Trauma Goes On

Scars from the Holocaust

Growing up as the daughter of concentration camp survivors is like carrying "a terrible bomb," says Author Helen Epstein. That sense of menace and dread, she writes in her book Children of the Holocaust (Putnam; $10.95), can make New York City's Seventh Avenue subway seem like a train rolling through Poland to a death camp. As children, she and her brother armed themselves with kitchen knives whenever their parents were out, because the "burglars and murderers" might come at any time.

This week Jews around the world commemorate the victims of the Holocaust by marking days of remembrance and Yom HaShoah (Shoah literally means destruction, and loosely translates to holocaust). As children of the survivors join their parents in lighting memorial candles to the dead, there is a growing sense that the children--now mostly young adults in their 20s or early 30s--are beginning to show some of the same emotional scars as their parents.

Evidence of psychological damage is still sketchy, and most survivors' children seem to be functioning well. Says Minna Davis, co-founder of Chicago's Association for the Children of Holocaust Survivors: "There is nothing serious enough to land us on a psychiatrist's couch, but we do walk around with part of us missing." In many survivors' homes, ominous silences and gaps in the family history created a somber approach to childhood and an aura of tragedy about adult lives. Says one survivor's daughter, who is now raising her own family in Naperville, Ill.: "My parents and other adults were always talking in hushed tones. They had a serious and fearful approach to life that was bound to affect me."

Children pick up from these parents a sense of danger, distrust and the fragility of life. The parents tend to view the very existence of their offspring as a final triumph over Hitler and antiSemitism. But for the child, it can mean an overwhelming pressure to compensate for dead relatives and justify the parents' lives. "Some of these children don't feel they have a right to be happy," says Toronto Psychiatrist Henry Fenigstein, a camp survivor himself. "The child begins to feel that whether the parent says it or not, he or she must vindicate all the suffering." And since survivors' children are usually namesakes for Holocaust victims killed in their prime, says Robin Moss, a coordinator for survivor groups in the Kansas City area, "they feel a tremendous burden in having to live out a life for someone who didn't have a chance to live his."

One way to rebel against that kind of expectation is to fail at school or work. A more common reaction is to overachieve, with little sense of accomplishment or pleasure. The attitude, says Davis, is "Whatever I do it's never enough to make up for your loss." Either way, the survivor child is likely to feel isolated. Says Miriam Schiller, whose mother survived the Warsaw ghetto and Auschwitz: "When I was very little, all my parents' friends were survivors. Even among American Jews, I was an isolationist. I always felt separate from the people around me."

Social Worker Martin Trachtenberg, co-founder of a number of groups that support children of Holocaust survivors, several years ago began to notice one odd symptom: survivors' children were frequently overwhelmed by anxiety when facing some less-than-vital decisions, such as choosing a college or leaving home to move into an apartment of their own. Trachtenberg saw it as a fear of separating from parents; in the camps, separation was usually final and meant death. "Some struggled with going to college, but they did it," says Trachtenberg. "And when they got there, they called their parents every day. As adults, there's a geographic separation but not an emotional separation."

Lisa Newman, a psychiatric social worker in Toronto, thinks that some survivors have not been able to pass on a coherent value system to their children, because their ordeal under the Nazis was so absurd. "People survived, not for anything they did, but only because of someone's whim. That undermines your faith in your own actions having a sensible outcome, or a sense of a universe that men can act in."

Despite all these burdens, says Fenigstein, survivors' children are not inevitably victims of their parents' trauma. Says he: "Plenty of children managed to cope on their own, or they went for help." Several years ago, Fenigstein started "Holocaust workshops"--group therapy that seems to benefit most of the survivors and survivors' children who attend. Children with enough inner strength do not copy their parents, he says. "When there's a knock on the door, which reminds parents of a traumatic experience in the war when the Nazis came, this child doesn't react with anxiety but in a more realistic way--he checks to see who's at the door." Adds Ruth Kukiela Bork, president of One Generation After, a service organization for the children of survivors: "The offspring's behavior will depend to a great extent on how the parents managed to cope."

Some 20 organizations have sprung up around the country to serve the social and psychological needs of the Holocaust survivors' children, and--in the words of Trachtenberg--"to stop the trauma from passing on to the third generation." Still, there is no way to protect that generation from the emotional shock of learning what the Nazis did. Anne Sommerfeld-Halliwell, a survivor's child and a Yale psychologist, reports that her daughter Naria, 4, already wants to know "Will the bad men come here?" Her son Eli wrote a poem about assassinating Hitler, and at age nine, he is shaken by recurring fantasies of revenge. Says their mother, who is studying the effects of the Holocaust across generations: "When there's a traumatic event of such magnitude, it just doesn't go away with time."

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