Are the kids all right?
As a child of Holocaust survivors, it’s a question I ask myself as an adult.
Both the question and the answer attract increasing attention today, now that we understand more about the nature of trauma, and how it can be transmitted from one generation to the next.
Ever since the Holocaust, and every year during Holocaust Education Week, from Nov. 2 to 9, we remember our parents’ stories of the unspeakable horrors they endured and the courage it took to survive them.
It turns out that trauma has a long memory and a peculiar way of breaking into our consciousness, even decades after the fact.
Those who lived through the Holocaust were forever branded, even though they survived, emigrated and created new families.
Among them, were my parents.
When I was growing up, I was afraid. Of what, you might ask? What was there to fear in Toronto during the 1960s?
[For more of this story, written by Pearl Goodman, go to http://www.torontosun.com/2016.../suffer-the-children]
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