In the late 1960s, Henry Krystal, a psychoanalyst and Auschwitz survivor, organized several conferences for doctors, social-service providers, and German government officials on the after-effects of “massive psychic trauma” on survivors of Nazi concentration camps and the Hiroshima nuclear disaster.
While organizing the conference at Wayne State University, Krystal learned of Canadian psychiatrists Vivian Rakoff and John Sigal who had reported that 25 percent of the families seeking psychological help for their children at the Montreal Jewish General Hospital were Holocaust survivors. This percentage was disproportionate to their numbers.
The adolescents Rakoff and Sigal treated came to them with severe phobias, chronic depression, anger, and unsuccessful suicide attempts. Rakoff wrote,
“It would be easier to believe that they, rather than their parents, had suffered the corrupting, searing hell… With the accumulation of knowledge and the unfolding of the concentration camp experience through the damaged generations, one may fairly ask if indeed there were any survivors.” (1966)1
An Israeli psychiatrist, Hillel Klein, who had been conducting research on Holocaust survivor families on a kibbutz, disputed Rakoff and Sigal’s findings. He maintained that survivors spent more quality time with their children than other parents and that their children had a rich fantasy life that enhanced security and provided relief from anxiety. (1968)2
Krystal concluded that the intense and unique family dynamics centered on the children of survivors
“related to the subject of object-loss [of beloved relatives] is the yearning (hope) that the lost people would be restored magically. The most common expectation is that such love objects would return in the form of children… [who would] represent the new versions of parents, close relatives or offspring lost in the Holocaust.” (1968)3
After the Wayne State University conferences Krystal and others approached the American Psychoanalytic Association to organize a study group on the psychological effects of the Holocaust on offspring of survivors. They met tremendous resistance, so met ad hoc to continue to explore the transmission of historical trauma during APA and International Psychoanalytic Association meetings. Among the participants of the Discussion Group on “Children and Social Catastrophe: Sequelae in Survivors and the Children of Survivors” were Henry Krystal, Hillel Klein, Judith Kestenberg, Peter Blos, Yehuda Nir, Vivian Rakoff, John Sigal, Elmer Luchterhand, Paul Chodoff, Janis Schossberger, and Sam Kaplan.
New York psychoanalyst Judith Kestenberg sent a questionnaire to 320 analysts around the world to ask about their treatment of children of survivors. Reporting in 1972, she concluded:
“A vast majority of those questioned revealed an amazing indifference to the problem… Some were startled by the questions because it never occurred to them to link their patients’ dynamics to the history of their parents’ persecution.” (1972)4
In 1974, the committed psychoanalysts finally persuaded the American Psychoanalytic Association to sponsor the Group for the Psychoanalytic Study of the Effect of the Holocaust on the Second Generation, which held its first session in December, 1975. Kestenberg was joined by psychoanalysts Martin Bergmann and Milton Jucovy, among others, in developing new psychoanalytic approaches to treating second generation patients. The Group for the Psychoanalytic Study of the Effect of the Holocaust on the Second Generation also met monthly in New York for approximately 15 years and culminated in the edited volume Generations of the Holocaust, 1982. Although the book is ascribed to Martin S. Bergmann and Milton E. Jucovy as editors Judith S. Kestenberg was a lead editor and is acknowledged so in the German edition. She was reluctant to have her name listed because she was concerned that her patients would recognize themselves in the book even though they would be disguised.
I joined this discussion group in December, 1976. After listening to dozens of Holocaust survivor children in the privacy of my office for a year, I wanted to share ideas with colleagues who understood the importance of combining the historical with the personal.
Meetings of The Group for the Psychoanalytic Study of the Effect of the Holocaust on the Second Generation usually began with participants introducing themselves and their interest in the study group. Many were Jewish and shared a Holocaust-related history, which enabled them to empathize as well as to realize the limitations of psychoanalytic concepts to describe the consequences of massive psychic trauma on “second generation” members. Some were reluctant to share their connection to the Holocaust and many were oblivious to psychological dynamics in the lives of Holocaust survivors, let alone in the lives of their offspring.
Most of those mental-health professionals whose patients informed them that they were children of survivors were unclear about the therapeutic implications of this information. Psychoanalysts often interpreted children of survivors as emotionally impaired or colluded in a silence about the subject to protect themselves from hearing graphic death narratives. Misdiagnosis was common. For example, some second-generation patients who expressed mistrust of the outside world were diagnosed with paranoid personality, when in fact, what they were expressing was a world-view that was transmitted to them by their survivor parents.
One prominent psychologist doing work in this area, Chester Feuerstein, had been part of the American liberating army. He witnessed first-hand the unbelievable effects of the Nazi’s murderous actions. In the early 1970s, despite considerable opposition, he worked to establish the Holocaust as a legitimate area in clinical psychology that affects mental-health, as he would later do with the Vietnam War. Later, he fought with the Executive Board of the New York Clinical Psychologists to establish Holocaust memorial awards for the best work in this area.
The efforts of these psychoanalysts were unknown to me and my colleague Bella Savran when we started our Awareness Groups for Children of Holocaust Survivors at Boston University, influenced by the consciousness-raising groups of the women’s movement. In the United States, many different groups had been forming groups based on collective identity. In 1975, I happened to read the transcript of a conversation among children of Holocaust survivors published in Response: A Contemporary Jewish Review. They discussed how growing up with survivor parents influenced their world view, values, behavior, and feelings. That publication gave Bella and me the idea to start a short-term awareness group for children of Holocaust survivors at Boston University.
We posted flyers on bulletin boards around campus and at local kosher food stores and the bookstore. Elie Wiesel had started teaching a course on the Holocaust at Boston University and advertised the group in his class. We subsequently published articles about the dynamics of these groups, including, the leaders’ reactions. (1979, 1980)5 6
Transcripts and interviews of a few of the early groups, (one which Mona Fishbane co-led with me) were used for one of the earliest doctoral dissertations on the second generation (1979). Another group which I co-led with psychiatrist Henry Grunebaum became the subject of the documentary film Breaking the Silence: The Generation After the Holocaust (PBS, 1984).7
In 1976, Time published a paragraph on the research of Israeli psychiatrist Shamai Davidson, entitled, “Second Generation Effects of the Nazi Holocaust.” This article helped journalist and daughter of Holocaust survivors Helen Epstein, persuade her editors at the New York Times Magazine to give her an assignment on this topic. On June 19, 1977, Helen Epstein’s cover story Heirs to the Holocaust, and her subsequent landmark book, Children of the Holocaust : Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors (1978)8 gave children of survivors the language to understand themselves.
Epstein’s interviewees articulated what many others felt but could not put into words. That resulted in children of Holocaust survivors becoming an identifiable group in American society. The second generation (in lower case letters) became Second Generation (upper case) or as they refer to themselves colloquially today, “the 2Gs.”
Our Boston awareness groups, described in Epstein’s article, spearheaded similar groups in a few other cities. I was invited by Hillel Klein to start such a group at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1978, when I lectured in Israel, mental-health professionals told me that I was bringing an American phenomenon to Israel, that children of survivors in Israel were not psychologically affected by their parents’ trauma. They argued that children of survivors felt integrated into Israeli society and did not feel alienated, different or isolated from their peers as in the U.S. It took another decade until the phenomenon was recognized by Israeli mental-health professionals and 2Gs themselves.
In the United States, Gerald Green’s Holocaust television mini-series in 1978 and the inauguration of the United States Holocaust Commission, then the Holocaust Museum focused much media attention survivor families, who became a highly visible part of the American cultural landscape – unlike in other parts of the world. The detrimental effect of all this attention was that 2Gs were being put under a psychological microscope.
One of the themes that emerged from our awareness groups, was that children of survivors were mourning murdered family members whom they never knew. Mourning the loss of an entire people cannot be done in isolation. It requires a community. Towards that effort Bella Savran, Moshe Waldoks, and I approached Rabbi Irving (“Yitz”) Greenberg, at the time director of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership (CLAL, which included a Holocaust Jewish Resource Center) to host a conference on children of Holocaust survivors.
This idea came to fruition in November 1979, at the First International Conference on Children of Holocaust Survivors. Six hundred children of survivors gathered in New York City with a smattering of survivors. It was an explosive conference, in which mental health professionals speaking about their research became the unexpected targets of audience rage.
The torrent of anger was, I believe, in lieu of the collective mourning process that usually takes place when survivors and their children get together. This intense anger was really about what was done to innocent people by their persecutors. Some felt that the professionals were speaking of them as specimens to be experimented on, the way some survivors were guinea pigs for medical “researchers” in concentration camps. Since the actual persecutors were not present, the rage was directed at the “messengers.”
Theologian and historian Michael Berenbaum helped address this rage by leading participants in chanting the Kaddish (prayer for the dead) for those who were killed in the Shoah.
Following the conference, more mental-health professionals established self-help kinship groups and second-generation therapy groups but encountered resistance when they asked Jewish organizations to provide funds.
Some children of survivors resisted the idea of groups and of trying to understand the psychological impact of their parents’ trauma on them. Some felt stigmatized by mental-health professionals and wary of being compared to America’s many other victimized groups. Children of survivors sometimes heard,
“You’re just like children of alcoholics.”
Such an interpretation undermined the Holocaust survivor parent who would not be emotionally compromised were it not for being persecuted as a Jew.
Other offspring of survivors sought more life-affirming active ways to identify with their family’s traumatic history. When the World Gathering of Holocaust Survivors met in Israel in 1981, one day was devoted to a meeting of 1,000 children of survivors where the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, with Menachem Rosensaft as its Founding Chairman, was formed. Its mission was to continue Holocaust commemorations and education, to help other oppressed groups, to fight genocide, and to provide social support to those in need. It established chapters throughout the United States and organized regular conferences in Israel and the United States.
On the research front, more than 150 psychology doctoral dissertation and 500 research articles have been written (UP UNTIL 2017?) about the transmission of historical trauma. The literature includes findings that highlight resilience among members of this group and findings on the psychopathology and vulnerability in this population.
Early researchers focused on the psycho-historical themes in the lives of children of survivors that differentiated them from their peers. Robert Prince’s doctoral dissertation in 1975 was followed by research asking whether children of survivors were more clinically depressed or anxious than comparative groups. Did they have the capacity to separate from their survivor parents and function as independent adults? How had communication about the atrocities and losses in the family effect the well-being of these children? How was their identity and self-esteem influenced by having parents who were persecuted as Jews?
Since the early 1990s researchers have focused on the biological transmission of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder diagnosis in the second-generation. Do children of survivors have normal cortisol levels? Are children of survivors exhibiting PTSD? More recently, epigenetic inquiries concentrate on trauma-induced genetic changes in Holocaust survivors, and how and whether altered genes are transmitted to the next generation.
Since there are too many findings to review, I will highlight ones I found key. In research conducted by Gloria Leon and others, at the University of Minnesota using the Minnesota Multiple Personality Inventory, the conclusion reached was that being a child of Holocaust survivors is not a personality syndrome (1981).9 Children of survivors were shown as not more depressed, or more anxious, than a comparative cohort group. They do not exhibit a greater tendency towards schizophrenia, or bi-polar disorder or borderline narcissistic personalities. These findings were also corroborated by Zahava Solomon from Tel-Aviv University who conducted a series of controlled studies with thousands of subjects in Israel using other psychological instruments.
A major subject of inquiry has been regarding the developmental stage of separation and individuation. Clinicians have suggested that 2Gs cannot separate from their parents and thereby cannot become independent human beings who assume adult responsibilities. The dozens of studies with control groups have yielded mixed results but suggest that children of survivors have the capacity to separate from their parents, but take longer to go through this phase of development. Furthermore, daughters of survivors are less separated and individuated than daughters of American-Jewish born parents. However, these results are not significant when measured by more projective measures like the Rorschach, which tap the unconscious. (1979)10 11
Another interesting inquiry is the difference between sons and daughters of survivors. In Israeli society, sons of survivors have been shown to attempt to undo their parents’ victimization by being extroverted, assertive, dominant, aggressive and competitive. They display courage, take risks, seek excitement, and look for novelty. They also tend to be less neurotic, more independent and more suspicious. In sum, they present a relatively consistent personality structure with low inhibition as its main feature. And sons of survivors tend to volunteer for front-line combat. (1983)12
Generally, daughters of survivors have a more emotional approach to life, with their behavior directed by feelings of melancholy and depression rather than by objective rationality. But I would note that these symptoms are within the normal range and are not considered clinical depressions. This may be because Holocaust survivor mothers tend to talk more than the survivor fathers, and thus, the father serves as a role model of instrumental coping, while the daughters identify more with the mothers’ internalization of past victimization. This finding, by the way is in sync with general findings that women tend to be more emotional and men tend to be more task oriented.
I learned that such commonalities must be understood in the context of each child of survivor’s unique family history. On the surface, the 2Gs are no different from any other group of people their age. They are lawyers, doctors, parents, teachers, journalists, actors, artists, secretaries—people from every walk of life. They are straight, gay, lesbian. They seem as well adjusted as any of our peers. Many have a tendency to be over-achievers. Some are classical musicians of the highest order—such as Emmanuel Ax, others are heavy metal head bangers. They have a presence in Hollywood with Ivan Reitman; have made it into the halls of the U.S. Congress with Sam Gajdenson and Ron Wyden and into the board rooms of major corporations. They are in the ranks of Jewish national and international leadership. Wolf Blitzer on CNN is a son of Holocaust survivors.
What seems to have differentiated children of survivors from their peers in America is that the 2Gs grew up feeling different; not having grandparents, no extended families for celebrations, mournful remembrances during holidays, in addition to having immigrant parents who needed the child to be the spokesperson with the outside world and bureaucracies. These distinctions may have also affected their self-esteem.
The values and world views that some children of survivors were subjected to also contributed to a sense of isolation; observing the world as a hostile place, learning not to trust anyone outside the immediate family, choosing an occupation that can be transferred anywhere, being prepared for a catastrophe, keeping a low profile as a Jew, to name but a few values.
Another psychological dynamic we examined is the extent to which communication about the persecution had an impact on the psychological well-being of the offspring of survivors. In most families, the children were exposed to their parents’ suffering and losses by eavesdropping on conversations with other survivors, or hearing bits and pieces of their ordeals. It is when parents or a close relative spoke incessantly or were totally silent that more extreme reactions ensued. Hearing too many gruesome details at a young age caused tremendous uncontrollable rage, and not knowing anything about the family history resulted in a lack of an intimate relationship with parents and to some extent with others.
One group member, Solomon, shared a bedroom with his uncle who had lost his wife and two children when they were sent to the gas chambers. Every night when Solomon went to sleep, his uncle would repeat the story of how his wife and two daughters were directed “to the left” by Mengele. It did not take long for Solomon to act out his aggression by misbehaving in school and starting fires at home.
Solomon was sent to live in group homes—he was one of the few Jews in such a place. This clearly exacerbated his alienation and isolation. But he was very intelligent and went on to become a college professor specializing in European Jewish history between the wars. He channeled his anger into a constructive intellectual pursuit, and educates others about the continuity of the Jewish people and the Jewish life that existed before the war.
Another child of survivors, David came from an Orthodox Jewish background. He would hear about atrocities from his mother when he came home from school and she served him milk and cookies. As a young man, he would take his anger out on Jewish women he dated by rejecting them, one after another. After several years of marriage to a Muslim woman, and many other relationships with non-Jewish women, he finally married a non-Jew who converted to Judaism after they had a child.
The Jewish identity of the survivor generation was diverse: from Hasidim to converts to other religions, from Bundists to Zionists. The second generation reflects that diversity and reactions to it. A small percentage of children of survivors – as authors Helen Fremont and Louise Kehoe have described –did not know that they were born to Jewish survivor parents until their adulthood (1995, 1999). 13 14
Ingrid Tauber’s doctoral dissertation explains how the social milieu of growing up with many children of survivors, with a few or with no others formed ones’ self-esteem and identity as a second- generation member (1980).15
Most children of survivors knew that their parents were persecuted as Jews. Even when the details of their lives before, during, and after the Holocaust were vague, they heard bits and pieces about their parents’ traumatic years as they eavesdropped on adult conversations. But children of survivors were often reluctant to ask too many questions for fear that a survivor might break down if his or her wounds were brought to the surface. To most 2Gs, “break down” means crying uncontrollably.
The quality and quantity of how the past is communicated to a child has other effects. Very minimal information can lead to excessive fantasies and shame about how a parent survived, sometimes resulting in low self-esteem and poor self-image. The quality of family communication cannot be psychologically measured and was different in each Holocaust survivor home. In some families there was a haunting theme of secrets which kept a child of survivors in the dark about what “really” happened.
Another variable is the mood of the individual home. Some homes were permeated with a sense of loss and mourning. Dozens of memorial candles were lit along with holiday candles—mitigating the joy of holidays. Festive meals were reminders of all those who were not there to celebrate. Survivors tended to name their children after relatives who were murdered in the Holocaust—and some children mourned the person for whom she or he is named.
I have observed that a child of survivors does not necessarily know that he or she is coming into therapy to mourn his or her unknown relatives or is unable to verbalize the connection to losses during the Holocaust. One who came to see me held a napkin on his lap.
When I asked him about who was in his mother’s and father’s families before the war, he opened his napkin and said, “This is the reason I am here.” He then read the names of a list of relatives who were murdered on both his mother’s and father’s sides of the family. He came for treatment because every time he contemplated having children of his own, he fell into a deep depression, and did not know why. After a number of sessions, he became aware of his fear of losing a child the way his parents lost a son during the Holocaust. He was then able to mourn his dead brother, and went on to have four children of his own.
The way 2Gs mourn may take different forms. Some may repress any family losses, others may channel their feelings into helping others. Israeli psychologist Dina Wardi contends that in every family of survivors there is one who is designated as the “memorial candle.” (1992)16
According to Wardi, working in Israel, the stages of mourning may begin with the shock of finding out that parents were persecuted as Jews and that many in their family were murdered. Then there is a period of denial: not dwelling on the suffering and losses. This denial may be disrupted when a parent falls ill or dies, by a book or movie, by experiencing an anti-semitic incident or some other experience of fear. Then begins a stage of confrontation – seeking details of the parents’ survival, their life before the war, going on “roots”-trips, reading books, searching for documents.
During the feeling stage of mourning, the individual may experience survivor guilt, a desire to undo the pain and suffering of the parents, anger, rage, a desire to take revenge, loss and sadness, identification with victimhood. At times overly identifying with victimization or heroism can result in transposition — living in the present as if it is the past, for example, putting oneself in a dangerous situation. Finally, feelings need to be channeled into constructive life affirming behaviors. Raising consciousness about man’s inhumanity through Holocaust education, human rights work, creative projects, helping other oppressed groups, raising Jewish families, connecting to the culture and Jewish knowledge that was destroyed.
Many 2Gs knew that their parents survived “the war,” and lost many close relatives, but the details were vague. These people are not revisionists. They do not say, “It didn’t happen,” but rather, they never attend a memorial service, read a book, interview a survivor, visit a Holocaust museum or memorial or read an oral history. They avoid Holocaust-related films, and they complain that there is too much focus on the Holocaust.
A different level of awareness sets in when a barrier to confronting the past is removed. Often a more direct dialogue begins with the parents or with other relatives. This is the “confrontation” phase in mourning. It often starts when a parent becomes ill and the family worries that it will soon be too late to get the stories about their families.
Too often, the confrontation stage begins after a parent dies, and then getting details of their lives becomes problematic. Many 2Gs were enlisted to help their parents fill out forms for German reparations, and that got the story-telling ball rolling. Another avenue to confrontation came from the third generation, the 3Gs, the survivor’s grandchildren, who would ask a question about the family, and their parents did not know the answer. Another trigger to confrontation could be seeing a experiencing an external event that triggers fears of annihilation, such as the days before the Six- Day War in Israel, or 9/11 in New York.
After learning the details of the humiliation, persecution, and losses, a flood of feelings are evoked in 2Gs. The “feeling stage” is the third stage of mourning, in which 2Gs wish they could undo the pain and suffering of their parents. Feelings of grief, sadness, depression, anger, rage, revenge, helplessness, and survivor guilt can be overwhelming. That guilt has the potential to turn into a dysfunctional state of being—making some 2Gs feel like they have to deprive themselves of joy and need to suffer in the present.
As a result, some 2Gs put themselves into situations in which they are forced to survive or compete with their parents’ heroism, or they live in the present but are transposed into the past world of their parents. Psychoanalyst Judith Kestenberg called this dynamic “transposition,”
“the organization of the self in relation to time and space. Transposition must not be confused with a dual personality. This dual existence of living in the present and in the past arises under extreme stress and danger of death otherwise it is dormant.” (1982)17
This time tunnel, at times a replacement of mourning, can be subtle and misunderstood if one doesn’t connect it to the parent’s traumatic past. For example, Aart, a journalist in Israel, was writing for a Dutch newspaper. He was planning to live in Israel permanently but could not see himself taking Israeli citizenship. It frightened him to think that if another Holocaust were to occur, he would be stuck and unable to escape. He had German and Dutch passports and felt he belonged nowhere. When Aart revealed his father’s story, it was clear his father survived because he had false passports that allowed him to travel incognito out of Holland when the rest of the family was deported to Westerbork (a way station to Auschwitz).
When Aart began to understand that connection, Aart was eventually able to get Israeli citizenship, and have a feeling of belonging rather than feeling like a refugee.
This concept of transposition—living in the present and past at the same time—is often at the heart of psychological problems among 2Gs who are “stuck” in the feeling stage. There are those who are immersed in feeling the pain and suffering of the Jews. They interpret the Jewish people as the ultimate sufferers and they turn themselves into victims in their current lives. Some of these 2Gs walk around in a state of self-induced paranoia or believe that the Jews are under constant siege from anti-Semites and Muslim countries:
“Everyone is out to get us Jews.”
Some feel guilty because they did not suffer like their parents. Others are full of rage, a mechanism to keep fear away.
These negative feelings need to be transformed into constructive life-affirming ways to identify with the dead and remember them before and beyond their suffering. When the feelings are “good,” when feelings emerge with awareness of the losses, they can be channeled in various ways one of which is to affirm continuity of aspects of the Jewish culture that was destroyed—as Zalmen Mlotek does with the National Yiddish Theatre-Folksbiene in the United States.
This, the “search for meaning,” is the final stage of mourning that connects us with the life that was destroyed, and heals those who have gotten stuck in the emotional state of the mourning process. It is interesting to note that the search is best accomplished through group efforts. One cannot be an active Jew in isolation. To fight oppression and racism, to raise Holocaust consciousness, to help others requires a collective effort. The Holocaust Awareness Movement can arguably be called one of the most influential consciousness-raising efforts in history—for good and evil. When the search for meaning in the lives of survivors and 2Gs began, the memory of the Holocaust no longer remained a private nightmare of the survivors. The memories shifted from individual memory to collective memory.
Psychoanalyst George Pollock explains that the creative process enables an individual to integrate the mourning process. And indeed, among the children of survivors there is a flourishing second generation genre of literature and film which Alan Berger analyzes in Children of Job: American Second Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust (1997).18 In 2017, the number of films, plays, performative and visual works produced internationally has dramatically increased.
This process occurs within an artistic, social and cultural context that has been very different for 2Gs in their far-flung places of residence: Australia and New Zealand (Deb Filler, one woman shows); formerly Soviet-occupied and western Europe; North and South America.
I believe that Judaism and Jewish identity clearly cannot be based on the Holocaust and a history of persecution. Judaism is a life-affirming religion and needs to be transmitted as a great joy and not as a burden. The Holocaust is not Judaism.
The late historian Josef Hayim Yerushalmi wrote that the modern effort to reconstruct the Jewish past began at a time when there was a break in the continuity of Jewish living, and also a decay of Jewish group memory. He argued that for the first time, history – and not sacred text – became the arbiter of Judaism.
As 2G Leon Wieseltier wrote when the Holocaust museum in Washington was built:
“Traditions decay or disappear if they are not remembered, but they do not flourish in the hands of those who live in the past. And memory, too, may cloud or clog one’s view of one’s time. In collective memory there will always be a mystical quality, since it consists in the unaccountable capacity to remember — not to know, but to remember — things that happened to others. What is missing in memory is the eros of Jewish life in Europe before the end.”
The late Rabbi Harold Schulweis, with whom I founded the Jewish Foundation for Christian Rescuers, understood that
“Memory contains an ambiguous energy: It can liberate or enslave, heal or destroy, the use of memory carries with it a responsibility to the future.”
The significance of the second-generation of Holocaust survivors is much more than psychological symptoms. As a group they have been role-models for other historically-traumatized groups to mourn collectively and to engage in life-affirming endeavors.
See also: Eva Fogelman, The Rescuer Self. (1998)
- Rakoff, V. (1966). Long Term Effects of the Concentration Camp Experience, Viewpoints, 1, 17-21.
- Klein, H. (1968). Problems in the Psychotherapeutic Treatment of Israeli Survivors of the Holocaust, in H. Krystal, Massive Psychic Trauma, 233-248.
- Krystal, H. and T.A. Petty (1968). Rehabilitation in Trauma Following Illness, Physical Injury, and Massive Personality Damage. In H. Krystal (Ed.) Massive Psychic Trauma, 325.
- Kestenberg, J. (1972). Psychoanalytic Contributions to the Problem of Children of Survivors from Nazi Persecution. Israel Annals of Psychiatry and Related Disciplines, 10, 311-25.
- Fogelman, E. and Savran, B. (1979). Therapeutic groups for children of Holocaust. International Journal of Group Psychotherapy, 29,211-235.
- Fogelman, E. and Savran, B. (1980). Brief group therapy with offspring of Holocaust survivors: Leader’s reactions. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 50 (1), 96-108.
- Mason, E. A., Grunebaum, H., Wieder, E., Fogelman, E., Documentaries for Learning (Firm), & Cinema Guild. (2008). Breaking the silence: The Generation After the Holocaust. New York: Cinema Guild.
- Epstein, H. (1988). Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors. New York, N.Y., U.S.A: Penguin Books.
- Leon, G. et. al. (1981). Survivors of the Holocaust and their children. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 41, 503-516.
- Fishbane, M. (1979). Children of survivors of the Nazi Holocaust: a psychological inquiry, Doctoral Dissertation, University of Massachusetts. Dissertation Abstracts International, 40 (1-B).
- Wanderman, E. (1979). Separation problems, depressive experiences and conception of parents in children of concentration camp survivors, Unpublished doctoral dissertation, New York University.
- Kav-Vanaki, S. and Nadler, A. Gershoni, H. (1983). Sharing past trauma: a comparison of communication behaviours in two groups of Holocaust survivors. International Journal of Psychiatry, 29, 1, 49-59.
- Kehoe, L. (1995). In this Dark House, New York: Penguin Random House.
- Fremont, H. (1999). After Long Silence: A Memoir. New York: Delacorte Press.
- Tauber, I. (1980). Second generation effects of the Nazi Holocaust: A psychosocial study of a nonclinical sample in North America. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, California School of Professional Psychology, Berkeley, California.
- Wardi, D. (1992). Memorial Candles: Children of the Holocaust. New York: Tavistock/Routeledge.
- Kestenberg, J. S. (1982). A metapsychological assessment based on an analysis of a survivor’s child. In M. S. Bergmann & M. E. Jucovy (Eds.), Generations of the Holocaust (p. 137–158). Columbia University Press.
- Berger, A. L. (1997). Children of Job: American second-generation witnesses to the Holocaust. Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press.