Fear and Hope: Three Generations of the Holocaust

Fear and Hope

---

Free download. Book file PDF easily for everyone and every device. You can download and read online Fear and Hope: Three Generations of the Holocaust file PDF Book only if you are registered here. And also you can download or read online all Book PDF file that related with Fear and Hope: Three Generations of the Holocaust book. Happy reading Fear and Hope: Three Generations of the Holocaust Bookeveryone. Download file Free Book PDF Fear and Hope: Three Generations of the Holocaust at Complete PDF Library. This Book have some digital formats such us :paperbook, ebook, kindle, epub, fb2 and another formats. Here is The CompletePDF Book Library. It's free to register here to get Book file PDF Fear and Hope: Three Generations of the Holocaust Pocket Guide.

The ftfteen individuals were interviewed without much intrusion from the interviewer. Only occasionally did the interviewers intervene to prompt the respondents forward or to clarify the questions for the respondent. The ftve families had different experiences ofsurvival during the Holocaust years. Bar-Qn became interested in the topic ofsurvivors when he came into contact with children of survivors, and their offspring, who needed counseling. What conclusion did the author reach from these interviews? First, that the traumas and life experiences are different for the three generations.

The first generati0n has experienced the most trauma and posttraumatic stress because they lived in extermination camps, the Warsaw ghetto, under FascismjNazism in.

The Globe and Mail

Some of the survivors had large families that were destroyed during the Holocaust. For example, Genia, one of the survivors, faces her trauma and pain by still living consciously in the past. She said, "Our hearts were burned in the camps. Others, like Laura, who lost most of her family, wanted to forget the past and rebuild life anew. The survivors described here, like those documented in other studies, including Keilson's,2 went through the traumatizations of separation from their parents before the Holocaust, experience during the Holocaust, and encounters with the external world after the Holocaust, including coming to an unsafe, war-torn, newly established state of Israel.

The survivors, at the time of the interviews, were advanced in their years. The second generation were in their fonies, and hence in a different stage of life. Because they had not experienced the Holocaust first-hand, their emotional and psychological well-being depended on that of their parents, and how their parents perceived, understood and expressed their war experiences to them during their formative years.

Their parents' feelings of pain and loss, which they transmitted by the way they lived, and the view of life that their parents espoused were all powerful influences on the children. Some children, Tamar, for example, tried to respond to their parents' difficulties, while others, such as Hannah, absorbed their parents' stories but were unable to acknowledge their own feelings of mourning. The impression one gets, not just from this book but also from other psychological studies, is that children of Holocaust survivors have been affected unequally.

We avoided recruiting patients of mental health services, as the research focus was on the general population. The participants comprised 15 adult OHS 7 males, 8 females. At the time of the interview, 13 participants had a stable union or civil marriage and two were divorced.

They presented good functioning in terms of personal, social and professional lives. Five of them have had history of prior anxiety disorders, but any participants presented psychiatric problems at the time of the interview. Concerning the parents, nine participants were offspring of parents that had survived Nazi concentration camps and six had parents that had been restricted in ghettos or in hiding places during the Holocaust. All eligible individuals were sent an invitation letter, which was followed by a phone call from the main investigator first author , who explained the general aims of the research.

Prior to interviews, all participants were assured that their anonymity would be maintained. Then, they completed a demographic questionnaire and provided written informed consent by means of a standardized form approved by the University Research Ethics Committee. The lead investigator conducted all interviews at a location chosen by the participant usually, at their homes. Participants were invited to speak freely about the traumatic experiences of their parents and how these experiences affected their lives.

The interviews were conducted in Portuguese, lasted from one to three hours, were digitally recorded and transcribed verbatim. The transcripts were compared to the audiotaped interviews to check for accuracy. The sample was closed when theme saturation was achieved. The Grounded Theory GT methodology [ 41 ], chosen as the theoretical basis for analysis and interpretation of data, is a qualitative research method based on a systematic set of procedures used to develop a model derived inductively from the study phenomenon.

The data analysis involved a succession of phases for its realization. The first stage was actually a Pre-Analysis , in which the investigators established an initial contact with the texts without prioritizing any specific aspect, so that the content could gain clarity in an overall perspective. The second stage consisted of analyzing each interview individually Within-case analysis and confronting analysis of all cases Cross-case analysis. This procedure enabled discovery of similarities, standards, differences and negative cases [ 42 ], what provided the means for the realization of the third stage: Codification of categories.

The codification process made possible the creation of categories and subcategories, which were all inductively derived from the content of the interviews.

Search form

To be created, a category or subcategory had to be based in the repetition of the theme in two or more interviews. This process can be better understood as following:. First of all, a more opened way of coding data enabled the identification of Descriptive Categories , by recognizing general and non-selective thematic axes in the interviews.

Finally, the selective coding reordered the categories from the perspective of the core phenomena, enabling the establishment of Theoretical Categories. By this systematic procedure, the interpretative work was accomplished through the development of a comprehensive model to understand the phenomenon in question. An example of data analysis is in Table 1. To amplify inter-rater reliability of data analysis procedure, three investigators performed the thematic content analysis separately. Then, the individual analysis were compared and discussed, examining the diverse categories and the interpretations of findings.

The differences were discussed and a mutual consent was pursued, leading to a high level of agreement between the researchers. GT-based analysis of the 15 interviews enabled construction of a system of categories related to transgenerational transmission of trauma and resilience between Holocaust survivors and the second generation Table 2. The following subcategorization scheme respected the relevance of modes of communication between Holocaust survivors and their offspring.

These modes cross a broad spectrum, ranging from open, everyday communication to its opposite — silence, secrets and the unsaid. The presence of an open, loving communication style enabled creation of symbolization mechanisms, which, in turn, favored resilient outcomes. Interviewee 01 ". The use of linguistic resources, such as jokes and comic tirades, enables a peculiar approach to the traumatic experience: while it makes the issue easier to address, it simultaneously serves to denounce the violence experienced. In these cases, humor may be viewed as a sort of symbolic displacement, at once allowing the survivor to present and repudiate the traumatic experience without distancing himself or herself from it, creating something of a cushion to lessen the impact of traumatic experience:.

The Holocaust’s long reach: Trauma is passed on to survivors’ children

Interviewee 05 ". Many survivors took part in formal interviews and other types of documentary records in an attempt to systematize and order their experience, so their children and grandchildren could be aware of their experiences during the war. Use of this resource by survivors attenuates possible hurdles to direct communication. I only found out about [these] things when I heard the tape. Interviewee 12 ". Some participants reported that their parents had never directly recounted their traumatic experiences.

The following segments deal with this aspect of parental communication. Interviewee There were few stories about what it was like at the village where my father was born, or what it was like in the city. Interviewee 11 ". The communication patterns of survivors are often pervaded by feelings of guilt and shame or by fear of having a negative impact on the lives of their offspring.

This commonly led to silence, secrets and points left unsaid concerning traumatic experiences. As parents did not address their traumatic experiences, the second generation found it more difficult to achieve psychical and biographical integration of these events, as indicated by the following excerpt:. The following subcategories comprise second-generation experiences that correlate with the disruptive parental life event. Experience of trauma for OHS may be presented as a wide range of manifestations, all of which feature the presence of behaviors, worldviews or experiences that follow patterns similar to the traumatization suffered by Holocaust survivors.

Some participants claimed their parents had failed to provide an affective framework of security, stability and predictability; instead, many survivors transmitted a terrifying view of the world to their children.

The offspring of these parents feel the need to always be ready to react to imminent catastrophes and potential threats to their survival. The following excerpts provide prime examples of this scenario:. Because, in a way, I was told, you have to recognize the signs of a disaster before others do.

Always ready. Interviewee 13 ". This category describes experiences of feeling a lack of rootedness or belonging. Interviewees associated these feelings with a fragmented family history, characterized by a large number of deceased relatives, unmet relatives, lost roots, difficult logical nexuses, and a precarious, frayed symbolic fabric. It was reported by many OHS as an experience of psychical deterritorialization:. Outside, in this implausible place in which we travel through life, on top of wheels, with no floor.

Some interviewees felt as if they were currently living experiences typical of war victims:. Interviewee 09 ". Some descendents related to the victimization of their own parents and reported feelings of guilt and submission of their own. Myself, that is.

Me, as a victim of this history. These may occur as fears restricted to self-identification as a Jew or relative to any type of social identifiability, as the following excerpt shows:. Interviewee 02 ". As my father was very small and very weak, he just watched.

Fear & Hope – Three Generations of the Holocaust by Dan Bar-on

So, that may have given me, and perhaps even my brother, something like this: we never expose ourselves, we never put ourselves out there. Interviewee 14 ". This category comprises mechanisms used by descendents for psychical working over of parental traumatic experiences. It encompasses a broad spectrum of mechanisms, ranging from the private to the universal. Faced with the fragmented, enigmatic discourse of their survivor parents, some interviewees created their own narratives of parental experiences as a means of taking possession of this past. This may constitute a possible resilience mechanism.

Sometimes, the process began in childhood:.

• The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics
• Runaway Vampire (Argeneau, Book 23)
• An Introduction to Catalan Numbers
• The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration
• Spaces with Corresponding Paths
• Physical Properties of Hydrocarbons [Vol 1]
• The Shadowlord