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Strangers in Their Own: Young Jews in Germany and Austria Today

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At the time this book was published in 1987, there were about 35,000 Jews in Germany, most of whom were children of Holocaust survivors. (Today, there are also quite a few Eastern European Jews who came after the Berlin Wall came down). Later, when I myself visited Germany in 1997, I had many conversations similar to those in this book.

"I'm proud to live with my family in Germany as a religious Jew," writes one contributor. "My bags are always packed," writes another. Between these two extremes of comfort and fear, there's a wide spectrum of feelings about what it is like to be a Jew in Central Europe today. These are 14 testimonials from German Jews, not as the public would like to see them, but how they feel in private, in the depths of their hearts and souls. A troubling, thought-provokng book that is hard to read, but impossible to put down.

As a person whose parents are Holocaust Survivors, and who was raised in the U.S., I was curious to see how it was to have been raised as a 2nd Generation Person in Germany or Austria. I always assumed I would feel "uncomfortable in my own skin", but after reading this book, it has been far worse than that for the children of Holocaust Survivors there. Not trusting their non-Jewish peers, 'suspicious' of the history of those people's parents, and just plain, feeling terribly unwelcome there. How to reside day-by-day in a place which you call 'home', but has horribly negative aspects for you? In addition, the Survivors, the parents of these children, are always worrying about their children running into anti-Semitism. Wanting to protect their children, yet realizing that that is extremely difficult to do in a country which was Nazi Germany just a mere generation back. My parents never understood how someone like themselves, Survivors, could live in Germany after the war; Most Survivors couldn't wait to flee from the place where they and their people were almost wiped out from the face of the earth. It appears that the children of Survivors there, who had no choice in where they were raised, feel much more uncomfortable than their parents; it is the most disturbing, unhealthy place for them to have been raised.I wonder how it has affected them as adults, no matter where they finally chose to live.