home with me and were told by their parents not to stare and not to ask questions), her fashion customers, etc. She discussed the war with everyone who asked. My father (who spoke bad English) talked more about sports than he talked about the war with my friends but in their circle of immigrant friends – Jews and non-Jews – they discussed the war in Czech.
Who was among your parents’ closest friends?
They included Hana and Pepik Wiener-Winn, Ivan and Milena Herben, relatives Willi and Lisa Kauders. One of my mother’s employees was Mimi Kohout (wife of the comedian Jaroslav Kohout). My mother’s GYN was Dr. Karel Steinbach, a respected doctor who worked in Prague before the war. Her first customer was opera singer Jarmila Novotná. All of the conversation was in Czech – which was my first language because while my mother worked, my first nanny was Milena Herbenová, a very intelligent and literary woman. She had hidden a Jewish child during the war in Prague, while journalist Ivan Herben was a political prisoner for six years. She died when I was 16 years old and we always spoke Czech even though I never learned grammar.
Did your parents’ story influence your childhood and adolescence? How?
I felt that having no grandparents and no extended family, an ocean separated me from a normal past. The only connection was the Czech language and the refugee community. We saw almost no relatives.
Their history made me relate to my parents differently from my generation of Americans. I sang Bob Dylan songs but I did not rebel. I idolized my parents. I adopted their tastes and prejudices and values. I thought they were heroes unlike “soft” American parents because of their history of survival, but also because there were no grandparents or siblings to contextualize them. The entire Epstein family was murdered. My mother was an only child.
Also compared to 1950s Americans, my parents were frank and interesting. They had better stories than I learned at school or read in books or saw in the movies. Everyone I knew thought so too. Their stories made American history seem too simple, too black and white in all senses, which of course it is not.
Their experience had a profound and lasting effect on every aspect of my life. I thought of myself as more Czech than American. I read European authors and European history – French, Russian, British. I loved Czech music. I wasn’t attracted to American boys or movie actors at all. I liked Austrian actor Maximillian Schell. My closest friends were the children of other immigrants. I married a European man.
You yourself belong to the so-called second generation, i.e. to the broad group of people born to survivors of WWII. When did you decide to devote yourself to the experiences of the second generation and what was crucial for you in making this decision?
Living in Israel was of key importance. When I was 16, in 1964, I spent the summer on a small kibbutz. I understood little Hebrew then, but heard Holocaust survivors called sabonim (soaps) who had gone like Ke’tzon letzevach (like sheep to the slaughter). I understood that the words were demeaning and humiliating. As a student at Hebrew University after the Six Day War in 1967, my classmates seemed barely aware of the Holocaust. They could identify with Biblical Jews, but not with those who fled Nazi Europe or the Arab countries.
In 1968, when I was 20, I was caught in the Soviet invasion. That affected me a great deal and marked the beginning of my work as a journalist. In 1968–1969, I met Czech students in Israel where I was a student at Hebrew University, and a reporter for the Jerusalem Post. I quoted a Czech student complaining: “There’s no irony in Israel. There is so much to satirize and no one’s doing it. And American students have an amazing variety of opinions on everything and do not hesitate to express them. Israel has accomplished with its students what the Communists failed to do – establish a uniform way of thinking.” It was the first time I met my peers, people I might have known had there been no war and no 1948 and my parents had remained in Prague.
Slowly, over three years of working and studying in Jerusalem, I realized that I missed my home (NYC). I was most comfortable with the European students who, like me, had come to Israel to investigate their identities. They were a varied group but I realized that what was most salient to us was family history and the Holocaust.
Was the public interested in the Holocaust, the lives of survivors, and the experiences of the second generation at that time?
No one used the words “survivor” and “second generation” or “inter-generational transmission of trauma” then. Survivors were marginalized in the world and anything to do with Holocaust survival was deemed “damage.” As late as 1985, when second generation author Nava Semel published her first book, A Hat of Glass, no Israeli publication reviewed it. A brief notice in HaAretz read: “From what it says on the cover, this is a book about the second generation, children of survivors. I, for one, have no intention of reading it.” My deciding to “descending” to the U.S as opposed to “ascending” to Israel had a lot to do with being a daughter of Holocaust survivors.
In 1979 your book “Children of the Holocaust” was published in the United States of America. When you prepared the book, what was the attitude of your surroundings? Did you have to overcome any external obstacles? For example, did you have problems finding a publisher? Did you encounter misunderstanding or rejection of the subject?
Years of problems, obstacles, rejections from newspapers and publishers – all three! It was very difficult to get anyone interested in the subject for ten years! I was a young female journalist in the 1970s when there were not many women journalists and little interest in the Holocaust. A book was out of the question because I did not yet have a publishing record or reputation. Also, American Jews (inside and outside the publishing industry) were not interested in Holocaust survivors. There were two exceptions – both Jews — one was the late Hungarian child survivor Charles Fenyvesi, a journalist then editing a small Jewish magazine called The National Jewish Monthly 1970–1975.
In 1972, he asked me to write a profile of my father after the terrorist attack at the Munich Olympics on the Israeli team. He made me feel like there was a real subject there. I had started writing for the New York Times Sunday edition and kept asking my editors there for an assignment about second generation but they said no. Finally in the fall of 1976 they agreed, and I went to Toronto to interview the Miss America Deborah Schwartz, a daughter of survivors who is chapter one in Children of the Holocaust. That was a cover story in the New York Times Magazine in June of 1977, it was read by two million people, and provoked some five hundred letters. Then a publisher asked me to write a book.
The publication of the book was preceded by several years of research, during which you got to know a considerable number of different stories. Did you have to overcome anything internally while working on the book? What area or question was the most difficult for you to grasp, and the one you would have preferred to avoid if you could?
I found it very difficult to confront stories where the second gen described abuse by survivors, including sexual abuse. I was not psychologically sophisticated at the time I wrote the book. Since that time I had heard many more stories of abuse and have reconstructed my own childhood sexual abuse and the long affair my mother had with my ”adopted“ grandfather Ivan Herben. I avoided writing about this in the first book but I analyze it in the third.
Have the stories of others helped you to better understand your own story?
Very much.
Members of the second generation often carry with them, as a legacy of their parents traumatized by war, loss and violence, a certain, often very difficult to describe, burden. There is talk of so-called transgenerational transmission. What does it consist of?
Great anxiety and sensitivity to life-threatening danger and anxiety to leave earlier rather than later as in 1939. Difficulties about separating from family, anti-Semitism, political violence, racism. Empathy for other groups impacted by genocide. Resilience, including ability to proactively respond to difficult situations. I am a cancer survivor and wrote about finding inspiration to get through it from the memory of my parents.
You write that you created an iron box inside yourself that was like a ticking bomb. What did you store in your iron box, and did you manage to open it with the writing of the book?
I felt compelled to write “Children of the Holocaust”. That is why I persisted when no one was interested. It was a great relief to get it out but initially frightening.
You have been intensively devoted to the experiences of the second generation throughout your professional life. Has your view on some of the subtopics changed over the years?
My feeling and thoughts about the second generation have remained more or less the same. I have learned from second generations of other communities – children of resistance fighters, alcoholics, Nazis, genocide survivors or perpetrators – who experienced similar things and find my book useful.
Has public’s overall approach to the issue changed?
As Trauma Studies academic and Holocaust Studies have become academic fields, people are far more familiar with my subject than they were when I began 50 years ago. Intergenerational transmission is now an accepted term.
How did your parents’ story shape your approach to life, your values and attitudes? To what extent has your family history influenced your approach to the rising, third generation?
It has shaped my life in every possible way: my work, my family, and my friends. As for the third generation, I have two sons and I was careful in what I chose to tell them about their family history and when. They learned about the Holocaust as part of the curriculum in their public schools and in their Jewish schools, and from the American media. For them the landscape of Jews, Israel and America is very different than it was for me. I made a decision not to talk about this with them unless they asked me. They have both been to Prague and Roudnice and are aware of their family history.
