Jennifer Krebs
I’ve never been much of a flirt with people, but ideas? I flirt shamelessly. I don’t fall head over heels, but I linger. I’ll bat my lashes at a seductive concept, maybe take it out for coffee, but I rarely commit. One of my life mottos is “Don’t believe everything you think.” It has served me well, especially when it comes to the thoughts that won’t leave me alone.
Take “child of a Holocaust survivor.”
My father was born in Germany in 1928. His teacher was a Nazi. He witnessed Kristallnacht in November 1938. He was eventually sent on a Kindertransport to Belgium. He and his parents made it to the United States in 1941 on one of the last trains out of Germany.
But he never saw himself as a Holocaust survivor. He wasn’t in a camp. He never sought therapy. He worked nonstop, had chronic insomnia (a family tradition) and could be short-tempered, but he genuinely loved to laugh. He was the sane one in the family. The stable one. The survivor who didn’t make a big deal out of surviving.
Still, there were moments … like when we were at my grandparents’ house and the conversation suddenly flipped into German, shutting me out. When I asked for a translation, I’d get: “That’s not for children.”
Once, I joined a six-week support group for children of Holocaust survivors. I mostly stayed quiet. Other participants had parents who’d been in camps. One had been born in a Displaced Persons’ camp. Another had a serious illness. Who was I to claim their trauma?
But trauma doesn’t care about credentials. Some people say it’s passed down epigenetically, through blood or bone or breath. I have my father’s insomnia, his bad back, his congenital mitral valve issue. I’m quick to anger, quick to judge, and I often assume other people should be able to tough it out, too. Is that trauma? Genetics? Just being human?
Now, well into my sixth decade, I think I’m finally getting a handle on it. I hope so — for my kids’ sake.
Below are a few key insights I’ve gleaned:
1. Demons
Utopia is for books; dystopia is what we have. Demons lurk behind the trees, stepping off the bus at school or at the town hall. Some are named on the nightly news. Others appear in your dreams. The Bible is full of them. Your parents are worried. Your grandparents have advice on how to negotiate living among them. You live with your eyes wide open.
2. Save the World
When people ask you what you want to do with your life, you’re unable to pick something reasonable. You have to do something big. I wanted to be the diplomat to bring peace to the Middle East. When I learned that I was ill-suited for work as a diplomat, I became an environmental planner to heal the planet.
3. Become a Detective
In your spare time, you obsess over old family stories that don’t make sense. How is it that your father survived to get out of Germany, but his cousin did not? Surely, your grandmother’s answer of luck doesn’t explain it. There are archives, books, videos, museums. Get on it.
4. Have Children
When my parents came to visit shortly after we adopted my daughter, I realized that I’d finally fulfilled their wishes. A new generation had come. Dad was a great snuggler and joke-maker. But he still had a hard time talking about his childhood and was slow to answer when my kids inquired. I had to step into the breach. I found myself examining my memories and the family stories, once again trying to determine which ones were most important moving into the future.
5. Write About It
I started in my 20s, even before I had children. Reams and reams of paper about the demons, the heroes and luck in its various shades of gray. You might paint. Throw pots. Knit. Crochet. Create family dinners. Something that connects your heart, your head and the world.
I scribbled, typed and researched for years before I called my project a memoir. I called it “Stumbling Blocks” after the Stolpersteine, the small brass memorial plaques embedded in European sidewalks to remind the living of the Jews who used to live among them. Those who they forced to flee or who were deported to Auschwitz. Like my father, my grandparents and all their relatives with less luck.
I began to face the fact that we all stumble, that it is a good thing. We live in a complicated world. Stumbling blocks are the tip of the iceberg. Below them are demons, laws, newspaper articles, aspirations, luck and a crazy range of responses to reality. Certainly, lots of tears. Outrage. Hope.
Maybe you’ll call yourself a child of survivors. Or a child of the Holocaust. Maybe you’ll just call yourself human.
But here’s what I know: Pain isn’t the end of the story. If you trace it far enough, you’ll find something else waiting — compassion, clarity, even joy. Every time I dig into the past, I find a thread of resilience running through it. My father didn’t just escape; he rebuilt. He loved jokes. He loved parties, dancing and games. And he loved family. That’s something worth carrying forward.
History doesn’t need to be about blaming and shaming. History needs to be about sharing, finding common threads, as well as different interpretations or meanings in the world that we inherited.
Memory is not a weight, but a tool. It builds bridges between generations, between strangers, between the living and the dead. And that is how pain becomes purpose.
That is how being stuck becomes being engaged.
Jennifer Krebs is an author and a former environmental planner who lives in Berkeley, California, and Shokan, New York.
