Intergenerational memories: Hidden children and the second generation

The relative characteristics and problems of children who hid or were hidden during the Holocaust and of survivors' children are examined and analysed. For hidden children, the chief problem was remembering the pain of experiences they wanted to forget. For survivors' children, the problem was how to retrospectively reconstruct the memory of an event in which they did not directly participate. Hidden children bore their pain in secret; survivors' children felt excluded from a world of their parents they could never know. What both groups shared was a silencing of memory and a denial of recognition by their parents.