Alexander Soros, the son of billionaire investor George Soros, has contributed an essay to a recently-published book on the legacy of the Holocaust for the descendants of those who survived.
The essay is one of 88 in “God, Faith & Identity from the Ashes: Reflections of Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors”, which was published late last year.
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“Many if not most children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors live with ghosts, ” Menachem Rosensaft, a son of survivors, writes in the introduction of the book he edited, Reuters said. “We are haunted much in the way a cemetery is haunted. We bear within us the shadows and echoes of an anguished dying we never experienced or witnessed.”
The essayists, who are from 16 countries and range in age from 27 to 72, focus on how their parents’ and grandparents’ experiences helped shape their identity and their attitude toward God and Judaism.
The 51 men and 37 women from six continents include academics, artists, psychologists, journalists, writers, rabbis and politicians.
In his essay, the 29-year-old Soros, whose father is a survivor of Nazi persecution in Hungary, wonders what he would have done if had he been born a German or Hungarian and not a Jew during the time of the Holocaust.
When his father told him of his experiences as a child in German-occupied Budapest in 1944, it was their first bonding experience.
The book was published at a time of growing concern over the rise of anti-Semitism, particularly in Europe. On Thursday, the U.N. held its first-ever meeting on the increase in violence against Jews following the attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris this month.
“I identify very strongly as being Jewish, but my Jewish identity is wrapped up in universal values of social justice, ” the younger Soros told The Wall Street Journal in 2012.
