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The picture on the book cover was taken in Norrköping in 1956. Ernst and Ili Silberstein smile for the camera with the children Margit and Willy among them. The parents managed to get out alive from the camps in Siberia, respectively, the typhus barracks of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. In addition, they had managed to reach Sweden after four years of separation.
In the book, Margit Silberstein writes about how she and her little brother became the salvation of the parents and gave them meaning. They gave children infinite love, but is “all-encompassing love just good? It can give self-esteem, but it can also consume guilt, ”he writes in the book.
“Children of the Holocaust” is a story that Silberstein has carried with him for decades, but has not been ready to write until now.
– I’ve thought about this for as long as I can remember, he says on the phone from Långholmen’s house in Stockholm.
– My ambition was to include different aspects of my parents, their history and the heavy backpacks they were carrying that also became my weight. But also Judaism in me and belonging to a minority.
How did you proceed?
– I began to twist the threads of the story when I translated and read all the letters from dad to my mother, which captivated me very much. I love him even more now, he says laughing.
The Silberstein family. From left to right: Ernst Silberstein, sons Margit and Willy and mother Ili Silberstein.
Photo: Private.
Ernst Silberstein sent many heartfelt letters to his then future wife Ili. He wrote about his longing for her, but also about pain and his sometimes shaky faith in God.
“Now we are two orphans, we will meet again. You are my mother, my father, my dear little sister, my little brothers, my older brothers, you will soon be my wife ”, he promises in one of them.
– Mother was central in our family. She was clear and said what she thought the whole time. Dad was quieter and in the background. But through his letters during these years, he became passionate and very powerful. He got through his envelope on them somehow.
During her teens, Margit Silberstein struggled to remain loyal to her parents’ dreams and beliefs, and to break free, to rebel. She got engaged to a non-Jewish boyfriend, whom her parents don’t want in the family.
– That was very difficult. I wanted to be like all the other Norrköping youth in the world outside my home. But also be mom and dad’s girl and make them happy because they were so sad and fragile.
They were “perforated of everything they endured ”, he writes.
And as the son of Holocaust survivors, it was almost impossible not to always be kind, that’s how he felt. It was a tug of war that caused me a lot of guilt, says Silberstein, pointing out that today he is a more complete person.
He likes the two worlds that he has brought with him and today he has no problem dealing with them.
“It felt good to write about Mom and Dad struggling with their lives, which they did so well anyway,” says Margit Silberstein.
Photo: Beatrice Lundborg
– That is probably the case of many Jews in Sweden: you find your way, you cling to certain things and you defend them more today. I go to synagogue and fast on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, although some people find it strange: “Don’t you eat in a completely day?”.
His focus on how children born after the Holocaust grew up in his shadow is a revelation.
– I’m glad you said that. I was afraid people would say “well, now there will be another book on the Holocaust, haven’t we had enough?” But I wanted people to know that we exist and still carry the heavy burden. That we have it in our bloodstream. It did not end with the liberation of Auschwitz, he says and continues:
– As a journalist, I could be standing on TV and looking cool, but you don’t know what backpack I’m wearing.
Sometimes she listens to people Let’s say that the years of war and death camps are far behind us today. That was then and now it’s over.
– But that is not the case. For my two adult sons, Joel and Markus, of course, it is not as heavy as it is for me. But a catastrophe like the Holocaust still trickles down to those who came after.
Today, unlike in the past, there is greater knowledge about trauma, crisis and effective therapies.
– Yes, it probably could have helped Dad with his blues and pain and also Mom to be able to sit down and talk to a professional. But there was no such thing in the world they came from, he says and continues:
– However, for a brief period in my twenties, I went to a psychologist, but it didn’t work, so I quit. But when I later started talking to people with the same background as me, we quickly formed small conversation groups. It was a milestone.
Margit Silberstein has worked as a journalist since the mid-1970s, including at Svenska Dagbladet, Göteborgs-Posten, Sverige Radio, and Sveriges Television.
Photo: Beatrice Lundborg
The American Author Helen Epstein’s collected testimony in the 1970s was another. Their stories came from children who, like Margit Silberstein, had tried to comfort and support their parents.
– Epstein’s book was fantastic. It became a movement among the second generation of Jews in many countries and served as a liberation for me. This is often the case, you are never completely alone with your experiences.
How do you think your children will relate to their background in the future?
– When I speak to them, I understand how deep it is also in them. I was so moved when my only son said that with our family roots severed, he has not been able to get to know a large part of me and my background, which is his family. It may not be there as a wound in him, but as a hole, a void, think aloud.
At the same time, he believes that pain that does not affect oneself directly will slowly disappear.
– The pain is still so strong in me, and I have involuntarily passed certain things to my children, but for them I think that in the end it will not hurt so much.
He visited Auschwitz in 1995, where his mother was detained before moving to Bergen-Belsen.
Auschwitz had been in my imagination all these years and when I went there I was quite old. The barracks, fences, and barbed wire were still there and it was somehow nice to get there and see everything, he says.
She visited the camp in company with a man who had been a prisoner at Auschwitz as a child.
– He told me in a very objective way how it had worked and the smells there, he says.
The ride itself wasn’t a huge revelation for her, but Margit Silberstein describes how something still fell into place.
– I thought later that it could have been good for my mother, who passed away the year before, to have come with me. But I really don’t think I had the strength.
In December 2019, she also traveled to the Romanian cities where her parents grew up. In Satu Mare, there was nothing left of the city as it seemed when his mother grew up there. In the small nearby Nusfalau, where Ili Silberstein was born, he still found in the town hall a lumberjack with all the names of the relatives written on it.
– Navigating through it was very strong. Seeing my grandfather’s name and all the other names written made it more real that they really existed.
Your parents, your children and your brother’s lost all family ties backwards. All of his relatives died during World War II.
– That’s something that makes me cry so easily. That pain will never pass. Unfortunately my kids weren’t allowed to see their grandfather and they were very young when my mother passed away, but my little brother Willy’s family and mine are very close. We have stayed that way for all the years.
In the book, he returns to his double worlds. How have they changed over the years?
– I enter and leave my different worlds, I am of course Swedish, a Swedish Jew. Sometimes I feel more comfortable being Jewish. It is a feeling that cannot be explained, it is not a problem, it just is.
Readers say Margit Silberstein’s 190-page story has a kind of warmth, despite all the darkness. Some they recognize in parts of the story.
– It was nice to see it because I was afraid that parts of my book would be misinterpreted. The reason my mother and father cared so much about my marrying a Jew was that the Jewish heritage would be passed on.
In the last word of “Children of the Holocaust” She claims that her book reveals itself and makes her vulnerable, but that it must be written this way to reach those who read it. It is written for his parents, for their honor, he emphasizes. They were two “wounded” people who were deprived of almost everything in an evil machine, but still managed to move on and live a decent life.
– Miraculously, my mother and father were able above all to overcome incurable pain and give love.
What has it meant to you to tell your family’s story?
– It felt good to write about the efforts of mom and dad with their lives, which they did so well anyway, he responds.
– But also to tell you that people like me still exist around you.
Read more:
Anders Rydell: The memory of the Holocaust must be protected
Mats Greiff: Malmö is the best place for a museum about the Holocaust
