Identity Disorders of Second-Generation Holocaust Survivors

ABSTRACT

Healthy child development is outlined, with particular attention to its crucial element of identity formation. Second-generation Holocaust survivors are saddled with a mission of “carrying the torch” which is inconsistent with normal identity formation. Over and above the normative milestones in acquiring personal identity, children of this generation had particular difficulties establishing a sense of self distinct from family and religious identity. This threatened ego integrity portends potential identity dissonance, disruption of the developmental process, and problems in the adult lives of second-generation survivors. The author’s personal narrative is featured to highlight identity challenges inherent in the life of a “memorial candle.”

KEYWORDS:

• Holocaust survivors
• identity disorders
• second-generation

Notes

¹Our perspective championing of individuality and personal identity as crucial features of development is decidedly Western. Clearly, cultures that stress group identity would evince a different view of children who are born into a specific role.

²There was also one surviving brother who had managed to join a work detail attached to the Hungarian army and avoided deportation to Auschwitz.

³The seemingly naïve question my brother asked of my mother when he was in early grade school is quite revealing: What terrible things did you do to Hitler that made him kill your entire family?

⁴This inability to enjoy anything in life, including a simple joke, is consistent with the findings by Krystal (1968) of anhedonia in massively traumatized concentration camp survivors. In a person (like my mother) with significant symptoms of PTSD, the presence of depression would be predictable (Yehuda, Kahana, Sothwick, & Gilller, 1994).

⁵I hypothesize that the identity enigma was a serious challenge to survivors themselves. Many shared the sentiments elaborated by Emil Fackenheim (1982) that their very purpose in life was to deny Hitler a posthumous victory over the Jewish people—a stance that curtails the value of individual identity. For my mother, this dissonance must have been exponentially confounded by her role of “replacement wife” with an implicit mission to “reproduce” the lost children of her husband. It is striking that in trying to get U.S. visas, my father resorted to listing my mother as a Polish national, an effort to which my mother reacted with intense anger (and constantly recalled as one of my father’s most egregious transgressions). Poignantly, when my father was hospitalized in critical condition close to his death and asked for his wife’s name, he gave the name of his first wife instead of my mother’s.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Samuel Juni

Dr. Sam Juni is professor of applied psychology at New York University and director of its Graduate Psychology Program at NYU–Tel Aviv. A foremost expert in differential diagnostics, he heads a number of research teams investigating cross-cultural factors at the intersection of trauma, psychopathology, and personality adjustment. Born to survivors in the aftermath of the Holocaust, he was raised in a community of survivors and their families. The data for this paper are based on clinical notes from the treatment of survivors, interviews with survivors who sought out the author following lectures, and personal experiences.