Behavior: Trauma Goes On

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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."