The Sunday Read: ‘This Is the Holocaust Story I Said I Wouldn’t Write’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 4 May 2025

⏱️ 67 minutes

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Summary

When Taffy Brodesser-Akner became a writer, Mr. Lindenblatt, the father of one of her oldest friends, began asking to tell his story of survival during the Holocaust in one of the magazines or newspapers she wrote for. He took pride in telling his story, in making sure he fulfilled what he felt was the obligation of all Holocaust survivors, which was to remind the world what had happened to the Jews. His daughter Ilana knew it was a long shot but felt obligated to pass on the request — it was her father, after all. Taffy declined because after a life hearing about the Holocaust, she said, she was “all Holocausted out.” But, years later, when she learned of Mr. Lindenblatt’s imminent passing, Taffy asked herself what would become of stories like his if the generation of hers that was supposed to inherit them had taken the privilege that came with another generation’s survival and decided not to listen? So here it is, an old Jewish story about the Holocaust and a man who somehow survived the pernicious, organized and intentional genocide of the Jews. But right behind it, just two generations later, is another story, one about the children and grandchildren who have been so malformed by the stories that are their lineage that some of them made just as eager work of running from it, only to find themselves, same as anything you run from, having to deal with it anyway.

Transcript

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0:00.0	My name is Taffey Brodesser Echner, and I'm a writer for The New York Times Magazine.
0:12.4	Recently, one of my oldest friends told me that her father was dying.
0:16.5	I've known her father since I was 15 years old, and he has been asking me for years to tell his
0:24.0	story about how he survived the Holocaust. And I always said no. I said no because I felt that I had
0:36.1	grown up inundated with Holocaust stories.
0:39.5	I sort of hate telling Holocaust stories.
0:42.7	I hate the Holocaust as a reasonable person should.
0:46.8	And part of my coming of age was to leave the Holocaust behind,
0:50.9	was to figure out who I was as an American, as a Jew, without this sort of
0:58.6	story that tends to follow Jewish Americans around. So I resisted. I would put him off
1:08.6	or say no. And then I found out he was dying. He had cancer.
1:15.7	And I was so sad about it.
1:19.4	I felt like, what have I been doing not telling this man's story?
1:26.4	He was seven years old for the duration of the time that the Nazis occupied Budapest,
1:32.8	which is where he was from.
1:34.5	And he was 87 when I found out he was sick.
1:39.7	It created a sort of panic in me that if the youngest people who survived Nazi persecution were dying,
1:47.2	then there would be nobody to tell these stories. And so I decided that I would.
1:57.7	So I started writing the story and people would ask me, oh, I heard you're writing a Holocaust
2:05.6	survivor story. What camp was he in? And the man I'm writing about lived in Budapest and was sent
2:14.7	into hiding in several different places. But he was not in a concentration camp.
2:20.4	And people were strange about that.
	...

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