We who came after the war
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American journalist and author Helen Epstein was born on 27 November 1947 in Prague to Jewish parents who survived the Holocaust. Her father, Kurt Epstein, was a competitive swimmer and water polo player who represented Czechoslovakia at the Olympic Games in Amsterdam in 1928 and Berlin in 1936. His mother Franci, née Rabínková, trained as a seamstress and designer before the war and with her mother owned the Weigert fashion salon in Prague’s Spálená Street. Both Kurt and Franci passed through Nazi camps during the Holocaust, including Auschwitz, and lost their families. They married in 1946 and emigrated to America with Helen, who was less than a year old, after the communist coup. They found a new home in New York. After graduating from high school in 1965, Helen entered the City College of New York and from 1967 studied literature and musicology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In August 1968, during a holiday trip to Europe, she visited her hometown for the first time in 20 years and lived through the first days of the Soviet occupation in Prague. She described her experience in a report published by the Jerusalem Post, which led to a job as a journalist at the newspaper. She returned to America from Israel in 1970, completed graduate studies in journalism at Columbia University, and wrote for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other newspapers. In 1979, she published a groundbreaking book, Children of the Holocaust, which focused on the intergenerational transmission of trauma to the so-called “second generation,” the descendants of Holocaust survivors. She also dedicated other books to the trauma, Jewish history and her family history. In 1981, she was appointed professor of journalism at New York University. She raised two sons and lives in Massachusetts, but enjoys returning to the Czech Republic.
