The psychiatric after-effects of the Holocaust on the second generation

Abstract

Numerous studies conducted in clinical and community settings by researchers from different countries over a period of almost five decades, have conclusively shown protracted and disabling psychiatric effects among World War II Holocaust victims, formerly known as the concentration camp syndrome (e.g. Matussek, 1975; Eitinger & Krell, 1985; Eitinger & Major, 1993; Levav, 1998). The multiple and brutal trauma endured by the survivors during the war years were further compounded by earlier systematic discrimination, and by exhausting socio-political events and pogroms that followed liberation by the Allies. In this latter period survivors had to learn the fate of their spouses, children, parents, other relatives and friends. Hastily contracted post-war marriages were likely intended both to cope with feelings of extreme loneliness and to recreate a social support group that would buttress survival.

Given the above, many observers hypothesized that, among other impaired abilities, survivors would evidence a deficit in their parenting functions. As one author noted 25 years ago: ‘Survivors are now beginning to bring their children to our clinics. In retrospect one should not be surprised at this because of the nature and severity of the psychological effects of the persecution, and because the emotional state of the parents has some bearing on the development of the child …’ (Sigal, 1971). Several mediating mechanisms that affected the survivors' family as a functioning unit were postulated by the examining clinicians, such as over-involvement, withdrawal, inability to exert control, parental affective unavailability, undue degree of preoccupation with past experiences, and an inability to cope with mourning and bereavement (Klein, 1973; Levine, 1982; Sigal & Weinfeld, 1989). Other imputed mechanisms referred to psychological processes taking place during child development, such as difficulties in the individuation-separation phase (Freyberg, 1980).