Legacy of Terror

Many Jews who escaped the Nazi horrors of World War II were scarred for life by "survivor syndrome"--chronic anxiety, flattened emotions, depression, guilt and recurring nightmares. Now, says Israeli Psychiatrist Samai Davidson, similar symptoms are turning up in the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors.

Davidson, director of Tel Aviv's Shalvata Psychiatric Center, found in treating many refugees from Nazi camps that they often married hastily, focused all hopes on their children, and as parents proved overprotective and found it difficult to show love. Says he: "The effects of the systematic dehumanization are being transmitted from one generation to the next through severe disturbance in the parent-child relationship. Survivors have made up a large part of our psychiatric population in Israel, and now increasing numbers of their children are requiring psychiatric help."

Currently a visiting scholar at Stanford University Medical School. Davidson is finding the same symptoms among children and grandchildren of survivors who now live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Moreover, he believes the problem in America is even worse than in Israel, where there was nationwide support for the refugees. Says he: "In the U.S., the survivors have been aliens, whose ordeal was never recognized as part of the national experience."

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