Jewish activists in Scotland have started a campaign to support the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors across the world, saying the trauma of the extermination camps continues to haunt the descendants of those who suffered there.
Dan Glass, 29, from London, said he heard constant tales of the Holocaust as he grew up, which have deeply affected him into adulthood.
“All four of my grandparents narrowly avoided the gas chambers in Auschwitz and countless of their friends met with this fate. For my father it was a daily conversation in my teens and early 20s and even though I very profoundly understood his pain, one day I had to say to him, ‘Dad, I can’t talk about this anymore.’ My father had a whole wall of books on the subject of the Holocaust – it was all he wanted to talk about, but it was so harrowing for me.”
Glass began speaking to other children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, initially for an academic thesis, then later as part of the group he founded Never Ever Again!, a reference to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights pledge. He said he soon realised he was not alone in being scarred by the traumatic pasts of his relatives.
[For more of this story, written by Jean West, go to http://www.theguardian.com/wor...ren-inherited-trauma]
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