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“I tell my story everyday, but still it is painful,” re-counted a survivor of Auschwitz C oncentration Camp, her voice quivering, with a mix of quiet determination and tears. Thus began a five-day dialogue process between descendents of Holocaust survivors, descendents of Nazis, and others deeply connected to the Holocaust, which occurred in Berlin this spring . I participated as a psychologist, and as a child of a Jewish father who served in the American Air Force during WWII.
The 15 participants, who included children of high-ranking Nazis, children of survivors, children of bystanders, and one survivor herself, came to the dialogue with a variety of motivations, including a desire to lighten the burden most report feeling they have inherited as a result of their own or their families' wartime experience. I came with my own mixture of personal and professional motivations. The latter included a desire to better understand the intergenerational transmission of trauma, and to see whether a dialogue of this sort could help participants diminish the likelihood of repeating traumatic patterns.
Despite the importance of attempting to study the psychological dimensions of the Holocaust, a well-documented “conspiracy of silence” has been noted over time, in both the families of Jewish and German descendents (Bar-On, “Attempting”; Barocas and Barocas; Speier). Children on both sides have been left to grapple with the silence and emptiness left by their parents' inability to discuss their wartime experience. Barocas and Barocas, in their psychiatric work with numerous families of Holocaust survivors in the United States, concluded that “Individual and collective ritualized mourning were not experienced, and grief was not worked through” (333). Cultural historian Dominick LaCapra, describing a context in which mourning the Holocaust was often bypassed, states that in Israel “the aim was to go from victim to agent, without passing through survival and the process of working thr