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HOLOCAUST RELATED
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If you or a family member were directly involved with or impacted by the Holocaust, please send us your story for publication.

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Holocaust Survivors and Their Second Generation Children

By: Hugh Rosen

In my book, "Silent Battlefields: A Novel," I write about Holocaust survivors and their adult children. In addition, there is a character in the book that had been a Hitler Youth and German soldier, as well as his young adult Child. Although this piece stresses Jewish people, the vast majority of the Holocaust victims, inclusive of those taken to concentration and death camps were political prisoners, criminals, developmentally disabled persons, gays, and so called "gypsies."
Regarding Holocaust survivors, I would like to introduce a controversial subject that is debated amongst psychotherapists, in particular amongst psychiatrists, psychologists, and clinical social workers. There are those, cutting across all three disciplines, holding the view that holocaust survivors who have demonstrated psychopathology subsequent to liberation are all people who have had mental disorders prior to internment that predisposed them to the psychic problems they later experienced. Other professionals maintain that such is not necessarily the case and that the trauma of concentration camp life provides a sufficient basis for the symptoms displayed by the survivors. It is my position that the latter assertion is correct. Further, I think that the former view constitutes an unwarranted assumption and even a presumptuous one. It would be difficult to advance hard evidence to support it, since there is no way in retrospect to conduct a scientific experiment verifying it. Consequently, the conclusion rests upon mere speculation. The atrocious conditions and inhumane living in concentration camps and the atrocities committed within them, are, in my opinion, sufficient to produce psychological disorders in even the most psychologically healthy individuals.
Many Jews who survived the Holocaust were often placed in untenable, even unbearable, positions in which they were faced with choices of survival by betraying their own families or fellow compatriots. Some Jews in the role of a Kapos (a person having supervisory control over a group of Jews in the concentration camps) administered harsh, even cruel, behavior to others, for which they were rewarded camp amenities not available to others. One should not sit in judgment of such people decades later. Unless we were to find ourselves in the same existential situation, we cannot know how we would have behaved; we can only know how we would have liked to behave. Many such survivors paid a heavy price of guilt throughout the remainder of their lives, not simply for surviving, but for the way they managed to survive.
Holocaust survivors often tended to exclusively be comfortable only with others who had survived. Non-Jews were looked upon with suspicion and not to be trusted. A tacit code of silence prevailed in the families they formed so that the second-generation children were protected from the atrocities their parents had been subjected to. Another reason for the silence was to protect themselves from exposing the utter humiliations that they had endured while in the camps. They did not wish their children to know of this.
It was not uncommon for survivors to emerge from the camps as hypochondriacal. Their symptoms were converted into psychosomatic disorders. As a result, visits to the doctor for physical treatment frequently occurred for problems that were psychic in origin. They can be plagued by tenacious memories throughout their lives and visited by nightmares like unwelcome guests that long overstay their time.
Parents of Holocaust survivors commonly proved to be overly protective of their children, which led to the restraining of the children's range of allowable behaviors, much to his or her frustration. Second generation children growing up were often protective of their parents, in turn. Sometimes they were made to feel guilty for raising their own normal developmental concerns. Survivor parents when hearing from their children about the problems they were encountering would respond by pointing out that such issues were nothing compared to what their parents had gone through during the Holocaust. Hence, the code of silence would eventually become bilateral. Many second generation children, painfully aware of the past suffering their parents had been forced to live through, internalized their parents comparisons of the two sets of problems, leading the children to feel ashamed of bringing up their own concerns or to remain silent so as to protect their parents from having to listen to such "trivial" matters. The families were often symbiotic in nature, making it difficult for the children to separate and individuate as happens as a part of normal adolescent development in the thrust toward the approach of early adulthood. Second-generation children, through transmission of their parents' earlier trauma in the concentration camps, not uncommonly resulted in their own distrust of the outside world and made close relationships with peers difficult to come by. It is not unlike the more recent phenomenon in which persons with AIDS no longer feel connected to the disease free community and seek out only others who are experiencing the same physical and psychological experiences they are experiencing.
Nothing I have written here should be misconstrued as criticism of Holocaust survivors. They were compelled to live, if, indeed, they could manage to do so, in an evil environment of daily horrors that no human being should ever have to endure. As for their children, they were caught in a web of trauma transmission, by virtue of their second-generation status, that was inescapable. Further, each survivor, child, and family had their own individual identity, so that not everything said here can be applied as a generalization across the board.
Most importantly of all, many survivors and their families, despite their lingering psychic injuries went on to lead lives of hope, renewal, and success. One has only to witness the life of Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor who went on to provide the world with moral leadership and has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.Sadly, genocide is not an evil from mid-Twentieth Century only. It continues to persist, involving other ethnic, racial, and religious groups. The global reawakening of anti-Semitism is itself a threat.

About the Author
Hugh Rosen is the author of Silent Battlefields. Visit his Web site http://www.hughrosen.com to learn more about his novel of second generation Holocaust survivors.
(ArticlesBase SC #37982)
Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/ - Holocaust Survivors and Their Second Generation Children

Holocaust Butterfly Project Encourages Compassion
By: Wendy Young, LMSW, BCD

It is always nice to see our children develop a sense of compassion and caring for others. If you are looking for a project that will encourage just that, consider being part of the butterfly project from the Holocaust Museum of Houston. May the Holocaust Museum gather more butterflies than they have set out to collect and may we all band together to show the goodness in humankind...with the hope to someday obliterate man's inhumanity to man.
In an effort to remember the victims of the Holocaust, the Holocaust Museum is collecting 1.5 million handmade butterflies. These butterflies will symbolize the 15,000 innocent children that passed through the Terezin Concentration Camp during the years 1942-1944 as well as the 1,500,000 innocent children that perished during the Holocaust.

Butterfly Requirements:
Butterflies should be no larger than 8x10 inches. Butterflies may be of any medium the artist chooses, but one-dimensional submissions are preferred. Glitter should not be used.
Send butterflies by June 30, 2008, with the following information included:
Your name/Organization or School/Your address/Your email address/Total number of butterflies sent If possible email a photograph of your butterflies to butterflyproject@hmh.org
Mail your butterflies to:
Holocaust Museum Houston
Education Department
5401 Caroline St.
Houston, TX 77004
Web Sites of Interest
www.hmh.org (Holocaust Museum Houston)

"The last, the very last, So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow. Perhaps if the sun's tears would sing against a white stone...Such, such a yellow is carried lightly 'way up high'. It went away I'm sure because it wished to kiss the world good-bye. For seven weeks I've lived here, Penned up inside this ghetto. But I have found what I love here. The dandelions call to me And the white chestnut branches in the court. Only I never saw another butterfly. That butterfly was the last one. Butterflies don't live in here, in the ghetto.
Pavel Friedman, April 6, 1942
(Born in Prague, 1921/Deported to Terezin, 1942/Died in Auschwitz, 1944)

About the Author
Wendy Young, LMSW, BCD, is a child and family therapist in private practice in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Visit her at www.kidlutions.com Kidlutions: Solutions for Kids...because kids have problems, too!

(ArticlesBase SC #429948)
Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/ - Holocaust Butterfly Project Encourages Compassion

“Jews on the Web” Submission for IHMEC

The Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center (IHMEC), located in Skokie, Ill., draws visitors from around the state and the nation as Illinois’ premiere resource for Holocaust remembrance and education and human rights programming.
The Museum is dedicated to preserving the legacy of the Holocaust by honoring the memories of the six million Jews who were lost and by teaching universal lessons that combat hatred, prejudice and indifference. The museum fulfills its mission through the exhibition, preservation and interpretation of its collections and through education programs and initiatives that foster the promotion of human rights and the elimination of genocide.
Housed inside a 65,000 square-foot building designed by renowned Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman, the museum’s structure represents a three-part journey from dark to light, reflecting the journey of the Jewish people from Nazi Germany, through the Holocaust, to today.
The Museum’s Zev and Shifra Karkomi permanent exhibition features more than 500 artifacts, documents and photographs from 1930s Europe and beyond - including an original German rail car - that tell the story of Jewish people and the many other minority groups persecuted in the Holocaust.
The Museum also features a Youth Exhibit, which uses interactive tools to introduce children to the Holocaust. In addition, the Museum’s Legacy of Absence Gallery focuses on modern genocides and serves as a visual reminder of the atrocities still taking place around the world.
The Museum aims to fight prejudice by teaching future generations the universal lessons of the Holocaust, and by empowering them to become activists in the fight against unchallenged bigotry. To this end, the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center offers a series of programs and travelling exhibitions aimed at drawing insights from the Holocaust including the Voices of Conscience lecture series which brings international human rights figures to Illinois.
IHMEC also serves as an educational center that teaches school children about the importance of diversity and tolerance, carefully integrating Darfur and other modern-day genocides into its curricula for both teachers and their students. The Museum anticipates as many as 250,000 student visitors each year.
Additionally, the Museum’s Brill Resource Center provides guests with access to the complete set of volumes on the Nuremberg Trials, Holocaust encyclopedias, anthologies of the European ghettos and resistance movements, and more than 2,000 testimonies of Midwest Holocaust survivors as recorded by the Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, founded by Steven Spielberg.
IHMEC is ideally situated in Skokie because of the Village’s connection to the Holocaust. After the War, Skokie became an enclave for many survivors and has still has a large Jewish community.
The Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center is a project of the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois. Founded by Holocaust survivors in 1981, the organization is dedicated to teaching about the Holocaust and the dangers of unchallenged hate. To learn more, visit www.ilholocaustmuseum.org.

Kristallnacht - Horror On The Timeline Of World War 2
By Daniel M Delott

Thousands of Jewish homes and almost 8,000 Jewish shops were ransacked and destroyed during what is now known as Kristallnacht, or "Night of the Broken Glass", throughout Germany on the 9th and 10th of November 1938. Both the Sturmabteilung (SA) and the Schutzstaffel (SS) rampaged Germany with sledgehammers as they smashed windows, doors, and buildings belonging to or housing Jewish families and businesses. It was during this part of the timeline of World War 2 that more than 30,000 Jewish men were taken away to concentration camps, more than 1,600 synagogues ransacked, and many Jews beaten to death in their homes and on the street.

Adolf Hitler, the mad man behind all events to cleanse Germany of the Jews and other unclean races, planned for this event to take place on Martin Luther's birthday. Hitler, at this point on the timeline of World War 2, was following the outline set forth by Luther in 1543 in his writing On the Jews and Their Lies. However, it is proclaimed that the whole incident was set in motion by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Jew, when he shot and killed a German Embassy staff member in Paris in retaliation for the way his family suffered at the hands of the Nazis.

Almost two weeks prior to Kristallnacht, more than 15,000 Jews including Grynszpan's family, all originally from Poland were forcibly expelled from Germany by train and dumped at the Polish border. The world's reaction to Hitler's "bloody vengeance against the Jews" was not well received by any means. The United States recalled its German ambassador permanently immediately following the event.

Take a deep breath and check out Timeline For World War 2 for even more articles on this fascinating time in our world's history.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Daniel_M_Delott
http://EzineArticles.com/?Kristallnacht---Horror-On-The-Timeline-Of-World-War-2&id=1027431

Holocaust Survivors and Their Second Generation Children

Holocaust Butterfly Project Encourages Compassion By: Wendy Young, LMSW, BCD

Holocaust Butterfly Project Encourages Compassion
By: Wendy Young, LMSW, BCD