What does it mean for survivors of the Shoah and their children to be “at home” with the Holocaust? Of course, this question does not suggest that survivor-families lived comfortably with or found a sense of refuge in the memories, stories, or traumas from the Holocaust post-1945. For survivors and their children, those known as the second generation, this was most certainly not the case; these two groups, affected both directly and indirectly, were not uncommonly traumatized by the murderous events that took place during Hitler’s reign between 1933 and 1945. This question of being “at home” with the Holocaust instead refers to how the memories, stories, and traumas from the Shoah took up residence, abided with, and haunted survivors and their children alike in their homes for years to come. For both groups, their domestic lives were in significant ways shaped by the Holocaust; it came home with them, so to speak, darkly coloring how they interacted with and inhabited their domiciles. Being at home with the Holocaust thus denotes a state of domestic existence that was (and is) imbued with the enduring legacy of the Nazi regime.
My new book, At Home with the Holocaust: Postmemory, Domestic Space, and Second-Generation Holocaust Narratives (Rutgers University Press, 2025), examines the relationship between intergenerational trauma and domestic space, focusing on how Holocaust survivors’ homes became extensions of their traumatized psyches that their children “inhabited.” Analyzing second-generation (and, to a lesser extent, third-generation) Holocaust literature—such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Sonia Pilcer’s The Holocaust Kid, Elizabeth Rosner’s The Speed of Light, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated—as well as oral histories of children of survivors, my research reveals how the material conditions of survivor-family homes, along with household practices and belongings, rendered these homes as spaces of traumatic transference. As survivors’ traumas became imbued in the very space of the domestic, their homes functioned as material archives of their Holocaust pasts, creating environments that, not uncommonly, second-handedly wounded their children. As survivor-family homes were imaginatively transformed by survivors’ children into the sites of their parents’ traumas, like concentration camps and ghettos, their homes catalyzed the transmission of these traumas.
At Home with the Holocaust’s examination of the literature and oral histories of children of survivors gives voice to a number of interrelated themes and phenomena, including how members of the second generation’s relationships to their homes reveal their relationships to themselves, their parents, and the Holocaust; how their homes and material belongings contained therein spatialize, temporalize, express, and shape their inherited traumas; how survivor-family homes paradigmatically shape subsequent domestic spaces (along with space and place in general); how the home, often in complex ways, stands for the self in second-generation Holocaust literature and oral history; and how notions of home(lands) are complicated for descendants of survivors. An exploration of survivor-family homes as represented and narrated by members of the second generation moreover sheds light on how the affective impact of survivors’ memories—as expressed in their verbal and nonverbal communication—manifest, invade, and permeate their and their children’s domestic lives. It is these emotional intensities that radiate from survivors and are perceived by their children as both parties navigate time and space in their family homes. Second-generation authors and narrators give expression to this affective transmission, particularly in and through their narratives about their homes.
But although survivor-family homes are markers of haunted pasts, they are also markers of separation from those pasts—those which symbolize a severing of continuity. They stand for new starts, New-World beginnings, ruptures from the Old World, and archival containers of that which occurred after the catastrophic years of 1933–1945. Holding within them both traumatic pasts and the severing of those pasts, survivor-family homes represent the second-generation paradox: They are not only intimately connected to and gripped by the past, but they are also emphatically distant from the Shoah. This proximity and distance—this simultaneous connection and disconnection from the Holocaust—defines many second-generation lived experiences, certainly within the home but also, no doubt, without.
Throughout the literary representations of survivor-family homes and homelands analyzed in At Home with the Holocaust, along with selected oral-history discussions of domestic space, it becomes clear how space speaks. As survivors’ traumas and experiences of the Holocaust were imbued in their homes, such traumas and experiences were expressed in and by the emotional space of the second generation’s childhood and adulthood homes. Surrounded by their parents’ Holocaust pasts that found emotional, material, and spatial expression in their domestic milieus, children of survivors became aware of and subject to their inherited traumas of the Holocaust. Survivor-family homes were and are integral actants that emotionally speak to the second generation about their parents’ Holocaust experiences. This specific sort of speaking—this type of emotional, material, and spatial communication—typified and, in many cases, continues to typify many survivor-family homes, wherein the second generation have found themselves, in complicated and complex ways, at home with the Holocaust.
Lucas F. W. Wilson is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Toronto Mississauga and was formerly the Justice, Equity, and Transformation Postdoctoral Fellow at University of Calgary. He is the editor of Shame-Sex Attraction: Survivors’ Stories of Conversion Therapy (JKP Books, 20205), and he is the author of At Home with the Holocaust: Postmemory, Domestic Space, and Second-Generation Holocaust Narratives (Rutgers University Press, 2025), which received the Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award. He is also the co-editor of Emerging Trends in Third-Generation Holocaust Literature (Lexington Books, 2023). His public-facing writing has appeared in The Advocate, Queerty, LGBTQ Nation, and Religion Dispatches, among other venues. He is currently working on an edited collection about queer experiences at Christian colleges, universities, and seminaries. You can follow him on Twitter (@wilson_fw), Instagram and Threads (@lukeslamdunkwilson), and Bluesky (@lukeslamdunkwilson.bsky.social).