Inherited Grief

Book – Elizabeth Rosner, Survivor Café: The Legacy of Trauma and the Labyrinth of Memory

In her insightful and far-reaching book, Survivor Café, Elizabeth Rosner, a daughter of Holocaust survivors, writes about her search to understand her parents’ grief and its continuing impact on her family. 

Her inquiry began when she found that she was reacting to her own grief in ways that she couldn’t explain. When she mentioned this to her parents, they told her more about their experiences of despair and terror in the concentration camps. In talking with her friends, Elizabeth discovered that she shared this inherited trauma with many others in the second and third generations.

In addition, Rosner finds that research in epigenetics is showing that prolonged stress and trauma cause chemical reactions in the body that can change how DNA is expressed and this is passed on to offspring. Then, when the offspring experience trauma, they react in ways they can’t explain. One of her friends said she could recognize survivors “by way of a certain haunted look, a sadness in their eyes.”

Elizabeth says it’s crucial that Holocaust survivors and their offspring continue to tell their stories of oppression and survival because humanity has a way of forgetting its atrocities and then creating new ones. Besides the Holocaust, there were the genocides that went on in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Syria. Americans forget that we didn’t believe the early reports of the Nazi death camps and turned away boatloads of Jewish refugees during World War II, sending them back to their deaths. 

We forget that we forced 120,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry out of their homes during World War II and into concentration camps with barbed wire and armed soldiers in places like Heart Mountain, Wyoming and Manzanar, California. We forget that we fire bombed civilian populations in Dresden and Chemnitz, and atomic bombed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We forget that we took away the homelands of Native Americans and forced them to move and live on reservations. The descendants of all our actions are still dealing with the aftermath. 

Rosner notes that the German people continue to own up to their complicity in the Holocaust and preserve places like Auschwitz because they do not want to forget and repeat it. She speaks of the need for us to remember our mass shootings and lynchings, and suggests setting up memorials in these places where we can grieve those who died. 

Whenever one group of people decides another group of people isn’t worthy of respect, the bullies among us will abuse those who are powerless. Every human being is equal. Respect starts here.