Most Holocaust remembrance events in Gainesville have featured talks by survivors, but now many of these victims of World War II have come to the end of their lives.
This year, something different is happening. On May 5, the Jewish Council of North Central Florida (JCNCF) will show the documentary “Traces: Voices of the Second Generation,” commemorating Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The documentary is an outgrowth of Jacksonville-based writer and producer Stacey Goldring’s writing workshops, which encourage the children and even grandchildren of Holocaust survivors to tell their stories.
Goldring, founder of the Searching for Identity project behind the documentary, says it is all about hearing the second- and third-generation voices of the adult children of Holocaust survivors. What each one has learned is that truly surviving the Holocaust involves much more than the moment of liberation from a concentration camp.
“The idea of Traces can be interpreted in many ways,” Goldring said. “But the way I see it, [these] are the traces of history that can still be seen in the present, and they are told through the voices of those you see on the screen.”
In other words, the trauma is still generational, as those who speak—themselves now in their 60s and 70s—try to make sense of the horrors of the Nazis that their parents experienced and how it impacted them as the children of their parents.
“A lot of people mentioned they missed having an extended family and missed having grandparents (as children) because they had been killed,” Goldring said. She said this sometimes led to discussions about “the pain of imagination,” like the woman who “was looking for anyone who looks like her” during a visit to the Holocaust Museum.
In other words, it is another way of feeling the loss of family.
“Genetically, we are survivors because we wouldn’t be here if our parents hadn’t survived. But I don’t think of myself as a survivor,” said retired UF professor and JCNCF treasurer Abe Goldman. “I haven’t gone through the trauma. But we are the children of survivors, and we feel a responsibility to honor and respect what they went through and what their entire generation went through.”
Goldring is a former journalist who first got involved in documenting these issues after she wrote a memoir about a woman who survived the Holocaust with her two daughters by hiding in the Dutch countryside.
Goldring took a different approach in some of the filming by opting to use graphic images to depict Holocaust horrors in a more palatable way.
“No one in the animation has a face because it is everyone’s,” Goldring said. “It is a human story, a universal story. It is man’s inhumanity to man and the resilience that, despite the horror, we have these amazing voices on screen.”
In some ways, “Traces” should start with the credits, where families—older parents and their adult children—are identified on screen with family photos that show the speakers in a still as they look today alongside old black-and-white pictures of their parents from decades past.
That closing is poignant and leaves the viewer with a sense of life interrupted.
“We are the way that the stories of our parents can be told,” said retired UF professor Ken Wald, who is also on the JCNCF board.
Wald has written a play and a book on what he learned after finding decades-old correspondence from his grandparents tucked away in a file cabinet in his parents’ home after his father died.
“The proportion of people who survived is quite small,” Wald said. “Most survivors did not want to talk about what happened to them. Today, we might call it PTSD.”
Goldring said the day after the film screens in Gainesville, it will be screening in Tel Aviv and Haifa as part of Israel’s Yom HaShoah program.
“It has worldwide appeal,” she said. “Our goal is to get to 6 million views of our movie.”
Goldring said she wants to get “Traces” into classrooms with a curriculum for students that can accompany the film, which is currently available in English and Hebrew, with Spanish and Braille to follow soon.
JCNCF executive director Linda Maurice also wants to do more around education.
“Last year, I had a Holocaust survivor speak to an eighth-grade class, and the talk was streamed live to all other eighth-grade classes within the Alachua County School system,” she said.
JCNCF now has an endowment fund to support Holocaust education, and Maurice hopes to conduct more programs year-round, including teacher training.
Yom HaShoah pays homage to the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis before and during World War II. It is a national memorial day in Israel.
If you go:
- Date: May 5
- Time: 7 p.m.
- Location: Congregation B’nai Israel, 3830 NW 16th Blvd.