In my book, “Silent Battlefields: A Novel,” I write about Holocaust survivors and their adult children. In addition, there is a character in the book that had been a Hitler Youth and German soldier, as well as his young adult Child. Although this piece stresses Jewish people, the vast majority of the Holocaust victims, inclusive of those taken to concentration and death camps were political prisoners, criminals, developmentally disabled persons, gays, and so called “gypsies.”

Regarding Holocaust survivors, I would like to introduce a controversial subject that is debated amongst psychotherapists, in particular amongst psychiatrists, psychologists, and clinical social workers. There are those, cutting across all three disciplines, holding the view that holocaust survivors who have demonstrated psychopathology subsequent to liberation are all people who have had mental disorders prior to internment that predisposed them to the psychic problems they later experienced. Other professionals maintain that such is not necessarily the case and that the trauma of concentration camp life provides a sufficient basis for the symptoms displayed by the survivors. It is my position that the latter assertion is correct. Further, I think that the former view constitutes an unwarranted assumption and even a presumptuous one. It would be difficult to advance hard evidence to support it, since there is no way in retrospect to conduct a scientific experiment verifying it. Consequently, the conclusion rests upon mere speculation. The atrocious conditions and inhumane living in concentration camps and the atrocities committed within them, are, in my opinion, sufficient to produce psychological disorders in even the most psychologically healthy individuals.

Many Jews who survived the Holocaust were often placed in untenable, even unbearable, positions in which they were faced with choices of survival by betraying their own families or fellow compatriots. Some Jews in the role of a Kapos (a person having supervisory control over a group of Jews in the concentration camps) administered harsh, even cruel, behavior to others, for which they were rewarded camp amenities not available to others. One should not sit in judgment of such people decades later. Unless we were to find ourselves in the same existential situation, we cannot know how we would have behaved; we can only know how we would have liked to behave. Many such survivors paid a heavy price of guilt throughout the remainder of their lives, not simply for surviving, but for the way they managed to survive.

Holocaust survivors often tended to exclusively be comfortable only with others who had survived. Non-Jews were looked upon with suspicion and not to be trusted. A tacit code of silence prevailed in the families they formed so that the second-generation children were protected from the atrocities their parents had been subjected to. Another reason for the silence was to protect themselves from exposing the utter humiliations that they had endured while in the camps. They did not wish their children to know of this.

It was not uncommon for survivors to emerge from the camps as hypochondriacal. Their symptoms were converted into psychosomatic disorders. As a result, visits to the doctor for physical treatment frequently occurred for problems that were psychic in origin. They can be plagued by tenacious memories throughout their lives and visited by nightmares like unwelcome guests that long overstay their time.

Parents of Holocaust survivors commonly proved to be overly protective of their children, which led to the restraining of the children’s range of allowable behaviors, much to his or her frustration. Second generation children growing up were often protective of their parents, in turn. Sometimes they were made to feel guilty for raising their own normal developmental concerns. Survivor parents when hearing from their children about the problems they were encountering would respond by pointing out that such issues were nothing compared to what their parents had gone through during the Holocaust. Hence, the code of silence would eventually become bilateral. Many second generation children, painfully aware of the past suffering their parents had been forced to live through, internalized their parents comparisons of the two sets of problems, leading the children to feel ashamed of bringing up their own concerns or to remain silent so as to protect their parents from having to listen to such “trivial” matters. The families were often symbiotic in nature, making it difficult for the children to separate and individuate as happens as a part of normal adolescent development in the thrust toward the approach of early adulthood.

Second-generation children, through transmission of their parents’ earlier trauma in the concentration camps, not uncommonly resulted in their own distrust of the outside world and made close relationships with peers difficult to come by. It is not unlike the more recent phenomenon in which persons with AIDS no longer feel connected to the disease free community and seek out only others who are experiencing the same physical and psychological experiences they are experiencing.

Nothing I have written here should be misconstrued as criticism of Holocaust survivors. They were compelled to live, if, indeed, they could manage to do so, in an evil environment of daily horrors that no human being should ever have to endure. As for their children, they were caught in a web of trauma transmission, by virtue of their second-generation status, that was inescapable. Further, each survivor, child, and family had their own individual identity, so that not everything said here can be applied as a generalization across the board.

Most importantly of all, many survivors and their families, despite their lingering psychic injuries went on to lead lives of hope, renewal, and success. One has only to witness the life of Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor who went on to provide the world with moral leadership and has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Sadly, genocide is not an evil from mid-Twentieth Century only. It continues to persist, involving other ethnic, racial, and religious groups. The global reawakening of anti-Semitism is itself a threat.