Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors

Author: Helen Epstein

They were survivors of a past that even they did not fully comprehend. They had heard the muted voices of their parents discussing “it” but did not really understand the pain and suffering it represented. Their parents were survivors of the concentration camps. The author sets out on a journey seeking other children of survivors. Her own parents in another life had jobs of status—her mother worked in a salon for the haute couture in the center of Prague, while her father was a long-standing member of the Czechoslovak National Olympic Committee and a water polo player. In this life, they lived in poverty with her father moving from job to job and her mother sewing clothes for the ungrateful aristocracy. Reaching out to other sons and daughters of survivors, the author meets a former beauty queen, a woman who grew up in South Africa pretending to be a protestant, a Vietnam veteran, and a scientist with a gallows sense of humor, to name a few.

Paperback

336 pages