Zivia remained principled, restrained, and driven by movement ideals. She was tight with money, fiercely against German reconciliation and reparations （except when her practical side set in）， and had to be forced by Leon Uris to buy a new dress for an important event. She allowed her children to receive only books for gifts; they were the last ones on the kibbutz to get bicycles. （Antek, the romantic visionary and bon vivant, enjoyed more material things.） When she wanted a new front porch, Zivia collected rocks and hammers and built it. Quotidian actions, she always felt, were the mark of value. She did not dwell on issues but believed that a person had to make a decision and carry it through. “Give yourself a slap on the ass!” was her motto.
Zivia worked, traveled, managed kibbutz finances, avidly read new books, hosted guests, and mothered two children. Like a majority of Holocaust survivors, she and Antek were overprotective and nurturing. Many survivor parents kept their pasts from their children, desperately wanting their offspring’s lives to be normal, but this inadvertently caused rifts. On kibbutzim all over Israel, children lived in separate communal quarters and spent only the afternoons with their parents, creating further distance and troubles with developing physical intimacy. At GFH, the children had particular issues with nightmares and bed-wetting, and Zivia agreed to hire a psychologist—a lavish expense on outsider work she normally would not condone. She too was haunted by the fact that her son was crying, and she had to leave him screaming because parents’ hours in the children’s wing were over.
Zivia remained in the periphery of the public eye. In 1961 she testified at the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann, and on a few occasions, agreed reluctantly to be on the Labor ticket for the Israeli parliament. She wanted to support the party, and went along with it only because she knew she’d lose. She was assigned a political position in government, but resigned, wanting to work on the kibbutz, to be with her family. She preferred cooking and poultry farming to the tiresome charades of being a figurehead. When, in the 1970s, intellectuals focused on the everyday resistance rather than singling out heroic fighters, and due to Zivia’s evasion of the limelight, her name faded from Israelis’ consciousness. Her book about the war was based on her lectures, and edited by Antek. Though she insisted her writings be published posthumously, they contain no personal revelations. “You can tell a lot about a person,” she said, “by the amount of times they say ‘I’ in a sentence.”
Even in heroic Zivia and Antek’s home, the past was secret. As was common with children of survivors who sensed it was not safe to probe, Zivia’s children made few inquiries into their parents’ history. Her daughter, Yael, a psychologist, wondered, How could I not have sat them down and asked them? As a child, she’d wanted younger, Hebrew-speaking, sabra parents. Their son, Shimon, felt pressure being the child of legends, unable to live up to expectations: “What am I supposed to do, throw a Molotov cocktail, kill a German, what?”
Many children of survivors felt the opposite pressure: to achieve what their parents couldn’t and to accomplish goals for their entire extended family, while also being constantly happy, justifying their parents’ survival. Others felt pressured simply to be “normal”—and rebelled by not marrying. Still others felt pushed to pursue particular careers, such as medicine. （“A philosopher [is] useless in the forest,” a surviving partisan told his Californian children.） Many became mental health and social workers.
Just before Zivia died, her daughter-in-law bore her a granddaughter: Eyal, which happens to be the Hebrew name for the ZOB. Zivia held the baby and cried in public, the first time since the forests of Poland. Eyal speaks publically about her family history, attributing her chattiness to her grandfather, with whom she was close as a child. Though she wishes she’d known more about her grandmother’s inner life, Eyal looks to Zivia’s book—the tale of a carer, a doer, someone who put others first, who held extremely high standards for everyone, including herself—as a source of strength.
Eyal also exhibits a frank self-criticism; a legacy of the Freedom philosophy. In an Israeli documentary about the family, she questions whether she would have had the strength to fight as Zivia did. When others criticizes the Poles who stood by, she remarks that she too has sat in restaurants bordering war zones, enjoying herself.