Day of Remembrance speaker: Holocaust trauma passed down generations

Survivors of Germany’s World War II death camps experienced effects of their imprisonment for years and, in some cases, passed trauma to their children, according to this year’s Day of Remembrance speaker.

Dr. Harold Koplewicz, who spoke April 24 at the Atlantis Casino Resort Spa in Reno, is a child and adolescent psychiatrist whose parents survived the Holocaust. He presented a viewpoint on the survivors’ experiences and how they faced their trauma after liberation.

Koplewicz said the experience of the camps echoed across generations, changing the survivors and how they showed their fears.

Koplewicz said trauma can become biologically embedded — not just in memory but in stress responses — and may be passed from a parent to their child.

Koplewicz said second generations may find this research validates what survivors long felt but could not explain. As he delved further into survivor feelings, he told the audience, he felt different from others who may have experienced something similarly.

“Childhood is colored by our past,” he said.

Through his profession and as president of the nonprofit Child Mind Institute, Koplewicz said he sees how deeply these experiences shaped children not only in the days after the war but often for the rest of their lives.

“I know this first-hand growing up as a child, and the trauma was always present, sometimes in silence,” he said. “My father was in 14 concentration camps and survived the Warsaw ghetto, and my mother walked out of the ghetto with false papers as a Catholic.”

Koplewicz said one of the indications of his research is that while trauma can be passed down, so can resilience.

“The silence is starting to echo what parents with many families have known emotionally for decades – that trauma and strength are often passed down together,” he said.

“We now understand that the children of survivors can carry stress responses, not only increasing the risk for anxiety and depression, but in some cases enhancing vigilance, empathy and even determination. We inherit scars, but also tools for survival.”

After the war, Koplewicz’s family relocated to New York City, where they lived across the hall from the family of Judith Schumer, who is now an organizer of the Day of Remembrance.

Koplewicz said if he needed a respite from his parents, he walked to Schumer’s apartment.

“It became my safe space,” he said.

They remained in contact as friends for decades and Schumer reached out to him to be this year’s guest speaker.

Before she introduced Koplewicz, Schumer opened with a prelude of the Nazi atrocities and the challenges facing Holocaust survivors. She said immense challenges — the loss of family, homes, communities and professions — left the survivors with little or no means to rebuild their lives.

“Some have survived concentration camps and had to cope with the memories of what they have ignored,” she said.

Nothing was simple for the thousands of Jews during the last weeks of the war or in postwar Europe. Schumer said, for example, a number of anti-Jewish riots occurred in the Netherlands.

Other countries were also affected.

In the small Polish town of Kelcin, 29,000 Jews lived in the city in 1939. Schumer said during the summer of 1946, some 200 Jews remained.

In 1948, Israel became a state and many survivors found permanent homes in a land more than 1,600 miles from Germany and Poland.

“By the late 1940s and early 1950s, many survivors had finally found permanent homes in the new state of Israel and in many countries of the world,” Schumer said.

During her presentation, Schumer weaved stories of survivors who came to the United States to restart their lives. She mentioned Esther Nisenthal, a Polish seamstress who created a series of pictures on 36 fabric panels. Another story focused on the German-born Ruth Westheimer, who was known as Dr. Ruth, the sex therapist who died in July.

Mitka Kalinski, a young Ukrainian boy who escaped to Germany, attended the presentation at the Atlantis. During the war, Schumer said, Mitka, who now lives in Sparks, worked as a child laborer on a German officer’s farm.

“Conditions were terrible and food was scarce,” Schumer said.

The annual Day of Remembrance was sponsored by the Nevada Governor’s Advisory Council on Education Relating to the Holocaust, Atlantis Casino Resort Spa, Jewish Nevada and OLLI at the Sanford Center for Aging, part of the University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine.