The next generation: Survivors’ grandchildren teach Holocaust’s lessons

Grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, two generations removed from the Nazis’ horrors, are stepping up to tell the stories of their grandparents, eager to show there are still lessons to learn from the calamitous but increasingly distant years of World War II.

They are visiting schools and speaking at community events, as their grandparents did for decades, hoping the world will never forget how the Nazis destroyed their families, their cities and their culture.

A school visit by a Holocaust survivor has become a mainstay of South Florida students’ education since Florida mandated Holocaust instruction in 1994.

But witnesses to the Holocaust are now mostly gone. Survivors who are still alive are in their 80s, 90s and older. And their children, in their 60s, 70s and 80s, are aging.

The task is now falling to the grandchildren. And a growing number say they are ready to pick up the mantle.

“I’m not just the voice for my grandparents or my late father. I’m a walking history of the Jewish people,” said Rayna Rose Exelbierd, 32, a Boca Raton resident who has been visiting schools to talk about the Holocaust and antisemitism. “I see myself in the line of Jewish continuity. I want to empower other descendants.”

Exelbierd’s grandparents, Joseph and Rachel, survived World War II by passing as non-Jews who were put to work clearing train tracks. They were able to immigrate to Memphis, Tenn., in 1951. Exelbierd moved to Boca Raton to attend Florida Atlantic University and graduated in 2015.

She has been speaking in schools about her experiences with bullying and antisemitism since 2011, and in 2013, became a friend of Anya Bogusheva Baum, 95, a Holocaust survivor who lives in an assisted living facility in Boca Raton. After the war, Baum was in the same displaced persons camp as Exelbierd’s grandfather, a coincidence that has created a deep connection between the women. For the past year, they have been visiting schools together to talk about the Holocaust and their families’ stories.

There are an estimated 1 million grandchildren of Holocaust survivors in the United States, according to Living Links , a support network for survivors’ grandchildren. The USC Shoah Foundation, which has recorded interviews with survivors and witnesses since 1994 and was founded by director Steven Spielberg, announced in May it had partnered with Living Links to help grow local grandchildren networks and train the third generation to share their ancestors’ testimonies in public.

The third generation includes some famous people. Actress Gal Gadot has recounted how her grandfather lost his entire family in the Holocaust and made his way by himself to Israel. Actor Josh Gad and actress Lisa Kudrow also had Holocaust survivor grandparents. Actress Mila Kunis said she lost much of her Ukrainian family during World War II and had to flee the former Soviet Union at age 7 with her parents due to antisemitism.

There are 18 support groups now for the third generation, who are often called 3Gs, in the United States and Canada. A Miami chapter has members from Miami-Dade and Broward counties. A Palm Beach 3G group is currently in formation. Living Links expects there will be as many as 25 affiliate groups in North America by the end of the year.

Speaking at schools

These grandchildren groups have been working closely with non-profits and school systems that bring Holocaust speakers into classrooms. South Florida students have benefited for years from an abundance of nearby survivors who retired to Palm Beach and Broward counties as well as easy access to local museums and documentation centers.

In Broward, students can visit museums such as the Holocaust Documentation and Education Center in Dania Beach and the Craig and Barbara Weiner Holocaust Museum of South Florida. In Palm Beach County, there are groups such as inSIGHT Through Education, which funds grants for Holocaust educators and student leaders, pays for transportation to make sure survivors can get to schools to speak and works closely with the Palm Beach County School District to make sure Holocaust education remains robust as there are fewer and fewer survivors.

The school district is already planning for that eventuality.

“I’ve been talking to survivors about encouraging their families to carry on their story,” said Kimberly Coombs, the Palm Beach County School District’s Holocaust studies planner. The district’s Holocaust speakers’ programs have proven extremely popular: Of 183 schools in the district, 60% requested a visit from a survivor last year, and Coombs said she was able to accommodate every request, reaching 40,000 kids.

As the task falls to the descendants, grandchildren of survivors, mostly in their 30s to 50s, have had to figure out how to tell the stories of their scarred grandparents, a delicate subject in many families.

Some survivors spoke openly about the horrors they had endured. But many declined to discuss their trauma, hoping to forget the past and start fresh in the United States. Others felt more comfortable talking with their grandchildren as they got older.

When she was 16, Caryn Pardo, 38, a mediator from Miami Beach, asked her Poland-born grandfather to share his story of life during the Holocaust before she took a trip to Germany. He was finally ready to talk, having never offered details to his children.

“I was always told he lost his family, but that’s all I was told,” said Pardo, who has been speaking at schools in Miami-Dade and Broward about her grandfather, Harry Feldzamen, who survived five concentration camps. “I felt so connected to him. Then when I started meeting other 3Gs, I felt an instant connection with them.”

Research on traits this generation has in common is sparse. But a 2002 study found that the third generation was twice as likely as a control group to choose a helping career such as teaching, social work or medicine. Psychologist Flora Hogman found that the third generation has integrated their families’ stories into their lives and directed their public energies into empathy and political consciousness.

“The third generation is able to be compassionate to their parents and grandparents,” Pardo said. “As an adult, you realize their childhood was tough.”

Elana Ostroff, 51, of Boca Raton grew up in Hollywood, the grandchild of four Holocaust survivors. She said she knew one of her grandmothers, Vicki Weissberg, survived Auschwitz and the Nazis had tattooed a number — A7085 — on her arm. But she knew little else until she became an adult.

“My grandmother started to open up as an 85-year-old,” said Ostroff, who had always wondered about Weissberg’s quirks, such as eating slowly and hiding food in her purse, habits her grandmother learned when food was scarce during the war. When Ostroff went on the March of the Living, an annual pilgrimage of teenagers to concentration camps in Poland, she said she began to want to know more about her grandparents’ experiences.

Now she works as director of the Jewish Federation of South Palm Beach County’s PJ Library, which mails free books and music to Jewish children.

“It’s up to us to repeat their stories,” Ostroff said. “We need to listen to every word. It’s the job that was given to us.”

One day, the third generation will age as their grandparents and parents have. And the fourth generation will be ready to take the helm of educating the world about the Holocaust. Katherine Kolbar, 14, of Aventura, is already taking up this project.

Four of her great-grandparents survived the catastrophe. Two lived through Auschwitz, another, the Warsaw Ghetto, and the fourth was saved by Oskar Schindler, who was made famous by Steven Spielberg’s film “Schindler’s List.”

Kolbar won the digital storytelling category in Nova Southeastern University’s recent Holocaust Reflections contest for a film about one of her great grandfathers, Zygmunt Rotter, who worked in Schindler’s factory in Krakow, Poland.

“I still want to understand why the Holocaust happened, and I want to go to Poland and the Czech Republic to see where my great grandparents lived,” Kolbar said. “I know most of their stories, but there’s a lot more I want to learn.”