Second Generation Effects of Historical Trauma*

A review of the literature reveals that during the past ten years there has been a dramatic interest in a previously neglected area: the study of children of Holocaust survivors (Fogelman, 1979). This phenomenon itself constitutes important data about the second generation effects of the Holocaust and leads to the first question a clinician must ask—why now?

One immediate and obvious answer is that children of survivors, many of whom have entered medicine and the social sciences, are now, 35 years after the liberation of their parents, the same age their parents were when the external world assumed the qualities of a nightmare; these people themselves are the principal investigators. In conducting their inquiry, they are following in the footsteps of first generation survivors, many of whom are responsible for the original contributions to the study of survivorhood. Further, this conduct of what is, essentially, scientific self—study may have an underlying psychological mechanism, albeit at a different level of ego organization and adaptation, similar or analogous to the finding reported by Axelrod, Blumen—thal, and Forman (1980). In this study 52 percent of her sample of hospitalized children of survivors had their first admission at the exact age of their parents' incarceration, and an additional 32 percent were first hospitalized at the same age the parents were at the time of some major Holocaust event. This comparison is made to highlight the character of events so powerful that they reach across generations to shape the lives of individuals born after the fact. In such terms, it