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CAPE TIMES September 20, 2005

"Holocaust casts long shadows on families of survivors"

The effects of the Holocaust on survivors and their descendants is the focus of a new documentary.

Nanette Konig and her daughter Elizabeth Kahn spoke to Robyn Cohen about the project.

Nanette Konig attended school with Anne Frank in Holland. She was one of the last people to speak to Anne before she died in Bergen Belsen. It was "pure coincidence" that they connected in the concentration camp, muses Nanette on the line from Johannesburg.

We don't dwell on her association with Anne Frank as she tells me about the documentary Forever After: Voices of Descendants of the Holocaust from around the world.

The film was conceptualized by her daughter, Elizabeth Kahn, after she attended a survivors conference in Houston three years ago.

This conference was dedicated to child survivors. Children - defined up to 18 years - are often not given the same credence as adult survivors, notes Elizabeth. Children are young and resilient and will get over their trauma quickly - or so people think.

The reality is very different. Long after the events, there is the ripple effect which shapes the dynamics of family relationships.

Elizabeth felt that what she was hearing at the conference was framed very much from the perspective of survivors in the USA.

She wanted to share the story of survival with a global audience and with an audience that wasn't exclusively Jewish. Elizabeth's exposure to other cultures has undoubtedly coloured her world view. She has lived in several countries including Hong Kong as she schlepped around the world with her husband.

The Forever After production team has filmed in Brazil and Argentina. They hope to do Australia and Europe. It is envisaged that in addition to a feature documentary, they will also make shorter films which can be used in tolerance education programmes.

Elizabeth's daughter, Helene, is also part of the team. Elizabeth's vision for this project is to examine the post-war story: what happened to the survivors after the war? Most people listen to the story of the survivor and "it ends happily ever after."

In real life, things are rarely that simple. Survivors who lost everything - family, possession, culture, language - had to adapt in their adopted countries where they often encountered racism and dictatorships. Survivors somehow had to put the horrors of their past behind them and get on with living.

As the child of a survivor, Elizabeth, 51, had first-hand experience of the complexities and guilt which feed into the experiences of survivors. Her mother, Nanette, was born in Amsterdam in 1929 to a Dutch father and a British mother - who was born in Kimberly. But that's another story.

Nanette had a happy childhood in an upper middle class Jewish environment in Holland. This was ruptured by the Nazi invasion and occupation of Holland in May 1940.

Nanette and her family were deported in September 1943 to Westerbork, the Dutch transit camp, and then to Bergen Belsen in February 1944. Nanette's parents and brother, Bernard, did not survive. When Bergen Belsen was liberated in April 1945, she was suffering from typhus and tuberculosis and spent three years recovering in a sanatorium.

Living with family from her mother's side, she worked as a bilingual secretary in a merchant bank. She met John Konig, a Hungarian-born engineer, who lost his parents shortly after the war and was already preparing to move to Brazil to join his mother's family there.

They were married in July 1953 and went to Brazil, where they had their first child, Elizabeth. They moved to the US for a couple of years, where their second child, Judith, was born. They then moved back to Sao Paulo in Brazil in 1959 and have lived there ever since.

Nanette remained a homemaker until her children grew up and married. In the '80s, she began to study education and was awarded a degree in economics by the Catholic University of Sao Paulo in 1986.

Nanette is regularly called on to speak of her wartime experiences, especially because of her association with Anne Frank. In May of this year she was invited to make the keynote address at the opening ceremony of the Anne Frank Exhibition in Calgary.

Reading through the key events of Nanette's life, I am drawn to the fact that she had just turned 16 when Bergen Belsen was liberated and that she was 24 when she got married and started her own family. Less than a decade after her family was murdered, she nurtured her own family unit. What was that like? At what age did her mother talk to her, I ask Elizabeth.

Without hesitation, Elizabeth answers that she cannot recall a specific time. As far as she is concerned, her mother has always been open with her and discussed her experiences. Elizabeth's father was not a survivor and Elizabeth ventures that her mother used her as a confidant to spare him.

Later on, when Nanette comes to the phone, I pose the same question, telling her that Elizabeth said there was dialogue from an early age. "No, I did not talk to her when she was very young," answers Nanette firmly. As this conversation is taking place on the phone, I am unable to see her _expression.

"This (talking) really started when she was a teenager, not as a young child. No, you can't speak to a young child of these things. It is impossible to imagine and understand this," she utters, her voice trailing off.

After a pause, she adds: "I have no doubt that certain aspects of my behaviour must have affected my family."

Nanette tells me that her younger daughter has been interviewed and filmed for the film and that she says that Nanette never really enjoyed life.

"That's interesting," murmurs Nanette, "where - how - do you start enjoying life (after the Holocaust)?"

Clearly, she is not whitewashing her interaction with her family and is able to confront the collision of her perceptions and theirs.

Post war there were no grief counselors: "You had to cope as best as you could. My own relatives in England did not have much patience. People thought we were mad so we didn't talk." Survivors generally spoke among themselves and not for an audience.

How did she manage to make the transition from child survivor to being a wife and mother in such a brief period? "I wasn't convinced I wanted to have a family. I did question it - what was the point? But, life's circle will go on. It must."

The circle does go on but undoubtedly the loss pervaded the family unit in Brazil.

"Yes, loss did pervade everything," admits Elizabeth. "We tried to lead a normal life. I felt that everything that was important was inconsequential because of my mother's experiences. By the time I was fifteen, I was suicidal. I felt like I was living in a terrible world."

Therapy helped her to start the healing process. She began digging into Jewish history and Holocaust literature.

Factoring into her own experiences of being the child of a survivor was the social context: "Growing up in Brazil (in the '70s) we were living under a dictatorship. If you made statements against the regime, you would be imprisoned without trial." Nanette did not want her offspring to get involved.

In fleeing regimes, survivors like her mother were faced with more tyranny. Jews in Brazil and elsewhere converted to save further persecution. Identity issues are addressed, she says, in the testimonies filmed in Brazil and Argentina and she is excited about tackling issues of apartheid in this country - how survivors dealt with legislated racism and the inevitable friction it led to amongst survivors and their children.

•There will be a public event at the Cape Town Holocaust Centre on Tuesday September 27 at 8pm, at which both Nanette Konig and Elizabeth Kahn will speak. Information 021 462-5553.