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?

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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.

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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.“

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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Fern Schumer Chapman

“Every traumatizing experience, if you survive it, can lead to one of three results,” Aghazarian writes. “Either you turn numb, without sensation; or you insist you have a monopoly on the suffering and no other suffering compares to yours. Or you become hypersensitive and hyperactive against anything that shows the slightest similarity to what you have experienced yourself. You must make up your mind.”

Aghazarian’s assumption is that there is some free will in choosing one of these options. Maybe a traumatized individual has some control over how much he or she talks about the experience, but the individual does not choose to be numb or hypersensitive or hyperactive to the experience. In fact, regardless of whether a traumatized individual is silent or speaks incessantly of the experiences, he or she will likely be hypersensitive and hyperactive to similar experiences. They are likely to be emotionally numb, too.

Those who suffer with PTSD relive the past in the present

These reactions of numbness or hypersensitivity are defense mechanisms and a symptom of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Those who suffer from PTSD attempt to mobilize coping responses to protect and insulate themselves from repeating the trauma. They have

the distorted belief, as professor of biology and neurology at Stanford University Dr. Robert M. Sapolsky writes in Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, “that stressors are everywhere and perpetual, and that the only hope for safety is constant mobilization of coping responses.” Consequently, someone who suffers with PTSD can be unaware that he or she is in a constant state of vigilance.

In addition, Dr. Sapolsky reports in his book that research shows that “people with PTSD from repeated trauma (as opposed to a single trauma) – soldiers exposed to severe and repeated carnage in combat, individuals repeatedly abused as children — have smaller hippocampus, and in at least one of these studies, the more severe the history of trauma, the more extreme the volume loss.” He concludes that there is decent but not definitive evidence that this kind of stress can cause structural changes to the hippocampus.

What does the hippocampus do? It helps form conscious memory. Those people who suffer with a damaged hippocampus can remember the distant past but can’t form new memories. That is consistent with the symptoms of those who suffer with PTSD. For healthy people, memories are recalled as stories that change over time and do not evoke intense emotions and sensations. But those who suffer with PTSD relive the experience in the present and feel as if the trauma is happening all over again.

So I don’t believe that there are options and that an individual has a choice. The brain structure of those who suffer with PTSD is altered by this disorder. That’s why I take issue with Aghazarian’s assumption.

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Fern Schumer Chapman

Your response about your pure adventure of reading about the German submarine commander while listening to Franz Liszt’s music reminded me of my early exposure to the word, “Nazi.” Sometimes, children have awareness and no context; consequently, they can be grossly insensitive.

I was probably seven-years-old when I first heard the word “Nazi” from other children on the playground. I had no idea what it meant, but I knew it had a connotation of “evil.” Somehow, I had deduced that it had something to do with my mother’s past. Nothing was said; I simply absorbed that understanding. I remember playing outside with a few friends within earshot of my mother. One playmate called another a “Nazi;” I doubt he knew what the word meant. I cringed and hoped my mother hadn’t heard what he had said. If she did hear him, she didn’t say anything.

Interestingly, my greatest education has come as a result of giving speeches about my books. By writing a book about a personal experience and raising profound questions about survivors, immigration, trauma and legacy, many people have felt comfortable enough to share with me their personal stories.

My mother has attended many of these events with me. She has gained perspective by hearing how others have suffered. But, more importantly, she has heard me repeatedly tell her story and that has served as a kind of therapy for her. Now, each person who attends my speeches becomes a kind of witness. (To heal from trauma, it’s critical to tell your story and have others hear it.)

Learning of my mother’s childish interpretations of events, some people have tried to help her reframe her experience. For example, after hearing my speech and how, for years, my mother felt her parents had rejected her by sending her to safety in America, one man said to my mother, “At least your parents went to their deaths with the knowledge that they had saved your life.” She looked stunned as she absorbed his words. Later, she told me that she felt lighter because of his comment.

Concentration camp survivors have attended a few of my speeches and they have taken issue with my book. “She was not a survivor,” some yelled at me at one event. “She was not in the camps. What did she know of suffering? She was just a child.”

Of course that is my point, but they were not willing to listen.

“Why go back to Germany? What is to be gained there? You think you’ll find remorse?”

It is more dangerous not to return to Germany, I told them. Graham Greene who once wrote, “It’s much harder to hate someone when you see the way his or her hair grows.” They must see us, I said.

But the survivors would have none of it. I understood. But their anger and hostility made me even more determined to find another path. I realized that it is the second generation’s responsibility to do something different.

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Fern Schumer Chapman

In his book Child Survivors, psychiatrist Paul Valent describes the second generation as “lacking the knowledge to extract meaning from some deep influences on their lives.” They are “dominated by the shadow of the Holocaust without ever understanding the original context.”

1952 Modern Library edition of Anne Frank's "The Diary of a Young Girl"

When I was ten years old, my mother made her first and only attempt during my childhood to give me some “understanding of the original context.” For my birthday, she gave me a 1952 hardcover edition of the book, The Diary of Anne Frank (A Modern Library Book) with an introduction by Eleanor Roosevelt. (The first edition came out in Dutch in 1947.) I knew, even at my young age, that this book was a statement. My mother never bought me hardcover books; they were too expensive.

She was trying to tell me without telling me that she was part of this horrifying history. She was trying to give me a glimpse of her world. But she didn’t want me to know too much and she couldn’t bring herself to talk about it. (Years later, my mother explained why she didn’t tell her children about her past: “I thought they would be frightened and they wouldn’t understand.”) Anne Frank’s story would have to suffice. Now, 57 years after its publication, that edition of the diary is one of my prize possessions.

During the 1960s and 70s, the educational curriculum offered little material on the Holocaust. In fact, a reader of Motherland who grew up in the south thanked me for introducing her to that period in history. “All they taught us in high school was the American Civil War,” she said. She’s right. I was educated in the north during the same period and I was first introduced to the Holocaust in university classes – an astonishingly late phase of my education.

Now, states mandate that the Holocaust must be taught in high schools as part of the curriculum. But it is a daunting task for teachers. They fear they will trivialize the subject or not do it justice. Consequently, some teachers simply require students to watch movies like Schindler’s List to fulfill the requirements of the mandate.

Even when schools do commit to educating students about genocide, textbooks often present the material with bias. Even the language textbooks use to explain the history can subtly influence a student’s perceptions of the crimes.

How does America educate children about one of its own shameful chapters in history? In the last half-century, mainstream textbooks acknowledge the U.S. government’s genocide against the indigenous people, though the books don’t necessarily use those words. Still, the history of Native peoples exists as a sidebar to “real” American history. Native Americans appear in textbooks during the European settlement, the Jacksonian period of North American “removal of the people,” the mid- and late-19th century settlement of the American West and only sporadically in the 20th century. Once relegated to reservations – the land whites deemed unusable for their own purposes – the Native peoples seem to disappear, only to magically reappear in the late 20th and early 21st centuries as owners of casinos.

Today, most non-Native Americans are woefully ignorant of the vast array of indigenous peoples’ cultures and America doesn’t acknowledge the genocide.

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Fern Schumer Chapman

The moment you raised your arm in self-defense against your mother, you became your own person. In ways, you continue to raise your arm …even by writing this blog.

It is so difficult to emerge from a cruel environment. In some ways, children are prisoners of their childhoods, and — unless they work to change their understanding — when those children become adults, they continue to be prisoners of their childhoods. (I guess that’s what Freud meant by “schiefgeheilt.”)

It can take decades to gain perspective to understand that the place you were raised was terribly damaging. As children, we make the assumption that our early lives were “normal” since that’s all we know. I imagine, it must be especially confusing if you were raised in Germany throughout the 1900s in a community that generally practiced cruelty. I imagine those people were rarely exposed to another model; they had a narrow understanding of parenting, which they practiced on their own children. Thankfully, you had the insight to do something different. But so often, so much of what we do as parents is re-enact what was done to us.

In recent months, I have thought about what I’ve gained as a child of a survivor. It’s important to recognize the positive ways this experience has shaped me. First, I believe my mother’s experience forced me to develop a profound sense of empathy. I tried to imagine her life and feel her emotions, both in relating to her and in writing my books. (Sometimes, that drive has overwhelmed me.) That empathy also has made me mindful of the legacy for you and other Germans of your generation. I hope my empathy has helped enlarge the view of the devastation of the Holocaust.

Though I resented it at times, I felt I was assigned the responsibility of succeeding and carrying on the family values and family name for all those who had died. This made me hard-working and task-oriented. My efforts and my success made a statement that was much larger than myself.

I think our survivor parents modeled resilience. From my mother, I learned that what appears to be unendurable can be survived. We can adapt to the most difficult circumstances; we have no choice. Not easily…but in time. Often, when something terrible happens in my mother’s life, she reminds me, “I’ve survived worse.”

My mother’s experience has made me cherish family relations. I see the devastation of living without family members. I watched my mother struggle, even as an adult, with questions of abandonment. Well into her 70s she still didn’t understand, as she would say, “why my parents sent me away.” Consequently, I have tried to be a loving daughter to compensate for her losses. In my life with my mother, there was always a presence of absence; with my own children, I have tried to simply be present in their lives.

This is how I raise my arm to the blows from the past.

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