The Holocaust’s long reach: Trauma is passed on to survivors’ children

Good long piece on the work of Helen Epstein (author of Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors) and Vivian Rakoff of the ongoing inter-generational trauma faced by children of Holocaust survivors, and the commonality of that experience with other atrocities:

Trauma is trauma, whether it is besetting children of Holocaust survivors or children of families shattered by atom bombs, civil war, terrorism, domestic violence, sexual abuse, addiction, or even illness and disability. The stories keep emerging: in Heather Connell’s Small Voices, a film about the children of survivors of the Khmer Rouge killing fields; in Peter Balakian’s memoir Black Dog of Fate, written as the son of survivors of the Armenian genocide; in Michael Arlen’s Passage to Ararat, also about Armenia. (Memoirs by the children of Rwandan survivors are rarer: They’re just becoming adults.) The details of each oppression make it unique, but the effect of the trauma always follows the same path.

“I don’t feel possessive about my PTSD at all,” Ms. Epstein says. “I think it’s nearly universal.” To which Vivian Rakoff adds, “I think the transmission of trauma has to be admitted to. That when you do something terrible, it has effects. You can have psychic transmission of disorder in the same way you can have microbial transmission of disorder.”

Now we are learning that the horror can be passed along physically, and perhaps even genetically. Efforts are being made to interrupt that fateful flow: At Mount Sinai in New York, Dr. Yehuda has a theory that hydrocortisone might stymie the establishment of PTSD. There are also encouraging therapies and experimental programs, as Judith Shulevitz reported in The Atlantic, in which pregnant women at risk for PTSD receive counselling to help them through the thickets of child rearing.

Trauma and the atrocities that cause it are unavoidable. Parliament’s decision to expand Canada’s war against the Islamic State is, at least arguably, a legitimate and necessary evil. But the children of the soldiers and victims who fall on both sides in that war will feel its trauma regardless, in some place too dark to see. Then will come the hard part. Because once we notice trauma, and inquire after it, we are apologizing for it, and admitting to some sense of responsibility.

Maybe this is why we try so hard not to to notice other people’s pain, why we resist the idea that formative experiences are passed along in physical form as memory, conscious or collective or otherwise. We know we’re connected to one another in ways we can’t see or control, inconvenient as the fact often is. “Much of history is written in blood,” Helen Epstein writes in Children of the Holocaust, “and experiencing some degree of trauma seems to be a part of experiencing life. What that means to me is that it is not ‘other’ but, to various degrees, ‘us’ and that we need to learn to use that insight toward connection rather than separation.” Human pain turns out to be not very private after all.

Judith Herman, the Harvard psychiatrist who in 1993 wrote Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, observed that “the study of psychological trauma has a curious history – one of episodic amnesia.” Why? Because “to study psychological trauma is to come face to face both with human vulnerability in the natural world and with the capacity for evil in human nature.”

We want to remember, and we want to forget. We are who we are. But sometimes we can’t bear to admit it.

The Holocaust’s long reach: Trauma is passed on to survivors’ children – The Globe and Mail.