Answering the Wicked Child: Three Generations, One Holocaust Story

On the second night of the three-day, three-generation Holocaust speaker event I was hosting at the Hillel of UC Davis and Sacramento, I found myself being interviewed by a journalism student for her class project. She asked me if I thought third-generation Holocaust survivors were just as important to hear from as first-generation Holocaust survivors, and why. Instead of answering her question with the necessary cliches, I heard myself, miraculously, talking about Passover’s wicked child.

“There are four children we talk about during Passover,” I said, watching as polite incredulity dawned in the student’s eyes. “The wise child, the wicked child, the simple child and the child who does not know how to ask. We call the wicked child wicked because the question he asks is how it came to pass that ‘they’ were liberated from Egypt — ‘they,’ not ‘we.’ By using the word ‘they,’ he alienates himself from the community, sets himself apart. But we’re not separate; as Jews, we are all affected by what came to pass in the generation before us.”

I was initially pleased by this thematic l’dor v’dor I’d come up with on the fly. After all, my whole intent in creating and overseeing this three-day event, in which speakers from three generations of Holocaust survivors — starting with great-grandchild Shachar-Lee Yaakobovitz, to child Tamara Kraus, and finally to LA-based Holocaust survivor Henry Slucki — came to speak at the Hillel of UC Davis and Sacramento, was to illuminate how antisemitism continually afflicted the generations. That, for any and every Jew, there was no separation from the community because one generation’s woes were another’s. It was kefitzat haderech, a contraction of the road between enormous distances of time and space.

But after I came back home that night, I was troubled by my mention of the wicked child. Why was it that, when asked about my feelings of these Holocaust survivors and their descendants, my mind had immediately turned to this secular son? The black sheep whom I had spent the past 23 years of life disdaining, first subconsciously and then explicitly, for his desire to remove himself from the sea of Jewish memory?

I constructed the speaker line-up like Russian nesting dolls, with the youngest and smallest generation coming first. Shachar-Lee Yaakobovitz’s presentation on Jan. 27 centered around her great-grandmother, Bergen Belsen survivor Hannah bat Ita Yaakobovitz. During the Q&A portion of her lecture, Yaakobovitz, a regional manager for StandWithUs, was asked how she felt about Jews “losing the propaganda war” and what that boded for modern Jewry.

“We are losing the propaganda war,” she acknowledged, “but our goal is not propaganda. It is the truth and telling the Jewish story … as truthfully and authentically as possible.”

“We are losing the propaganda war … but our goal is not propaganda. It is the truth and telling the Jewish story … as truthfully and authentically as possible.” – Shachar-Lee Yaakobovitz

Tamara Kraus, who spoke of her late father Michael Kraus on Jan. 28, echoed a similar sentiment. Michael Kraus, a former “Birkenau Boy,” survived Auschwitz and Mauthausen, and was a loving but relatively private father who reserved the bulk of his story for his diaries, which he started immediately upon liberation.

“It is impossible,” Michael Kraus wrote in the year 1945, “to describe the horrors of the concentration camps, because no one can feel, from mere words, the real hardships and horrors as they actually occurred. Surely no one could believe the SS methods if he did not experience them on his own skin. Who could feel with us? Who could understand us?”

“This was always something I knew,” said Tamara, answering his question some 80 years in the future. “That my father had gone through something terrible when he was young … that something too terrible to imagine, too terrible to understand had happened.”

Could even the mysticism of kefitzat haderech collapse this distance? Tamara, Shachar-Lee and Michael were all compelled to try, Michael through his writings — including the book “Drawing the Holocaust” — and Tamara and Shachar-Lee through speaking of their loved ones’ experiences. I thought again of the wicked son. Did he use the word ‘they’ instead of ‘us’ because he felt that he couldn’t co-opt the pain of his ancestors? How could I make it apparent to him that he needed to be presumptuous, needed to subsume their pain into his own body, because individual suffering would not last beyond the body who absorbed the blows, but communal suffering would last in perpetuity?

Ninety-one-year-old Holocaust survivor Henry Slucki, who had a series of narrow escapes from deportation and was one of only 122 children to embark on Eleanor Roosevelt’s American Kindertransport program in 1942, wrapped up Hillel’s Holocaust speaker series on Feb. 1.

“In today’s world, it is each person’s responsibility to prevent another Holocaust,” he said to his audience of 50. It seemed a fitting answer to the wicked child, to his — and my — questions about the nature of generational trauma. Time may not be permeable, but responsibility is.

Lyric Niv is an Ezra Springboard Fellow at the Hillel of UC Davis and Sacramento. Born and raised in LA, she graduated from UC Berkeley in 2023 with a degree in English literature. She has written for Cultured Magazine, HeyAlma, The Daily Californian and Magenta Magazine.