When Taffy Brodesser-Akner became a writer, Mr. Lindenblatt, the father of one of her oldest friends, began asking to tell his story of survival during the Holocaust in one of the magazines or newspapers she wrote for. He took pride in telling his story, in making sure he fulfilled what he felt was the obligation of all Holocaust survivors, which was to remind the world what had happened to the Jews.His daughter Ilana knew it was a long shot but felt obligated to pass on the request — it was her father, after all. Taffy declined because after a life hearing about the Holocaust, she said, she was “all Holocausted out.”But, years later, when she learned of Mr. Lindenblatt’s imminent passing, Taffy asked herself what would become of stories like his if the generation of hers that was supposed to inherit them had taken the privilege that came with another generation’s survival and decided not to listen?So here it is, an old Jewish story about the Holocaust and a man who somehow survived the pernicious, organized and intentional genocide of the Jews. But right behind it, just two generations later, is another story, one about the children and grandchildren who have been so malformed by the stories that are their lineage that some of them made just as eager work of running from it, only to find themselves, same as anything you run from, having to deal with it anyway. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What prompted Taffy to write Mr. Lindenblatt's Holocaust story?
My name is Taffy Brodesser-Eckner, and I'm a writer for The New York Times Magazine. Recently, one of my oldest friends told me that her father was dying. I've known her father since I was 15 years old, and he has been asking me for years to tell his story about how he survived the Holocaust. And I always said no. I said no because I felt that I had grown up inundated with Holocaust stories.
I sort of hate telling Holocaust stories. I hate the Holocaust as a reasonable person should. And part of my coming of age was to leave the Holocaust behind, was to figure out who I was as an American, as a Jew, as a Christian. without this sort of story that tends to follow Jewish Americans around. So I resisted. I would put him off or say no. And then I found out he was dying. He had cancer.
And I was so sad about it. I felt like, what have I been doing not telling this man's story? He was seven years old for the duration of the time that the Nazis occupied Budapest, which is where he was from. And he was 87 when I found out he was sick.
It created a sort of panic in me that if the youngest people who survived Nazi persecution were dying, then there would be nobody to tell these stories. And so I decided that I would. So I started writing the story and people would ask me, oh, I heard you're writing a Holocaust survivor story. What camp was he in?
And the man I'm writing about lived in Budapest and was sent into hiding in several different places. But he was not in a concentration camp. And people were strange about that. There's this idea that in order to write about the Holocaust, you have to write its most brutal stories in order to make a point about what the Holocaust was.
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Chapter 2: Why did Taffy initially refuse to write about the Holocaust?
But actually, the whole problem with the Holocaust, other than the fact that it was the Holocaust, is that it touched every single Jew. And at some point, in thinking about this and in hearing all of the stories that I heard, I came to understand that I, too, was from a family of Holocaust survivors. In my family, we never spoke about the Holocaust.
When I asked my grandmother what it was like for her as a child, well, it was the war. There was a vague war. There was a point at which I was 9 or 10 years old, and I realized that the war they were talking about was the Holocaust I was learning about in school all the time. I went to a Jewish day school.
And we didn't talk about it, and we didn't describe ourselves as Holocaust survivors, and we were surrounded by people who did. So over the course of reporting this story, I called my mother, and I asked her, do you think of us as a survivor family? And she said, what are you talking about? Of course we are. Your Hebrew middle name is...
is the name of your grandfather's sister who was killed in the Loge ghetto. And my mother was named after her grandmother who suffered the same fate. She said, of course we're a survivor family. And I got off the phone and I was very emotional. And I called my kids into the living room. And I said to them, kids, do you realize that we are from a Holocaust survivor family?
And they said, of course we do. I guess part of me not understanding it was, was part of the same wish I had in running away from it, which was a refusal to define myself in those terms. But of course, like anything else you run away from, you arrive at a certain age and realize that the running away from it, that is its own way of engaging in your culture.
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Chapter 3: What unique perspective does Mr. Lindenblatt provide?
It's not that inherited trauma gets diluted as generations pass. But it's also not as if you can deny your inheritance. The trauma just doesn't look the same as it did in the prior generation. It morphs, it changes, it becomes its own thing that you might not even recognize as inherited trauma in the first place.
I came to understand over the course of this story that there are people like me who refused the Holocaust as their burden. But it's all of our burdens. Running away from it is its own burden. So I finally wrote it. I finally wrote the Holocaust story I said I would never write. And it's this week's Sunday Read. So here's my article, read by Gabra Zachman.
Our audio producer is Jack D'Isidoro, and our music was written and performed by Aaron Esposito. Thanks for listening.
I learned that Mr. Lyndon Blatt was dying when I was in London this past November on business. I had awoken from a dream that his daughter Ilana, who is one of my oldest friends, was engaged. I called her up and asked if there was something I didn't know, because I inherited a witchy quality from my mother.
I occasionally have dreams about people, and it turns out that they're predictive, or at least thematically correct. She laughed, sadly, and told me she wasn't engaged. No. That her father was dying. And that perhaps the thing I had sensed across the ocean was her sadness. He has cancer, she said.
He was receiving a palliative chemotherapy treatment, and the doctors didn't have a guess as to how long he would live. Weeks or months. Nobody really knew for sure, but the end was inevitable. And inevitabilities... In this story, they are everywhere. I hung up the phone and I thought about Mr. Lindenblatt.
His first name was Yehuda, though it feels seditious to even say the first name of a childhood friend's father. I thought about how he was a runner, back when it was just called jogging. How he drank rice milk before alternative milks were the style. How he would walk through the house in his running shorts and no shirt, which absolutely none of the other dads did.
How he thanklessly and happily took on the burden of driving Alana and me both ways to our losing basketball games and our even losing our play rehearsals. We were in Brigadoon together, don't ask, when my mother was pregnant with my youngest sister. How he taught me to say, hello, how are you, in his native Hungarian, which has proved useful in my life twice so far.
how he walked around on Shabbat with a walkie-talkie, because in addition to working at his family's camera store in Midtown, he volunteered for the Jewish Ambulance Service in Manhattan Beach near their home. And I thought about the fact that Mr. Lindenblatt survived the Holocaust. In my neighborhood in Brooklyn, in the surrounding neighborhoods too, it seemed as if everyone was a survivor.
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Chapter 4: How does Taffy's family history connect to the Holocaust?
But here it is anyway. In my most bitter moments... In times when I realize how much of my foundational education was given over to the war and how little was given over to, say, gym or art or the other humanities that would have helped me in life or at the very least in work meetings, I say I went to a Holocaust high school, a magnet school for Jewish death studies.
I say my school taught us master's-level World War II history and also just enough math and science to pass the New York State Regents exams. I'm joking. But am I? I left high school having read Macbeth not once, but Elie Wiesel's Night three times over the course of my education. I can probably autocomplete any sentence from Anne Frank's diary if you start me off with three words.
I have forgotten more about the Holocaust than I ever knew about the American Revolution. Again, I'm mostly hyperbolic here. Lots of people hated their high schools, and even more people of my generation have aged up to find that their formal education let them down in some crucial way or another.
There were other yeshivas that were more focused on their students' prospects for success, and a few of my classmates became doctors and lawyers. Hey, maybe it was a fine high school, and I was just a terrible student, which I absolutely was. I did fail several classes and had to take something called business math twice.
But I recently joked to a group of fellow alumni that one of the best parts of Hamilton for me was not knowing how it would end. And nobody didn't know what I was talking about. It wasn't until adulthood that I realized that there was an official Holocaust Remembrance Day. Because it always felt just like a rolling year-round thing. And it kind of was.
There was Holocaust Remembrance Day in January, yes, but also Yom HaShoah in the spring. And in November, the commemoration of Kristallnacht, which is the event that is acknowledged as the official beginning of the Holocaust, the night that the windows of Jewish businesses, homes, and synagogues were smashed by Nazis while the German authorities looked on without intervening.
It was also later than any of us would like to acknowledge that I realized Nazi hunting, a field I believe I had the natural talents to dominate, might be an industry in decline. I was not a good enough math student to have considered that all the Nazis would be dead by now. The Holocaust was the water in which we swam, invisible to us, but there we were, sopping wet.
I remembered a poem that Alana wrote for school when she was 10, in response to an assignment that asked her to occupy the point of view of a child in the Holocaust. Her poem was called Death, and it began with the lines, I feel death coming, and so do the people around me.
It ended with its narrators hearing the footsteps of Nazis, being grabbed by the arm, tied up and pushed against a wall and shot. It was signed, Ilana Lindenblatt, age 10. And her parents enlarged it, framed it, and hung it in the living room.
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Chapter 5: What does inherited trauma look like across generations?
Anyway, years later, years after I would crash the Lindenblatt's Shabbat dinners or show up in my car to take Ilana to the local diner, years after dancing at his daughter's weddings and serving as a bridesmaid in one of them, I became a writer. And Mr. Lindenblatt began asking Alana to ask me to tell his story of survival during the Holocaust in any of the magazines or newspapers I wrote for.
He took pride in telling his story, in making sure he fulfilled what he felt was the obligation of all Holocaust survivors, which was to remind the world what had happened to the Jews. Alana knew it was a long shot, but felt obligated to pass on the request. It was her father, after all. I would decline and make my excuses. It's not good to write about your friends, for one thing.
For another, it's not the kind of article I do. I would tell her about all the people who are good at ghostwriting memoirs, Holocaust ones in particular even, and say I was happy to share a name or make an introduction. And all of that was true. But none of it was why I said no. I said no because by then, I was all Holocausted out.
I can't say what my precise breaking point was vis-a-vis the Holocaust, but here's a story I think about from that time. I went to see Schindler's List on its opening weekend at a theater in Tel Aviv, near where I was spending my gap year. Afterward, I overheard some tattooed Holocaust survivors casually compare the conditions conveyed in the movies with the conditions they remembered.
They weren't skinny enough, one said. And there was something about that moment, its excruciating discomfort, following three hours and 15 minutes of horror enrichment, that I began to wonder, what am I doing here? Don't I know enough about this? Doesn't further engagement with the Holocaust threaten to deform me? Aren't I deformed enough by it already?
What sort of inertia of inevitability brought me along to Schindler's List? Was this what counted for escape velocity? Crossing oceans to get away from Brooklyn only to end up right where my mother wanted me to be, which was a student at an Israeli university using my recreation time to watch Holocaust movies?
I realized, suddenly, that there was no future in which I would know enough Holocaust to move on from it. What the education was asking of me was to not move on. Not ever. And just like that, I thought... never again. No, I would survive my education and try to live like a real American, to enjoy the life that liberation had granted me, to see what that was like. And I did.
I attended college, where I placed out of language with all the Hebrew I knew and didn't take one Jewish history class. I drank Coca-Cola and ate hot dogs and went to the movies and the beach and fell in love and dreamed of my unlimited future.
I became a writer and turned down most of the Jewish assignments, daring anyone to tell me that it was my obligation to write about anything I didn't want to write about. I never saw a Holocaust movie again because no matter how much they were called triumphant, they are not so triumphant that they take place in a world where the Holocaust didn't happen.
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Chapter 6: What challenges do the grandchildren of survivors face?
And exactly how triumphant can you be inside the Holocaust? Not very. I was sent on stories to Europe, to Budapest, even to the very square mile where the Lindenblats fought for their survival. I wasn't writing about any of the atrocities that happened in that city. I didn't visit any of their six memorials to the Holocaust. I was writing about Antonio Banderas. We ate at the Four Seasons.
I walked along the Danube. I had done it. I had survived the harrowing past and its equally toxic undertow, which had consumed so many of the people around me. Now, all these years later, after I hung up with Alana, I walked around Covent Garden, unable to sleep, a panic welling inside me. I had not told Mr. Lindenblatt's story, the thing he asked me for forever, and now he was dying.
All the Holocaust survivors were dying. All the Holocaust survivors were dying, and at home in New York, spray-painted swastikas had been showing up all over town, and my nephews had stopped wearing their yarmulkes.
Yes, all the Holocaust survivors were dying, and we were locked in debates over whether a salute given by a newly installed government official was a Nazi dog whistle or a Nazi Nazi whistle, or maybe just an awkward wave or a weird shout-out to his buds.
What would become of stories like Mr. Lindenblatt's if the generation of mine that was supposed to inherit them had taken the privilege that came with another generation's survival and decided not to listen? What would happen to these stories when there was no one left to tell them? Mr. Lindenblatt was 87 that night I called Alana from London.
So, as I said, even if not for the cancer, inevitabilities. I called her back the next day and asked if maybe now was a good time for me to write her father's story. So here it is. An old Jewish story about the Holocaust and a man who somehow survived the pernicious, organized, and intentional genocide of the Jews. But right behind it, just two generations later, is another story.
One about the children and grandchildren who have been so malformed by the stories that are their lineage that some of them made just as eager work of running from it, only to find themselves, same as anything you run from, having to deal with it anyway. The Holocaust arrived in Budapest in 1944, where it stayed for a comparatively short nine months.
Mr. Lindenblatt remembers the day he saw the train arrive at the station, decked out with swastika flags and all kinds of fancy things. It was March 19th. He was six, and he lived near the train station. Suddenly, all around, there were posters that announced that Jews over the age of seven had to start wearing yellow stars.
The Jews had a good life in Budapest, or what counts for a good life for Jews in Europe around that time. There were some hate crimes, yes, and a quota system for allowing Jews into universities. And sure, there were the random incidents like targeted beatings in the street and at school that allowed him to grow up understanding that Jews were generally and more or less universally loathed.
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Chapter 7: How is the legacy of the Holocaust being carried forward?
She was clever, his mother. She was always figuring out how to live in the worsening reality of Budapest. But as it goes in every Holocaust story, worsening quickly got worse. It became harder to violate curfew. Mr. Lindenblatt's father was taken to a forced labor camp, Mr. Lindenblatt's mother was left to fend for the family, and seven-year-old Mr. Lindenblatt was now the man of the house.
Then one day, an order came. Every woman from the age of 16 to 56 had to report to the train station. His mother went to get her green winter coat to take some money from her pocket and leave it for them. But when it was time to put on the coat and go, she took one look at her sons and realized she couldn't leave them. She put away her coat, and Mr. Lindenblatt looked out the window.
He saw women walking, he said. They were being led to the Danube by teenagers with rifles. Once they were at the river, they would be tied up, five per group. The Hungarian Nazis would shoot one or two and then push the entire group into the river to let the current take them as the living drowned, attached to the dead.
The Nazis began knocking on doors and rounding up Jews to send down the Danube. One day, as they approached, Mr. Lindenblatt's mother, frantic, told him, You know how to daven, say the Avinu Malkenu. The Avinu Malkenu is the holiest prayer in Jewish liturgy, a prayer for God's mercy recited on high holidays. Mr. Lindenblatt began to recite the prayer.
and the Germans stopped their rounds that day at the house just short of the Lindenblatts. Months went by. The Lindenblatts moved to Mr. Lindenblatt's grandmother's house in what eventually became the Jewish ghetto in Budapest. Troops of Hungarian Nazis, called the Arrow Cross, continued to go house to house, sending Jews off to concentration camps or the more immediate death of the Danube.
Once again, as they approached the door, Mr. Lindenblatt's mother beseeched her son to recite the Avinu Malkenu. He did. He said it with all his heart, and they stopped again, again, just short of their door. Air raid sirens would ring out. There was an underground bomb shelter that allowed Jews, but only in a section that was covered absurdly by a glass roof.
Each night, Mr. Lindenblatt would watch a panorama of planes flying overhead and the bombs they were dropping. He could still see it now, as he talked about it. He was there again, and it was easy to see what he looked like as a child. His eyes lit up as he watched the light show.
In November, Mr. Lindenblatt's mother got word to his father in the labor camp that the family was in trouble at home, and so he bribed some guards and sneaked out one night. Mr. Lindenblatt's father arrived at the apartment to find his wife arguing with the Hungarian Gentile in charge of the building, who was trying to evict them. Mr. Lindenblatt's father offered his entire money belt to the man.
Mr. Lindenblatt doesn't know how much money was in there, and said to take it, that he would never ask for it back to help save his family. But the man put the belt into the kitchen stove and burned it, saying his money was useless and that he would do nothing to help the Lindenblatts. They couldn't stay, but there was also nowhere to go.
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Chapter 8: What role do personal stories play in Holocaust education?
What it must have been like to try to explain all these things to children who simply had lucked out by being born when they were born. How I should have understood that I was hearing recent history. how I should have understood that a lifetime ago is not actually a very long period of time. Those who survived left Europe, for the most part.
They fled to Israel, to South Africa, to Australia, to America. They became congressmen and industrial designers. They composed operas and pioneered electronic music. They won the Nobel Prizes for Peace and for Literature and Economics. They won the Presidential Medal of Freedom. They were best-selling authors and celebrated pianists. They helped legalize abortion. They won Oscars.
They were therapists and doctors, teachers and factory workers. My maternal grandparents, let me just remember my own family here for a minute, were named Joseph and Raya Turco. I was given my Hebrew middle name, Leah, after Joseph's sister, who was killed in the Lodz ghetto. My mother is named after his mother, Rachel, who shared her daughter's fate.
My grandmother Raya was on the last train out of Kiev before the Babi Yar massacre, the largest killing spree the Nazis carried out, murdering 33,771 people over two days. My grandfather fled Lodz to Bukhara, where he met my grandmother's mother, who hired him to sell ice cream, of all things, on the black market. When the communists caught him, they sent him to a work camp in Siberia.
He got out, married his employer's daughter, had my mother and my aunt, and emigrated to Israel in 1950 and then to America in 1962. Here, my grandfather was a house painter. My grandmother was an architect, which was what she had studied in Kiev before the war. Their children had children, and they were devoted, excellent grandparents.
They bought a dinette store called Sam the Chrome King at the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Eastern Parkway. It's something else now, but the Sam the Chrome King sign was still under the new sign, last I checked. But that's all I know. In my family, we never spoke about the war. The war was an assassin that stood over us, threatening to shoot if we looked it in the eye. But it was there.
It was there when my grandmother wouldn't leave any food on the table and combined all the remaining liquids into one glass and drank them. It was there when my grandfather told me he didn't believe in God, because what kind of God would allow a war like that to happen? In those moments, I glimpsed into the window of their suffering and saw a universe of pain with no floor or ceiling.
Some survivors, like Mr. Lindenblatt, made it their mission to make sure the world knew what happened to them. My family lived at the opposite end of the spectrum, which is no moral failing of theirs, but it probably is why I spent so long not even knowing to identify myself as from a survivor family.
This is apparently a common point of view, though it is a bad one, according to people who know better. My family being murdered during and as a result of the Holocaust makes the people in my family who made it out survivors. Often, while I was writing this article, I would hear about people who don't identify as survivors because they hid in barns or forests for weeks.
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