Verified by 
I have been travelling these past few weeks. I am now writing from Israel. I arrived here from Germany where I attended a meeting of the International Work Group on Death, Dying and Bereavement. One of the plenary sessions was devoted to the consequences of the Holocaust for later generations. One question that came up related to how parents who survived these horrendous mass killings raised children in the new families they developed. One thing that I took away from these presentations and the discussions that followed was how little, if at all, parents talked to their children about what had happened. This silence left the children with a gap in their history, and to some extent a sense of distrust of the world around them. As I listened I realized that their parents were trying to protect their children. There were no words to describe or explain the horrors they had gone through. It seemed to me, as an outsider, that by being silent they tried to push the past aside, and hopefully leave the pain behind. A conspiracy of silence developed, but in many ways the past is always there.
I was describing this conspiracy of silence to a colleague here in Israel. She described her own mother’s experience as a young child. Her mother had not been told, until many years later, that her father had died. Her mother told her that the sense of his loss is a pain that lingers, 70 years later, as a dark hole in her chest. My colleague could understand the problems Holocaust survivors had in telling their children what had happened to them; but she thought that most parents today are able to be more open, so that her mother’s experience would not be repeated. I think today that silence is displayed differently, rarely is the death of a parent or sibling withheld from a child, but in many ways there is a silence that still lingers.
I found in my e-mail recently a piece written by Tina Chery, whose son had been murdered. She was writing it to explain why she walks on Mother’s Day with other parents whose children were murdered. This is the 16th Mother’s day since her son Louis Brown was killed when he inadvertently walked into the cross fire of rival gangs in his neighborhood. Hers is a different tragedy than what happened to survivors of the Holocaust, but nonetheless involving violence caused by human disrespect for others. As I read what she wrote I see that she is talking about a silence that she tried to maintain, as she fought facing her grief and the pain when she confronted what she had lost. She did not hide the fact of the death from her other children but she was trying to hide her grief, in some way, from herself as well as from them.
I quote what she wrote:
“Our children are grieving and we as adults are not equipped to know what to do and how to help; our children often feel the need to protect us and we as parents believe that we are protecting them by putting on a MASK of “I am FINE”
In the first few years after Louis was killed I remember not wanting to do anything or go anywhere with my family; we would make plans and when the time came I would cancel, feeling guilty for moving on and leaving Louis behind while at the same time not being there for my two babies. I remember my daughter at age 5 asking me if I still loved her and her brother. That day hearing her ask me that question and watching her sad face got me out of my trance.
How could I forget my children; they too needed to know me. I prayed to transform my pain and anger into power and action. The Mother’s Walk for Peace was born. I realized that if I was feeling this way how many mothers were in the same situation.
My children are my teachers not my friends. Louis in his young life, taught me to be a good mother. Alexandra and Allen today are teaching me to be a better mother, a mother who has had to learn to grieve the death of her oldest son while at the same time finding joy in celebrating the life of her two living children.”
We have not yet found a way to end the violence that still fills our lives in so many ways. But is our silence about our grief only making it worse? We all grieve, we feel the pain of a loss. In children it may look different than it does in adults, but they are grieving too. How do we learn to respect each other’s pain as we recognize our children’s pain as well?
