The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Out from the Shadows: Growing up with Holocaust Survivor Parents (Holocaust Heritage) by Willie Handler

Episode Date: October 18, 2025

Out from the Shadows: Growing up with Holocaust Survivor Parents (Holocaust Heritage) by Willie Handler https://www.amazon.com/Out-Shadows-Holocaust-Survivor-Heritage/dp/9493322882 Williehandler.com Growing up, the author and his family constantly lived under the shadow of the Holocaust. There was persistent tension at home. He was frequently told: “Finish your dinner. We didn’t have food like this in the camps.” His parents only provided bits and pieces of their Holocaust experiences, since he “didn’t need to know.” A few years ago, Willie Handler decided that he did need to know. Thus began a journey into his family’s past, eventually revealing their extraordinary survival and painful losses. Their stories reflect not only the evil that swept Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, but also the resilience of the human spirit. His parents appeared to have taken some shocking secrets to their graves, forcing the author to view them in a different light. With the acknowledgement of his own buried trauma, and following years of research, he has finally stepped out of the shadows.

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and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the host or the Chris Voss show. Some guests to the show may be advertising on the podcast, but it is not an endorsement or review of any kind. Today we're an amazing young man on the show. We're going to be talking about his insights, his experience, et cetera, et cetera. Willie Handler joins us on the show. He's the author of an amazing book we're going to be talking to him about and some of his insights into that book.

so we can find out more about it. It is entitled, Out of the Shadows, growing up with Holocaust Survivor Parents. And that came out October 26, 2024 by Willie Handler. Willie has reinvented himself on several occasions throughout his work career. He's been a hospital administrator, a government policy manager, an expert in insurance, and a consultant. Following his retirement from the government, Willie began a writing career. He's published three fictional novels. over the last few years.

His latest books include a memoir, focusing on growing up as a child of Holocaust survivors. He's active in Toronto's Holocaust second generation and third generation of survivor community participating in educational programs, commemorative events, and group discussions. He's also a volunteer at Toronto Holocaust Museum, where he assists students and visitors they make their way through the museum's gallery. He's spoken online at a person events about the Holocaust and his family's experience. He's currently working on a book dealing with generational trauma and descendants of Holocaust survivors.

Welcome to the show, Willie. How are you? Thank you very much, Chris. Thank you. Thank you. It's wonderful to have you, Willie. Give us any dot-coms. Where can we find you on the interwebs?

I am all, not only do I have a website. I'm on Substack, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and all you have to do is search for Willie Handler. Willie Handler.com. So, Willie, give us a 30,000. How's an overview? What's in this book? Give us the details, if you were. Okay. Well, the book is sort of divided the three parts. The first part is my family's history. And it was a, part of the reason why I did that is I didn't know it because my parents were like many Holocaust survivors

who did not feel comfortable speaking about their experience during the war. And so I didn't know that much. So the first part was researching my family's history. The second part of the book, the largest part of the book, is like growing up with my parents. And then the last part talks about intergenerational trauma, sort of more broader community groups in anti-Semitism, more things that occur within the community. There you go. It all does. It all really just ties together. Yeah, ties together. And so were both your parents' Holocaust survivors?

Yes, they were. My father was, he came from a small town in Poland. And my mother was from a tiny little village. I don't even think it exists anymore in Romania. Oh, wow. Now, what country was your father from? Poland. Poland.

So Poland or Romania. And what was their experience during the war? So we can kind of get a foundation of what you ended up raised in in dealing with the fallout from that willie willie it looks like you locked up on me willy there i did i was asking you the question what was your parents experience uh if you could give us a lowdown on that of uh the the experience during the war and the holocaust right so my my father at the start of the war was a young adult. He was in his 20s. He just got married. He had two children. He was sent away

at one point, probably in, I believe, about 1942. They were living in a ghetto in the town that they lived in. And he was, he essentially went from one camp to another because he was used as slave labor and ended up seven different camps before the end of the war, and he was liberated. As far as his family, in the summer of 1942, his wife and two daughters, his parents and other family members were shipped to Auschwitz where they were killed. Oh, wow. That is unfortunate. Yeah. now as far as my mother goes she there was a there was a the war was very different in Romania than it was in Poland

and the Germans actually never invaded Romania because the Romanian government at least at the start of the war was actually one of the access powers so they were aligned with Germany. And so on their own, they started persecuting Jews. There was actually a pogrom in my mother's village. And every home, every Jewish home was destroyed. So everybody was left homeless and they were sent off to a larger town where they were there for about a year until the entire Jewish population was deported to a region in the Ukraine called Transnizia that had been handed to Romania by the Germans.

And there they were ghettoized in what was probably not anything better than any different than a concentration camp other than the fact that there were no gas chambers. So many people died of disease, the elements because they had no warm clothes or starvation. And she had lost her two parents, but her and some of her siblings did survive. Yeah. And what was it like for you to be raised? What was that environment like when it came to you being raised? You know, that's an interesting question.

looking when you're growing up you think that your household is sort of normal but it was far from it yeah and as you grow up you start to realize more and more how out of the ordinary it was i mean my parents were both very traumatized by their experience yeah in those days they didn't even know what trauma was yeah the sd was not was was not a label hung on people until after the vietnam war and so they tried to pull their they actually met after the war in Israel they tried to you know they basically managed to they immigrated to Canada and they began to sort of scrape together money they worked and bought a home very early on but they were really very much focused on your basic needs which is food clothing shelter

When it came to emotional support, they weren't there. They really didn't have the greatest parenting skills. So it's kind of very much, you're left on your own. So there was no one to help me with homework. If you have a problem with a friend, no one to really talk to about it. You want to play sports, you better sign yourself up and get yourself there because that was not something within their realm of needs. And so you become relatively independent, but a little bit too much.

And so I found myself, in fact, to be very much in survival mode. And also, as I learned, is that some of that trauma that experienced was transferred over to me and to my siblings as well. And today we know that as intergenerational trauma. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Fun is fun. The, and so what sort of, how did that manifest itself in your experience?

Well, it's interesting. Because I grew up having to do everything for myself, I learned not to rely on people. So even today, I don't really know how to ask for help. Oh, really? And that's part of it. And you, I think I gain a lot of my father's sort of distrust of people. And I kind of did not develop very much in a way of close relationships with other people. I tended to push people away or have a wall around me.

I wasn't one to display much in the way of emotions. I just held them all in. And it kind of really worked fine for me. I was very functional. I was very successful in my work career. And then I guess about five years ago when I decided I was going to start working on my memoir, things for me started to change a lot. And so, and how that happened is that, you know,

I started doing a lot of research, found some kind of shocking things. In what case do you find shocking? Maybe the best example is I mentioned that my father had a wife and two kids, daughters. But growing up, he basically told us, he told us all, including my mother, as far as she knew, he had a wife and one daughter. And anytime he was reminded of them or he talked about them, he would just start to cry. So when I did some research, I wanted to, I didn't have any clear sense of dates. So when he was married, when his daughter was born, so I got access to Polish archives and got

I got marriage and birth records. And what I got was, I got his marriage records, but what I got was birth records for two children. And so he had essentially buried the memory of his younger daughter. And I should say, when they, when they perished, they were 27 months and 11 months. They were like virtually.

babies. And so that was a huge shock for me and for the rest of the family. And I still don't completely understand it. And so that was, that's like one of the shockers. I did not even know the name. I mean, he had five siblings, three of which actually survived to perish. I did not know their names. And I had to, you know, part of my research was finding out their names and how old they were.

so on and stuff like that. And so that, but as I started to, as I started to recall some of my childhood memories because I really needed it, you know, to work on the book, not only did those memories come back, but all this trauma that I had been storing inside of me for decades just came all that. once. And I, within a couple months, I basically had a breakdown and ended up in therapy.

Oh, wow. Yeah. And I'm still in therapy, but I'm, you know, I have, I have bounced back and moved on to work on another book. But that whole process was very transformational. And so I I think at a certain point, I started re-evaluating my whole life, my relationships with people, what I wanted to do the rest of my life. I was, the name of the book, out from the shadows, is non-accidental. And it's a sort of a metaphor for my life, which was that I tended to not like to be in the spotlight

and be sort of back in the shadows. but also the whole the shadow of the Holocaust followed around my family, as it does for other Holocaust families. It's very hard to sort of escape from that. And so I decided, I decided, and at the same time,

anti-Semitism around the world was exploding and I decided that I needed to start speaking out more. And so not only am I really, writing another book that's holocaust related but as well i'm speaking about the holocaust anti-semitism and and and and very much speaking to other descendants of holocaust survivors and helping them sort of cope with what's going on around this uh and that's really important i mean i i would imagine you know there was a lot of trauma that took place doing that right the uh you know that can that can be really hard to deal with and you know they were dealing with it the best they could

in any way they could and that was just uh that was just the issue that they had there right yeah it's people a lot of people are very much capable of bearing the trauma but it will come out from time to time and as well not only have i inherited all this trauma but maybe to a lesser extent I was also traumatized through my childhood by what I would say is sometimes I call my I had different labels for my parents

they were sort of they were they were loving and nurturing but they were also distant and they did not necessarily integrate well into the North American society and so at times I labeled them useless and cluel which is a little cruel.

But it kind of very much reflected the fact is that I had to do things on my own because they did not have a good sense of what was the best. So, you know, picking courses for school, I couldn't go to my parents. What did they know? They did not know. But they were, my parents were essentially illiterate. You know, when your life is disrupted, when your life gets disrupted by something like, you know, World War II, it either delays or stops your development. Yeah.

As I spoke to other, and I should say from my next book, I interviewed over 100 descendants of Holocaust survivors. And what I found was they were experiencing very many, very similar things. And their ability to cope and their parents' ability to cope really sort of end up being a very broad spectrum, but there was nothing unique about my experience. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and maybe you need to start a counseling service for survivors, you know, because a lot of this transposes into generational trauma, correct? Yeah, yeah. And in fact, it wasn't, I would say, this whole notion of intergenerational trauma was not really kind of, was not recognized or understood. I don't think people realize it was happening until 25 years after the end of the war.

and the interesting thing is because the children Holocaust survivors weren't necessary their trauma was never really recognized and I should add the reason and it's reflected in the title of my next book which I'm still working on is the hidden victims because people don't realize that these people People are, in many cases, as damage as their parents. And what's happening now is they're all, I would say, they're from 50 to 78 years old, something like that.

It's kind of like the boomer generation, right? And their children, the third generation, are also carrying intergenerational trauma. And so part of my book will be, the new book, will be, on how to mitigate transferring that trauma from generation to generation to generation. Transferring the generation and dealing with it and stuff. I mean, that's a really important point, you know, that people have to take and deal with, et cetera, et cetera. So do you go around, you go around to speak and do different things, et cetera, et cetera, is that correct?

Yeah. And so, you know, I do virtual and in-person sort of talks and sort of, I'm very, flexible. In fact, in the first week of November is in Toronto, it's Holocaust Education Week. And one of the programs I'm doing is I'm doing a program with a friend of mine who used to be a white supremacist. Wow. And she left, she left, she was only in for a very short time. And then she realized that she was making a huge mistake in her life. And And so we're doing a program on Holocaust denial in the digital age. And it actually should be a very interesting program.

All right. That should be pretty cool. I don't have information yet, but I will be posting it online and social media probably next week when the link is available because it's going to be a virtual, sort of like a fireside chat. a fireside chat with no fire maybe a virtual fire i'm not sure a virtual fire as it were uh so you've got some chats coming up any future books you're working on you want to uh well i right now it's uh right now it's the hit of victims that i'm going to be working on and and once this is done and which will be sometime by

before the end of the year, I might just go back to fiction and give my body a rest because this stuff is pretty stressful. Yeah, pretty stressful, as it were pretty stressful. So as we go out, any more we need to talk about plug or, you know, get to have people talking about? I should mention that I'm on substack. I write on a lot of topics that impact on my community and sort of like current events. For instance, I just, you know, I do stuff on anti-Semitism.

I just published a piece on the ceasefire in the Middle East. And so if you look for Willie Handler on Substack, you will find me there. And you'll find some very interesting articles in as well. My newsletter is there. So the best way to keep up with what I'm doing is to subscribe to my substack account. That sounds like a lot of fun. Well, thank you very much, Willie, for coming the show. We really appreciate it.

You're welcome. My pleasure. Thank you. And thanks for tuning in. Order up Willie's book, wherever fine books are sold. And definitely take a look at what's going on in today's world, the anti-Semitism and stuff like that. And why these stories are important that we don't relive the whole. Holocaust and other horrible things that we've done to people around the world.

Yeah. And sort of one of the points is that Holocaust denial, which is my latest topic that I'm speaking on, is really a very much a form of anti-Semitism where by denying that the Holocaust existed, you take away the ability of Jewish people to claim they were ever victims. Yeah. and that's sort of very much a whole part of it and it's all very much it's just conspiracy based and as we know there are the in social media now and on the internet conspiracy theories are flying around like crazy yeah the that's the that's the fun part of the fun part as it were

so folks order up his book wherever fine books are sold is called out of the shadows growing up with Holocaust Survivor Parents out October 26th, 2024. Thanks for tuning in. Go to Goodrease.com, Fortresschus, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress Chris Foss, Chris Foss, one of TikTokity,

and all those crazy places on the internet. That should have us out. Great show, Willie.