Olga Horak endured concentration camps, death marches and losing almost her entire family in World War II. Decades on, her grandson still feels the reverberations of that trauma, sometimes in surprising ways.
As a child, Anthony Levin would cover himself in blankets. Even on the hottest of Sydney’s summer nights, he would make sure his arms and legs were entirely swaddled.
The quilts were a form of protection — from the chainsaws he was convinced were going to remove his limbs, the strangers ready to abduct him while he was sleeping. His fear was palpable, and continued for years.
“That’s not your normal childhood bogeyman under the bed,” Anthony says.
Anthony thinks his visceral imaginings came from hearing family stories from the Holocaust.
“You’re vulnerable, it’s in the dark, it’s when you alone. It’s all the things that resonate with the Nazis coming in the night to take you away.”
Monday is Yom HaShoah, the international day of Holocaust Remembrance, but for Anthony, the Holocaust has always been present — though not always identifiable.
Even as a child, he had an understanding of what the genocide was through the experiences of his grandmother, Olga.
Read the full article by Natasha Mitchell and Tiger Webb at ABC News.
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