Second-generation Holocaust syndrome

History

In 1966, psychologists began observing large numbers of children of Holocaust survivors seeking mental health help in Canadian clinics. Anne Karpf places the onset of study in the early 1960s, noting that Canadian psychiatrist Vivian Rakoff saw more adolescents with survivor parents than expected and wrote an article with three case studies. By the late 1970s, it was an established field, with academic papers drawing attention to disturbances in parent-child relationships and suggesting that offspring of trauma survivors might manifest some of their parents' trauma.

Effects

Children of survivors often struggled to express normal adolescent anger, as parents had suppressed their own rage during the Holocaust and had few later opportunities to vent it, making the children's aggressive instincts feel overwhelming. Research has shown effects in the children of survivors, but evidence for effects in grandchildren is less consistent; however, a 2003 study by Fossion et al. found that grandchildren of survivors were overrepresented by 300% among psychiatry clinic referrals compared to their general population representation.

Survivors' trauma responses are thought to harm their children's personality, worldview, and interpersonal and religious relations, with these effects potentially reaching the third generation through coping strategies of the second generation. Survivor Henia Bryer noted that reading about the syndrome and observing family friends led her to minimize discussion of her experiences with her children, as children tend to be protective and she did not want them to treat her differently.

Common research findings include parents who had survived starvation worrying about feeding their children as if it were life or death, and later development of eating disorders among daughters of survivors. Rita Goldberg, discussing her mother's biography, said she felt she lacked her parents' survival qualities and that she and her sisters feared acknowledging anger or anxiety as unworthy, feeling measured against grandparents' martyrdom and parents' courage and failing to meet that standard.

Academic influence

The view that parents transmit trauma to their children underlies many theories of transgenerational trauma. Studies of children of Holocaust survivors have influenced broader research on transgenerational trauma among descendants of African-Americans forced into slavery, Native American genocide survivors, war survivors, refugees, and survivors of domestic violence. The work on second-generation syndrome may also have relevance to genocidal trauma and intergenerational transmission affecting Indigenous populations, including many Aboriginal families and communities.