Join two daughters of second generation Holocaust survivors for a conversation about their mother-daughter relationships, secrets and lies, and how the past shapes their identity.
Monique Charlesworth’s mother Inge was German, half-Jewish and a Holocaust survivor, all of which she chose to deny. She moved from place to place, constantly reinventing herself, driven by the desperate need to be safe.
Talented and charismatic, Inge never wanted her daughters to know who she really was; it helped that they couldn’t hear her German accent. When as young teenagers they discovered her past, fear that her daughters might divulge her secret fostered mistrust. In France where nobody knew who she was – least of all the friends who adored her – Inge spent her final and happiest decades, far from the family she supposedly adored.
The inadvertent revelation changed Monique, whose life took the reverse trajectory. She studied languages, lived in Germany and against her mother’s opposition converted to Judaism when she married. She also sought German nationality – something she never dared tell Inge.
But her mother was hiding yet deeper secrets. After her death these emerged to devastating effect. The mother and daughter who claimed to love each other both knew how to frustrate and enrage. It would take three years of research to find the whole truth.
Monique will be in conversation with Rabbi Julia Neuberger, another daughter of the second generation with a German mother. While Julia’s own mother Liesel Rosenthal never sought to deny her origins, she faced conflict of a different order. Liesel was escaping not only Nazi Germany and the loss of opportunity but the stifling bourgeois world (beloved of her own mother) that she could not bear.
They will talk about mothers and daughters, how past and present create our identities, about secrets and lies and what the past means to the second generation.
