Intergenerational Trauma – The Hidden Voices After The Holocaust

Intergenerational Trauma – The Hidden Voices After The Holocaust

While much has been told about the atrocities of the Holocaust survivors, their descendants have trauma too.
There has been so much shared of survivors’ accounts of the atrocities they lived through in the Holocaust, but not nearly enough of the trauma they’ve passed onto their children, their children’s children, and what future generations may have to bear. If we only consider the approximately 11 million victims who were murdered in the Holocaust, there must be at least that many survivors of family members/relatives, who probably have been inflicted with survivor trauma. That also doesn’t consider that many descendants of survivors may live with generational trauma.

There has been so much shared of survivors’ accounts of the atrocities they lived through in the Holocaust, but not nearly enough of the trauma they’ve passed onto their children, their children’s children, and what future generations may have to bear. If we only consider the approximately 11 million victims who were murdered in the Holocaust, there must be at least that many survivors of family members/relatives, who probably have been inflicted with survivor trauma. That also doesn’t consider that many descendants of survivors may live with generational trauma.

Psychological research has found that survivor trauma for those who survived a time as catastrophic as the Holocaust has been passed on genetically to their descendants, and lets us see what future generations may need to confront.

You may read more about Intergeneration Trauma and the Holocaust in the full article here.

 
 
 

My Overbearing Mother and I (Robert Don) – Was It All The Right Love

My Overbearing Mother and I (Robert Don) – Was It All The Right Love

My mother

I was raised with overbearing affection by my mother, so that I felt growing up no one could have loved me more. She was always there for me, coming to my ballgames, walking me to school, when I was bullied for being a fat little kid, often with kids in my class, and even came with her to adult social functions in synagogues or events with organizations for Holocaust survivors. I even slept in her bed, often afraid to sleep alone until I was 11 or 12. But was it really what I had needed –smothering affection that forced me to question for years, and even today, I am often not convinced that I have been able to stand on my own.

The overbearing affection of my mother, I felt later in life, only left me far more enabled than was healthy. Growing up, I always considered myself very lazy, both physically and mentally. I never exercised much, didn’t study hard, and worked part-time for my father delivering cars for his auto wholesale business – dropping cars off from one used car lot or car dealership to another. It was just a mindless, cush job. I blamed my mother for how I perceived myself as being incredibly lethargic. She never encouraged me to study, or work hard, or aspire to my own independence, really not have to think with my own mind. It was just growing up being raised that dependent upon her, so I would never leave her. That was in exchange for my lens of her darkness for my stepmother and father being hers.
My German Stepmother on the left
I left home when I was eighteen, but I didn’t have another choice. It was for my own survival, realizing that I couldn’t live with my mother anymore, because of what traumatized her spiraling after the Holocaust, and the overbearing affection that I felt if it still continued, that I’d never be able to take care of myself. I was leaving home to save for my life, knowing that it might take with her. But, Unrelenting guilt followed me for leaving my mother in her condition, and sometimes, feeling how much she protected me growing up, instead of really seeing that what she was doing was more for her than for me.
I also was certain that I betrayed my mother when I left, when I began to develop a relationship with her bitter enemy of a lifetime– my German stepmother. The guilt never left me until something happened, standing next to my stepmother, visiting my mother lying in bed, five weeks before she died. When my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, my stepmother put aside over two decades of hatred between them and became her primary caretaker. The childhood trauma that never left me growing up, finally changed after something my mother did, which let me finally absolve the guilt that I couldn’t move past when I left home.

It’s pretty well known for Holocaust survivors that overprotection of their children is common, hearing the stories of how the Nazi’s separated families, murdered children, and any others who couldn’t work before everyone else. But I would never forget that her overprotection was also that she didn’t want me to leave her. How could she be alone after the loss of a large family in the Holocaust, and later in life, a husband whom she probably loved too much? What that must have done to her, probably knowing not long after they were married, that he never loved her. I wish that I had never blamed my mother as much as I did for how often, as I grew up, I felt that her affection ruined me, unquestionably more than saved me.  After everything she went through, I’m not certain anyone would have been able to act any differently. 

From Left to right:

Why Did I Become A Writer  – The Story I Needed To Tell

Why Did I Become A Writer  – The Story I Needed To Tell

I decided to change careers from my professional background in corporate banking, senior within risk management, to becoming a writer when I was laid off from my position with PNC Bank in late 2021. The voice inside me had grown too much and couldn’t be silent any longer. I had to write about the unconscionable injustices that I saw with racial bias in our own government, and after the Hamas attack on October 7th, over the Gaza border into Israel. 

 

The racial inequality of our perceptions and antisemitism that has been polarizing the world more than I’ve ever remembered, and hasn’t been more prevalent than since the Holocaust. I felt that what better way to let people see how dangerous segregation is for our lives than to be the themes of a memoir for my mother’s life, who was a “Schindler’s List” survivor who confronted generational trauma manifested in racism. My brother and I inherited my mother’s trauma of the undeserved lifetime of hatred for my German stepmother and every other German.

 

 If I could tell a story of my mother’s life being saved by Oskar Schindler – a Nazi German and the irony of how her children grew up, that might change how we look at people differently than ourselves, based on nothing more than our own bias. The research I conducted in both the Auschwitz and Plaszów concentration camps, where my mother was deported, helped me reach the intellectual capacity I needed to be well-versed in the details of this time period. I was convinced that I had to write this story, but also continue writing. My voice needed to be heard, and no one could take that away from me. How could anyone not feel the priceless wealth of the unforgettable moment when someone tells you, by what you’ve shared, they see the relevance of your experience for their own lives, especially if they feel a part of you living your story. 

 

After what I saw in the concentration camps in what my mother had to have lived through –dehumanized for what another human can do to another, while there alive and when they were dead, there was an unrelenting conviction to articulate where racial bias can lead and its penetration throughout the world over the Holocaust based on nothing more than conspiracy. While I could tell the story of Schindler, who was a member of the Nazi party, being the movement for the racist ideology that saw Jews only as parasitic vermin that must be exterminated on an unprecedented scale. The guilty who bore responsibility for the Holocaust. But after Schindler finally actually had seen the atrocities that were being inflicted on Jews in the ghettos and the camps, he saved my mother and many other unforgettable Jewish lives, who were not certain of their fate, which inevitably meant death. If nothing else, writing could let me tell everything I felt inside of how the road for inhumanity reached a penetration not even conscionable that led Schindler to find humanity when there were very few that did in a world that didn’t feel differently. 

 

Writing has also left me the rite of passage – the cathartic outlet that I never needed as much as I felt that I did. It‘s let me find a release for the trauma my brother and I inherited, being the victims of everything my mother went through in the Holocaust, and when my father left her. There was no way she could ever see what it had done to her and had inflicted on her children. The voice that I never was able to share before has let me legitimize the pain. But more than anything, it is my insatiable ambition to share the weight of the losses from what happened to our family. Hopefully, it’s learning that will stay with others to not let what we couldn’t help happen to them. 

 

Finally, writing is not only an expression that lets your voice be heard, but it also shows there is unquestionable hope when you feel no one else will listen. It’s been that hard to understand, and honestly heartbreaking, when that many synagogues and sanctuaries for Holocaust remembrance have not been receptive to a story of a Schindler Jew that confronts generational trauma manifested in racism. But what you write can let you feel that you can reach everyone with what you have to tell them. How much do you remember the unforgettable emotion of finding real certainty that many others understand your story and everything it hopefully opens for what it means in their own lives.