When Sarah Fishman traveled to Israel with JEWISHcolorado’s Young Adult Division (YAD) in May, it was the first time she had experienced life in Israel during war. She recalls feeling the ground shaking from bombings in Gaza and hearing gunfire, even as Israelis went about their normal daily business.
When she returned from the trip, Fishman started having panic attacks. For her, traveling to Israel had reignited multi-generational fallout from her family’s history.
“This trip felt so important to me because being Jewish is such a huge part of my identity,” she says. “Right now, in the world, it does not feel safe to be Jewish, and I can see a lot of parallels between 1930s Germany and where we are headed today.”
Fishman doesn’t make that comparison casually. She knows whereof she speaks. She is the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor, the third generation to live with trauma that has its roots in Lukow, Poland. Fishman’s grandmother, Eta Wrobel, had 10 siblings. Eta was the only survivor of the family.
“My grandmother’s stories about the war were very much a part of the culture of our family,” Fishman says. “The first story I ever heard was how she jumped out of a second-story window to escape the Nazis, so her experiences have been part of my world as long as I have had a world.”
Fishman’s grandmother survived the war, but she lived with the psychological scars of what she had experienced her entire life. Today, Fishman will tell you that she carries “generational trauma” in her DNA.
“My grandmother had to be tough to survive,” Fishman says. “She could show compassion to the people she loved, but she was quick to anger. I think she could not access her grief because it would have killed her.”
In an effort to connect with other people who understand her life experiences, Fishman has joined four other founding board members to start “3GCo,” the Colorado chapter of Living Links. Living Links is the first nationwide organization created to empower grandchildren of Holocaust survivors.
A grandmother’s stories
Many children grow up with family lore about joyful times. Sarah Fishman grew up with her grandmother’s stories of horror.
Eight of Eta’s siblings and her mother were rounded up in two separate actions, destined for death at Treblinka. One of her sisters, who was pregnant, was beaten to death by the SS in front of her family on a train platform because she disobeyed orders and stood to find her husband.
Eta with young Sarah
Eta escaped her family’s fate twice. During the first action, she was considered fit to continue working in a factory. During the second action, she hid in an attic. Eventually, Eta and her father joined a group of partisans fighting the Nazis in the forests of Poland and Germany. When Eta was shot in the leg, she dug the bullet out herself.
Eta tried to write a book about her wartime experiences multiple times. During her first two attempts at writing the book, she had a heart attack both times.
“I think her body was just saying to her, ‘You cannot go there,’” says Fishman. “And when she finally wrote the book, it was not emotional. It feels removed from the intensity of the experience because I think that’s the only way she could write about it.”
The stories also had a lasting effect on Fishman. When she first visited Auschwitz, she looked around at everyone who was crying and realized that she felt nothing.
“I think I had been desensitized,” she says. “For many people, it was the first time they had really learned about the atrocities of the war. I have known about this since I was born.”
A grandchild’s legacy
After the war, Eta reconnected with a distant cousin. He was the only family she had left, and she was so scared of losing him, she married him. The two were placed in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany where Fishman’s mother, Shain Fishman, was born, a stateless baby who would become a U.S. citizen at the age of six and the mother of Sarah at the age of 46.
“I think the trauma my grandparents experienced informed how they parented my mother and that informed how my mother parented me,” Fishman says. “My grandmother and my mother were always ready for a fight, but my mom has done a lot of healing and has worked on this issue.”
Fishman believes that the trauma Eta experienced affected her nervous system on a cellular level and that impact has been carried through future generations.
“I react with fear much more quickly than Jews who are not descendants of Holocaust survivors,” says Fishman. “I live in a constant state of fear and anger, and I use humor as a coping mechanism, much like my grandmother did. Everything that was in my grandmother’s cellular make-up is in the core of me.”
Living Links
Fishman recalls that at one point during the YAD trip to Israel, the group met with a woman whose husband was an October 7th hostage and his body was still being held in Gaza.
“She told us this story like she was telling the plot of a movie,” Fishman says. “It reminded me of my grandmother who, whenever she tried to access the personal part of her story, had a heart attack. This is the dissociation that can happen with trauma.”
Eta Wrobel died in 2008 at the age of 92. But in her granddaughter, her courage lives on, as evidenced by Fishman’s determination to go to Israel and bear witness.
“I wanted to be an example of Jewish people in the world,” she says. “I wanted to see with my own eyes what was happening. That was important to me because of everything my family has been through.”
In Fishman’s case, when she began to feel intense anxiety after she returned from Israel, she could step outside herself and look at how her body was reacting to the fear. She has also taken action, working to bring together other Holocaust grandchildren in Colorado’s new chapter of Living Links.
“It’s comforting to be around people who don’t think that talking about the Holocaust is a shock,” Fishman says. “There are people who say they are tired of hearing about the Holocaust. It’s just really nice to be with people who say, ‘The same thing happened to my grandparents.’”
For more information about 3GCo, please contact 3gcolorado@gmail.com or fill out this form to be added to the mailing list.