On Yom Kippur day, October 1993, the rabbi’s sermon in synagogue was the story of the upcoming release next month of the movie “Schindler’s List.” It had been five years since my mother had passed away. At the end of the Rabbi’s sermon, my father leaned over to me and told me something that she never did. It was six words that I would never forget – “Your mother was on that list.”
“In the Midst of Darkness:” The memoir explores what I know of my mother’s teenage life as a Schindler’s List survivor, which confronts Intergenerational Trauma (“Second Generation” holocaust survivor trauma) manifested in racism – how it can begin, what it can do to us –deeply penetrating its familial and social ramifications and how we can reconcile even amidst the reach of darkness. The underlying theme draws upon my mother’s life being saved by Oskar Schindler – a Nazi German and the irony of how her children grew up.
The story explores my mother’s trauma primarily resulting from the atrocities she endured during the Holocaust, and her parents and six of seven brothers and sisters who were murdered in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. She deeply inflicted her trauma upon her sons as children, but far more critically in my brother through bitter hatred for my German stepmother and all Germans.
Jesse Eisenberg’s new movie that was released late last year, “A Real Pain,” an Academy Award winner, includes a story of Intergenerational Trauma due to the Holocaust. Another film recently released in January, “The Brutalist” that won three Academy Awards, including Best Actor also tells the story of the impact of a Holocaust survivor living with that trauma and assimilating to life in America after the Holocaust. Both films hopefully begin to change that there has always been so much shared of survivors’ accounts of the atrocities they lived through in the Holocaust, but not nearly enough of their trauma, and their descendants as told in a Real Pain. This is what my brother and I grew up with as children – our mother’s trauma was our trauma.
About the Author: Robert Don has been changing careers from his professional background in senior risk management in corporate banking to becoming a writer. He recently conducted research in both the Auschwitz and Plaszow concentration camps where his mother was deported and is deeply familiar with the Holocaust stories being told. Having lived through this story, he finally wanted to tell the story and is well versed in the details of this time period of the Holocaust. In the Midst of Darkness will be his debut book.
This event is free of cost; registration required.
