Different Horrors, Same Hell: Gender and the Holocaust

10. Survivor Mothers and Their Daughters: The Hidden Legacy of the Holocaust

218 10 Survivor Mothers and Their Daughters The Hidden Legacy of the Holocaust Gaby R. Glassman My prime focus on women in this chapter enables us to look at the generational line grandmother-mother/daughter-granddaughter, which the Holocaust ruptured in so many cases. Second, I draw on some of the findings from attachment theory studies to aid our understanding of why some people seemed to cope when others did not. The focus of these studies tends to be mainly on the attachment patterns between mothers and daughters. Third, I note that at the time that survivor mothers brought up their children, many of them were at home as the primary caregivers in these families. Consequently, a special identification based on their common gender had time to develop. Fourth, as in therapy generally, there seems to be a preponderance of women attending my second generation groups and, therefore, this gender concentration has given me a substantial opportunity to become aware of the ramifications of insecurities in mother-daughter attachments.1 In her introduction to After Such Knowledge,2 Eva Hoffman writes: “The guardianship of the Holocaust is being passed on to us. The second generation is the hinge generation in which received, transferred knowledge of events is transmuted into history, or into myth.” However, Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks, argues that Judaism was organised around something other than history. Its key 219 Survivor Mothers and Their Daughters word was memory. Perhaps the simplest way of describing the difference is this. History is what happened to someone else. Memory is what happened to me. Memory is history internalised, the past made present to those who relive it.3 In the first book on children of Holocaust survivors, published in 1979, Helen Epstein’s opening words are: For years it lay in an iron box buried so deep inside me that I was never sure what it was. I knew I carried slippery, combustible things more secret than sex and more dangerous than any shadow or ghost. Ghosts had shape and name. What lay inside my iron box had none.4 Epstein describes a history that she did not live through but had, nevertheless , been affected by. Since then, numerous papers and books on the psychological aspects of transgenerational transmission have been published, written in the main by psychologists and psychotherapists,5 and the topic has been articulated in the autobiographies of the second generation. My observations are based on the several hundred children of Holocaust survivors and refugees who participated in second-generation groups I have conducted in London since 1989. The mothers to whom I refer in this chapter are the mothers of daughters who took part in my groups. These mothers either managed to escape Nazi persecution and come to England before the war—some bore children during the war—or survived in hiding or in concentration camps and arrived in England after the liberation. In most cases, the mothers left close relatives behind, many of whom did not survive. When survivors’ worst fears about the fate of their relatives proved to be true, mourning for their loved ones was often inhibited by distance in time and geography and by the absence of a body, a burial ground, and, frequently, other relatives with whom to share their grief.6 For many, having lost all or most of their families, procreation was paramount, as without children there could be no family continuity and, for some, no Jewish future. As relatively few camp survivors and former hidden children settled in the United Kingdom,7 there were insufficient numbers of second-generation survivors to form separate groups for only children of survivors. Whether the mothers were survivors or refugees, however, the impacts on the second generation were similar enough for the daughters to explore 220 Gaby R. Glassman these impacts together in one group, in spite of marked differences between them. Considering the 65,000–70,000 Jewish refugees who came to Britain prior to WWII,8 the total number of children of survivors and refugees might exceed 70,000.9 Although the second generation seems to be successful, both academically and professionally, I address in this chapter some of the implications of the attachment problems I have noticed second-generation children have experienced with their survivor parents. However, I believe with other authors that the legacy of parental trauma has also had an impact on their offspring in positive...