Tales of the Third Generation

None of my grandparents were victims of the Holocaust. My grandfather’s family somehow escaped Poland during the pogroms and made it to the U.S. in 1922. Nonetheless, when I was growing up in Brooklyn, the Holocaust wasn’t only something I learned about in school, or in books. It was something we lived and breathed daily; over 70% of Holocaust survivors in New York state live in Brooklyn. In one of my journalism courses in college, we were tasked with interviewing and writing about someone who faced tremendous adversity. For me, it was a no-brainer to head back to Brooklyn from Amherst, Massachusetts, and interview Jack Ratz, our next-door neighbor.

I’d heard Ratz’s story so many times, I didn’t even think I needed to interview him formally. But each time we spoke, and especially this time, I learned something new, not just about what he endured, but about how he survived and rebuilt his life.

Ratz was a mainstay in our lives. We saw each other daily while I lived with my parents. He came to every bris and shiva for our family. We came to depend on him as a neighbor, a friend, and a true beacon of hope. And then, one day after my wedding in 2017, he died.

Ratz had children, and many grandchildren of his own, and even wrote books about his life. Still, I somehow felt somewhat personally responsible for his story. I was holding on to his memories, his pain, and his trauma. And I never really knew what to do with any of it.

According to the Claims Conference, there are approximately 245,000 Holocaust survivors still alive today. The median age of those survivors is 86. While it’s a sad truth that soon there will be no living Holocaust survivors, it’s estimated that there are around 1 million third-generation Holocaust survivors (grandchildren of Holocaust survivors) in the United States. These descendants—my contemporaries—are now telling their own stories, in their own way.

This past fall I was invited to preview Jesse Eisenberg’s new film, A Real Pain, which won a Golden Globe award earlier this month and was nominated for two Oscars last week. In the film, two cousins, David and Benji (played by Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin), travel to Poland to explore their past. They join others on a Jewish heritage tour, including a visit to the Majdanek death camp.

I say explore their past, and not just their grandmother’s past (their Grandma Dory survived the Holocaust, leaving them money and instructions for this trip when she died) because this film isn’t about what happened in the Holocaust. And the trip is just the backdrop for the pain and trauma David and Benji inherited, and live with, from their grandmother. Eisenberg didn’t make a movie retelling his grandma’s story. He made a movie telling his own story about pain, trauma, love, and loss he inherited, and how it infiltrates every ounce of his life.

I sat down to speak with Eisenberg and learned that not only is the film based on his family history (“Grandma Dory” is based on his great-aunt Doris who emigrated to the U.S. from Poland) but that the movie was inspired by a story he wrote for Tablet Magazine over seven years ago.

“This movie started as an attempted adaptation of a story I wrote for Tablet years ago called ‘Mongolia,’” said Eisenberg. “I was trying to adapt the story and it just was not going well. And as I was struggling to finish the script, an ad popped up online for Holocaust tours and I scrapped the ‘Mongolia’ story. And I started from the beginning, but set these same two characters that I was writing on the path of a road trip.”

I asked Eisenberg how it felt to explore this past, on his own terms, and how it feels to keep the stories alive and hold on to the pain and trauma. “It makes me think of the way pain trickles down, and the way we try to hold on to pain, while at the same time trying to cure it, and what it means to be the third generation,” he said. “And what I stumble upon is multifaceted. I grew up with parents who didn’t know anything about their family’s history and the war because their parents never talked about it with them. And so I actually grew up with baby boomer parents who were not constantly trying to contend with their family’s horror because they didn’t hear about it. And so I became very interested in understanding my family’s history as it related to me, and understanding myself. I don’t want to take credit for the horrors, but it allows me to connect to them in a more linear way. I don’t know anything about the way my biology has been changed or altered by the historical trauma of my ancestors. But I do know that paranoid people survived because they were paranoid and my parents were paranoid because their parents were paranoid. And I became paranoid because my parents were paranoid.”

Driven by his sincere curiosity about his family’s history, as well as the performative way he experiences the world, Eisenberg explains that he simply just wasn’t afraid to ask the questions he had always wanted to ask. “There are so many quotes from almost every culture and they go a little bit like this: ‘First generation builds the house. Second generation lives in the house. Third generation burns it down.’”

“When I was growing up, we would be visited by Maria, my grandfather’s first cousin who survived the war through a thousand miracles, and stayed in Poland. And every three years or so, she would come to my family’s house in New Jersey, and she would sit there and no one asked her anything about her past because she had survived the war and had a traumatic life. And there would be a certain heaviness in the room that I was too young to understand,” said Eisenberg. “When I got older, I went to visit Maria, and I stayed with her for two weeks in Poland. And I asked her every single thing that none of my family members asked her because I was curious and I was removed enough to have the ignorance to just assume that she would answer my questions. And she did answer my questions. And I learned everything about her.”

Eisenberg points out an important piece of the puzzle in how third-generation survivors, or 3G’s, take ownership of their families’ history. Grandchildren and grandparents (or in this case great-aunts) have a very different relationship than with their own parents or children. Often disconnected enough from their grandparents’ past, and sometimes driven by the idea that “time is running out,” we see the descendants of survivors knowing way more about their family’s past than 2G’s (children of Holocaust survivors).

“Maria didn’t even want to talk to the Shoah Foundation,” Eisenberg continued. “She was quite closed off. But she told me everything. And I went back and I wrote a play called The Revisionist, and it was revelatory for my immediate family because I came back and I told my family about Maria and they were shocked. My dad didn’t know any of these things because he was trained by his parents to never talk about it. And then I came along, and I have the gall and ignorance to assume that I could ask any question I want. And sometimes that works.”

Why now? Eisenberg told me he’s been working on this for years, and movies take time to create, and come alive. With so few survivors currently alive, is there anything that simply cannot be preserved, I asked, no matter how hard we try?

“I was not alive for the war, but I was alive to know these people. So my experience is viscerally quite different from people born now for whom meeting a Holocaust survivor would be much more rare. I’m making a movie about people for whom history is not just one thing. They don’t just grieve the Holocaust. They have a kind of curiosity that can come with distance. They have a kind of ambivalence about taking their own connection to that trauma and feeling comfortable owning the pain because it didn’t happen to them and it didn’t happen to their parents. They have anxieties and paranoias, but they can’t relate it directly to the event, they can only relate it to the ripple effects of the event. And so I imagine if there is a movie made by the younger version of me in 20 years, it will be struggling with that same distance.”

Making a movie that’s centered around the Holocaust isn’t for the faint of heart. Eisenberg considers himself a student of Holocaust movies, both literally (in college), but also recreationally, because he’s just interested in exploring that piece of his past. “This movie is really a reflection of not just my family history, but my perspective on Holocaust movies in general,” he said. “I was trying to make something I’d never seen before in this genre, which is a movie that can simultaneously have great reverence for the history while also creating an irreverent and sometimes transgressive tone, because that’s the full and honest way I experience history, and that’s what I was trying to depict here.”

The movie is comedic, sobering, and at times so painful. Never before had I seen a movie that depicted the ways the third generation grapples with their past and their inheritance the way the characters did in A Real Pain. The pain portrayed in the film is palpable. Not the kind of physical pain we’re used to seeing in Holocaust films. But the kind of inherited pain that lives in the descendant’s bones and brains. The kind that induces panic attacks and outbursts. “My character suffers from what he would consider unexceptional medicated anxiety and OCD,” said Eisenberg. “And Kieran’s character suffers from something a lot darker and existentially troublesome. But because the movie is set against the backdrop of a genocide, I’m trying to pose a question to the audience, which is really a question I have for myself. And the question is: What pain is valid? I don’t know the answer to that. All I know is that I have deep wells of anxiety and depression.”

My conversation with Eisenberg led me to want to explore the third generation more in depth. As it turns out there’s an organization called If You Heard What I Heard, founded by third-generation Holocaust survivors, aimed at preserving their ancestors’ stories, as they were the last generation to hear them firsthand. The organization interviews and records the stories told by third-generation survivors, and includes Scott (Scooter) Braun, Josh Gad, and over 50 others. They currently have a waitlist of over 400 3G’s waiting to tell their stories.

Carolyn Siegel, a third-generation survivor herself, founded the organization. After learning at a young age that her grandparents survived the Holocaust, she became endlessly curious about the lives her grandparents lived before the war, how they survived, and how it changed them forever. “As I got older, I had this really deep interest in finding family records,” said Siegel. “My grandfather spoke so much about what he lost, or what we lost, or what we as a people lost. So to me, finding records was like getting something back.” Her interest only grew, and after over 10 years working in fashion, she came up with the idea for and launched If You Heard What I Heard during the pandemic.

Siegel felt she had a responsibility to continue the legacies of those Holocaust survivors who are now gone. “These stories have to be told because we were raised with this obligation to make sure it never dies, and to make sure it never happens again,” she said. “I feel that obligation so deeply.”

For Siegel, the organization and its mission isn’t only about getting 3G’s family stories on tape. The process, she says, is sometimes more impactful than the finished product. So often, Siegel says, she hears that potential interviewees don’t feel they have the knowledge, or the right to tell the stories of their ancestors. “I want them to feel empowered, and so I encourage them to dive in and do research so they can carry on this legacy. I tell them that it’s important that the family that was lost is not forgotten, so if you don’t know the names of your great-grandparents, or great- aunts and uncles, go get them so we can honor them and give them a voice.” Through Siegel’s work, she’s leading them on their own exploration of the past, and giving 3G’s their own voice and role in retelling history, when they didn’t think they had one.

Adam Kuperstein, a reporter for NBC New York, and an interviewee of If You Heard What I Heard, grew up with two grandmothers who survived the Holocaust. “I always felt I had a duty to share my family stories as if they were my own, especially in a way that could relate better to our generation,” said Kuperstein. “I was so enthusiastic about being part of If You Heard What I Heard because I always felt there was a disconnect between the older organizations and nonprofits focused on Holocaust education, and our generation. I was so grateful that somebody created a platform for our generation to share stories in a language that would be more relatable, and more impactful.”

After speaking with Siegel about her work, I still had questions about the pain of it all. Does inherited pain live within us? In our minds and bodies? While she works through some of it during her interviews, she led me to Dr. Melissa Wasserman, a clinical psychologist with a specialty in traumatic stress, and a board member of If You Heard What I Heard.

Wasserman is the grandchild of two Holocaust survivors, and has dedicated much of her career to understanding the effects of trauma, specifically from war, on how we live our lives. While Wasserman says the jury is still out on whether there is a genetic component of specifically intergenerational trauma with Holocaust survivors, she does explore a lot of that inherited pain and trauma through the way people are raised and nurtured. “There’s some excellent research from Dr. Yael Danieli that explores how trauma was communicated in the family system. ‘Were they not talking about it at all? Or were they oversharing and not being able to regulate?’ Either can have significant ripple effects,” said Wasserman. “Then, for most, you had acculturation stress after the war, (the psychological and physical stress that people experience when they move from one culture to another), which really affected the family unit.”

Wasserman believes it makes sense that so many 3G’s are stepping up and owning their family’s history now more than ever. “We (the third generation) are finding ways to make meaning out of this traumatic experience, and I think on top of that, we are seeing a lot of people think about intergenerational patterns and cycles, and question how we shift those for future generations. Plus we’re thinking about how we can really practice never forgetting. So I think it’s kind of just a perfect recipe right at this moment.”

I remember back to that semester in college where I interviewed and wrote about Jack Ratz’s life and survival for my writing seminar. I felt so uncomfortable reading it to my peers, both because I didn’t feel it was my story to tell, and because I didn’t feel I could do it justice. I remember the shock on my classmates’ faces, and I understood just then that not everyone lived next door to a Holocaust survivor. Actually, I don’t think any of them, including my writing professor, had known any survivors personally.

Now it makes sense to me why I felt so beholden to the story of my neighbor. While I wasn’t raised by him, I inherited his story. And his pain. Even if I didn’t mean to.