From Booklist

The 29 second-generation essayists in this penetrating book include both Jewish children of Holocaust survivors who live in the shadow of the death camps and the German children of perpetrators who have inherited the sins of their parents through no fault of their own. The second-generation Jews reflect an intensely personal relationship to the Holocaust legacy and a distinctive voice in responding to what the authors term "the presence of an absence." Offspring of the perpetrators, however, need to confront the enormous conflict between love for their parents and the fact that their progenitors were Nazi sympathizers, informers for the Third Reich, or passive witnesses who watched as their friends and neighbors were humiliated, robbed, and deported. Julie Goschalk, a German-born daughter of survivors, describes the different emotions confronting the two second generations as they work through relationships with parents. Liesel Appel, the German-born daughter of Nazis, turned her back on family and homeland when she discovered her legacy. "I lived a lie," she admits. "Every time I encountered a Jew, I told a lie." George Cohen