Fear and Hope: Three Generations of the Holocaust (review)

Book Reviews 139 other, or, putting it differently, that the prelude was just as important as the denouement. For students of the Third Reich and the Holocaust in particular, I consider this to be one of the most consequential books to have appeared in recent years. Michael H. Kater Department of History York University Fear and Hope: Three Generations of the Holocaust, by Dan Bar-Qn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. 375 pp. $39.95, While there has been much written on the Holocaust and its horrors, there is much less data on the topic of how survivors, their children,and their grandchildren cope with the nature and trauma of the Holocaust. Bar-On, a therapist and Professor of Psychology at Ben-Gurion University, and his associates have interviewed ftfteen individuals consisting of three generations of ftve families of Holocaust survivors, currently residing in Israel. Bar-On's approach was unique because he and his interviewers let the respondents speak for themselves and tell their story which represented the reality for each ofthose three generations. This methodology, based on "softer assumptions," in which the storyteller reconstructs his or her own biography, differs from a hermeneutic approach, in which the researcher tries to extract, reconstruct, and interpret the stories of the respondent. 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. Some were in Nazi camps, others survived by being in Fascist/Nazi occupied Libya, or living as partisans in the former Soviet Union. Bar-Qn became interested in the topic ofsurvivors when he came into contact with children of survivors, and their offspring, who needed counseling. The author states that this book was inspired by a larger project which consists of interviewing families of Holocaust survivors and 140 SHOFAR Winter 1997 Vol. 15, No. 2 their offspring and by Gabrielle Rosenthal,l who did research in Germany on children of Holocaust perpetrators. 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 .libya, among the panisans in Russian forests. 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." This appears to have negatively affected her ability to function as a mother. 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. Some identify with their parents' pain and guilt; others resent or are unwilling to carry the pain and cannot communicate well with their parents who went through...