Episode 12 Transcript: Unraveling Hidden Family History: The Impact of the Holocaust and Intergenerational Trauma
There’s a Lesson in Here Somewhere Podcast
Episode 12 Transcript
Guest: Michael Hickins, Author of The Silk Factory
There’s a Lesson in Here Somewhere is a podcast hosted by Jamie Serino that features exceptional people that have compelling stories to tell. Whether it’s a unique perspective, an act of kindness, an inspirational achievement, a hardship overcome, or bearing witness to a captivating event, these are stories that must be heard, and from which we can draw important lessons.
Unraveling Hidden Family History: The Impact of the Holocaust and Intergenerational Trauma
What would you do if you received an email that unraveled a hidden chapter of your family history? Join us as we embark on a powerful and emotional journey with Michael Hickins, former Wall Street Journal reporter and author of 'The Silk Factory.' A mysterious email from a nephew he'd never known sets Michael on a path to uncover his family's past, which intertwines with the Holocaust, as he learns of a silk factory that was in his family for generations until his father was imprisoned in a concentration camp. Michael travels with his family to Ansbach, Germany, to learn more about the silk factory and the tragic impact of the Holocaust on his parents. This episode explores the importance of sharing our personal stories, uncovering our roots, and understanding the sources of painful experiences at both the individual and collective levels that can be passed along as intergenerational trauma.
As Michael digs deeper, he confronts the emotional complexities of reconnecting with a painful past. His travels to Ansbach, where he finds scarce Jewish historical markers, and Wiesbaden, where historians document his family's deportation, highlight the stark contrasts in how societies choose to acknowledge and remember. The conversation broadens to include his father's harrowing wartime experiences and the post-war mystery of the family's silk factory, painting a poignant picture of survival, loss, and unresolved legacies. Through this narrative, we navigate the intersections of memory, identity, and the weight of history on personal lives.
As we discuss concepts such as epigenetics and intergenerational trauma, we explore how societal acknowledgment—or lack thereof—can influence healing. Michael shares his reflections on his father's hidden fury and its influence on his life, offering insights into how visiting historical sites and engaging with family narratives can aid in breaking cycles of inherited trauma. We discuss the transformative power of storytelling and the crucial role of societal recognition in fostering a healthier future, offering hope that understanding one's roots can lead to healing for future generations.
Listen HERE
Watch HERE
Intro
Welcome to There's a Lesson in Here Somewhere, conversations with interesting people with fascinating stories to tell and from which we can draw important lessons. Here are your hosts, Jamie Serino and Peter Carucci.
Jamie Serino (00:00)
Hello and welcome to There's a Lesson in Here Somewhere. I'm Jamie Serino and we're here today with Michael Hickins, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and the founder of the CIO Journal actually, and an author since 1991, written a bunch of books and novels. And he's recently written a book called The Silk Factory and that's what we're gonna talk about here today. It delves into Michael's history. Thank you, Peter. And...
Peter Carucci (00:05)
And I'm Peter Carucci.
Jamie Serino (00:29)
It intertwines with the Holocaust and it's really an amazing story. So we're gonna dive into that. Michael, thank you for joining us today.
Michael Hickins (00:38)
Well, thank you guys. Thank you, Jamie and Peter for having me. I'm really excited to talk to you guys. It's funny because you say intertwined and that's really a good way of describing what happened. I've come to find after the book has been published and I've gotten a lot of really positive feedback about it, it resonates with a lot of people in my generation, which is that...
Jamie Serino (00:44)
Yeah.
Michael Hickins (01:07)
our parents went through the Holocaust and then told us almost nothing about it. And so it's kind of been up to us to discover in a lot of cases the roots of the trauma that we've felt and not even really had a sense of like, why am I so damn angry? My life's pretty good. And...
Jamie Serino (01:14)
Yeah.
Michael Hickins (01:31)
You know, it even came about by accident. As I recount in the story, I one day got an email from somebody that I didn't know. And the subject line intrigued me because it said, my grandmother was Vivian Bronstein Castillo-Hickens. And the reason that intrigued me is because Vivian Bronstein Castillo-Hickens is my mother.
I'm like, wait a minute, your grandmother is, but I don't know who you are. And it turned out that it was a nephew of mine from a half brother that I had never met. And that's part of the story as well.
Jamie Serino (02:17)
And they didn't want you to send them $10,000 through some bank account.
Michael Hickins (02:21)
No, and what's funny is that that's the first reaction when I tell people that is how much money did he ask? He asked for nothing. What he asked for was did I have a photograph of his father? Because he had never met his father either. And my mother having recently died, I had this box in my basement and she'd always said to me, when I die, there's this box, you gotta look at the box.
Peter Carucci (02:22)
Ha! It was Zimbabwe.
Michael Hickins (02:50)
So when she died, I looked at the box, was half hoping maybe there was like a million dollars in there or something. There was a bunch of memories. There was old report cards and photographs of people that someone I didn't know and junk. then life is going on, I have a kid and I'm like, I'll get to look at this box at some point, but not now when I put it in my basement.
Here comes this guy who wants a photograph of his father and I'm like, I know, it's probably in the box. Right? So I go to the box, I find a picture of his dad as a little kid, but I also find these incomprehensible clues. Photographs of road signs of places I've never heard of. Who takes a photograph of a road sign unless it's meaningful, right? Meillon in France.
Jamie Serino (03:26)
Mmm. Yep.
Michael Hickins (03:50)
a picture of a guy in a mayoral garb signed, you know, to Max with friendship. But I've never heard of this guy. And Max is my father's name. So I'm like, what is all this stuff? so I send Louis, my new found nephew, the photograph that he wants. But in the meantime, I'm like Googling all these places and names. And I'm trying to find
Jamie Serino (03:55)
Hmm.
Michael Hickins (04:21)
I find a business card with an Astor Place address and it's got one of those old New York time, ye old New York phone numbers with a Murray Hill 4375. I'm like, what is this? so it's obviously, my father's maternal grandfather was Edward Kupfer.
Jamie Serino (04:35)
Yeah.
Wow.
Michael Hickins (04:52)
and
And this was a business card for someone with Kupfer as the last name. So I'm like, this must have been a cousin. Again, I didn't know we had cousins in New York. So I'm like Googling and I don't find the Kupfer in New York and I kind of broaden the search and I find a website for the Kupfer silk factory in Ansbach, Germany.
Jamie Serino (05:19)
Hmm.
Michael Hickins (05:21)
Ansbach is where my father grew up. I knew that his family owned a silk factory before the Nazis took it away. And here's this website that says, Cooper Silk Factory, family owned for more than 135 years. And I go, family owned? Whose family are we talking about? Last I looked, I wasn't an industrialist.
Peter Carucci (05:42)
I don't know. Yeah. Yeah.
Michael Hickins (05:50)
That is what led to a road trip with my wife and my infant, my three-year-old at the time son, and my grown older son, who's now 34. He was, you know, I guess, he was 30 at the time. And we go on this road trip to Germany and France and we discover all these things.
Some of them are still incomprehensible, but a lot of them answer questions that were sort of in the back of my mind. But anyway, you said intermingled, and it really is. I it's like my life today, and I think the lives of a lot of first generation survivors of the Holocaust, Jewish American people in particular, resonates. the Holocaust is like this thing that's like a long time ago now, but it's still...
resonates through the generations. And a lot of us just don't know anything about it.
Jamie Serino (06:50)
Yeah. Yep.
Yep.
Peter Carucci (06:57)
You know, Michael, I was able to read not only The Silk Factory, but also Blomqvist, your earlier work about basically the 12th century Northern French Normans, know, Vikings conquering and then The Silk Factory. And I got to say, I think I really got in your head. I really got to see how you think.
Michael Hickins (07:06)
Aha!
Peter Carucci (07:25)
And I was always fascinated as I read Silk Factory. is this you personally speaking just everything that comes out or do you gate this and keep it and as you're writing kind of have a filter, I need to say this instead in order to meet maybe the goal of the book. Or is it just really just a memoir of everything you're feeling and thinking?
Michael Hickins (07:52)
it's a memoir of, I mean, it's.
It's so raw in a way that, I mean, there are parts of it that everyone in my family hate. In fact, the only things I changed are people's names because like my son, and by the way, I mean, there are women who read this book and they come to me and go, God, your son sounds awesome. Can I meet your son? And I'm like,
Peter Carucci (08:13)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know.
Jamie Serino (08:15)
Ha ha ha!
Michael Hickins (08:30)
Yes, sure, but he hated the way he was portrayed and asked me to change the name. I changed my wife's name. I changed most people's names in my family just because... And I think it's less because I don't trash anybody. I certainly don't try to. But I think that it's just, it's raw.
Jamie Serino (08:32)
Okay.
No.
Michael Hickins (09:00)
And I get a lot of this weird, it's like, people go, wow, they're really brave. And it's like, yeah, I'm not, it's not like I'm running into a burning building and rescuing babies or anything. I'm not brave in that way. But I suppose emotionally, there's a certain amount of courage of just following like, you know, okay, this is me. And with all my flaws and hopes and dreams.
Jamie Serino (09:17)
Mm-hmm.
Peter Carucci (09:17)
You know, have to tell you, that's actually what I think stood out for me stylistically with this. I am a victim of my father having written a book of memoirs where I, it's over here somewhere on my bookshelves, it didn't portray me correctly or my other family members. And so we had to do a similar thing and say,
Can you change our names? Because in his original one, he didn't. But he's very proud of it. But the truth is that stylistically, he kind of tempered himself to create almost a work of fiction. And what I found in the Silk Factory is you are, forgive my language, but balls to the wall, like expressive. And it's very much like a French Impressionist painting to me. It has so much expression of.
not only character, but your inside thought processes that I found it very, very captivating in that way. I know you might've caught in flack for it, but I think that's one of the burning kind of artistic things I loved about it. And then you tie in the history of what you're learning. And I don't even begin to explain how you jump down this journey in the box and you're finding a piece here and a piece there.
I know you started to explain it already, but I don't want to ruin the plot there for anyone. But what winds up happening that you find yourself in the middle of onspock Germany with your wife and your kid? I mean, I just want to know what happened right then. You're in the middle of Germany. How the heck did this happen? How the heck did you wind up in the middle of Germany? You're just like, let me find this old business card and bam, you're in Germany. mean...
Michael Hickins (11:12)
Well, mean, the spark was that website for the factory, right? So I wrote to them, I emailed them and I was like, hey, you know,
this belongs to my father and I would love to come visit. And I acted very like I didn't.
act like, know, I've lived in France for 12 years and, you know, I'm very conversant with Europe. I was very much like, gee, I'd like to take a trip with my family and visit, you know, kind of very innocent. And it was, mean, I didn't have any thoughts about any specific goals other than I wanted to, I had one goal, right? I wanted to see, because my father talked about the factory.
to the extent that he said that I knew he had that, right? And I knew that he lived there. And I wanted to see where he lived. I wanted to visit the apartment. And this is in the book as well. It's like, it's a three story building. Next to it is an annex that is the manufacturing part of it. But the three story building,
Ground floor are offices, second floor offices, third floor living quarters. And the woman who responded to me even says, the president of the company still sleeps in the house. And my daughter says to me, didn't she mean your house? You know, but like.
Jamie Serino (12:50)
haha
Michael Hickins (12:55)
I wanted to see that. And so, and they were very courteous. They were like, sure, come visit. When would be good? You know? And so I planned this trip where I also reached out to that, so that mayor, there was a picture of a mayor and I found out who it was. And it turns out his grandson has the same name as him and was a former communications officer for the biggest city in the region of that town.
And it was where my father was in the concentration camp in France. And what I learned is that that mayor was able to...
find homes in this town of 600 people? 600 people. They hosted close to 2,000 Jewish refugees. And it struck me, know, when I was writing the book, it was Trump's 2016 to 2020 term. It was 2019 when I went.
Jamie Serino (13:57)
Wow.
Michael Hickins (14:11)
And he was just saying America is full, you no more immigrants. America is full. And I'm thinking, we're saying America is full. And here this town of 600 people is hosting 2000 refugees so they don't have to be in these horrible concentration camps where literally if you went out at night and you slipped and fell and you were elderly and you fell face forward in the muck, you would drown.
because you couldn't get up and you were drowning in the muck. So, you know, I visited that guy, the grandson of that who was unbelievably welcoming. But when I went to Germany, I was really hoping to love Ansbach, you know what mean?
Jamie Serino (14:44)
Hmm.
Michael Hickins (15:11)
what little my father had talked about, was a charming little town. And it's still a charming little town. And I really wanted to fall in love with it. But there were no markers whatsoever of Jews ever having lived there other than... So there's this thing that they have in Germany called Stolperstein, which are literally called German for stumbling blocks. And they're these little bronze plaques that you can buy.
Peter Carucci (15:23)
.
Michael Hickins (15:40)
and place in the sidewalk in front of the house, they would say, you know, these people who were Jewish lived here before. And it's kind of a way of marking, of acknowledging something, right? And there's none of that other than.
In front of the factory, could see that the cement was fresh around. It was like they hastily, they were like, man, these guys are coming. We gotta put these in. Nothing else anywhere in town. The synagogue is boarded up and there's just, I got really angry while I was there. But while we were there,
Jamie Serino (16:10)
you
Michael Hickins (16:32)
My wife was like, Googling, and she said, there's some people who've written an article about your family. And I was like, you know.
that can't be. And she's like, well, how many Herschkens were there in Ansbach who had a silk factory? And I'm like, what? And so there are these historians in Wiesbaden, which is another city north of Bavaria in Germany, who were doing articles about people who were deported from Wiesbaden. And as it turns out, members of my family, my father's mother included.
went to Wiesbaden from Ansbach and other parts of Germany because Wiesbaden was seen as more of a Jew-friendly city. And they got deported too. But the difference in Wiesbaden, and I talk about this as well, is that there were three different memorials. There's very much like the Vietnam War Memorial type of thing, sort of long.
Jamie Serino (17:18)
Good stuff. So long.
Michael Hickins (17:45)
wall with names of people who were deported on plaques. And then there's a memorial by the train that was taking people to Auschwitz, the train depot. And then there's a memorial in the town hall that rotates exhibits and they're very personal little vignettes.
The larger memorials are breathtaking, literally. I found myself almost blacking out. And I couldn't remember my own family's name. I'm looking at this wall, and I'm like, what's their name again? It was just too much. Whereas the... I'm sorry, go ahead.
Peter Carucci (18:29)
Yeah.
Jamie Serino (18:38)
Yes. Yeah. So going back to the, to the plot, sort of the story of the book. So your family had this factory and then your, your father then was put in a concentration camp. So then I'm assuming the not the Nazi party then took over the factory at that point. Okay. And so then, so after that, you.
Michael Hickins (18:59)
Yes.
Well, actually, no. What happened is that my father and his sister had to give their shares to my sister's ex-husband, my father's sister's ex-husband, who was not Jewish. So, and then the idea, the deal was after the war, they would patch things up again or whatever, right? But that, it didn't work out that way.
Jamie Serino (19:20)
Okay.
Michael Hickins (19:32)
that's part of the plot of the story is sort of what happened to that. my father was then left Germany and was arrested in Belgium and put in a concentration camp in France. Because that mayor was organizing a way for Jews to get out of the camp, my father was able to apply for visas. He ended up going to Cuba.
with his first wife and their son. And from Cuba, he immigrated to the United States.
Jamie Serino (20:09)
Okay, how long was he in the concentration camp?
Michael Hickins (20:13)
He was in the concentration camp for about a year. A little under a year.
Jamie Serino (20:16)
Wow.
Okay, and so was he married at that time?
Michael Hickins (20:21)
But I mean, let me amend that. Let me amend that. Because he was very quickly living with that mayor, Paul Mirat, is his name, or was his name. And he was able to leave the concentration camp and live with Paul Mirat. And, but they were in Meillon for a little under a year.
Jamie Serino (20:54)
Okay. And so then he's in the US and now then, you don't have to delve into too much detail. People will read the book, but now he's like, okay, well, how can I get, the war's over, how can I get my factory back? And he's not able to get it back.
Michael Hickins (21:17)
Well, I mean, that's part of the mystery that's lost in the sands of time.
Part of it was he didn't want to go back. And that's part of, you know...
In a weird way, the book could just be a travelogue. It's the story of me, my wife and my children traveling through Europe and learning all these things about our past. But it's also about my relationships to my wife and children and how they're damaged by
Jamie Serino (21:42)
Mm-hmm.
Peter Carucci (21:43)
Right.
Michael Hickins (22:07)
my, let's call them neuroses, my anger.
over seemingly nothing.
Jamie Serino (22:17)
Hmm.
Michael Hickins (22:18)
and discovering just how.
much of that anger is a product of what happened to my father and his family. And realizing that the root of it isn't even having lost the silk factory. I mean, you know, it's weird because we tend to see pictures of Holocaust victims as either they're really, really old
or their children. Those are the pictures that we receive, right? My father was in his 30s. So he had a whole career, right? I mean, he'd gone to university. He had built up this factory that his grandfather had created, you know, and all of a sudden he's got nothing.
Jamie Serino (23:14)
Mm.
Michael Hickins (23:14)
But that's not the fuel of his anger. The fuel of his anger is that they killed his mother. And not only did they kill his mother,
Jamie Serino (23:22)
Yeah.
Michael Hickins (23:26)
but she was killed in a mass grave, no date. And the Nazis, one of the things that the historians of Wiesbaden did was they brought me to the archive and I saw a lot of firsthand documentation. And they're like documenting exactly how much money they're taking from her account.
on any given day for whatever tax reason that they can invent, including, you know, they charge her for the trip to Auschwitz, but they can't be bothered to write down the date that they kill her because they, you know, she's in the cattle car. They march them out into the forest. Maybe some of them they gas and some of them they shoot in the pit. We don't know. And that's the thing that I realize.
Jamie Serino (24:03)
Hmm.
Mm.
Yeah.
Michael Hickins (24:25)
drove my father crazy. And I mean, I use the word advisedly because in many ways he was a normal affable guy, but there was always beneath the surface a fury that I never really understood and that I housed in here.
Jamie Serino (24:27)
Love ya.
Hmm.
Yeah. Yeah. And that's one of the things I love about the exploration in the book is, you know, the idea of intergenerational trauma. you know, and so your father had to deal with the trauma of losing his mother and then that anger of how he lost her. And then now you're talking about you dealing with that.
Peter Carucci (25:12)
without even realizing what it was.
Jamie Serino (25:15)
Yeah, and then you're discovering that in this trip. So there are a lot of people out there that deal with that in a lot of different ways, and the Holocaust is a huge example of that. Can you talk a little bit more about that, intergenerational trauma?
Michael Hickins (25:34)
Yeah, I mean, it's funny because before I started writing this book, I'd never heard the term or knew that that existed.
Jamie Serino (25:43)
Hmm.
Michael Hickins (25:46)
But we almost genetically pass along significant trauma that we incur.
Jamie Serino (25:55)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Hickins (25:58)
to subsequent generations. And I hope that I've caught it early enough that I spare my son that anger and that incomprehension about what that anger is about. I think that, and I think there's a lot of resonances for our society in many ways, whether it's African-Americans,
or Native Americans or Japanese who were interned, where we're not very good at making amends as a society. And one of the things I found, the reason I was talking about Wiesbaden and the memorials is because
Jamie Serino (26:42)
Mm.
you
Michael Hickins (26:52)
You know, the feeling I had in Wiesbaden was 180 degrees out from what I had in Ansbach, where in one city there was absolutely no acknowledgement of anything at all, and I was beside myself with fury. And then Wiesbaden, where they seemed to bend over backwards to acknowledge what happened and to try to make amends in some small way, and it was very meaningful to me.
So I think that the converse of the generational trauma is like, okay, so what do do about that? Because we don't need to live with that, right? We can fix that.
Peter Carucci (27:33)
It seems that in your desire to seek any kind of healing through acknowledgement of the wrong helped some degree of like cognizance for you that it can be okay, that you can start to heal. Whereas in Ausbach, the fact there's nothing there
at when I was reading that you were so fuming about it, it's still, you know, I wonder what society can do to begin, or not to begin, to actually help fully, I mean, will we ever heal from this? know, what, I don't know, I just said a lot of stuff there, but I was really fascinated by your desire to.
for acknowledgement of what happened in this. Ansbach, they did not. in Wiesbaden Wiesbaden, they, what they did, yeah, you know, it began to heal you a little. least I read that, I felt that. You know what I mean? Even still in Wiesbaden, you're still like, it's just a little bit, you know, but it means, you know, you
Michael Hickins (28:35)
Right.
Yeah, Ansbach and Wiesbaden.
Yeah.
Jamie Serino (28:50)
Thank
Michael Hickins (28:55)
mean, Wiesbaden was good. And then going to Meillon and realizing, you know, meeting the grandson of that mayor and the incredible humanity that he displays. Yeah. And, yeah, there are some pretty interesting photographs in that book as well.
the humanity that...
that they displayed is as much a healing agent as anything, you
I also, you you brought up Blomqvist and I'm like, what is the commonality between Silk Factory and Blomqvist? in both, there's kind of the question of faith, right? Because...
Blomqvist, the narrator, is bereft because his religious tradition has been destroyed. The Norse gods have been vanquished by Christendom. because it's an epic adventure, they're running into all these different people with these different faiths, and he's trying to find one that corresponds to
his personal belief system or something, right? And my father had been very religious at one point in his life. But when I was growing up, he wasn't at all. We didn't, you know,
Peter Carucci (30:33)
Yeah.
Michael Hickins (30:58)
We didn't keep kosher. We didn't keep the Sabbath. There was, you know, the high holidays. High holidays we observed and khanukkah for my sake and Passover. But that was basically it. you know, he died when I was very young. So I was 15.
So we never had a chance to really have those conversations like, know, dad, why did you stop being a practicing Jew? And,
You know, again, it comes down to...
what happened to his mother.
You know, it's something I felt.
on top of like
even more than the material goods that were taken from him and even more than his livelihood and his homeland and where he grew up. And I mean, just think about how attached we are to where we live. Patriotism aside, right? I mean, we grow up somewhere and it's part of who we are and all of sudden that's ripped away.
Jamie Serino (32:26)
the
Michael Hickins (32:36)
And we take it for granted because we're Americans that well, know, at least he came to America, great place to be, right? Everyone wants to come to America. Not necessarily, right? Some people were very happy where they were or thought they were. But on top of that, you know, they killed his mother and God let that happen. And that is the thing I think that, you know, they took
the Nazis took his faith away. And to me that's almost, I don't know if it's almost worse, but it's, you know, and I don't know for sure, but if that's the case, that's really tragic. Because at some point it was important to him.
Jamie Serino (33:10)
through.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so much there that he had to carry. So you brought up so much like, you know, physically removed from where he was living, right? Killing his mother, taking away his career, his livelihood, his whole identity and not being in control of any of that. You end up somewhere, okay, maybe ended up in an okay place, but not being in control of any of that and having that identity shift on a lot of levels just
very sudden and being put in a concentration camp. There's so much that he had to carry. And you talked about, you know, when getting back to the intergenerational trauma, you know, what you were referring to, I think might be called epigenetics, where, yeah, you can actually pass biologically that trauma along. they actually use the Holocaust to prove that. And they use Holocaust survivors to prove the concept of epigenetics that it
Michael Hickins (34:10)
Yes.
Jamie Serino (34:24)
it does exist, and you were talking about being worried about passing that along to your son. So how did the trip and the experience and now post-trip, how did that affect your relationship with your son? How do you feel about that now, about him and about passing along that trauma?
Michael Hickins (34:46)
Well...
You know, it's interesting to me that...
I've been married to non-Jews. My family, they were all Jewish. I was told from an early age that it was important to marry a Jewish woman because otherwise that would become a thing.
And I don't know whether on some level consciously or genetically I wanted to diversify my own gene pool. I know that as a...
As a father, became really important to me to become more self-aware and to change my behavior and to be less like my father in certain ways.
Peter Carucci (36:12)
consciously, right?
Michael Hickins (36:13)
Yeah, I mean it's funny because my dad used to say to me when he would get really mad at me for whatever reason, he would say my father would have slapped me, which was terrifying because occasionally he would spank me and on one occasion did slap me.
You know, I've never, you know, we don't spank Max, but there is an episode in the book that I won't spoil, you know, I try to, I've tried to consciously mitigate that, you know, with Max. And I hope that I'm not passing that trauma along to him.
But, you know, he was three when we went on that trip. So a lot went on in his life before that. But, you know, it's interesting.
When we were in the factory, so we get this tour of the factory and it's me and Carol and my older son Catfish and Max in the stroller and...
as we're getting the tour and as it becomes clear that the guy who's the, so the tour is given to me by the CEO of the current CEO of the company.
And I'm getting angrier and angrier at him for reasons that I'll leave for the readers to discover. But as I'm getting angrier, Max is getting fussier and fussier in his stroller to the point where Carol has to leave with him so that we can finish the tour without this, you know, squalling kid basically driving everybody crazy. And, you know, I found it.
interesting that without, I mean he was three, without knowing anything or understanding anything about what was going on he could just feel it. He could feel the vibe. And yeah, it's you know.
Jamie Serino (38:40)
Hmm.
Yeah, and so another thing I wanted to kind of return to is, I mean, I think it's wonderful that you've written this book, it's a memoir, but you're also sort of documenting something here. anytime something can get documented about the Holocaust, I'm happy about because as we know, there are people out there actively trying to say that it didn't happen, right?
So anytime you can sort of plant the flag and say, here's more evidence that it happened. And you touched upon that with one town saying it happened in another town, not really acknowledging it, you know? And you try to look at it in both ways. Like the German people, when I speak to people from Germany, some of them do have tremendous guilt about it and they want to move on, not necessarily be reminded about it all the time. And then some feel that it should be acknowledged.
And then you have people saying it didn't happen. then you have, so my grandfather was in World War II and he was one of the people who liberated Dachau and he had those stories and he had, I have some documentation and stuff. And so I think it's great that you've written this memoir, you've sort of planted another flag like this happened. Can you talk a little bit more about that? You did talk a little bit about it terms of comparing the two towns, but.
Anything else in your experience where now you feel like I have this sort of evidence and there are people out there trying to say it didn't happen, what are some thoughts about that?
Michael Hickins (40:21)
It's interesting that you should say that because...
The box had a lot of things. When I started to really look at it, a lot of artifacts, historical artifacts like, I can't now think of the word in English. I know it in French because it's in French. a document basically set. It's like a hall pass for checkpoints.
And basically, are these, some of them are written in pencil on the back of a scrap of paper, basically signed by a notable saying, this person is allowed to go to this place at this particular time. There are ration cards, there are a lot of documents that
help place those events in a particular time. And a very good friend who lives in France, who's French, he read my book and we met up for lunch one day. I was visiting about a year, well, after the book came out. And he said,
you missed a really big opportunity to really go in depth and talk about each one of those artifacts. And I was like, well, I didn't want to slow the narrative down. And he's like, well, you should blog about it. So I did. For about a year, I wrote a different piece about a particular artifact, whether it was like,
something to do with, there's a letter from the prefect saying that my father's wife was not allowed to travel from the concentration camp to the house where they were living, in Meillon. She had to go back. father could stay. So they were just, and I would write about exactly what the piece was and I took a picture of it and included it in the post.
I there's more than can fit in a memoir, and particularly, you want it to be readable. I I wrote it so that people would read it. So I didn't slow the narrative down every time there was a piece of documentation to really, but there are pictures of some of them. My publisher also was like, people like photos, but they don't like pictures of documents. So there aren't as many documents there, but.
Jamie Serino (43:00)
Mm.
Michael Hickins (43:24)
easy enough to find my blog. But it was part of what I wanted to do was to counter the narrative of denial, you know, without explicitly saying, hey, deniers are full of it, but just to basically say, you can't deny this because I've seen it.
Jamie Serino (43:37)
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. Yep.
Peter Carucci (43:49)
You know, I'm really glad to hear you say this, having known you for a while, because when I read that in the book, your kind of self-discovery journey in your mother's box, I remember feeling kind of like I was there in that room as you're discovering it all and trying to figure out what happens. And I can't wait to see or check out your blog now, you know.
That's really great because it's not only just your father's trauma, but also how your mother handled it, how you handled her not opening to you all those years, that she must have known stuff. And as I was reading, I remember thinking, wait, what? You know what? And that's because your voice saying, how could she not have said this to me?
Jamie Serino (44:40)
Mm.
Peter Carucci (44:41)
And especially because I know we talk often, we're both history freaks. Like your previous book was dove into like literally like the 12th century specific historiographical stuff. then to find out in our own life, I mean, 1057, know, you know, know. then, but to find out that in your own life, that history part was kind of missing.
Michael Hickins (44:54)
Peter, it's the 11th century. Get it right for crying out loud.
Jamie Serino (44:58)
Hahaha!
Peter Carucci (45:10)
in a way I thought was really very powerful, especially, know, and also I have a second question for you that's really bizarre and seemingly trivial, but I think it does speak to some of that lack of self-history, but I think you discover kind of giving yourself your own opportunity to rediscover yourself. Second to that, which I would love you to talk about the kind of history and your personal history.
is I remember that you named your son in the book Thurman.
And I remember the reason why. Is that okay to break this? Can you explain that to us?
Michael Hickins (45:51)
Sure, Well, yeah, so my older son's name is Catfish. And the reason I named him Catfish in real life is because while I was living in France, his mother was French. Our relationship was doomed from the beginning. So I wanted to make sure that he had something indelibly American about him.
and I, as a, as a lifelong Yankees fan, I, I was just, Catfish Hunter was a, you know, a favorite of mine. not my favorite, but one of my favorites. And the reason I say, and, and, and, and, and, and so I convinced his mother that, so I'm a Taurus, not that I'm really into astrology, but I'm a Taurus, she's a Pisces. Catfish is as everyone knows, like amphibian, right? You can live outside the water.
bottom feeder, one of the oldest species on earth, a survivor. So I convinced her that this was a good name because of that. And yeah, he's also a baseball player, but really, you know, this, right? And she bought into it.
My favorite baseball player of all time is Thurman Munson. But the French cannot pronounce the TH. So he would have been Turman. See, they call him Catfish, right? He, unfortunately, he's a big, strong kid, never really had to worry too much about being teased about it. But they pronounce it correctly, pretty much. But Thurman would have been like torture. It would have been like
condemning him to a lifetime of no one ever being able to pronounce his name. So I didn't name him after Thurman Munson. But when he asked me to change his name in the book, I changed it to Thurman, and I added in how difficult it was for the French to pronounce, which is probably the only invented part of the book. But it compensates for the fact that there's a section that I had to take out.
where he talked about how at one point, you know, as a grownup, someone in a bar said to him, were your parents like drunk when they named you? And he had to resist the temptation to beat them to a bloody pulp. And since I had to change that, I changed it somewhat to be Thurman. Did I answer your question, Peter?
Peter Carucci (48:31)
Yes, I love that. love that. Especially, you know, he was my favorite player when I was a little kid. I'm a Mets fan, loving Thurman Munson and yeah, my baseball card collection, all that. So now, all right, so now that's cool. Now the history that you find yourself uncovering as you're going through this helps you, did it help you heal?
Michael Hickins (49:02)
think so. I mean, it's not so much that it helped me heal, which I think it did. It helped me...
get more in touch with.
the roots of my behavior in a way that allowed me to change it. Because it's one thing to understand something on an intellectual level and it's another to allow it to permeate you in a way that allows you to actually, because no one goes in, I didn't go into a situation being like, gosh darn it, I am gonna lose my temper right now. You know what, in about a half hour, I think I should lose my temper.
Jamie Serino (49:26)
Mm-hmm.
Michael Hickins (49:50)
That's not how it works, right? Like, you're gonna doop-de-doop-de-doop, bam, you lose your temper, like you, poof, and to learn.
What is underlying your own psyche in a way that an insignificant incident can cause you to lose your temper?
I find them.
losing my temper much more rarely, let's say. I haven't achieved perfect equanimity yet, but getting there.
Jamie Serino (50:29)
Yeah, so the trip and the experience seemed to resolve certain things that were bothering you, I guess. And some of which it seems you knew and maybe some of which you didn't quite know. So it was certainly therapeutic, but I guess if you have any advice for people that you think may have intergenerational trauma or just something that's unresolved for them.
besides telling them to take a trip to Germany or something like that. Like, do you have any other advice for someone to have a therapeutic experience like the way you did?
Michael Hickins (51:08)
You know, I did one thing.
Towards the end of her life, my mom came to live with us. And I probed her with questions and I recorded them. I recorded her answers. And I would urge anybody who's got any relatives who are still alive, who experienced the Holocaust in any way, even if they were kids at the time,
Jamie Serino (51:27)
Hmm.
Michael Hickins (51:43)
ask them about it and record it. And the reason I say record it is because
A lot of what my mother said, I didn't hear because the previous thing she said was so shocking that I was still processing it while she kept talking. And if I hadn't recorded it, I wouldn't have heard the next part, you know? It's like, I'm lucky because I also, I'm a writer, I wrote a book, I had this recording that I could kind of refer to. Not about anything specifically.
Jamie Serino (51:59)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Michael Hickins (52:20)
related to my father, but her own experiences, right? because she happened to live in France too, during the war, right? So, there were layers to this, but having access to that, I would say, absolutely, whether you're a writer or not, record those conversations because you're sure to capture what is said.
Jamie Serino (52:25)
Yeah.
Michael Hickins (52:50)
hear it again. And if you're a Holocaust survivor, tell someone, tell your family, know, talk about it, overcome the reticence. And what I think for a lot of people is the survivor's guilt, right? Get over that because otherwise what you're doing is you're passing, you're just passing it along and people aren't understanding what they're, what's at the root of it.
Jamie Serino (52:59)
Yeah.
Peter Carucci (53:15)
Wow.
Jamie Serino (53:15)
Yeah, that's really powerful. And that's great advice. I think that's a pretty strong way maybe to conclude here. Is there anything else that you'd want to add? Anything else you'd want people to know? And Peter, if you have any other questions as we look to conclude.
Peter Carucci (53:33)
I just want to say I'm really grateful for the opportunity to have this discussion with you. It's really cool. You know, we call this, there's a lesson in here somewhere. And really like there are so many lessons just in here, you know, we're just really grateful you were able to join us.
Jamie Serino (53:37)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Michael Hickins (53:49)
Well, I'm really grateful to you guys for hosting me and asking me such thoughtful questions. And I just have to say that there's a lot of internal conflict involved in approaching this topic. mean, this is something that we barely touched on, for instance, which is the whole concept of financial remuneration.
Jamie Serino (53:50)
Yeah.
Mmm.
Michael Hickins (54:18)
And there's a guilt element to that as well, which is like, you know, am I just trying to, you know, get my hands on some reparations? What, you know, is that wrong? And, you know, so, and I think it's, I think that my own case apart, I do feel that reparations are important.
because that's the way we acknowledge things. It's like in the, go back to the Bible, it's like the reason that the Jewish Bible has these sort of very specific laws about if you accidentally kill your brother-in-law, then you have to provide this and that to, it's because before that, was,
chaos and there was blood feuds and these people came along and said, no, look, we're going to quantify this. And it's like, okay, it doesn't make up for your emotional loss, but it makes up for your loss of income, for lack of a better word.
Jamie Serino (55:17)
Okay.
Mmm.
Peter Carucci (55:35)
It's a way also to acknowledge what happened and own the behavior.
Jamie Serino (55:39)
Yeah.
Michael Hickins (55:39)
Exactly. And it is a way that you can atone, right? You as the perpetrator. So I say that because, you know, as Americans, and I said this earlier, we're not very good at this, it's like, and it's being discussed now, you know, what does the United States owe African Americans? And, you know, I don't know what the answer is, but I know the answer is there's...
Jamie Serino (55:46)
Yeah.
Hmm.
Michael Hickins (56:09)
It's something. And until there's that acknowledgement, and I can speak from personal experience about that, just acknowledging that a wrong was committed and being willing to put a value on that goes a long way towards healing wounds that have not healed in over 100 years.
Jamie Serino (56:11)
Yeah.
Yeah, putting a value on it, that's a good phrase. All right, well Michael, thanks again. And thanks everybody for joining us. Michael Hickens, The Silk Factory, Google that. Check out Michael's blog as well for all those things in the box. A lot of stuff and a lot of other books from Michael that you can explore. So check them out. All right, Michael, looking forward to seeing you again. All right, take care everybody.
Michael Hickins (56:57)
Thanks very much.
All right, take care. Bye bye.
Jamie Serino (57:01)
Bye.