Fear Is Inherited. Pride Must Be Cultivated.

We Taught Them What Was Done to Us. We Forgot to Teach Them What We Built.

Dr. Ivan Gulas

Every Jewish parent I knew growing up wanted one thing above all others: for their children to be safer than they had been. They got it. Nobody warned us what it would cost.

I was born in Hungary a few months after the Holocaust ended. For the first decade of my life, nearly every adult I knew was a survivor — of a camp, of the forced labor battalions the Hungarians called munkaszolgálat, or of years in hiding. Then came 1956, our escape, the refugee camps, America.

I did not learn Jewish history in those years. I grew up inside its aftermath.

Children absorb the emotional weather of a house long before they understand the facts. Among the adults of my childhood there was one belief nobody had to say out loud:

We are safe today. Tomorrow may be different.

That sentence was the air in the room.

Most young American Jews have never breathed it, and I am glad they haven’t. Most were not born to survivors and did not grow up among them. They know the Holocaust happened.

Knowing is not the same as feeling it close.

Call that distinction emotional proximity — how near an event feels, as opposed to how much you know about it. The two have almost nothing to do with each other. A single afternoon can do more to your sense of a thing than ten years of reading.

The wall

I recently finished translating an extraordinary diary in which my uncle details his years of forced labor in a Hungarian battalion — the munkaszolgálat, which sent tens of thousands of Jewish men to the Eastern Front and brought back a fraction of them. No much in it was new to me. I had heard versions of all of it through my childhood, and later, as a clinical psychologist, I treated Auschwitz survivors whose memories had not faded at all.

Then I reached a line about my father’s brother, the one who did not come home. My uncle had found his name, among others he knew, written on the wall of a ruined building.

A man understands he is not going to survive, and the only thing left to him is a wall. So he writes his name on it. Someone who knows him walks past, reads it, and lives long enough to carry his name back home.

The diary added few facts I did not already know. What it did was ignite how close all of it felt — and leave me with something I had not expected. Not only grief. Awe. That a people came through that and then built what has been built in Israel is not a reasonable outcome. It is an astonishing one.

What we’ve been getting wrong

The challenge facing diaspora Jewish life, in America and elsewhere, is not preserving historical knowledge. We are extraordinary at that — curricula, museums, archives, more documentation than any persecuted people in history has assembled about itself. The challenge is to preserve emotional proximity once the last person who lived it is gone. We are within a decade of none.

We assumed proximity is built out of suffering — that if young Jews could feel the catastrophe closely enough, the connection would hold on its own.

It does not work that way, and it was never going to.

Proximity is also built out of ownership. An Israeli child does not experience Israel as a shelter thrown up after a disaster. Israel is the language he speaks, the university he wants to get into, the unit he will serve in, the government he will spend his adult life arguing about. His proximity comes from participation.

A Jewish child in Los Angeles or Cleveland meets Israel through headlines and a unit in Hebrew school. He learns about Israel. He does not experience it as any part of his own story.

Someone will say the distance between young American Jews and Israel in 2026 is a political judgment, not a failure of education. That is fair, and I will not pretend it away. But disagreeing with a government is a different condition from having no felt relationship to a civilization, and we have gotten sloppy about treating them as the same thing. People argue about what they own. The young Jew who debates Israeli politics with me does not worry me. The one for whom none of it is his to fight about does.

Where rescue was manufactured

My mother and her family were sheltered at 29 Vadász utca in Budapest, in the building people call the Glass House. I went there for the first time earlier this year.

It belonged to Arthur Weisz, a glass importer, until Hungary’s anti-Jewish laws stripped him of the right to run his business. After the Germans occupied Hungary in March 1944, Weisz handed the empty building to the rescue effort. The Arrow Cross took him out of it and murdered him on 1 January 1945.

What happened inside in between is not what people picture when they hear “hiding place.”

Moshe Krausz, who directed the Palestine Office, held 7,800 British certificates for immigration to Palestine. Carl Lutz, the Swiss vice-consul, had the building declared an annex of the Swiss legation, and the two of them reinterpreted those 7,800 as families rather than individuals — then issued tens of thousands of protective letters, every one numbered between one and eight thousand, so that on paper no limit was ever exceeded. The Germans respected paperwork. He gave them paperwork.

Then the building went further than diplomacy could. The Zionist youth movements ran their underground out of it.

One of them was a boy named Endre Grósz, who had come to Budapest to learn a useful trade for the life he intended to have in Eretz Israel, and apprenticed as a draughtsman. In 1944 that drafting hand turned out to be the most valuable skill in the Jewish underground, and at eighteen he was running its forgery workshop. In December it was raided; he was interrogated and imprisoned, and one of his colleagues died under it. The underground broke him out with a hundred and twenty others. He reached Israel in 1949, took the name David Gur, and has spent the eighty years since making certain the record was written down. He is now a hundred years old.

Couriers, some of them thirteen, carried the workshop’s papers into a besieged city wearing Arrow Cross armbands and German police uniforms as cover. In November 1944 the movements set themselves a target: 120,000 forged Swiss protective passes — one for every Jew still alive in Budapest. Yad Vashem puts the number actually distributed at roughly 100,000.

Three thousand people were living in the Glass House by then, in the cellar, the attic, the corridors. My mother was one of them. About two and a half thousand walked out when the Red Army reached Vadász utca on 18 January 1945.

The Glass House is where rescue was manufactured.

Not where refuge was sought. Where the largest organized rescue of Jews in wartime Hungary was made — by hand, at scale, deliberately, by Jews, with a Swiss diplomat holding the roof up over them.

And the hands were young. Those movements had not been created to run rescue operations. They existed years before the war to train young Jews to emigrate and build. They were rivals, divided by politics and even by the practice of religion, but in 1944 they agreed in advance to operate as a single underground — which Gur has maintained ever since was the only place in Europe the movements ever did that. An organization built for construction was turned to saving Jewish lives because that was the greatest need.

The capacity to build is what made the rescue possible.

Gur was eighteen. The couriers were thirteen. They were the age of the children we are trying to reach.

That matters more than it sounds, and it is the part I understand best. I never once saw a patient build an identity out of a person they could not imagine being. Adolescents take their sense of themselves from models close enough to try on — someone their own size, in a situation they can picture entering. A fourteen-year-old cannot imagine being a murdered adult. The distance is too great, and what he feels instead is pity, which is a spectator’s emotion and leaves nothing behind. He can imagine being an eighteen-year-old with a steady hand and a drafting pen. That is not pity. That is identification, and identification is the mechanism by which somebody else’s history becomes a person’s own.

Today there is one room in that building — the old ground-floor garage — where the Carl Lutz Foundation has kept a memorial since 2005. One room, for all of it.

What that room should become — expanding into a building that now stands largely empty — is not another memorial museum. Europe has those. They are necessary, and they are full. What is missing is a place where a fourteen-year-old meets Jewish ingenuity face to face — the improvisation, the nerve, the willingness to answer a death sentence with a rubber stamp and a steady hand — and walks out owning a piece of it.

What we owe them

None of this argues for less Holocaust education. It argues that remembrance was never going to be enough by itself. We have taught our children to remember. We have not taught them to inherit.

And I want to be careful, because there is a version of this argument that is false. Fear transmits. It transmits beautifully. I know because I grew up breathing it, and decades of clinical work only confirmed what my childhood had taught me. Nobody sat me down to explain that safety was provisional; I absorbed it the way a child absorbs a language.

The problem was never that fear fails to travel.

Fear is inherited. Pride must be cultivated.

That asymmetry is the whole of it. Vigilance passes down on its own, through the emotional weather of a house. Pride does not. Pride requires participation — institutions, language, accomplishment, things built on purpose by people who decided they mattered, and a child given some part in them. One inheritance arrives whether anyone intends it or not. The other has to be handed over deliberately, and where nobody hands it over, it is gone.

We have been superb at the transmission that happens by itself and negligent about the one that does not.

I know how this reads with antisemitism at levels most American Jews have never encountered and Israel under pressure from more directions at once than at any point I can remember. Someone will say this is the wrong season to talk about pride. It is exactly the season, because we are choosing between two roads and most of us have not noticed it is a choice. The first is easy to climb aboard: more programming about what was done to us, an identity organized around the expectation that they are coming for us again. It is partly true. That is what makes it dangerous.

It is also where we have taught Israel worst. We hand it to American children as insurance — the place to go if it ever happens here. That is the fear road with a flag on it, and a child who understands Israel as an escape hatch has absorbed something underneath it: that he is a person who may one day need one.

Teach it the other way. Israel is a shelter — that is real, and it is written into the country’s founding law. But taught only as a shelter, it becomes an escape hatch, and the child absorbs the escape rather than the achievement. Israel is also the answer a people gave to helplessness, and that answer is still being written. A young Jew who holds it close because it is capable — not helpless, not waiting, not asking — stands somewhere entirely different from one who holds it as a last resort.

The eighteen-year-old forging papers in Budapest did what could be done with a pen, because a pen was what he had. The ones who came through spent the rest of their lives making sure the next Jewish teenager would have more than a pen.

Museums do not only preserve. They assign ownership. The question is never what children learn there; it is what they walk out believing belongs to them. Emotional proximity begins the moment a child stops thinking this happened to Jews and starts thinking this is mine.

Nobody in that building knew they were making history. Gur was not producing a museum exhibit; he was producing a discharge certificate, because a man needed one by Thursday. Everything a Jewish child might someday feel proud of was made by people doing the next thing that had to be done — which is the one part still available to him.

My father’s brother wrote his name on a wall and did not come home. My mother walked out of the building on Vadász utca alive. Eighty-two years later I am trying to turn one garage room into a place where a child can stand inside what was built there and feel some part of it as his own. Nobody assigned me that. That is what it looks like when a thing is yours.

There is an older image for this than any I have offered. Judah is a lion, the blessing says. Jews carried that name through thirty centuries in which it was plainly not the case — through expulsion, through the ghetto, through the labor battalions. It was aspiration, and some years it was closer to defiance. What changed inside a single lifetime is that it became a description.

That is what I want a Jewish child to feel. Not that his people were hunted, though they were. Not that he is safe, because nobody can promise him that. I want him to know he owns a share in something that spent three thousand years calling itself a lion and then, in the span of his grandparents’ lives, became one — and that it cost what it cost, and the bill was paid by people whose names are on walls.

That is the whole of what we owe the next generation. Not somebody else’s past. Their own unfinished business.

______________________________________________________________

A note on the Glass House. The Carl Lutz memorial has been kept alive on public donations for twenty years, in one room, while the courtyard, the cellar, the attic, and the offices where the work was done sit intact, empty, and closed to the public. It should grow outward into them — not into another memorial museum, of which Europe has many and needs no more, but into a place built around Jewish ingenuity and the dangerous, inventive solutions it produced, where a child leaves knowing he belongs to lions. If it works, it is a model for the half of Jewish education we have neglected — and that half matters most to those of us raising children in the diaspora, who cannot rely on the air in the room to do it for us. It will not happen on goodwill; it will happen if there is the will and a funding mechanism behind it, which is what I am working on now. If you share that vision — or you work in Holocaust education, museum development, or foundation giving, or your family came through 29 Vadász utca — write to me in the comments below.