The trauma of second-generation Holocaust survivors

The children of people who lived through the Holocaust – mostly Jewish – are known as second-generation survivors. In recent years, large numbers of these middle-aged men and women have been trying to make sense of their backgrounds, which have sometimes been obscured, especially where their parents have been unable to talk about their experiences. In Rita Goldberg, a teacher of comparative literature at Harvard University, they have found a new voice to cheer their quest.

At a recent London reading of her mother's biography, Motherland, Rita, 64, was unprepared for the strength of the audience response. "I was startled by it and am beginning to see how many of my generation were defined by their parents' history, even though they did not live through it."

The need for the children of survivors to understand the origins of their own demons, is, she believes, fuelling research into their traumatic family histories. "People came up to me in tears – and recognition. I met the daughter of a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, whose father refused ever to talk about it and insisted she had no right to ask questions. He said it was nonsense that she should have a part of his history, since his life and hers were separate. It was his way of coping with the past."

One can understand both views. Despite the horrific nature of the survivors' wartime experiences, it is surely unreasonable to expect their children not to delve into that past, especially when it is declared taboo. Yet how justifiable is it for the postwar generation to claim, like Goldberg, that their parents' history also belongs to them?

Those questions lie at the heart of Goldberg's history of her German-born mother, Hilde Jacobsthal – now 89 and diagnosed with Alzheimer's – and its lasting influence on herself and her two younger sisters, whose own experiences inform part of the memoir. Much of the material comes from her youngest sister Dottie's recorded interviews with their mother about her early life, which Goldberg describes as: "A huge effort, emotional and difficult for us all."

It was especially difficult for their middle sister, Susie, who perceived her parents' past as dominating their lives; she refused initially to discuss the transcribed tapes.

Goldberg admits she wrote the book partly to confront her own demons. "I'm not sure it helped, but I never wanted to remove or exorcise these ghosts. They belong to me. I only wanted to examine and understand my relationship to them."

The narrative of her mother's many near miss escapes from the Gestapo, reads like a film script. The Jacobsthal family left Germany for Holland in 1929 for economic reasons. In Amsterdam, they became close friends of Otto Frank and his daughters. Margot Frank and Hilde, both 12, were classmates and close friends: Margot's sister, eight year-old Anne, often tagged along, eager to join in. When the Franks disappeared overnight after Germany occupied Holland in 1940, Hilde's family assumed they had fled to Switzerland. Only after the war did Hilde learn that they had been hiding nearby.

Trained as a nurse in 1941, Hilde worked in a creche, the uniform protecting her from danger to some extent. Even at 16, she possessed an "almost comic" self-confidence. Once, hiding with a non-Jewish family, the Gestapo knocked at the door: Hilde put on her uniform and remonstrated with them for forgetting that the flat was in quarantine following a reported case of diphtheria.

Working opposite a theatre used by the Germans as a round-up centre for Jewish deportees, Hilde rescued some people, grabbing and steering them through the streets to the nearest underground station where they vanished into the crowd. She even pulled her parents off a deportation truck several times. But one day, Hilde got back after work to find that their home had been looted. The door bore a Nazi seal and her parents had been deported. She never saw them again.

Her brother, Jo, working with the Belgian underground, smuggled Hilde into Belgium where she remained a fugitive for 18 months. This, too, was touch and go. Forced to swim half a mile across the river Maas into Belgium, balancing her clothes on her head and supporting her brother, paralysed by cramp, she outwitted the German border patrol's dogs and searchlights.

Staying one step ahead of the Nazis, she frequently changed her appearance, name, nationality, language, religion and age, using false papers supplied by the resistance. She became, says Goldberg, "an experienced escape artist", fleeing unsafe lodgings and Nazi sympathisers, squeezing out of attic windows, running across rooftops at night, hiding beneath stores of hay and vegetables in farmers' trucks under the noses of the Germans. Fluent in German, Dutch, French and English, and blessed like her brother with fearlessness and a quick wit, she convincingly swapped one identity for another, becoming a blonde 24-year-old member of the Dutch Reformed Church one week, a devout French-speaking Catholic the next, attending Sunday mass and saying the rosary with the other women.

Goldberg believes that the innocent young Hilde Jacobsthal was lost for ever at that point. "The culmination of intense emotion and physical strain became the foundation of a new personality in my mother."

That personality was energetic, cheerful and outgoing, but Goldberg sensed her mother's capacity for joy hid a wound too deep to heal. "Learning to build a wall and compartmentalise pain and conflict helped her to survive but created a remoteness that distanced her, even from us. She buried a part of herself so deep it remains impenetrable."

Goldberg at one stage went through periods of depression, consumed by "a vague gloom, like some sort of auto-immune disorder". As the eldest child, she felt the pressure to be responsible and protective towards her mother. "The history was a crushing burden and has to some extent paralysed me."

The origins of that burden are self-evident. Her mother returned to nursing after the war and joined the British Red Cross in April 1945. Intent on finding her parents, she volunteered to work in Bergen-Belsen.

When she arrived at the liberated camp, 13,000 decomposing corpses were unburied; 60,000 inmates, barely alive, were dying at the rate of 400-1,000 a day. After begging to be allowed to look for her parents, Goldberg was the only woman permitted to enter the notorious "Horror Camp One".

Separating the living from the dead and dying, she searched faces distorted by pain and emaciation, unable to discern any remnant of human personality. Her worst fear was of not being able to recognise her parents if she found them.

Finding out that they, as well as Margot and Anne Frank and Mrs Frank, had been murdered, she knew she had lost everything: her parents, name, language, country, home and official identity.

Belsen became her home for two years. Joining the American Joint Distribution Committee, she dressed in a US uniform and oversaw the rehabilitation of survivors, including the immigration of 70 Hungarian children to Palestine. As Belsen became the largest displaced persons camp in Europe, some semblance of a community miraculously evolved: there were dances, theatre performances; exiles fell in love, got married, had children, held religious services. Hilde's good looks and vitality attracted many boyfriends and in 1946 she met her future husband, Swiss-born Dr Max Goldberg, Belsen's public health officer. In 1950, Max and Hilde emigrated to the US with 10-month-old Rita.

For the Goldbergs, staying silent about the past was never an option. As a confident extrovert and mimic, Hilde thrived on storytelling. As Goldberg observes: "Her history has what Joseph Conrad called glamour, a hypnotic magic that has transfixed succeeding generations as well as her own. Adventure, danger and strong personalities – this is the tale listeners want to hear. My sisters and I began to think that our parents' self-confidence extended to a kind of bragging about their past, and often about us as well, as if we were golden examples of their successful survival. This may be true of other children of charismatic parents."

The spotlight fell on them for other reasons. After the war, Hilde was reunited with Otto Frank, who regarded her as his surrogate daughter. To Hilde, Otto was like a father, and he became Rita's godfather and legal guardian of Hilde's daughters.

The Goldberg daughters felt that they could never do as much with their lives as their parents had. "We were measured against our grandparents' martyrdom on the one hand and our parents' exceptional courage on the other. And we failed abjectly to live up to that sublime standard."

Goldberg believes she lacks the qualities necessary for survival, a conviction that has influenced everything she has done. It was also difficult for the three sisters to handle their teenage moods. "We were ashamed even to acknowledge anger or anxiety. Those emotions felt somehow unworthy."

Ultimately, writing her mother's story turned out to be liberating for Goldberg. "By narrating her story, I have found my voice. It is helping all of us move forward."

Rita Goldberg will read at Waterstones, Hampstead, London NW3, at 7pm on 18 March