Behavior: Trauma Goes On

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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."