On
the morning of April 15, 1945, 70 years ago this month, a convoy of
Canadian and British soldiers liberated Franci Solar, a 25-year-old
Czechoslovakian dressmaker, from the Nazi concentration camp at
Bergen-Belsen, in northern Germany. She had been living in camps,
including Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, since 1942.
She
was undernourished and puffy and had typhus. When she finally made her
way back to Prague, weeks later, friends were surprised to find her
alive, which was why they had sold or assumed possession of her
belongings. The odds were in their favour. Of the nine million Jews who
had lived in Europe before the war, and of the perhaps 500,000 who
survived in Nazi-occupied Europe in concentration lager, or fighting in small bands of partisans, or hiding, or passing as Christians, no more than 75,000 outlived the camps.
Franci
resumed a mostly solitary life in Prague – her parents and husband had
been killed by the Nazis – until she married Kurt Epstein, a 41-year-old
former Olympic water-polo player and fellow camp survivor, and in 1947
gave birth to their daughter, Helen – Helen, after Kurt's mother, also
killed. After the Soviet-backed Communist coup in Czechoslovakia in
1948, the Epsteins moved to Manhattan. About 92,000 Holocaust survivors
emigrated to the United States. An additional 25,000 headed to Canada.
Thirty-one
years later, Helen published a book. It was a story no one had ever
told before, at least not in a book meant to be read by everyone.
Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors
– published to widespread acclaim in 1979, 35 years ago last fall –
made a then-astounding claim: that the harrowing trauma of the
Holocaust, and the symptoms that marked survivors, had been passed on to
their children – a generation that wasn't even alive during the war.
Today,
having identified post-traumatic stress disorder, we take this as a
given. And the transmission isn't just psychological, as psychiatrists
have pointed out for more than a century; it's physical. Rachel Yehuda, a
pioneering psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Mount Sinai School of
Medicine in New York, has found that children of mothers with PTSD are
three times as likely to have it as are other kids, and almost four
times more likely to be depressed and anxious. As Judith Shulevitz
pointed out last fall in The New Republic, the children of survivors
often have unusual levels of cortisol, a hormone released in response to
stress – which was also true of infants whose mothers were pregnant and
near the World Trade Center on 9/11.
Emotional and physical trauma can become genetic.
I
reread Helen Epstein's book a few days ago, as we came up on Easter and
Passover, the annual celebrations of forgiveness and freedom and
resurrection and renewal that take place this weekend. Reading it, you
can't help but think of all the agony that has been stored up and passed
on – by survivors not just of the Holocaust, but of Hiroshima and of
Cambodia and of Rwanda, of residential schools and wars and countless
other public and private calamities.
But
the more we learn about how deep and far a wound can travel, the more
we seem to want to forget it. The world is plagued by genocide (Islamic
State, Boko Haram), ethnic wars (Ukraine, Mali, Burma), physical, sexual
and racial abuse (disappearing aboriginal women, men's fraternities in
Oklahoma). It made me want to remember what Helen Epstein noticed 35
years ago, and how the world responded. Because 35 years from now,
another generation's scars will be rippling to the surface.
Helen
Epstein was a student at Israel's Hebrew University in the late 1960s
(she's 67 now) when she first felt a connection to other children of
Holocaust survivors – multilingual citizens of a global array of
countries whose parents were all Central European survivors of
concentration camps.
"I
wasn't even thinking about trauma then," Ms. Epstein remembers. "I was
just thinking, 'Here are all these people who speak European languages
like me.' And I was connecting with them." Never before – not at school
in New York, not playing music (she is a widely published cultural
journalist and biographer of, among others, Vladimir Horowitz and
producer Joe Papp), not in the Brownie Scouts – had she ever felt part
of a community.
Her sense of
isolation was itself a symptom. Until then, the Holocaust had been what
Helen believed was her private secret, a "black box" within her where
she stored the details of her parents' life in the camps, and her own
vivid, almost hallucinogenic mental images: piles of skeletons and hills
of suitcases, barbed wire – none of which she had seen with her own
eyes. She lived within a "floating sense of danger and incipient harm."
Manhattan's Seventh Avenue subway line was a cattle car on the way to
Poland. A smokestack was always attached to an imagined crematorium. She
often felt angry and violent, but had nowhere to park those feelings.
In
hundreds of interviews over the next decade, including a two-year stint
of research in Toronto, she discovered how common and debilitating
these fears were. They recurred again and again in the lives of children
of survivors.
The parents of one of
her closest friends never left their house, for fear it would be looted
or burnt down: This seemed like a reasonable concern to Ms. Epstein.
Many children of survivors married other children of survivors: Raising a
family took on "cosmic significance." Some hid their Jewishness; many
never talked of the war, "because talk meant accepting that the war had
happened and, more than anything else in the world, I wished it had
not," as one subject explained. Many were named for murdered relatives.
Many were enormously accomplished people, but they still felt like
replacements, with all the burden that implied. Hardly anyone discussed
these matters.
Most of all, they had
to deal with their parents, who had survived unthinkable Nazi torture
to give their children a life free from it. "For most kids of survivors,
there's nothing except your parents," Ms. Epstein told me recently from
Lexington, Mass., where she writes and lives with her husband, Patrick
Mehr, an e-book publisher and himself the son of French survivors,
"There's no grandparents. No aunts or cousins. What does that mean? It
means, first of all, that your parents have no context. There's no one
to say, 'No, your mother didn't do that, your father's wrong.' It
essentially magnifies the power of the parents."
Quite
apart from hearing harrowing stories of murdered relatives – proof, as
Ms. Epstein says, "that something went really wrong in your family"– the
children of survivors had no allies. The ensuing pressure to cause no
trouble, to outperform others, to make up for all the losses of the war,
was overwhelming. Some had trouble settling on a career; many figured
any choice would fail; many were anxious. "I often wonder if I could
have survived myself and I doubt whether I could have," one interviewee
tells the author. Says another: "We had to be gentle with our parents.
They appeared to be very strong people but we had to be gentle with them
because they could shatter very easily."
Every
time Albert Singerman, one of Ms. Epstein's subjects, disobeyed his
mother, she screamed "Enemy of Israel! Enemy of the Jews!" He responded
by trying to see how long he could hold his breath in shower stalls, and
later enlisted and fought in Vietnam.
Ms.
Epstein herself often felt numb, as if she had no right to be angry.
Her solution was to dissociate from what was happening. She longed to
hear her family's stories, but she was loath to cause her parents any
pain in the telling. Everything took place under a curtain of secrecy –
and in a mixture of Czech and German, to boot. "I heard all this in a
language that wasn't my adult language"– loaded words like lager and kapo and achtung,
which didn't seem to have any precise English equivalent. "It made it
feel like a different world," Ms. Epstein says today. "And maybe that
speaks to why no one knew. It was like another planet."
Thirty
years went by before these problems were identified in the children of
survivors. Ms. Epstein estimated there were at least 250,000 children of
survivors like her. Today, there are, conservatively speaking,
somewhere between 10 million and 52 million refugees on Earth, people
who have been ripped out of their lives and families for the crime of
being who they are. Presumably their offspring will have a few issues
themselves.
For all the
corroboration Ms. Epstein found, there was very little acknowledgment of
the syndrome scientifically. By 1978, fewer than two dozen studies of
children of survivors had been published. The first, a casual
description of three patients, was written in 1966 by Vivian Rakoff, the
brilliant professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of Toronto
(and later director of what became the Centre for Addiction and Mental
Health), who at the time was an assistant director of research at the
Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, another gathering city for
survivors.
"The parents are not
broken conspicuously," Rakoff wrote, "yet their children, all of whom
were born after the Holocaust, display severe psychiatric
symptomatology. It would almost be easier to believe that they, rather
than their parents, had suffered the corrupting, searing hell." Two of
his three subjects had tried to commit suicide.
Twelve
years later, Rakoff and two colleagues published the first systematic
study of children of survivors. He was violently criticized for
pathologizing them, and while he now points out that "the vast majority
of the kids of survivors do okay," he sees nothing surprising in his
original thesis. "It's not surprising that a tremendously traumatic
event would be imparted to successive generations. Human beings are
shaped by experience. And experience becomes part of memory. And memory
is what we impart to our children." (Dr. Yehuda's theory, that stress
reactions caused by severe trauma are genetically inheritable, has run
into skepticism as well.)
That
changed as Helen Epstein's book appeared, first in the form of a New
York Times Magazine story. Some survivors hated it. "It really upset
Holocaust survivors who were invested in normal children, and in not
giving Hitler a posthumous victory." But the 500 letters that arrived in
response – detailed seven- and eight-page single-spaced accounts of
similar experiences – proved her hunch had been right.
Children of the Holocaust
has been in print ever since. Germany, Italy and Japan, three countries
of the Axis, were the first to translate it outside the United States.
It still hasn't been published in Israel.
"Israel
has always been extremely ambivalent about the Holocaust," Ms. Epstein
said, over the telephone. "In 1967, when I was starting my inquiry,
Israel was 19 years old, exactly as old as I was. So it was a very new
country, and they were really trying to differentiate between Israelis
and Diaspora Jews." Israel was trying to re-establish a stronger,
healthier, prouder, fitter image of Jewishness.
As
well, Ms. Epstein added, "Everyone in Israel is some kind of survivor,"
whether of 19th-century pogroms in Russia or of more recent Jewish
exoduses from North Africa and the Middle East. "So you have a country
that's totally populated with people who have PTSD. Why would they be
more interested in my parents' history than they would be in their own?
Plus, my family's story doesn't fit the Zionist narrative, because my
parents emigrated to America."
These
days, with her husband, she runs Plunkett Lake Press, a non-fiction
publishing company with a focus on Jewish writing (including Heda
Kovaly's Under A Cruel Star, one of the most gripping Holocaust
memoirs ever published, which Ms. Epstein discovered and translated.)
Plunkett Lake was the spot in the Berkshires where Kurt Epstein liked to
swim after he came to America.
Ms.
Epstein has two grown sons. They grew up with relatives, so "they're not
as preoccupied by history." The transmission of historical trauma from
generation to generation can be halted, it seems, provided one works to
becomes conscious of it.
But history
keeps grasping for us anyway. Ms. Epstein is now finishing the last in
what has turned out to be a trilogy of memoirs about the long and often
invisible hand of the Holocaust in her life: All she will say is that it
uncovers sexual abuse, an affair her mother had, and our astonishing
ability to "forget" what we most need to remember.
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.
I need help desperately because of this;
