“A Life Inherited: Unraveling the Trauma of a Second-Generation Holocaust Survivor” by Rena Lipiner Katz. Wilbur & Dolce Books. 2022. English. Hardcover. 280 pages. ISBN-13: 979-8987091616.
“Of course, this book is about the Holocaust” said its author, Rena Lipiner Katz. “Yet it isn’t my mother’s story. She is the survivor, but it is my story.” It is the story of the survivor’s daughter and about how her pain and despair was inherited.
The author’s childhood was not an ordinary one. But it was one with contours that children of survivors identify with instantly. There are subtle but unmistakable traits. Said one child of survivors, “I can’t tell you exactly what it is, but I can tell in an instant when I meet someone like me.” Perhaps it is because while the neighbors’ kids sat in front of their black and white televisions watching cartoons or “The Donna Reed Show,” these kids sat motionless in front of the screen watching the trial of Adolph Eichmann.
“His face showed no emotion,” said Lipiner Katz. “I was 6 years old, but no matter if I didn’t fully get the magnitude of what he had done, or the language that was being used, I knew from a place deep in my bones that he had murdered my family, and I should not have been born. It was like a lead weight on my being that was hardened in place from the moment of my birth. It was lodged in my genes.”
The weight she references is what scientists today call epigenetics. Epigenetics is hard science that deals with how one’s body reads a DNA sequence, and how it can change. These changes are often caused by environmental factors—things like stress, like Holocaust survival—and they are passed down from one generation to the next.
According to Lipiner Katz, “These changes drive a backstory in every child of survivors.” These backstories in children of survivors are not the stuff of levity or joy. Bright, intelligent, capable children of survivors often endure lifetime battles with depression, addiction or general malaise about their existence, or even their right to exist. While these backstories take a variety of forms, a common thread ties them all together. “On one of its ends there is an epigenetic directive not to live a fulfilled, happy life,” said Lipiner Katz. On the other, as in the author’s case, it was an irrational but hardwired drive to find “my own personal Nazi.”
“I was young, by all accounts attractive and intelligent, and fine young men tried to court me. But I rejected the best of the best and married him [the author’s first husband], the worst of the worst.” After 10 years of emotional abuse, eclipsed only by physical violence, Lipiner Katz left with her children to start a new life.
Part memoir and part history, the story of “A Life Inherited” begins in 1939 with the author’s mother, Lusia, a young girl of 6, escaping Poland and living in fear of being brutalized by locals, then turned over or discovered by Nazis, and perhaps worst of all, being separated from her parents. These events—being awakened in the middle of the night from what had been a carefree childhood, thrust onto a horse-drawn wagon, wandering through unfamiliar landscapes, constantly hungry, enduring disease and death on the roadsides—did more than shape young Lusia’s imagination. They transformed her genes, and when her daughter Rena was born in 1955, that transformation was as profound and permanent as her brown hair and green eyes.
What the author witnessed as a young child was the debris left of her grandparents’ lives caused by the loss of their siblings and young nieces and nephews to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Lipiner Katz writes:
“But Rose and Abe had lost too many to return to the people they had been. For where does one’s love, and the energy that fuels that love, go when half of the dyad is orphaned? When a beloved disappears, the identity of the person who is left—the one who is no longer called Mother or Father or Sister or Aunt—is changed. It untethers from the core of the self but still drifts on in a state of mourning, an unrelieved ache. I learned this for myself many years later when my son left. Who was I when he was gone? The tie had been disconnected but still hovered, always reminding me of his absence, and who I no longer was in relation to him. But my son was alive and breathing. Not alongside me, but he breathed, and hope for a different future was a powerful salve for my loss. There was no such hope for Abe and Rose—no goodbye, no final embrace, no burial rites to close the wound, just empty space where the beloved had once been. For me, the measure of every wrenching loss always returns to the losses of the Holocaust, the touchstone by which I calibrate grief.”
Hen Mazzig, an influential author and one of Algemeiner’s “Top 100 People Positively Influencing Jewish Life,” calls the Lipiner Katz’s prose “brilliant, moving…” as she writes in her opening chapter, “My heart breaks for the woman I was.” Hers is indeed both a heartbreaking and inspiring journey, with a surprisingly uplifting turn of events as the author, like Amos Tutuola’s “Brave African Huntress,” gradually disempowers her personal Nazi and with time and perseverance finds her way to a world of light and levity.
This passionate and beautiful memoir is full of insight into some of the darkest, most personal regions of Jewish history and a manifesto of hope and happiness. A must-read, it is destined to become a classic in its exploration of the impact of the Holocaust on past, present and future generations.
“A Life Inherited: Unraveling the Trauma of a Second-Generation Holocaust Survivor” can be purchased on Amazon and Barnesandnoble.com.
