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June 15, 2001
Pain often hidden from family
Survivors' children suppressed feelings of manipulation and resentment.
PAT JOHNSON REPORTER
Survivors of the Holocaust, their children and grandchildren recently
traded roles in an emotional process staged by Dr. Natan Kellerman,
an expert in the psychological impacts of the Shoah on survivors
and
their children.
Kellerman was brought to Vancouver June 3 by the Vancouver Holocaust
Education Centre, the Jewish Family Service Agency and the Second
Generation group. The evening event was titled Parents and Children,
Talking about the Shoah: A Dialogue about the Holocaust. Although
billed as a public lecture, it was an informal participatory
discussion.
In one session, Kellerman brought a Holocaust survivor to the centre
of the circle, where she was joined by the daughter of a survivor
and
a grandson of a survivor. He then had them express their unspoken
resentments and concerns in a way they could never do with their
actual family. Then Kellerman had them change roles, having the
survivor play a role of a survivors' granddaughter and so on.
What emerged were otherwise suppressed feelings of manipulation,
confusion and a lifetime of taboos. Survivors said they have been
criticized for intruding on festive occasions with sad memories.
Second generation members said their ordinary complaints about
childhood injustices or teenage angst were deflected with their
parents' recollections of horrific experiences of adolescence under
the Nazis.
"What have you got to complain about?" was the response
the next
generation said they commonly received.
The overwhelming message from both generations was the unwillingness
to approach the subject within the family. Many said they had
discussed their Holocaust experiences mostly, if not exclusively,
with other survivors. They said they didn't want to burden their
children with the terrible stories. Second generation members said
the message while growing up was unmistakable: Don't discuss it.
One man said he depended on Jewish schools to inform his children
about the Shoah.
"It wasn't a matter at our table to talk about surviving,"
he said.
"I relied on the Talmud Torah and the Jewish schools to tell
them
what happened. They heard it - but not from us."
That changed, as it did for so many survivors, with the rise in
Holocaust-denial in the 1970s and '80s. The same man said that the
advent of denial brought him out of his self-imposed silence. He
decided his children would hear his Holocaust-era stories, whether
they wanted to or not.
"If they didn't listen, I'd take away their pocket money,"
he quipped.
An 85-year-old survivor said there has never been any closure on
the
experiences of survivors, while another said the very concept of
closure is an abomination.
"You can't put closure to anything of this magnitude. Not
ever," said
one participant.
Pointing to the Jewish tradition of lighting yahrzeit candles and
the
more modern secular phenomenon of placing flowers on the sites of
fatal accidents, one person asked how one could mark the Holocaust
with so simple
a gesture.
"They leave flowers and letters at the accident site,"
said one
survivor. "What do you do when your whole world has been annihilated?"
The pain of the Holocaust remains very immediate for many survivors
and that means it can emerge in daily conversation, which is
sometimes jarring for the younger generations.
One woman lamented that she had ruined a birthday party by bringing
up a story from her past.
"I didn't know what I did wrong," she said.
Another participant bitterly summed up the unwillingness of younger
generations to hear the pain of their elders: "Six million
people
killed - and nobody wants to suffer."
"My parents were busy, so I didn't ask questions," said
a daughter of
survivors.
Several survivors acknowledged that they had immersed themselves
in
work in order to keep busy and numb the pain.
"Now, we probably would have gone to a psychiatrist or a doctor
of
something," said a survivor. "Then, we just went to work."
But memories have a way of coming back, said several. With retirement
has come time to think and that has been a new trauma for many
survivors.
Kellerman said that the inter-generational challenges of survivors
and their descendants is not just a Diaspora phenomenon. Many young
Israelis have heard all they want to hear about the trauma of their
elders, explained Kellerman. That is one of the reasons for the
creation of a group targeted at servicing the social and health
needs
of survivors in Israel.
Kellerman is the general director of AMCHA, the National Israeli
Centre for Psychosocial Support of Survivors of the Holocaust and
the
Second Generation. In addition to the evening event, Kellerman was
the keynote speaker of a day-long conference titled Second Generation
and the Legacy of the Holocaust: A Work in Progress.
Despite the large number of Holocaust survivors in Israel, it was
fully 30 years after the end of the war that AMCHA was founded to
deal with the psychological trauma of survivors. The growing need
now, he said, is for the children of survivors to begin to deal
with
the impact of their parents' experiences on their
own lives.
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