Fern Schumer Chapman

Reading your blogs about your friends underscores the differences in our experiences. I’m continually struck by the fact that every German of your generation was shaped by the Holocaust. The descendants of those directly involved in the Holocaust must sort out his or her identity in relation to their parents’ acts at that time.

As I’ve discussed in previous blogs, I have been defined by the uniqueness of my experience. First, I am not technically a child of a survivor, if that word is strictly used as a label for one who survived the camps. I am the child of a child refugee. Since America saved only 1,000 children, this is a rare experience. I have only met other children of refugees at reunions for the 1,000 children. The children of survivors (a more common American experience) tend to dismiss my mother’s history, claiming that she was “lucky.” While I’m grateful that my mother was spared the devastating traumas of the camps, you know from what I have written here that she suffers with the same losses as the survivors.

It sounds to me like Germans of your generation have an understanding of your shared legacy. You can discuss your parents’ acts and how they shaped each of you. It’s perfectly understandable to separate and distance yourselves from parents and their personal histories. I can see from your last two blogs that this is a process that you openly discuss with your friends.

It has taken me decades to understand my personal history. Since my mother never spoke of her past, I have had to slowly investigate and uncover what happened to her in childhood and how it shaped her. This has been a particularly arduous task since few in my mother’s family survived and could offer perspective on my mother and her early life. My mother was determined to cut off her past and her own history partly because that’s how she coped with the trauma — by compartmentalizing it. But there’s more. Like most immigrants, she wanted to fit in. America offered her a fresh start where her history was less important than her ability to contribute and to be productive to society.

So two factors have produced a sense of isolation for me. First, I have no community of friends with similar experiences. Second, my mother had a strong desire to eradicate her past so that she could become an American.

But there’s a third factor as to why my legacy has been particularly difficult. Dr. Paul Valent, a psychotherapist for 35 years who founded the Child Survivors of the Holocaust group in Melbourne, Australia explains that children of survivors experience what he calls “double trouble”. “Not only are they required to adjust to their parents’ alternating physiological circuits, emotions, behaviors and attitudes, but they must copy with their own automatic survival responses to their parents.”

So the children are reacting to experiences they never had directly. They know that something horrific shaped their parents’ lives, but they can’t see what it was. They are completely defined by this indirect experience. I wrote in Motherland about the “moment in which I was made long before I was born, the experience I never had but couldn’t escape.”

The children have patterned themselves psychologically after their parents’ anxiety. For the children of survivors and refugees, that unseen experience and misunderstood reaction intensifies the terrible sense of alienation.

No tags

Fern Schumer Chapman

1938- my grandmother, my mother, my grandfather. The last picture taken of my mother and her parents, just before she was sent to America.

Your comments about Kandel’s observation that people have the desire to destroy people outside the group to which they belong struck a chord with me.

What happened in Vienna in 1938 also occurred in my mother’s town, Stockstadt am Rhein, a village of 2,000 people and two Jewish families. My grandfather was a respected civic leader in town, which his family had helped settle in 1721. No farmer in the area could bring his crops to market without the services of my grandfather, Siegmund Westerfeld. In addition, my grandfather introduced the cucumber as a cash crop. His family had the first telephone and the first car in the area. The family was assimilated into the town and he served as a trusted lender to many members of the community. In fact, most families in the town had borrowed money from my grandfather; that way, they could stay solvent and keep their farms afloat.

When Hitler came to power and, as Kandel puts it, “the successes of the Jewish community generated envy and a desire for revenge among non-Jews.” The townspeople of Stockstadt did nothing to defend or protect Westerfeld and his family. After all, how convenient it would be if the town lender would simply disappear and the loans would be eradicated.

A daughter of one of the townspeople who owed my grandfather money came to me about ten years ago and cried. “My father was indebted to your grandfather a great deal of money and I feel that his blood is on my family’s hands,” she said. She was trying to take responsibility for, as you wrote in your blog “what we do and who we are.”

Even though we cannot change the past, I deeply appreciated her candidness, just as I value your deep reflection on envy. Both of you examine your lives and contemplate possible scenarios, guarding against impulsively dangerous reactions. Interestingly, this daughter is a member of your generation who you say “must sort out the complicated relationship between guilt, innocence and responsibility.“

The children of survivors and refugees also struggle with issues of identity, but it seems to me that you and your generation face the fundamental question: If that is my mother or father, who am I? The inhumane and criminal acts of the Nazis make this question especially difficult and painful to evaluate and answer.

For the victim’s children, we struggle with our own issues of guilt and responsibility. How can I be a good daughter to this parent who has lost so much of her family and her self? What is my responsibility to her well-being? What are the boundaries of parent/child love? The answers to these questions are unclear since the victim/parent is so dependent upon the little family that remains.

Sadly, we, the victim’s children, often see ourselves as inadequate in the face of our parents’ distorted expectations. We carry a sense of guilt and we feel we come up short: We can never replace the basic nurturing that our parents should have received from their parents when they were children. In terms of our own identities, we never feel we are good-enough sons or daughters…because we were children and we could never fill the role of the victim’s parents.

No tags

Fern Schumer Chapman

Since the 1940s, one of the few ways that American Jews protested the Nazi regime was to avoid certain German products. High on the list was the Mercedes. (Volkswagon and German wine were other targets.) Evidently, the protest didn’t make a dent in Flick’s financial portfolio.

Still it was a matter of principle. When Chrysler Corporation bought a majority share of Mercedes manufacturer Daimler-Benz, some newspaper and magazines posed the question of whether some Jews would begin to boycott Chrysler. Jewish writer Cynthia Ozick said that, as a “private memorial” to the Nazis’ victims she would boycott Chrysler. But others say that mega-mergers and the global economy make it impossible to know who owns the product. Others think it’s simply time to move on.

If this is a conundrum for American Jews, I can’t begin to wrap my mind around the problem Flick and his company posed for generations in Germany. What a complicated legacy!

* * *
On a trip to Germany in 1999, my mother and I the guests of an organization called “The German Society to Preserve Jewish Culture.” In 1988, fifty years after Kristallnacht, “Night of Broken Glass,” churches marked the mournful occasion by creating a “Night of Remembrance.” Services were held, candles lit, names of survivors and escapees read at memorials and churches. During those ceremonies, many church leaders asked elder members if they remembered the Jews who once lived in their towns.

A grass-roots movement emerged and Germans began to research the Jewish families who once lived in the area, restore the local synagogues, and
create organizations formed at that time to remember the Jews and their contributions in Germany.

This German Society to Preserve Jewish Culture brought back to Germany all the “children” in my mother’s religious class. Of the seven, all except my mother had gotten out of Germany with their parents (like Kandel).

“It is a very different experience to get out with parents,” one of my mother’s religious school classmates told me on that trip. “Yes, it’s traumatizing since they have lost the means of earning money, their home and homeland, but the family is still in tact.”

For my mother, as I described in my new book, Is It Night or Day?, to lose your parents as a child to genocide is devastating and incomprehensible. In addition, as I’ve described in this blog, the psychological consequences live on in the generations that follow.

On one of my trips to Germany, I came upon a metaphor for the effect of genocide on victim and perpetrator.

A 30-year-old man who worked in a nursing home in Crumstadt, Germany said he had only “encountered” Jews through the intrusive memories of his patients. Some had served in the SS. Sometimes, when disturbing memories flooded, they blurted out what they had done at that time. The caregiver said, “They are haunted.”

Interestingly, some concentration camps survivors living in American nursing homes also are plagued by persistent, painful memories. Uniquely challenging to the nursing home staff, survivors often refuse to take showers or do anything that triggers the memory of their traumas.

Sounds like Flick was so lacking in empathy and so well defended that he didn’t suffer with the consequences of his actions.

No tags

Fern Schumer Chapman

Here’s a summary of Alice Miller’s work in the obituary the New York Times ran last week:

painting by Alice Miller

“Unable to admit the rage they feel toward their tormentors, Dr. Miller contended, these damaged children limp along through life, weighed down by depression and insecurity, and pass the abuse along to the next generation, in an unending cycle. Some, in a pathetic effort to please their parents and serve their needs, distinguish themselves in the arts or professions. The Stalins and the Hitlers, Dr. Miller later wrote, inflict their childhood traumas on millions.“

Corporal punishment is one form of cruelty and I suppose, as you mentioned, it can be legislated. But there are other forms of cruelty that are less overt, difficult to legislate and equally damaging. For example, attachment to a primary caregiver is critical for a child to develop empathy and to form future relationships. During the first three years of life, the track is laid in the brain for future emotional, behavioral and social functioning.

Child psychiatrist Dr. Bruce Perry

“Children without touch, stimulation, and nurturing can literally lose the capacity to form any meaningful relationships for the rest of their lives,” writes Dr. Bruce Perry, an internationally recognized authority on brain development and children in crisis. “…There are, however, many millions of children who have some degree of impaired bonding and attachment during early childhood.” How these experiences shape the individual, Perry says, depends upon how early in life, how prolonged, and how severe the emotional neglect has been. So neglect can be as damaging as abuse.

Dr. Perry scientifically explains what Alice Miller has identified. So much more is known now about the brain and its development than when Miller was writing. Dr. Perry’s and Dr. Miller’s observations support the idea that one person can save a child by providing a safe, loving relationship. If no one loves the child, he or she may become a sociopath.

That, too, fits in with the concept of secondary injury, where the damage to a child is compounded because his feelings and his reality are not verified by some adult. Since children have so little understanding of the world, they need to know that what they see or what they feel is valid.

But the question remains, can World War II and the Holocaust be explained by upbringing?

I believe it is only part of the reason, as your psychologist friend suggests. Maybe this question is simply unanswerable…but what seems obvious to me is that we must intervene in the lives of these children at a young age to protect future generations. One program in Harlem, New York has created a school for new parents so that they don’t perpetuate the abuse cycle and they replace cruelty with love for their children. In addition, I’m hoping schools will offer more social education, cultivating empathy and emotional intelligence, thereby inoculating individuals from insensitivity that can lead to crimes against humanity.

No tags

Fern Schumer Chapman

These scandals are deeply disturbing on many levels. Of course, I feel for those who live with the memory of these traumas. In addition, it raises fundamental questions of why an individual would engage in harsh and humiliating treatment of children. In turn, I worry about how these children will re-enact these experiences when they become adults, thereby perpetuating the cycle of abuse.

I have been reading Alice Miller’s work, For Your Own Good: Hidden cruelty in child-rearing and the roots of violence. She summarizes her observations in this statement: “The scorn and abuse directed at the helpless child as well as the suppression of vitality, creativity, and feeling in the child and in oneself permeate so many areas of our life that we hardly notice it anymore. Almost everywhere we find the effort.to rid ourselves as quickly as possible of the child within us –i.e. the weak, helpless, dependent creature – in order to become an independent, competent adult deserving of respect. When we reencounter this creature in our children, we persecute it with the same measures once used on ourselves. And this is what we are accustomed to call “child-rearing.”

She claims that this practice, which has been reinforced by the tenets of some churches, has broad ramifications, particularly if the abused individual doesn’t have a person in whom he could confide his true feelings. Miller believes that the repetition compulsion of this behavior can lead to horrific acts of cruelty such as what occurred in Nazi Germany.

“People with any sensitivity cannot be turned into mass murderers overnight,” Miller writes. “But the men and women who carried out ‘the final

psychiatrist and author Alice Miller

solution’ did not let their feelings stand in their way for the simple reason that they had been raised from infancy not to have any feeling of their own but to experience their parents’ wishes as their own. These were people who, as children, had been proud of being tough and not crying, of carrying out all their duties ‘gladly’ of not being afraid – that is, at bottom of not having an inner life at all.”

While I certainly subscribe to some of her thinking, there is a frightening lack of free will in her beliefs. If our behavior is so psychologically driven and predetermined, there is little accommodation for individual experience and choice.

What do you think?

No tags

Fern Schumer Chapman

Your entry reminds me of a line I think Jimmy Carter once said when he was president: “Corporations are only as good as the people who run them.”

Organized religion, like a corporation, is an institution. While religious institutions have a moral infrastructure, people determine the church’s or synagogue’s political positions. Therefore, even these sacred institutions are limited by human nature. As you point out in the last sentence of your most recent blog, even the best intentions can be corrupted.

Nazi Germany, recent scandals in the Catholic Church, and even the celebration of Confederate History Month in this country are reminders that we must be vigilant, carefully analyzing the forces, from religion to politics, that shape us. Sometimes it’s difficult to see what’s right in front of us and what will develop. And history isn’t always a reliable guide.

Often, ugly chapters of history are revised to suit political perspectives or a country’s identity. In America, for example, a huge debate ensued recently because Virginia issued a state proclamation celebrating April as Confederate History Month. The governor’s declaration honored “the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens” without ever acknowledging slavery.

The governor apologized only after his own black supporters and the media pointed out the insult and pressured him to recant. But one newspaper pundit, Frank Rich of the New York Times, claimed that this was not an innocent mistake; it was part of “the long trajectory of the insidious campaign to erase slavery from the war’s history and reconfigure the lost Southern cause as a noble battle for states’ rights against an oppressive federal government.”

What actually happens is one part of the story. Who interprets the story is another.

I’m reminded of the blurb Rabbi David Wolpe wrote for my first book: “Motherland is a beautiful act of reclamation. In these gripping pages, we learn again that how we remember determines who we are.”

How we remember determines who we are.

No tags

Judaism's big tent

Fern Schumer Chapman

Our conversation is giving me lots to think about, too. Any belief system must be instilled in children at a young age…otherwise, it simply doesn’t take. The idea of a loving or omnipotent God is completely foreign to me, simply beyond my understanding.

Therefore, I can’t even debate his (or her) existence. I see that religion and God play an important role in other people’s lives and I do not judge them. But for me, it’s simply not part of my worldview.

After I wrote Motherland and began to fully comprehend the accumulated losses of my life – family members, personal history and family stories, religion – many people asked me if I would join a synagogue and begin to practice Judaism now. That was too much of a stretch for me. I didn’t know where to begin and I don’t think I could feel authentic as a practicing Jew.

But, as I said earlier, I define myself through other aspects of Judaism. It is unfortunate that the Holocaust is one of those aspects. Yet, given that I am the daughter of a survivor/refugee and I have told her story in two books, it would be impossible not to define myself through that experience. Unfortunately, I have suffered the emotional fallout as well since that trauma has been transmitted to me. Consequently I have had to investigate and understand the history and psychology of this legacy. I try hard to keep this part of my identity in check since I don’t want to define myself through anger and losses. But, I am aware of these forces in my life.

I also embrace Judaism’s teachings. For example, I have tried to give my children some of what I value in Jewish culture. For example, nothing was more important in my family than education – from school to music. That is true in many Jewish homes. When my husband learned to read at the age of five, his grandmother dipped her fingers in honey and touched his lips so that he would remember the sweetness of learning.

In addition, my parents taught me that I have a responsibility to leave the world a better place. My father instilled the idea that I must make some contribution, that what matters is how I live my life on earth (since Jews are primarily focused on life here and now rather than on the afterlife.) That philosophy complements the Judaic concept that we must contribute to social justice. “Tikkun olam” is a Hebrew phrase that literally means “world repair” and serves as a call to social action for Jews, to make whole what is broken. For centuries, Jewish religious leaders have emphasized this philosophy. For example, Hillel, 30 B.C.–A.D. 10, is known for the “golden rule“ handed down from generation to generation: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.“ He also said, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And when I am for myself, what am ‘I’? And if not now, when?”

So you see I have cobbled together a philosophy and an identity from loose religious principles and a fragmented past. My husband, who was raised in a more cohesive Jewish home, often assures me that my “Judaic“ worldview is just fine.

“Judaism,“ he says, “is a big tent.“

No tags

Fern Schumer Chapman

The practice of religion has not been much of a factor in my life; but the sense of identity that I’ve derived from religion has been important to me.

I was raised by two parents who rejected religion for different reasons. My mother, who was raised in a religious German home until she was 12, did not practice religion once she came to America for some of the reasons you identified below. (She could not understand a God who would allow the Holocaust to happen.) Yet, she maintained a connection to Judaism by not working on Jewish holidays or fasting on Yom Kippur. But she did not send her children to Hebrew school, partly because my father opposed the idea. Consequently, my brother was one of the only boys in our largely Jewish neighborhood who did not have a bar mitzvah when he turned 13.

My dad, the son of two eastern European immigrants, saw himself as an American. My paternal grandparents were right out of “Fiddler on the Roof” and my grandmother brought the old country and traditions with her. (Visiting their home was like visiting a foreign country.) Consequently, my father was raised in an Orthodox home. But as the son of an immigrant, he wanted to distance himself from their values and their world. He wanted to assimilate. In addition, he grew up and became a surgeon and a renowned researcher, who made significant contributions to medicine. He viewed himself as a scientist and a pragmatist. He simply couldn’t square his understanding of the universe through science with the leap of faith that religion required.

Despite his rejection of religion, he sprinkled Yiddish words throughout his conversations, particularly in the last years of his life. I mention that to you because even though he rejected the religion, he couldn’t reject the culture. It informed him.

I feel that way, too. I wasn’t raised with religion or a maternal family history; for a long time, I lacked a sense of my own identity. Once I wrote Motherland, I began to see the larger picture and I began to grasp the importance of that identity in my life. Even though I had little exposure to religion, Judaism deeply shaped my family through the Holocaust and through the immigrant culture. I lost much of my own identity through the Holocaust so the culture became even more important to me. I didn’t have religion, but I could understand my narrative through the ways the Holocaust was transmitted in the family and the subtle ways the Jewish culture and values defined me.

Even today, I am not religious. It is terribly challenging to begin to believe in what Jung called the “afternoon of life.” But, I am Jewish. That is something I probably wouldn’t have embraced a decade ago.

No tags

Fern Schumer Chapman

Okay, I can go along with that. We can make choices to contribute to human solidarity and resistance against the curtailment of human rights. But it is difficult to make choices about the reactive qualities of PTSD. I think we have established that important distinction in this blog.

Having said that, in the last decade, some exciting new treatments for PTSD – neurofeedback, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), light and sound therapy, to name a few – have emerged. They move memories to the proper storage place in the brain and reduce triggers.

Ernest Hemingway's "Analyst"

Interestingly, another way to gain power over trauma is through storytelling. The most famous American trauma artist is probably Ernest Hemingway. In a 1934 letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway advised, “We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. But when you get the damned hurt use it.” When Hemingway was asked if he had ever had an analyst, he said, “Sure I have. Portable Corona number three. That’s been my analyst.”

“Stories are our mind’s attempt to make sense of our own and other’s rich inner worlds,” wrote Developmental psychologist Daniel Siegel in Parenting From the Inside Out. “Those who can’t tell a cohesive story have not fully integrated the experience.“

In fact, sometimes you can listen to someone tell a story and realize that they have not integrated the experience. Their perceptions are fragmented and they tell their story in a staccato style without much arc to the narrative.

Interestingly, Dr. Siegel says, if adults can create a coherent, emotionally rich narrative about their own childhoods, they are likely to form a secure relationship with their children.

If they can’t… well, that is one way trauma is transmitted to the next generation. In other words, emotional health wasn’t determined by what happened to a person as a child, but by how that person made sense of what happened. Ultimately, that would determine what kind of parents they would become.

Studies also have shown that when people write about emotionally difficult events for just 20 minutes a day for three or four days a week, the function of their immune system improves. In a 1998 study published in the journal Health Psychology, college freshmen who wrote about their feelings and problems and created coping strategies made fewer visits to the medical clinic than those who didn’t write. So the benefits of making sense of life through stories are both mental and physical.

Maybe Hemingway knew what he was talking about when he said his Portable Corona was his analyst.

No tags

Fern Schumer Chapman

I took a strong stance in my first response to this blog. Now I’m going to back pedal a little. I want to address how trauma is alleviated. Part of what happens with PTSD is that an individual has a strong reaction to a situation. Though the individual may not realize it, he or she may be reacting to something that happened in the past rather than what is occurring in the present moment.

”Traumatized people find themselves re-enacting some aspect of the trauma scene in disguised form without realizing what they’re doing (e.g., putting themselves in dangerous situations this time to make the end come out differently (a version of the repetition compulsion.” says Judith Herman, who wrote what’s considered the bible on PTSD, a book called Trauma and Recovery. Often a PTSD experience is accompanied by a loss of feeling or numbness. With that numbness comes depression. You raise the issue of redirecting or reframing thinking and that is certainly a valuable strategy to cope with the depression.

Stress and Norwegian parachuters

But an individual who wants to manage PTSD must control stress levels and learn to recognize triggers before he or she reacts. That requires great awareness and vigilance. If the triggers surround one traumatic experience, it is easier to recognize PTSD. But if the trauma occurred early in life and is the result of prolonged abuse or neglect, the triggers are much more difficult to identify, which can be more disruptive.

A discussion on controlling stress levels and anxiety is a book in itself. There all kinds of ways of reducing stress, from breathing techniques to safe exposure to the original trauma. For example, the stress levels of Norwegian soldiers learning to parachute were examined over the course of months of training. At the time of their first jump, they were all terrified, and their stress hormones were elevated. But as they repeated the experience and mastered it, they were no longer terrified and their hormone secretion patterns changed.

One of the points that interested me in your first entry is that you identified that “people who in spite of traumatic historical and current experiences in their families are still working for peace and reconciliation between Israel and the Palestinians, some of them jointly in bi-national groups.” This is clearly productive, and it is also another technique for addressing PTSD.

Dr. Judith Herman, author of "Trauma and Recovery"

Herman claims that it’s important for those who suffer with PTSD to find a survivor mission. This may take the form of social action and a willingness to speak the unspeakable.

“I don’t think patients, survivors victimized people can recover in isolation,” Herman says. “They need other people and they need to take action in affiliation with others…Ultimately, if you’re talking about horrible abuses of power, you’re talking about atrocious things that one person does to another…You’re dealing with profound questions of human evil, human cruelty, human sadism. The abuse of power and authority.

“The antidote is the solidarity of resistance. Nobody can do that alone. It means testifying before the legislature. Or taking part in some kind of public education campaign or going to court or accompanying someone else to court, or demonstrating in favor of the assertion of victim’s rights, human rights.”

No tags