This is not a typical Holocaust memoir.

Taken. Numbered. Survived. tells my mother’s story, but it also does something more. It brings together her recorded testimony, surviving documents, archival records, and the historical evidence confirming what happened to her and her family.

I wrote the book not only to preserve her experience, but also to explain why that history continues to matter—to me, to my family, and to the generations that followed. This is why I felt compelled to write it.

I have tried to tell my mother’s story through her testimony, the historical record, and the documents that survived. The facts matter—for my mother, for the millions who were murdered, and for the families and communities that were destroyed.

They also matter because Holocaust denial, distortion, and indifference grow when memory weakens and truth is treated as optional. What follows, however, is not historical analysis. It is the reflection of a son who has spent much of his life trying to understand how his mother’s experiences affected the family that came after her.

As a child, I could not fully comprehend what my mother had survived. I did not see Auschwitz, forced labour, starvation, or a death march. I saw a woman raising a family and trying to create a normal life after everything that had once seemed normal had been destroyed.

Only later did I recognize that liberation did not end every consequence of what had happened. The camps had been left behind, but memory, fear, and loss entered the life she built afterward.

Intergenerational Trauma: The Legacy That Followed

I have come to believe that intergenerational trauma is real. I do not say this as a clinical conclusion or an abstract theory. I say it because of the ways my mother’s experiences have affected how I see the world, understand risk, worry about the future, and think about protecting my family.

Intergenerational trauma does not mean that children of survivors experienced what their parents endured. I was not deported, forced into a cattle car, starved, imprisoned, or separated from my parents on a selection ramp. Those experiences belonged to my mother.

Trauma can nevertheless move through a family. It can be carried through silence, caution, fear, protectiveness, and subjects that are avoided. Children observe what frightens their parents, what makes them watchful, and what memories they find difficult to express. We learn not only from what is said, but also from what remains unspoken.

My mother tried to protect us from the horrors of her past. She gave us a childhood that was not governed by what had happened to her, and that was an extraordinary gift. Yet even when the full history was not discussed, we understood........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)