ALYS KREMER A LEGACY FOR THE SECOND GENERATION The words of Psalm 137 recall to me not only the Je- rusalem Temple’s destruction and the Babylonian exile, but the exile of Auschwitz, with the mocking Arbeit macht frei over its gates and its inmate orchestra, com- pelled to accompany the nightmarish moments of that hell. Jewish history has long been one of exile. Over and over again, we have been forced to con- sider this psalm’s question: ‘‘How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” and it has become our central struggle. In Israel we see with great clarity the continuity of Jewish history, the link between Masada and the ghetto uprisings. In Jerusalem, on June 14-18, 1981, thousands of survivors of the Nazi attempt to de- stroy our people returned from this tragic exile to pass on to their children the need for remembrance and the the legacy of their faith. I am the daughter of Chanah Goldfarb and Michael Kremer, one of the thousand children from twenty-seven countries who joined their parents for this extraordinary event, the World Gather- ing of Jewish Holocaust Survivors. The World Gathering had many purposes. It was, above all, a time to cherish the individual memories of murdered mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers, now called “‘the six million,’ and the memory of the life de- stroyed with them. Despite the emphasis by the media on the search for family and friends, all who attended knew how painfully remote the possibility of such re- unions was. The sight of the meeting hall with its home- made posters and messages naming Polish streets and towns now empty of Jews, was a heartbreaking and embittering one for me. There would be no one from my mother’s tiny, destroyed shtet/ to remark on family resemblances. My aunts and uncles who died as chil- dren would not appear. At Yad Vashem I placed wild flowers where the memorial said ‘“‘Treblinka’’ and ‘*Auschwitz.’? A few months before, I had heard Elie Wiesel say to a Second Generation audience that our cemeteries are in our hearts, and our hearts are cemeteries. But the World Gathering was not only a Yizkor. I sensed a deep desire among those who attended to acknowledge proudly the resistance in their very survi- val, and to end years of isolation from a world, often including the Jewish community, which found their suf- fering too difficult to face. The survivors laughed and sang as they felt the joy of speaking Yiddish and joined those with whom they shared so much. They exchanged pictures of grandchildren. I met people from Bialystok and Grodno who were with my father in the ghetto and in the camps and who knew my parents when they first married. Every day I marveled at the detailed childhood memories of home and school that were exchanged, so clear and so haunting. A feeling of redemption was in The Bialystoker Memorial Book the air. The final ceremony of the World Gathering was held at the Wailing Wall. As the pilgrimage ended, the survivors passed on their legacy to the younger genera- tion in six languages. In response, we promised never to forget the world’s indifference to the fate of Europe’s Jews, and to assure that such destruction will never again befall any people. The legacy recited in Russian reminded us that many are still not free to live as Jews. For the last time, we sang together the Partisans’ song and the Hatikvah, and were privileged to witness six rabbis blowing ram’s horns, evoking a tribal past that for a moment transcended a thousand years of dispersion. During the World Gathering, the survivors’ chil- dren met to form an international network of Second Generation groups. Their purpose is to preserve Yid- dish culture and record the Jewish experience during the Holocaust. As I listened to the discussions among the Israeli, American and European children of survi- vors, I realized that we face many of the same conflicts Our parents confronted as modern young Jews in Poland in the 1930’s, even though we do not live in societies aS oppressive and openly anti-Semitic as that one. We too must confront the issues of our self-esteem and identity as Jews, and the meaning of life in the Diaspora and in the Holocaust, for, unlike the wistful Jewish socialists who tried to claim their rights as Pol- ish citizens, we have full knowledge of the murderous potential of civilized nations. We have inherited a world that still turns to anti- Semitism for solace. We can cheish no illusions about reason and culture as a refuge. Today there are people, even academics and “revisionist” historians, who deny the genocide of Europe’s Jews. There are also those more respectable voices that state Jews were not the only victims of the Nazis, so why hold our suffering as special or sacred? We must never forget thet Jews died not for their acts or politics but for the accident of their birth. And we, as children who know firsthand our par- ents’ heroism, can take the lead in asserting that oppression cannot be blamed on the victim.