“As amazed as I have been by the horrors my parents endured,” the U-M clinical psychologist adds, “I have been equally astounded by the miracles that enabled their survival—the extraordinary acts of courage, devotion, and resilience.” She heard of one such miracle firsthand at her son’s wedding in 2013.

Joy Wolfe Ensor, Julie Ellis, Rita Benn, and Ruth Wade edited memoirs by children of Holocaust survivors.

Benn is one of sixteen children of Holocaust survivors, all members of Ann Arbor’s Temple Beth Emeth, who joined together to preserve their families’ stories in The Ones Who Remember: Second-Generation Voices of the Holocaust, released last month. The project began after a Yom HaShoah Holocaust commemoration in 2004. Ava Dee Adler, Sassa Akervall, Phil Barr, Benn, Fran Lewy Berg, Julie Goldstein Ellis, Joy Wolfe Ensor, Myra Sue Fox, Eszter Gombosi, Avishay Hayut, Natalie L. Iglewicz, Nancy Szabo, Ruth Taubman, Cilla Tomas, Ruth Wade, and Simone Yehuda agreed to share their personal as well as parents’ stories publicly—some of which had never been told. Holocaust survivor Irene Hasenberg Butter wrote the foreword.

“Research indicates that the effects of extreme trauma can be experienced not only by the victims, but also by their children and grandchildren,” Benn explains. “We are living examples of that truth. Every one of us has felt the impact of our parents’ traumas and losses, and some of us are seeing effects in our own children, as well.”

Her story begins with her mother, a beautiful Aryan-looking blond who loved haute couture clothes and Chanel No. 5 perfume. “But it didn’t matter how many times my mother spritzed her sweet French perfume over her clothes. She could not cover the stench of the Holocaust from seeping out. Despite her remarkable resilience, invisible ghosts of sadness hovered, casting shadows on the makeshift beauty of a life she tried to create for herself and our family,” Benn writes. 

Benn’s father and his sister before the war. He survived Dachau, but his sister—Benn’s namesake—was killed in the Kovno Ghetto.

In 1941, her parents were university students studying in Belgium. They hurried to their family in Lithuania when they heard rumors of Nazi activities there. Soon after their arrival, the Nazis rounded up 29,000 local Jews and interned them in the Kovno Ghetto. Only 3,000 survived the war. Among them were her parents: Alyse Zlata Ginas and Philippe Allen Benjaminovitsch suffered horrifically, but lived. In time, they were able to emigrate to Canada, where Philippe simplified their name and launched a successful engineering company.

It was only after her father’s death that Benn began to ask questions about her parents’ World War II experiences. In an effort to learn more, she has visited the United States Holocaust Museum three times, studying films of the liberation of Dachau hoping to catch a glimpse of her father. She also joined a training program to teach U.S. Army personnel mental resilience skills “as a way of giving back to those unknown soldiers who freed my father and to whom I indirectly owe my life.” But to this day, she knows no more about her father’s family than his parents’ names, and no details of his internment.

Her mother was a little more forthcoming about her suffering in five different concentration camps. But solace and a sense of peace came to Benn years later, from an unexpected source: the wedding of her son, Jeremy Lapedis, to Cathryn Byrne-Dugan.

Dachau was liberated by American soldiers on April 29, 1945. SS leader Heinrich Himmler had ordered the camp’s destruction, specifying that “No prisoners shall be allowed to fall into the hands of the enemy alive.” Fortunately, Nazi guards were more interested in saving themselves. The U.S. 42nd Infantry Division reached the camp to find thirty railcars full of human remains and 30,000 starving survivors—including Benn’s father. “My mother told me he weighed seventy-five pounds at the time and suffered from typhus.”

Fast-forward to the April day in 2013 when Benn met Cathryn’s family at their children’s engagement party. Chatting with her son’s soon-to-be in-laws, she mentioned that she needed a new car but she wouldn’t buy a German one—“to honor my parents’ legacy.” Cathryn’s mother told Benn that her father Art Dugan, a World War II veteran, also refused to buy anything German. “But he never talks about his war experiences, so I’m not sure why.”

Benn moved to a chair beside the bride’s eighty-nine-year-old Irish Catholic grandfather. She asked if he had seen any concentration camps while he served in Europe, adding that her parents were both internees.

“Which camps?” he asked.

“My mother was at Stutthof, and my father at Dachau.”

When he heard “Dachau,” Dugan hesitated, then began speaking with averted eyes. “We thought we were going to help transport some prisoners out of jail,” he told her. “We had no preparations for what we would experience.”

They could smell the camp five miles away, he told her. They entered to find “dead bodies lying everywhere. You stepped over the corpses like they were roadkill. And those alive! I won’t ever forget what they looked like. Why would God allow a seventeen-year-old kid to see those sights and smell those smells?” The memory had haunted him for nearly seven decades.

Benn thanked him for his service. “Look at those children,” she told the veteran. “If you hadn’t been there to rescue my father, those children wouldn’t be here today.” 

Later, she marveled at the coincidence: “Who would have thought that this joining in marriage would be part of a legacy of reconciliation?”

Cathryn’s grandfather died months later—“more at peace than he had ever been,” Cathryn told Benn. “I think it’s because he told his story and realized that God had a purpose [for him] after all—it just took seven decades to learn it.”

Two years later, Cathryn and Jeremy named their daughter Alice, after Rita’s mother.