My father was in a Japanese internment camp as a child. My mother’s parents were arrested as suspected Nazi collaborators. These are facts. Also facts: My father was part of an oppressive colonial system. My mother was put in an orphanage, and her parents were tortured.
Growing up in the United States with the authoritative voice of history books and media, I absorbed an interpretation of war that adhered to a bifurcated world of absolutes. On one side, a medal pinned to the chest of a proud soldier. On the other, an officer in handcuffs. I learned about winners and losers, justice and evil, glory and shame. I learned that there are victims who have a right to their victimhood and others who have not earned the right to complain. It’s a stringent voice of judgment to reckon with. But the more I hear my parents’ stories and see how their war experiences influenced the people they became and how I was raised, the more I understand that war injures without prejudice. It injures participants and bystanders and all the people who come after them. Inherited trauma. Like a pileup on a foggy freeway, each car slamming into the car in front of it, war injures generations down the line who haven’t a clue what started the chain reaction in that fog behind them but feel the impact and find themselves skidding off the road too.
World War II is an ever-present specter in my family. Beneath everything, there exists a silent backstory that my father has seen some kind of hell that I will never be able to tenant sufficiently to understand him. I know he was in a Japanese concentration camp in the Dutch East Indies, but what does that mean to me as I try to navigate a relationship with this difficult man sitting before me? When I was growing up, whenever my father did something strange or infuriating, my mother muttered, “That’s his camp syndrome.” For years I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but we accepted it and understood that he was entitled to his character quirks and flaws.
My Nazi-allied maternal grandfather crept more silently in the family. I didn’t even know he was there for many years, though I sensed a presence I couldn’t explain and a sadness in my mother that couldn’t be comforted. We always knew about my father’s war trauma, but we never talked about my mother’s experiences as a little girl in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. I was a teenager when I learned that my mother’s parents had been arrested after the war and that my mother had spent time in a children’s home. But it wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned about the conditions there, and about the struggles of her family as they attempted to reconstruct their lives as the subjects of seething cultural hatred. My mother felt she didn’t deserve to claim her pain about the war the way my father was permitted his “camp syndrome.” It was always something to keep secret because I think at her core, she believed maybe she deserved it.
I want to know why she lost her own sense of self-esteem and right to take up space in the world. I believe the reasons are connected to the war. But now, as I uncover more facts, how do I process them? Raised watching Holocaust films, visiting the Anne Frank museum, listening to my friend’s grandmother talk to my elementary school class, the crude black numbers tattooed on her aging skin held up as an edict, what do I do now with the growing knowledge that all of that wickedness is also partly my heritage?
In a strange twist of irony, the more our parents bury their own trauma, their own grief over a lost childhood and a fragmented family, the more it bubbles up in me, my sister, and my brother—their offspring. But we can’t name it. Unlike them, we have no tangible anchor for our sense of loss. Groping in the dark for memories we don’t have, we can’t quite explain why we have increasing difficulty parting with old magazines or T-shirts with yellow stains, what makes us withdraw from or cling to love neurotically, why we lie awake with anxiety as we run through an endless list of all the things that could possibly go wrong tomorrow and all the things we might lose. We can’t tell you why we imbue food with a power beyond its purpose and starve ourselves or binge compulsively. But we learned some of these behaviors from our parents, and they learned them somewhere to protect themselves. Some of us can ignore our questions, quelled by all-encompassing explanations like “camp syndrome” and “survivor’s guilt.” And some of us, driven to give those terms a more comprehensive definition, hoping to fill in the blanks of our own gaping heritage, go looking for the past.