Introduction: Rupture and Repair: Marking the Legacy of the Second Generation

Summary

For what crime did he have to atone? He didn't know. What did he have to conceal, to mask, to erase? What secret lay unconscious in him that, with the least modification in his life, would surface like a corpse — a corpse that a murderer had been tempted to drown in a lake. It was his special fate to play a bit part in a play he hadn't written, a play performed years before his birth, with its own actors and audience. And once the curtain was down, he had to remain on the stage with the others, like him, born after the performance, or during, or before, remembering the play they had seen or acted in, as torturer or as victim. Was he waiting for the curtain to go up again?

—Henri Raczymow, Writing the Book of Esther

Stigmata of the Unknown

InThe War After: Living with the Holocaust (1996), Anne Karpf writes of growing up as the child of Holocaust survivors in postwar England, an experience that, as she discovers as an adult, has profoundly shaped her identity and her understanding of the world around her. For much of her childhood, youth, and early adulthood she is plagued by excessive fear of potential danger to her family, anxiety about breaking her close but at times stifling bond with her parents, and unfocused rage at having been bequeathed such a difficult and often incomprehensible history of family trauma.