Shedding light on the unique trauma of a Holocaust survivor’s child

There’s a school of thought that argues how important it is for the remaining Holocaust survivors to discuss their experiences while they still can, so that subsequent generations can learn from the past. Studies have supported this line of thinking.

Estimates tag the remaining number of Jewish Holocaust survivors at about 245,000. But try to imagine the pain and difficulty for them to relive the atrocities of the past that they witnessed firsthand.

Psychologists say the silence surrounding their experiences, while having a profound effect on their lives, could also affect the next generation. Children of survivors were often raised in environments marked by unspoken trauma, often leading to anxiety, hyper-vigilance and PTSD symptoms in the children themselves.

That’s how Mitchell Raff grew up. His family, sufferers of the Holocaust, “believed that silence — suppressing the horrors visited upon them in their young lives — could cauterize their wounds and insulate” he and his sister.

“Naively,” Raff writes, “I thought I could refuse this inheritance, but it doesn’t work that way. Sometimes you can’t choose what you inherit, and my birthright included those wounds.”

That’s the backdrop behind Raff’s riveting book "Little Boy, I Know Your Name," a second-generation memoir from inherited Holocaust trauma.

For much of his childhood, Mitchell lived in fear and was beaten and humiliated by his mother, seemingly without good reason. In so many ways, that mirrors the life of a concentration camp survivor: being considered unworthy and undeserving of respect, compassion or life itself, and living in that constant state. Life was a minefield.

Just consider the life of Raff’s mother: parents divorced, Nazis invade her home, she watches her own mother die, lives in loneliness,...