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Like a poisonous tree, the mid-twentieth-century Holocaust has sprouted toxic branches that reach through the generations and into numerous regions of our world. So it is not untimely, even three-quarters of a century later, to consider the traumatic effects of the unspeakable violence, atrocities, and genocide transmitted from surviving victims to their offspring, sometimes to the third generation.
Dr. Arlene Stein's book is a personal account of her experience growing up as a child of a Holocaust survivor. To her credit, Stein embeds her personal story in the sociohistorical context of the post-World War II era, the attitudinal changes that evolved from the Eichmann trial in Israel (where he was accused and convicted of engineering the extermination of the European Jews), and later in the recognition of the posttraumatic stress disorders of Vietnam veterans returning to the United States.
Surviving victims are known to process their experiences in diverse ways. Their differences seem to depend not only on the severity of their suffering, but also on their core personalities. Bruno Bettelheim, Viktor Frankl, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and other concentration camp survivors were able to write about their experiences, while many remained silent even within the family circle.
Some were silent because they wished to forget, others because during the immediate postwar years, “trauma stories” were difficult to tell, often because people found it too difficult to listen to them. Occasionally, listeners felt overwhelmed, if not traumatized themselves. “Survivors had a tremendous need (and felt a profound obligation to the dead) to speak. They had, however, very ambivalent listeners. Many survivors described both a gross refusal to hear, believe, or understand, as well as more covert resistance, subtle interruptions, and deflections of their narrative” (Prince, 1998, p.49). Choosing silence, they remained without a witness to their testimony and faced a void.
Two cousins reported