Yom Kippur is the most meaningful day in the Jewish religion to begin the Jewish New Year. Not only is it a significant Jewish holy day, but it's also the holiest day of the year. This day is dedicated to atonement, repentance, and reflection, allowing individuals to seek forgiveness and the purification of their souls. Through fasting, prayer, and introspection, Yom Kippur holds profound spiritual importance in the Jewish faith.

On Yom Kippur day, October 1993, my rabbi's sermon in synagogue was the story of Oskar Schindler due to the upcoming release of "Schindler's List" that would debut in the next six weeks. It had been five years since my mother passed away. At the end of the Rabbi's sermon, my father leaned over to me in temple and told me something that she never did. They were six words I would never forget – "Your mother was on that list."

"In The Midst of Darkness" is a memoir about what I know of my mother's teenage life in the Holocaust being a "Schindler" Jew that confronts Intergenerational – "Second Generation" survivor trauma manifested in the underserved hatred for my German stepmother and every other German. The unrelenting irony is my mother's life and over 1200 other Jewish lives were saved by a Nazi German – Oskar Schindler during the Holocaust.

The story explores my mother's trauma resulting from the atrocities she endured in the Holocaust, her parents, four sisters and a brother who were murdered in the Auschwitz and Belzec death camps, and how she deeply inflicted her trauma upon her sons as children. The underlying theme of the story confronts racism – how it can begin, what it can do to us, and how we can reconcile from the past – even amidst the reach of darkness. How we look at people differently, based upon nothing more than our own bias also has never been more prevalent in the world since the Holocaust than today.

My mother's holocaust survivor trauma, even if some of it had been reconciled nearly 20 years after liberation had to be retriggered, probably even impacting her far more than during her past when her husband left her when she was pregnant with me for a German woman. We were living in one Chicago's largest Jewish communities in the early 1960's, filled with Holocaust survivors. Her lifetime of hatred for my stepmother and all other Germans, which my brother and I inherited helped lead to his nervous breakdown that he never recovered from. Throughout most of his adult life, he was deeply impacted by mental illness – a fate that could have become mine.

The numbers of those who may be impacted by generational trauma due to the Holocaust are staggering - surpassing over 10 million direct descendants of survivors that may be living with the legacy of this trauma, yet its often unspoken. Of which, 7-8 million of them may be Jewish. That is approximately 50% of the world's Jewish population and doesn't account for the potential impact of what subsequent and future generations may already face or will need to bear. These stories also need to be told to the same reach that I feel we've given for survivors. If not how can their children and their descendants change the behavior they need to confront. The silence may continue to leave them without enough awareness needed to let them reconcile their trauma.

The story also let's us see that childhood trauma may stay with us for a lifetime. But I feel our awareness of the behavior can be the real difference.