Living With The Past, Iowa’s Holocaust Legacy—Experiences of the Second and Third Generations | William B. Friedricks | $21.95 | Isbn 9781948509770 | 172p | Coming 2026 | Preorders will be signed
The Holocaust ended over eighty years ago, but its survivors were left permanently scarred, and this had a significant impact on their heirs. There is a large body of literature on the children and grandchildren of survivors, but those from Iowa have not been studied. This account explores the lives of those descendants whose families settled in Iowa.
Although these children never hid from the Nazis, faced their brutality, lived in the ghettos, or endured concentration camps, the heritage of their parents’ terrifying trauma shaped their upbringing and forever affected their personalities, perspectives, and beliefs. Likewise, the grandchildren, though further removed from the Holocaust, also felt the weight of this legacy.
To understand their lives, each chapter begins with the Holocaust story of the descendants’ parents or grandparents. And just as each survivor’s experience was similar but different and unique, so too were the second and third generations’ responses to the effects of intergenerational trauma. Based on extensive interviews and research, this book is a significant addition to our understanding of Iowa’s Jewish community and its survivors’ children and grandchildren.
William B. Friedricks is professor emeritus of history and the former director of the Iowa History Center at Simpson College. He has authored many books on Iowa topics, including histories of the Des Moines Register, the Iowa State Fair’s Blue Ribbon Foundation, and several biographies. He was the recipient of Humanities Iowa’s Iowa History Prize and the Des Moines Public Library Foundation’s Iowa Author Award. His most recent book, Saved by Schindler: The Life of Celina Karp Biniaz, was awarded the Midwest Independent Publishers Association’s gold medal for best book in history in 2023.