Second Generation – The things I didn’t tell my father

Script by Michel Kichka - Art by Michel Kichka

I am a child of the Second Generation of the Shoah.
It took me over thirty years to understand.
A childhood burdened by the silence of traumatized parents who spoke in Yiddish when they didn’t want their children to understand.
A house where the ghosts of my grandparents and my aunts roamed, that my father carried with him everywhere, although trying to look good in a society that wanted to turn the page and build the future.
And then one fine day, mourning my little brother who had just ended his own life, my father began to speak. It came out like a dam that suddenly breaks, causing a huge flood.
I couldn’t listen. It was too late. It took me years to be able to do so, and then to agree to read his book.
In this double trauma, his and mine, between nightmares and anxiety, there are also some funny moments, almost therapeutic releases.
Second Generation is not a settling of accounts with my father, or with History. It is an attempt to explain the Second Generation through accurate anecdotes and memories. It is trying to explain a life that became survival.