Evolution of Traumatic Narratives: Impact of the Holocaust on Children of Survivors

Traumas' lessons are embedded in oral narratives of disasters that are transmitted over centuries and incorporated into historical memory; often they are woven into scripture and religious ritual; eventually they become encrypted in the collective unconscious. The story of the Holocaust functions like a map of the world for survivors' children, whose minds it both constrains and overwhelms, impacting psychological development and construction of reality. The focus in this paper is on composites of three Holocaust survivors and their daughters, who exemplify traumatic narratives' evolution as they are transmitted in fragments, sometimes silently and often nonverbally, to the second generation, who live out the stories' dictates consciously and unconsciously as they create and discover a reality into which they are born. The Holocaust lives on in survivors' current psychological lives, which occur in the wake of catastrophe, in their children's direct experiences of enduring conscious and unconscious reverberations of parental trauma, and in the children's imaginative lives as they reconstruct parental histories to decode emotional memories carried by stories parents tell that stand in place of stories that cannot be told. The paper examines daughters' interpretations of mothers' stories

as evidenced by the impact on individuation, differentiation, sexuality, the conceptualization of death, and relationships with self, mother, other, and society. Impact of the Holocaust is co-created by an amalgam of historical reality, contemporary lived experience, and fantasy, which leads children to uncover three different traumatic stories—the trauma of disaster, the trauma of the loneliness of survival, and the trauma of collateral damage to witnessing children who transmit their own versions of trauma to the third generation. Interpretative engagement and renarration, while injurious, also promote a reparative urge.