You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
I believe it to be an accepted fact that Holocaust survivors generally remain silent about their wartime experiences. The motives for this silence are manifold, and recently I heard a Jewish survivor say during an interview that when his generation dies, those who were killed will be able to rest in peace. He expressed the idea that memory disturbs the peace of the dead rather than being a sacred duty to them, and that silence is a service to the dead. This thinking adds another to the long list of motives behind the silence which disrupts family life and causes the children to feel excluded. Who is being shielded? Whom are the parents protecting when they want to spare their children the agony of their own history?
The answer to these questions are not readily available in Ilany Kogan's powerful book, because she avoids speculating about motives of the parents. What does become clear, however, is the suffering of the second generation that feels excluded from the central events in their parents' lives and the various ‘silent’ ways in which they attempt to insinuate themselves into their parents' history. Kogan describes the mute agony of the second generation of the Holocaust without judging the parents who could not permit their children to speak, and she succeeds in giving voice to the suffering of the children of survivors without incriminating the parents. Instead, she describes the work, her own understanding, and her struggles to reach these patients who are notoriously hard to keep in treatment. As it was, most of these treatments were seriously jeopardised by the patient's acting out, but Kogan's honesty, openness, and devotion eventually overcame these resistances.
This book describes how it happened that Kogan was successful where many have failed. She does it with the milk of human kindness, as Chasseguet-Smirgel writes in her foreword;