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Out from the Shadows: Growing up with Holocaust Survivor Parents
Growing up, the author and his family constantly lived under the shadow of the Holocaust. There was persistent tension at home. He was frequently “Finish your dinner. We didn’t have food like this in the camps.”
His parents only provided bits and pieces of their Holocaust experiences, since he “didn’t need to know.” A few years ago, Willie Handler decided that he did need to know. Thus began a journey into his family’s past, eventually revealing their extraordinary survival and painful losses. Their stories reflect not only the evil that swept Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, but also the resilience of the human spirit.
His parents appeared to have taken some shocking secrets to their graves, forcing the author to view them in a different light. With the acknowledgement of his own buried trauma, and following years of research, he has finally stepped out of the shadows.
His parents only provided bits and pieces of their Holocaust experiences, since he “didn’t need to know.” A few years ago, Willie Handler decided that he did need to know. Thus began a journey into his family’s past, eventually revealing their extraordinary survival and painful losses. Their stories reflect not only the evil that swept Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, but also the resilience of the human spirit.
His parents appeared to have taken some shocking secrets to their graves, forcing the author to view them in a different light. With the acknowledgement of his own buried trauma, and following years of research, he has finally stepped out of the shadows.
- GenresHistory
224 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 9, 2024
About the author
Willie Handler
9 books53 followersWillie Handler has reinvented himself on several occasions throughout his work career. He has been a hospital administrator, a government policy manager, an insurance expert, and consultant. Following his retirement from the government, Willie began a writing career. He has published three fiction novels over the past few years. His latest book is a memoir focusing on growing up as a child of Holocaust survivors.
Willie is active in Toronto’s Holocaust second generation and third generation survivor community, participating in educational programs, commemorative events, and group discussions. He is also a volunteer at the Toronto Holocaust Museum, where he assists students and visitors as they make their way through the museum’s gallery. Willie has spoken online and at in-person events on the Holocaust and his family’s experience. He is currently working on a book dealing with generational trauma in descendants of Holocaust survivors.
Willie is active in Toronto’s Holocaust second generation and third generation survivor community, participating in educational programs, commemorative events, and group discussions. He is also a volunteer at the Toronto Holocaust Museum, where he assists students and visitors as they make their way through the museum’s gallery. Willie has spoken online and at in-person events on the Holocaust and his family’s experience. He is currently working on a book dealing with generational trauma in descendants of Holocaust survivors.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
January 11, 2025
Few books earn 5 stars from my reading. It’s not that I’m critical, it’s just that I reserve 5 stars for books that actually give me meaning or change my life in some way.
As a small child, my grandmother would mention that there were these people who would have killed me and my brother. Even later in my life she would mutter “They would have killed you too.” Technically, she is probably incorrect because we would have been mischling at best, but the impact on a young girl that there were people who would murder her was profound.
Learning to read at the age of 4, I read the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich at an age when it was most likely ill advised. It was on my grandmother’s bookshelf next to the fairy tales. Fairy tales were unimportant in my mind. I needed to know what drove these people to want to kill me and what I needed to do to stay safe.
At the age of 8, my mother introduced me to one of the most important people in my life. His name was Sid and he became a father, coach and mentor for my entire life. Sid was also Orthodox Jewish. In my young mind, I had to keep Sid safe too. I imagined ways to hide him in the forest behind my house. Even as recently as our current house, I thought about how we could hide him in the attic.
Then Sid died this last May and it was a shock to think that I no longer needed to conceive of hiding places for him. It wasn’t even a conscious thought. Before he passed, I never told him or anyone else that I always planned to keep him safe.
For some reason since that first book, I’ve read so many Holocaust stories and books. I’ve read about World War II and the factors that led to the Holocaust. The thinking was that reading enough books, maybe there would be an answer.
My father’s family was German which was another struggle. In my mind the Germans were evil. Was part of me evil as well? At a young age I painted all Germans the same and yet my grandmother was a very kind person.
My husband mentioned Willie Handler as someone on Twitter who had written a book and who he liked very much. Sorry it took me so long to get to the point. Most Holocaust books focus on what happened during the war and the terrible atrocities. Sometimes they border on horror stories. The amazing part about Willie Handler’s book is that it describes who they were before the war and who they became after the war.
His parents grew up in different countries and cultures. Their communities were described as they were before society broke down. Then the cities are described as they were when the war started and people were “deported”. This format gives a clearer picture of how events took place.
So few books focus on the aftermath. It’s as if “tada” everyone is saved and lived happily ever after. Of course that cannot be the case. In other books, they have mentioned that some people became zealots in an effort to appease G-d and not have these things happen again. Other works have also mentioned that people were told to forget the war. Being through one of the most traumatic experiences in history and having to stifle emotions, must have been the worst feeling of all. Of course the survivors would be traumatized and carry that over to their children.
What this book offers is a glimpse into the lives of these traumatized survivors and their children. Hopefully the next generation can heal.
As a small child, my grandmother would mention that there were these people who would have killed me and my brother. Even later in my life she would mutter “They would have killed you too.” Technically, she is probably incorrect because we would have been mischling at best, but the impact on a young girl that there were people who would murder her was profound.
Learning to read at the age of 4, I read the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich at an age when it was most likely ill advised. It was on my grandmother’s bookshelf next to the fairy tales. Fairy tales were unimportant in my mind. I needed to know what drove these people to want to kill me and what I needed to do to stay safe.
At the age of 8, my mother introduced me to one of the most important people in my life. His name was Sid and he became a father, coach and mentor for my entire life. Sid was also Orthodox Jewish. In my young mind, I had to keep Sid safe too. I imagined ways to hide him in the forest behind my house. Even as recently as our current house, I thought about how we could hide him in the attic.
Then Sid died this last May and it was a shock to think that I no longer needed to conceive of hiding places for him. It wasn’t even a conscious thought. Before he passed, I never told him or anyone else that I always planned to keep him safe.
For some reason since that first book, I’ve read so many Holocaust stories and books. I’ve read about World War II and the factors that led to the Holocaust. The thinking was that reading enough books, maybe there would be an answer.
My father’s family was German which was another struggle. In my mind the Germans were evil. Was part of me evil as well? At a young age I painted all Germans the same and yet my grandmother was a very kind person.
My husband mentioned Willie Handler as someone on Twitter who had written a book and who he liked very much. Sorry it took me so long to get to the point. Most Holocaust books focus on what happened during the war and the terrible atrocities. Sometimes they border on horror stories. The amazing part about Willie Handler’s book is that it describes who they were before the war and who they became after the war.
His parents grew up in different countries and cultures. Their communities were described as they were before society broke down. Then the cities are described as they were when the war started and people were “deported”. This format gives a clearer picture of how events took place.
So few books focus on the aftermath. It’s as if “tada” everyone is saved and lived happily ever after. Of course that cannot be the case. In other books, they have mentioned that some people became zealots in an effort to appease G-d and not have these things happen again. Other works have also mentioned that people were told to forget the war. Being through one of the most traumatic experiences in history and having to stifle emotions, must have been the worst feeling of all. Of course the survivors would be traumatized and carry that over to their children.
What this book offers is a glimpse into the lives of these traumatized survivors and their children. Hopefully the next generation can heal.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 29, 2024
Out from the shadows
At the beginning of Out of the Shadows the author , Willie Handler, asks if the world needs another book about The Holocaust. The answer is an emphatic yes. It is so important for people to learn, especially now, about the personal stories of those who suffered so much at the hands of pure evil during The Holocaust and those who suffer generational trauma because of it.
Out of the Shadows is a book that explores a family ripped apart during the Holocaust, many of whom perished at the hands of the Nazis. Handler did extensive research on family members to bring us face to face with his relatives and their stories.
After the war Handler’s parents, survivors of the Holocaust, met in Israel and married. They eventually settled in Toronto, Canada. Handler speaks to the traumatic responses of his parents as they struggled to make a living. Their responses coming from their raw pain, not meaning to, of course, in turn traumatized their children.
Much gratitude to Willie Handler for writing on this topic to help us learn the widespread harm done to Jews during The Holocaust that continues to reverberate today.
At the beginning of Out of the Shadows the author , Willie Handler, asks if the world needs another book about The Holocaust. The answer is an emphatic yes. It is so important for people to learn, especially now, about the personal stories of those who suffered so much at the hands of pure evil during The Holocaust and those who suffer generational trauma because of it.
Out of the Shadows is a book that explores a family ripped apart during the Holocaust, many of whom perished at the hands of the Nazis. Handler did extensive research on family members to bring us face to face with his relatives and their stories.
After the war Handler’s parents, survivors of the Holocaust, met in Israel and married. They eventually settled in Toronto, Canada. Handler speaks to the traumatic responses of his parents as they struggled to make a living. Their responses coming from their raw pain, not meaning to, of course, in turn traumatized their children.
Much gratitude to Willie Handler for writing on this topic to help us learn the widespread harm done to Jews during The Holocaust that continues to reverberate today.
December 2, 2024
I loved this book—it’ll stick with me. Excellent balance of well-researched history and personal experiences. I better understand not only Holocaust families now, but also modern Jewish people living in a world that keeps returning to anti-semitism.
January 5, 2025
This is an exceptional piece of work that deserves a wide audience. Handler is compassionate, pragmatic, questioning and funny -- able to laugh at himself as he tells his family's heartbreaking story. A fast read, it is likely to resonate for quite some time.
November 24, 2024
A painful and traumatic read
Yes this was a painful and traumatic read for this reader. This is meant as a compliment to the author’s outstanding research and passion for writing this memoir about his family and the generational trauma of this horrific event and its aftermath.
As a student of history, reading Willie’s memoir gave me an excellent introduction to a topic about which I was somewhat ignorant.
Willie’s research was thorough and detailed and he provided excellent resources for those who choose to learn more. This book will significantly add to the body of knowledge about this subject and a thoughtful reminder to never forget.
Congratulations Willie for bringing your personal story to our attention.
Yes this was a painful and traumatic read for this reader. This is meant as a compliment to the author’s outstanding research and passion for writing this memoir about his family and the generational trauma of this horrific event and its aftermath.
As a student of history, reading Willie’s memoir gave me an excellent introduction to a topic about which I was somewhat ignorant.
Willie’s research was thorough and detailed and he provided excellent resources for those who choose to learn more. This book will significantly add to the body of knowledge about this subject and a thoughtful reminder to never forget.
Congratulations Willie for bringing your personal story to our attention.
April 13, 2026
I have to begin my review by saying that this book was, at times, heart wrenching to read so I can only imagine the strength and commitment it took for Mr. Handler to write it. I thank him for making that choice so that we can have this history. He says in his introduction that he first questioned the need for another book about the Holocaust. If it were another book of facts and numbers one might agree. But this is a book about human experiences…human stories and, of those kinds of books, we can never have enough.
The author chose to order his book from past to present with the events that took place before and during the war taking up about half of the book. Most of the remainder focuses on Handler’s childhood experiences with a few chapters at the end dedicated to his adulthood during his parent’s final years. Some family trees are also included at the start of the book and there is a small collection of photographs at the end.
Before I began reading I did wonder if someone who was writing from a personal perspective, versus an academic perspective, would have done enough historical research to tell a full story. This concern was completely unnecessary. I was impressed with the level of information and detail Handler included about the events that occurred before he was born. His writing about his family’s experiences in Europe were not just well researched but consistently felt like the result of a labor of love - the importance of the words not just to the story but to the writer shining through.
I also think this book makes a very important statement about generational trauma. So often society chooses to end the story of Holocaust survivors at the end of the war, the years that follow being little more than a footnote to the horrendous suffering that came before. The continuing tragedy is that they were expected to simply move on and bury their trauma with absolutely none of the resources necessary. This makes it all the more important, in my opinion, for the pain of these survivors and their children to be heard and validated not just yesterday but today.
As Mr. Handler emphatically asserts in these final pages, we need these stories! Humanity is so quick to want to forget the darkest years of history. We need to remember that just because these horrific things happened in the past doesn’t change the fact that they happened to PEOPLE. As a society we need to remember how evil human beings can be so we can commit ourselves to never being that evil again. We need to remember.
Even when it’s scary.
Even when it’s difficult.
Even when you see a black and white photo of two little girls on their mother’s lap and want to cry.
The author chose to order his book from past to present with the events that took place before and during the war taking up about half of the book. Most of the remainder focuses on Handler’s childhood experiences with a few chapters at the end dedicated to his adulthood during his parent’s final years. Some family trees are also included at the start of the book and there is a small collection of photographs at the end.
Before I began reading I did wonder if someone who was writing from a personal perspective, versus an academic perspective, would have done enough historical research to tell a full story. This concern was completely unnecessary. I was impressed with the level of information and detail Handler included about the events that occurred before he was born. His writing about his family’s experiences in Europe were not just well researched but consistently felt like the result of a labor of love - the importance of the words not just to the story but to the writer shining through.
I also think this book makes a very important statement about generational trauma. So often society chooses to end the story of Holocaust survivors at the end of the war, the years that follow being little more than a footnote to the horrendous suffering that came before. The continuing tragedy is that they were expected to simply move on and bury their trauma with absolutely none of the resources necessary. This makes it all the more important, in my opinion, for the pain of these survivors and their children to be heard and validated not just yesterday but today.
As Mr. Handler emphatically asserts in these final pages, we need these stories! Humanity is so quick to want to forget the darkest years of history. We need to remember that just because these horrific things happened in the past doesn’t change the fact that they happened to PEOPLE. As a society we need to remember how evil human beings can be so we can commit ourselves to never being that evil again. We need to remember.
Even when it’s scary.
Even when it’s difficult.
Even when you see a black and white photo of two little girls on their mother’s lap and want to cry.
December 30, 2025
A very difficult book to read but it’s well worth your time. It’s difficult because the descriptions of the horrendous atrocities that occurred - Handler personalizes them and this really hit home. It’s not just numbers, it’s descriptions of his family’s history during these horrific times. The impact is far more real than statistics.
Reading the post-Holocaust family history was almost like sitting down with the author over tea and cookies listening to him talk about how his family never was able to escape the mental horrors of what happened. I’m a child of survivors and while our circumstances were quite different, his parents and mine both treated the past the same way. I learned a lot and have forgiven my parents, albeit too late, as this book helped me clarify my muddled feelings.
Handler is honest, and wears his hat on his sleeve. I wish I could meet him to thank him.
Reading the post-Holocaust family history was almost like sitting down with the author over tea and cookies listening to him talk about how his family never was able to escape the mental horrors of what happened. I’m a child of survivors and while our circumstances were quite different, his parents and mine both treated the past the same way. I learned a lot and have forgiven my parents, albeit too late, as this book helped me clarify my muddled feelings.
Handler is honest, and wears his hat on his sleeve. I wish I could meet him to thank him.
April 30, 2026
This book gave a great amount of insight into the Holocaust and the generational trauma it caused. I appreciated a lot of what I was able to learn from it. However, the author takes multiple opportunities to reinforce their support for the state of Israel and not once do they acknowledge the very real harm that has been experienced by the Palestinian people. They equate being Jewish to being a Zionist, disregarding the many Jewish anti-Zionists. I struggle to understand how someone could see and understand the pain experienced by their family members, record it so beautifully, and then turn around and support similarly awful things happening to other families. It is a good and highly informative book when the author recounts history, but when they delve into their own opinions about the modern world it becomes logically inconsistent and frustrating.
April 23, 2025
Phenomenal job of dissecting out difficult family histories-and dealing with emotional trauma even as a second-generation survivor. The author takes you on his journey to find out what happened to his parents who escaped the Holocaust, and in the process, learn who he is in the process. Inter generational trauma persists and Mr. Handler shows how this happened and the effects. At the end of the book is a MUST HAVE reference to genealogical resources in Europe and also for Holocaust survivors. It’s meticulously assembled so worth the book price just for that!
July 8, 2025
Every baby boomer with parents who grew up in the Great Depression knows all about their parent's experiences with hardship through that economic debacle, ('At Christmas, all I received was an orange") but for Willie Handler, the son of two immigrant Holocaust survivors, the story is a little more serious. His Polish father lost practically an entire family during the war and in the camps (including a wife and two daughters of which Handler was unaware for a long time) and his mother's fate in the Romanian ghettos was not much better.
Yet, they survived, they relocated, first to Israel and then to Canada where their lives were dedicated to longs days of work and keeping secret the awful truth of what they had witnessed (unless the food leftover on the dinner table which was NEVER to be wasted.
Handler's book is more than a simple autobiography, however. It's a search for the stories now told that made the disquieted hockey fan and devoted family man he is today, always with the dark cloud of unspoken memories hanging over his head or nearby. I found the book's thesis concerning inherited unknown trauma fascinating--and so will you, with a secret sweetness to it that beats any oranges in December given out to a family of ten!
Yet, they survived, they relocated, first to Israel and then to Canada where their lives were dedicated to longs days of work and keeping secret the awful truth of what they had witnessed (unless the food leftover on the dinner table which was NEVER to be wasted.
Handler's book is more than a simple autobiography, however. It's a search for the stories now told that made the disquieted hockey fan and devoted family man he is today, always with the dark cloud of unspoken memories hanging over his head or nearby. I found the book's thesis concerning inherited unknown trauma fascinating--and so will you, with a secret sweetness to it that beats any oranges in December given out to a family of ten!
April 14, 2026
In this book, the author shares what he learned about his parents' experiences during the Holocaust. I particularly liked how he shared how those experiences shaped the rest of their lives, and by extension, the lives of their children. I'm glad he was able to share these stories before they became lost.
I received this book as a Goodreads giveaway. Yay!
I received this book as a Goodreads giveaway. Yay!
March 30, 2026
Beautiful.
May 15, 2026
A fast, easy read with a message that will stay with me forever.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews