With the children of Holocaust survivors, there is always a very close relationship. You grow with the sense that you are parenting your parents and - with this kind of responsibility to protect them. That's what makes the children of Holocaust survivors strange.
I'm the son of two Holocaust survivors. As a child, I heard from one of my parents' best friends about living through Mengele's infamous selection process at Auschwitz. He haunted my nightmares.
I think the typical way is that usually Holocaust survivors are known to be very quiet and full of anxiety, many of them don't like life, don't trust people. But my parents were children during the Holocaust. And my father was very optimistic.
The Mormons even baptized Anne Frank. It took Ernest Michel, then chairman of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, three years to get Mormons to agree to stop proxy-baptizing Holocaust victims.
One can't live with a child of Holocaust survivors without absorbing some of the same sensibilities that her parents transmitted to her as a young girl. It is an unspoken dread, a sense of fragility, an anxious anticipation of unseen horrors.
I do a lot of research. For 'I Am Legend', I did a lot of research about survivors. If everybody is dead around you, how you can keep surviving. I went to the bookstore and found psychiatry books about survivors from the Holocaust.
I have the greatest respect for the survivors of the Holocaust. We can't even imagine what these people went through.
The Holocaust survivors are among the most inspiring people I have had the privilege to meet.
I've learned there are a lot of people that don't want to believe the Holocaust ever happened because it doesn't fit their other beliefs and so they deny it and it makes them sleep better at night to do so. But it makes the Holocaust survivors sleep better at night to know that we've given them a voice.
Germany can make a major difference in the lives of so many Holocaust survivors who are struggling in their later years.
My grandparents are holocaust survivors so I was really aware at a young age how horrible human beings can be to one another.
As the generation of Holocaust survivors and liberators dwindles, the torch of remembrance, of bearing witness, and of education must continue forward.
My novella, 'The Lucky One,' is inspired in part by my dad and also by a Holocaust survivor I interviewed for the Steven Spielberg Survivors of the Shoah Foundation.
I've met many Holocaust survivors who find the era infinitely compelling because they have this deep hunger to understand how it all could possibly have happened.
I became a co-chair of the Congressional Study Group from Germany several years ago with the expressed purpose of helping increase aid to Holocaust survivors.
I went to Israel for two months in 1970 and worked on a kibbutz. It affected me on levels that I hadn't anticipated, working on a daily basis with people who were actual survivors of the Holocaust.