A Child of the Second Generation
My name is Martin Herskovitz. I began writing poetry in 2000 as a member of a mail group for Second Generation – Children of Holocaust Survivors. In the course of a few years I had amassed about 60 poems about the Second Generation experience.
My poetry has been published in Midstream, Maggid, and Poetica magazines and in the e-journal for Holocaust Survivors and Second Generation called ”If Not Now.”
I have decided to place the poems I have written, as well as some articles and presentations, on this website in the hope that other Second Generation can find here insight, support, and empathy. Hopefully it will give them a feeling of being a little less alone and that someone else understands growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust.
My parents come from the same town in what was then known as Czechoslovakia (now the Ukraine) near the Carpathian Mountains. My father came to the United States before World War II. My mother was taken to Auschwitz in the Spring of 1944 and survived a series of camps until being released to Sweden in 1945. From there she made her way to America.
I was born in Chicago in 1955 and moved to Los Angeles with my family in 1964. I went to school and lived in New York before moving to Israel in 1986. I now live in Rehovot. I am married and have three children.