Rene Lichtman - August 13, 1998
Family
And you, and you have a family?
And I have three great kids. So that's the other thing about it. I think and I don't know, this may be a human condition, existential stuff or something, but you just, because, that's the other thing, because you're a child survivor or a survivor, I think and you marry someone who's not, there's always a distance. There's always a distance in your spouses, which may not be bad. Sometimes it's good. It's good to have a little mystery, you know, of things you don't know, things that are of your own world and stuff like that. But it, it makes it--I mean, I don't know which is better, to marry a fellow survivor or to marry someone who doesn't know the survivor experience. I mean...
You're and you're talking about your wife, Kathy.
I'm talking about my wife, who's not, not a survivor, right, who...
Nor are your children.
No. Right.
Um...
And they don't know, it's hard. It's, that's why these survivors groups are important, I think, because then you're, you feel comfortable with these people, you know, because you're, you're sharing, you don't feel like a weirdo talking about this stuff. If I talk to my kids about this, they go, "What are you talking about this stuff for, Dad? What, what's it got to do with me?" They don't want to know.
And um, their names, just to make sure we get the names.
Oh uh, Josh is the oldest. He's, he's taken an interest in some of this stuff now. And David, who's a cynic, he blames me for it. See, he doesn't believe in anything, he says, except music. And uh, and he believes in music, that's nice. And uh, Reesa, who's 17 and um, she's, she's a normal American kid, I think, yeah. And...
Also a musician.
Also a musician. And they all have a, a good Jewish identity, which is what I wanted. And, and I and I mentioned when Josh was born and what a, what a miracle it--I think it was a miracle when I got married. I thought to myself, I said, my God, I'm really going to get married like a normal person. Because I--those things--because I didn't have those models in my life, you know. I mean, I never, I don't ever go to weddings or anything like that, you know. And, and so these things were all new. And when Josh was born and here we were having a Lichtman family again, it was like um, really wonderful. And um...
So if I could just correct something you said, you're not the last Lichtman.
No, I'm not. No, because I...
You have children.
Right. I started and, and you feel kind of self-conscious about it, you just go, well, big deal. So what happened to my wife's name? I always wanted her to be Stern, you know, because of Kathy's Stern-Lichtman. So I had never understood why the male has to, you know, get rid of the woman's name. So--but, no, that's why I think it's, it's, it's great because um, you know, Hitler was not successful in at least destroying. But now the Orthodox Jews are going to do that, so, so...
Well...
A little bit of a different...
Um...
...thing, okay. But you could see how I get pretty hot about some of these things when, I also feel that, I mean, anyway, that's [pause] what else?
Finish--feel that what?
You know, to me, what the Holocaust experience has done is made me conscious that, you know, we got screwed over badly and we got screwed over as children and there's other people that get screwed over and they're no different than what we are. And as Jews and as survivors, we should be fighting, not just for ourselves but whenever we recognize any kind of oppression like that. And, and not just be into our own little suffering, but really generalize and, and uh, and, and we should be more sensitive than anybody else, because we know what it, what it feels like. And so um, I think that's--for me, that was, that was very important. So therefore, I got involved in all these other things, you know, Vietnam and all that stuff that was, I felt that it was, it was unjust. And, uh.
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