When your parents survived Auschwitz, where do you fit into the family story?

‘You see, I have this problem: growing up in my parent’s house was not tragic. But their past was.’

Coming of age in Toronto during the 1960s, the Canadian writer and illustrator Bernice Eisenstein found herself ‘addicted’ to the Holocaust, consuming every film and book on the subject that she could. The tragedy largely defined the lives of her parents, Auschwitz internees who were moulded by both the enormity of their grief and the friendships they forged with fellow survivors. But to Eisenstein, who grew up in relative comfort, the Holocaust was at once omnipresent and alien – lore from a recent past she would never touch and could never fully understand, but one that informed her identity in inescapable ways. The animated film I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (2010) adapts Eisenstein’s celebrated 2006 graphic memoir of the same name. Borrowing her distinctive visual style and wit, the short explores Eisenstein’s personal history with honesty and a bit of poignant humour to probe questions of secondhand trauma and the sometimes unbridgeable chasms between generations.