The Holocaust Across Generations

Trauma and its Inheritance Among Descendants of Survivors

Janet Jacobs

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781479814343
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Psychology of Religion

Brings together the study of post-Holocaust family culture with the study of collective memory Over the last two decades, the cross-generational transmission of trauma has become an important area of research within both Holocaust studies and the more broad study of genocide. The overall findings of the research suggest that the Holocaust informs both the psychological and social development of the children of survivors who, like their parents, suffer from nightmares, guilt, fear, and sadness. The impact of social memory on the construction of survivor identities among succeeding generations has not yet been adequately explained. Moreover, the importance of gender to the intergenerational transmission of trauma has, for the most part, been overlooked. In The Holocaust across Generations, Janet Jacobs fills these significant gaps in the study of traumatic transference. The volume brings together the study of post-Holocaust family culture with the study of collective memory. Through an in-depth study of 75 children and grandchildren of survivors, the book examines the social mechanisms through which the trauma of the Holocaust is conveyed by survivors to succeeding generations. It explores the social structures—such as narratives, rituals, belief systems, and memorial sites—through which the collective memory of trauma is transmitted within families, examining the social relations of traumatic inheritance among children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. Within this analytic framework, feminist theory and the importance of gender are brought to bear on the study of traumatic inheritance and the formation of trauma-based identities among Holocaust carrier groups.

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Family Narratives and the Social Construction of Descendant Identity

Studies of children of Holocaust survivors have previously considered the ways in which the experiences of a traumatized parent become internalized and integrated into the psychological makeup of the child. This research emphasizes the transference of emotions, fears, and loss through conscious and unconscious processes that inform the construction of descendant identity. Beginning in 1966, psychiatric and psychological studies of first-generation descendants described children of survivors as suffering from nightmares, guilt, depression, fear of death, sadness, and the presence of intrusive images, indicators of posttraumatic stress symptoms among children of survivors (Bergman and Jucovy 1982; Prince 1985; Hass 1990; Berger 1997; Baranowsky et al. 1998; Binder-Byrnes et al. 1998; Holmes 1999). Although these symptoms have been found to vary across individual descendants, the overall findings suggest that the Holocaust, as “a dominant psychic reality” (Bergman and Jocovy 1982, 312), informs both the psychological and social development of succeeding generations. More recently, these findings have been expanded to include grandchildren of survivors (Fossion et al. 2003; Lev-Wiesel 2007).

While the psychologically based research on traumatic inheritance is extensive and ongoing, less attention has been paid to the social and cultural contexts through which knowledge of the Holocaust is learned and the impact of trauma-based knowledge on the identity formation of children and grandchildren of survivors (Danieli 2007). In particular, the role of narrative in the transmission of trauma has been somewhat neglected in studies of the Holocaust, even as the study of narrative in identity formation has become an increasingly significant mode of analysis in the social sciences. This chapter thus takes as its starting point a discussion of narrative in contemporary sociological thought. Beginning with a review of the literature on the sociology of narrative, the chapter addresses the intersection of memory and trauma narrativity in the formation of identity in the aftermath of genocide and mass trauma.

Narrative and Identity

More than two decades ago, Margaret Somers (1994) provided a theoretical framework for exploring the importance of narrative to identity formation. Challenging the notion that narratives are primarily the “telling of historical stories” (1994, 613), Somers argues that “people construct identities (however multiple and changing) by locating themselves within a repertoire of emplotted stories; that ‘experience’ is constituted through narrative; that people make sense of what has happened and is happening to them by attempting to assemble or in some way to integrate these happenings within one or more narratives” (1994, 614). Further, Somers suggests that is through the social networks and relationships of connectivity that narratives are given social meaning in the process of identification. In this respect, Somers suggests that identity is shaped by the narratives of events and history to which a person is connected, knowledge that is obtained through the relational interactions by which narratives are shared both publicly and within the private sphere of the family.

Following Somers, Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey (1995) suggest that, as a form of social practice, narratives are embedded in interactions that are defined by specific social contexts which bring cultural meanings to the process of narration. Thus, narratives are cultural productions that transmit knowledge about the conditions of social life which shape the identity of both the narrator and those for whom these narratives are intended. In the case of the Holocaust, descendant identity is therefore informed by the “metanarratives” (cultural frameworks) that surround the memory of the Holocaust in society and the social networks of familial memory that preserve this history among survivors. Among the respondents in this study, it is the latter, the biographical narratives of Holocaust memory, that have been most salient for the construction of a historically situated descendant identity. Within this narrative realm of identity formation, survivor stories constitute an oral form of transmission that is distinguished from, among other narrative media, written accounts.

As a story told to another, the survivor narrative is part of the social engagement of familial relations in which survivors “narrativize experience” (Linden 1993, 18) through a recollection of events that seek to recall and give voice to what survivors and scholars alike have often deemed unrelatable. Previous research (Linden 1993; Gubkin 2007) has elaborated on the difficulty of representing the magnitude of genocidal trauma for which there is inadequate language to convey all that has been experienced and witnessed. The narratives that inform descendant identity are therefore often incomplete, a limitation that, while acknowledged, does not render these stories less meaningful for the children and grandchildren of survivors who look to these narratives for a greater understanding of the self.

The Narrator, Modes of Telling, and Tropes of Remembrance

Within this population of descendants, the role of narrator varied across and within families. In some instances it was mothers and grandmothers who spoke repeatedly about the past, while in other cases it was fathers and grandfathers who conveyed and recollected the experiences of captivity and survival. Accordingly, the transmission of memory and trauma did not reflect a gendered pattern of narration and communication, a finding that may differ from that of previous studies (Wardi 1992). In addition, in a number of cases other family members, including sisters and aunts, also acted as narrators of family history, expanding the knowledge on which participants based their descendant identity. In almost all cases, the Holocaust narration began in the descendant’s childhood, although in later years narratives were sometimes revised and new accounts added, either at the request of the descendant or, more frequently, with the aging of the survivor. This was particularly true for the grandchildren of survivors, who often heard and were told stories of which their parents were unaware.

Through the interweaving of memory with historical events, the narratives of survivors provided a sense of time, place, and lived experience that became part of the knowledge and feeling-states of the descendants. According to the respondents, the survivors’ accounts were characterized by a wide range of memories and trauma episodes that included descriptions of life in captivity; the living conditions of escape and imprisonment; the witnessing of other’s victimization; and accounts of deportation, incarceration, and loss. The content of these narratives therefore contained “common place [sic] anchors” that, according to Ruth Linden (1993, 17), allow the descendant to interpret and understand, at least in part, the meaning of the story. As oral transmissions, these narratives were recounted in diverse social settings that included the postwar household, family gatherings, family trips, holiday celebrations, and trips to prewar homes and Holocaust memorials and museums. Two examples will help to illustrate this point. In the first, a daughter in her forties gives this account of a family dinner celebration that took place during her adolescence:

I remember there was a restaurant that we went to, to celebrate a birthday I think. Maybe I was a teenager. It served German food. After we left there, my mother said very quietly, “I don’t want to go back there. I’m pretty certain they’re Nazis.” She’d get this certain tone in her voice and say, “I think he [a waiter] must have been a Nazi.” She and this waiter had this very curt exchange. They were very friendly and then all of a sudden something happened in the conversation and she backed way off. You could see her physically shut the door. When we were driving home, she said something about, “I’m pretty certain he had been involved in this or that.” It was more like that. More like something would happen in life and you’d get the sort of welling up of response to a situation that was more of an indication of the background behind it. There were a lot of things that would creep in.

By comparison, a fifty-five-year-old survivor offered a more contemporary perspective on the transmission of narratives among aging survivors:

I would say in the last twenty years, [my mother] has talked about it more, but she doesn’t seem to have a filter about it. So we could be sitting at the dining room table, we have a very close family. There are about fourteen of us. And we could be in the middle of a conversation, I don’t know, about someone’s high school graduation or an upcoming wedding, whatever the various topics would be. Everybody’s just having this nice conversation and my mother will all of a sudden, something will trigger her, she’ll start talking about Auschwitz. And I’ll like basically freeze and want to stop it and I’ll want to say, “Mom, it’s not appropriate right now,” and then I’m conflicted, thinking okay, well that’s selfish, that I’m going into avoidance mode. This is a version of my own PTSD [posttraumatic stress disorder].

This quotation illuminates a number of important aspects of the intergenerational transmission of trauma through narrative. Both here and in the previously cited account, the interjection of Holocaust narratives into the lives of the descendants is portrayed as a random act of remembrance that was triggered by some reminder in the social environment or a conversation that may stir inner thoughts and memories of which the descendants are unaware. In both cases, the narratives that emerge from these social contexts are experienced by the descendants as intrusions into the present, bringing the survivors, their children, and grandchildren back to a past that is shared through trauma-based narrativity.

In many families, the stories were ongoing and repeated throughout the descendant’s childhood and adulthood, replicating the ongoing memory frames that informed the consciousness of the survivor parent, as the following account of a sixty-year-old descendant reveals:

My mother’s stories played over and over in my mind. Sometimes she would recount the same stories, adding details as she remembered them. It always gripped me as she spoke in a sad and tearful voice; “I have to tell you,” was how her stories often started. The listening sessions were not held on any regular schedule, but occurred sporadically over a fifteen-year period so I must have been six or seven when they began. The stories were realistically painted and gave me the sense that I was living through them.

Sometimes the sharing of narratives was precipitated by a parent’s nightmare or sorrow, other times by actions or behaviors that mirrored the traumas of the past. A son in his late forties recounted the memories of his mother’s postwar trauma activities and the narrative of camp life that engendered her behaviors:

My mother told us about Auschwitz, how she was in Budapest in 1944 and [Adolf] Eichmann showed up and they took her away. She was there she said eighteen months and she would take things like food and other necessities and hide them in her skirts to bring to other prisoners. When I was growing up my mother collected clothes in her bedroom to send to Europe. The clothes were from the floor to the ceiling all the way around. She sent them to cousins in Hungary. At a certain point, they didn’t want them any more, they didn’t need them. But she kept collecting them and giving them away to people, like what she did at Auschwitz, and she couldn’t stop.

As this account illuminates, survivor narratives included the retelling of events as well as the re-creation of scenes that invoked the past. A daughter thus describes how her mother reenacted an atrocity she had witnessed upon her arrival at Auschwitz: “One afternoon when retelling her stories, Mother acted out a situation where a limping woman behind her was shot by the SS guard. She showed me how the woman fell after being shot, how she cried and was left behind to bleed to death. Mother’s frightening voice still rings in my ears. I can envision Mother falling to the floor, her head turned up, grimacing as she portrayed the incident.” Similarly, another participant offered this recollection of her mother’s performances while relating her Holocaust experiences: “She did a lot of gymnastics. She would describe standing with hand up over her head and kicking her foot up. That’s my mom. She described doing this in front of the Nazis to prove how healthy she was on her own [initiative], that she was no slacker.”

Based on these examples, narrative, as a link to descendant identity, involves multiple forms of communication that include both oral testimony and reenactment, each creating a social context that connects one generation’s trauma to another generation’s sense of self and place in the world. Although survivor narratives contain a vast array of recollections and remembrances, among the respondents in this study two competing motifs of memory were most important to identity formation: narratives that were associated with victimization and powerlessness and those that, by contrast, emphasized agency and moral choice within a culture of terror and death.

Trauma Narratives: The Imagined Victim and Identity Confusion

The stories that shape a descendant’s understanding of a horrific past are often conveyed through imagery and detail that are both gripping and terrifying. In this respect, descendant generations, often at young ages, are given knowledge that lays bear the harshest and most cruel realities of war and genocide, creating both a fascination with the past and a sense of overwhelming emotion through which the descendant navigates his or her own identity and personhood. Here a son in his fifties considers how his father’s narratives of the camps affected his child self:

There is no way for me to describe what it was like for me to be eight years old in my home and listen to the story of how my aunt, my father’s sister, died. Because I remember him telling me that story when I was eight. And then with my Dad, it was so graphic. His memory was just incredible. He was able to remember names and faces and sights and smells. He made it real. That’s all well and good, but when you are eight years old, it’s a little bit much. That’s the kind of atmosphere I grew up in.

For first-generation descendants (the children of survivors) in particular, their parents’ narratives were steeped in memories of events and trauma that were barely a decade old. Thus, in the retelling of their experiences the closeness of the genocide heightened the sense of trauma that the narratives conveyed. Within the intimacy of the family, the lines between now and then were often blurred as the memory of atrocities traveled across time and space from Nazi Europe to the culture and consciousness of the post-Holocaust household. In addition, many of these narratives were connected to events that were taking shape in the postwar search for Nazi perpetrators, as the following account illustrates: “It was during Eichmann’s trial and my mother started talking. She said, ‘I saw him. He was there at the camps. I saw him. He would look into, there was this little window in the gas chamber where you could look in. I saw him looking into it and laughing. I must have been passing by, I can’t remember how I saw him,’ she said. ‘But I absolutely saw him there.’ She said he was really tall and handsome.”

In a somewhat different narrative, a daughter in her fifties recalled with great detail the story her mother frequently recounted of her arrival at Auschwitz:

One of the saddest stories my mother told me was [of] her initial arrival at Auschwitz. On the first day, she and her mother were forcibly separated, never to see each other again. Younger children were taken from their mothers and elderly women were ordered to stand with young mothers, holding their crying babies. “We pretended we didn’t know why we were separated,” my mother told me, “but we put two and two together. The elderly; feeble young mothers; babies and young children [were] grouped together to be killed. My heart was torn out to see my mother in that group and I was never the same after that.” My mother emphasized never, stressing the two syllables, and she would have a faraway look in her eyes.

Other atrocity narratives focused on acts of witnessing that took place at other death camps, at deportation sites, at places where massacres occurred, and in ghettos. In these stories, the survivor was frequently the sole member of his or her family to survive and spoke about the failure to save others whose deaths they were forced to witness. A male participant in his late forties offered this account of the knowledge that his father shared about the participant’s grandfather’s death at Treblinka:

My father was all over the place. He was in the Warsaw ghetto all the way through ten different camps. He had numbers, a number. They took him to Treblinka first. They took his parents and his younger brothers to Treblinka earlier. He said from eyewitness accounts that they tested the oven there with his father and his brother. The eyewitness said, “This is what happened. They were testing the ovens. They took the son and said, ‘Throw him in.’ His father was standing there and he said, ‘No, take me first.’ The father didn’t want to see the son going to his death. They said, ‘No, no, you’re next,’ and threw him in, the son, alive and then threw the father in alive.” That’s one eyewitness that he knew and that he told us about, a terrible, terrible story.

It is significant to note that this survivor narrative is told through the eyes of a secondary witness whose knowledge of the family’s fate shaped the atrocity stories that were handed down from father to son. Within this mode of transmission in which the survivor described in detail what he himself had not seen, the imagined horrors of the survivor converge with those of his son, whose own sense of loss and fear laid the foundation of an inherited victimized identity.

As recalled by the respondents, the atrocity narratives also revealed gender differences, with a sizeable portion focusing on fears surrounding rape and other violence against women and girls. In one example, a mother who survived Auschwitz often spoke about how Jewish women prisoners were repeatedly at risk for abuse. Here her daughter offers this insight into these gendered themes: “The story that horrified me most as a young girl was my mother’s description of filing past the guards, suffering the looks, smirks, and comments exchanged among the Nazi soldiers. Because Yiddish and German are similar languages, Mother understood what was being said. ‘I cowered and stooped as I walked past the guards, trying to make myself unattractive so I wouldn’t be chosen for pleasure.’ She noticed that a few of the prettier women had been singled out and they would disappear.”

In another poignant recollection, a daughter describes how, as her father aged, he would often repeat a story about the da...