Gampel grapples with the precise theme set by the conference: much of the damage to the children of survivors occurs because of the survivors' very attempts to cope with their trauma. In the first place stands silence. In their efforts against recall, survivors use repression, negation, and denial. These very methods of defense become the source of pathological effects in the offspring.

Silence keeps the survivor in a chronic state of mourning, which in turn causes damage to the psyche of offspring. The child is deprived of parents capable of joy, capable of worrying in a normal way, or of allowing the child a degree of natural, explorative curiosity. These basic elements of parenthood are always overshadowed by expectations of disaster, which cause an overload of fear in the child, who grows up with the unspoken world of parents who transmit the trauma without transmitting its memory. In an attempt to get hold of the "absent" parent, the child is driven to enter the parents' "unspoken-of world," to "recollect" what he or she has not