Since the 1990s, descendants of Holocaust survivors have constituted an important and socially significant group of visitors to Holocaust memorials and monuments, including death camp sites, ruined cemeteries, and renowned deportation centers (Stein 2009b). In what has become a rite of passage, visits to these geographic landscapes immerse succeeding generations in the memory frames of Nazi persecution. As acts of remembrance, these trips are often undertaken collectively with parents, siblings, and other extended family members and frequently include multiple generations of survivors and descendants. In other instances, descendants have chosen to visit these memoryscapes on their own or as part of an educational program. In all of these circumstances, sites of terror provide compelling historical landmarks for the recollection of traumatic narratives that shape and inform descendant identity beyond the formative childhood years. In strengthening identification with the past, engagement with sites of terror facilitates the ongoing construction of a social self that is grounded both in trauma and personal as well as collective suffering (Zerubavel 2005; DeGloma 2009). To frame this dimension of descendant identity formation within memorial culture, the discussion begins with an overview of memorial sites as interactive spaces of social remembrance.
Pierre Nora’s (1989) groundbreaking work on history and memory provides an important starting point from which to consider how sites of memory function in contemporary society. Writing from a French historical perspective, Nora argues that museums, monuments, and places of preservation serve as archives of a past that might otherwise be forgotten. According to Nora, memory “takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images and objects” that “without commemorative vigilance” would soon be erased by the writing and rewriting of history (1989, 9, 12). While Nora maintains that the increased interest in and proliferation of sites of memory has led to what has perhaps become an obsession with archival objects and the materiality of remembrance, his work nonetheless suggests that it is often through these objects that difficult and contested histories are remembered and preserved.
Following Nora’s observations, Robin Wagner-Pacifici and Barry Schwartz’s (1991) research on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., offers a sociological frame through which to consider how societies remember a difficult past. In investigating the means by which varied and sometimes opposing constituencies collectively create a monument to a troubling war, Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz conclude that “whatever processes brought this cultural object into being in the first place, it is the use made of it that brings it into the life of the society” (1991, 416). Among its many uses, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was found to function as an emotionally charged space for spectators, veterans, and the family and friends of the deceased. In this regard, the authors explain: “The names on the wall are touched, their letters traced by the moving finger. The names are caressed. The names are reproduced on a paper by pencil rubbing and taken home. And something is left from home itself—a material object bearing a special significance to the deceased or a written statement by the visitor or mourner.” Thus, in their analysis, Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz highlight the social dynamics that take place at the memorial, emphasizing the interactive processes that transform an “object of contemplation” into a place of connection, emotion, and remembrance. The insights that Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz bring to the study of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial foreground more recent research (Fine and Beim 2007) on the interactive nature of collective memory and the way in which individuals construct meaning out of the past through interactions with memory objects such as those discussed by Nora.
Aaron Beim’s (2007) work in particular highlights the interactive nature of collective memory, focusing on the way in which memory and meaning originate out of an individual’s engagement with institutions of collective memory, including memorials and monuments. Through interaction at sites of memory, the cultural objects that these sites contain and represent form the basis for a “memory schemata” through which individuals cognitively organize, make meaning of, and interpret past events (Beim 2007, 21). With regard to Holocaust sites in particular, these spaces of national, group, and individual memory include a wide spectrum of memorial traces through which past events can be both interpreted and deeply felt. Intended to evoke strong emotional responses (Alexander 2004a; Alexander 2004b), these sites provide a social framework for interaction with atrocity artifacts as well as objects of memorial culture. With regard to the former, preserved death and concentration camps, for example, contain the buildings of incarceration and torture, atrocity photographs, remnants of the victims, and technologies of death (gas chambers and crematoria). Among the latter, the camps contain memorial books, gravestones, and shrines that commemorate death and loss.
Thus as sites of terror, camp memorials are illustrative of built environments in which the memories of a difficult past have been both preserved and restored through the use of material culture (Milligan 2007). As such, they provide important cultural tools (Wertsch 2002) through which memory is mediated and where “social actors bring multiple traumatic pasts into a heterogeneous and changing post–World War II present” (Rothberg 2009, 4). Accordingly, sites of terror are interactive frames of remembrance that fulfill a significant mnemonic function as described by Zerubavel (1996; 2005) in his work on social memory: “Consider, for example, the mnemonic role of ruins, old buildings, souvenirs, antiques and museums. . . . A visit to the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City clearly ‘connects’ present-day Mexicans with their Olmec, Mayan, Toltec, and Aztec ancestors” (1996, 292). Similarly, visits to camp memorials act as mnemonic triggers, evoking strong emotions among the spectators who become witness to a horrific past. In Jeffrey Olick’s work on collective memory sites such as these thus constitute commemorative structures (“technologies of memory”) that help to “shape what individuals remember” (1999, 225, 228) and that, according to Michael Rothberg (2009), represent the multidirectionality of memory spaces “in which groups do not simply articulate established positions but actually come into being” (Rothberg 2009, 5).
In the case of Holocaust descendants, the multidirectionality of these sites is evident in the framing and reframing of identity in response to a landscape that is evocative of the narratives and emotions that have been passed on by survivors. In their interactions with the artifacts and structures of traumatic memory, the descendants, like the visitors to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, engage their senses—sight, touch, and smell—in a memorial landscape to which they feel deeply connected. In this respect, the camp memorials act as a transitional space of memory wherein the traumas of the past are communicated and further embedded in the emotional consciousness of succeeding generations, “providing a socially founded mechanism” by which the narratives of familial trauma are transmitted to Holocaust descendants (DeGloma 2009, 111). As the findings of this chapter will show, this process of memory transfer not only is found in the socials settings of death camp memorials but also takes place at cemetery ruins, massacre sites, and ancestral homes, places of familial terror that like the national monuments have become interactive social spaces where the children and grandchildren of survivors become immersed in the memory of Nazi persecution. More specifically, the findings illuminate the ways in which engagement with sites of terror fosters an increased internalization of anxiety and fear, a renewed connection to sorrow and loss, and the deepening of empathic bonds between survivors and descendant generations. In addition, the findings reveal several gender differences in these patterns of traumatic transference.
From the outset, it is important to point out that in visiting sites of terror, either on their own or with surviving family members, the majority of first-generation descendants demonstrated a change in life course. Where previously they had made conscious choices to distance themselves from the trauma of their parents’ lives, the decision to engage in the process of memorialization at sites of terror represented a shift toward greater rather than lesser emotional distance from their parents’ traumatic past. In almost all cases this shift coincided with the aging or death of a survivor parent. As the findings of the study reveal, this turn toward the past facilitates the first generation’s identification with Holocaust trauma in a number of important ways. Because these sites provide essential socio-geographic frames for the remembrance of suffering and loss, the immersion in terror landscapes results in an intensification of the descendant’s identification with a range of survivor feeling-states, including fear and anxiety. This effect of traumatic identification was especially pronounced in those situations where a surviving family member acted as a memory guide, leading the participant through a landscape of terror in which a parent had survived. An example of this form of interactive remembrance is described by a participant who visited Auschwitz with a cousin who had survived the camp with the participant’s mother. Here he recalls the day he and his cousin toured the camp together:
We spent the day in Auschwitz. We didn’t go on a guided tour. We didn’t need to. My cousin was our guide. My cousin remembered a lot. This is a long day. We’re walking through all the monuments. We see the gas chamber, ovens, also the crematorium. She remembers the day they were liberated. My cousin and my mom and my three aunts were in a selection that day. My cousin was selected to go the gas chamber. My mom and her two sisters were not selected. My cousin’s mom was also not selected but she volunteered to go with her daughter. They went through the door, down the stairs and were literally standing naked in front of the gas chamber doors when the Sonderkommando blew up the crematoria, literally at that moment when the Russians were about to enter the camp. They were let go. They were freed. And we went through the same doors and it was as if I could see my mother, standing at the door to the gas chambers with my aunt.
Although the participant had heard this story numerous times before, retracing his mother’s passage from captivity to liberation while his cousin narrated the traumatic events lent a new perspective to the reality of his parent’s trauma and especially to the feelings of anxiety and fear that his mother had expressed throughout her life.
In a further illustration of this phenomenon, a respondent in her late forties described the fear she experienced at Bergen-Belsen when she accompanied her mother to a commemorative event sponsored by the German government. In the following account, she reflects on the events that took place during the visit and her strong emotional responses:
It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, without comparison. It was a surreal experience. The German government took all these survivors and carted us around in tour buses and did a sightseeing trip. We went to the train tracks where they were all brought in and where their stuff was taken from them. We went to the fields where the bunkers, the mass graves are and the cemeteries. It was suspended disbelief. It’s like you want not to believe any of this is real, but you know that you have to believe it’s real even though your self-protection mechanisms are saying, “This can’t be real” . . . [The tour guides] had to feed 500 of us all at one time and they rarely had 500 chairs, which meant survivors and us [the children] were sitting on the floor in places that weren’t being managed. Frequently, I was separated from my mother, whether intentional or not, but frequently we lost each other. Then I got the hint of what it’s like to lose your mother in a crowd of strangers where they’re speaking a hundred different languages and it’s scary. I went through some of my own feelings that might have been similar to my mother’s and I know how scary it was, really scary, to the point where you just have to go someplace else in your head or you can’t survive. It is not possible.
In this account the interaction at the memorial site is complicated by the role of the perpetrator nation in bringing survivors to the camp to commemorate their liberation. Under these conditions of national memorialization, sharing of trauma narratives between survivors and their descendants is informed both by place and by the memory frames not only of the victims but also of the perpetrator/host culture.
As described above, first-generation descendants who accompany their parents on such journeys become both physically and emotionally situated in their parents’ past, taking on the identity of a traumatized parent as they are led from site to site by guides who re-create, now as ceremonial rite, the experiences and feelings of the original trauma. Interactive engagements such as these “shrink the distance between past and present generations” (DeGloma 2009, 113), creating the social conditions under which traumatic experiences are socially shared and psychologically transmitted.
This effect of collective remembrance, whereby children of survivors have difficulty distinguishing between their own safety and the sense of danger that sites of terror invoke, is also found among the second generation. Although grandchildren tend to be less vulnerable than their parents to the social-psychological effects of traumatic transmission (Lev-Wiesel 2007), the findings of the research nonetheless suggest that like those of the first generation, second-generation descendants identify strongly with their grandparents’ fears and suffering. In this regard, the findings confirm the role that grandchildren often play as generational links for the transfer of Holocaust memories (Fossion et al. 2003). This phenomenon, as discussed in chapters 2 and 4, is particularly apparent in those families in which grandchildren developed close emotional ties to survivors. Among these participants, visiting sites of Holocaust terror evoked similar responses of identification and extreme anxiety that were found among those of the first generation. Although many grandchildren of survivors believed that they already knew about the horrors of the Holocaust from family stories, such knowledge did not prepare them for the lived experience of previously imagined terror. This was particularly true for those participants who visited camp sites with a survivor grandparent. Here a twenty-two-year-old grandson describes how it felt to be at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen with his grandmother, a survivor who had planned this trip specifically for the edification of her descendants:
She was walking me through the camp and I remember being in the camps, walking around the camp with her, where all the bunkers were lined up and she was able to point, like, “That was mine.” She said, “We really had it bad.” It was there I learned most of what I know. How her hair changed color, how she worked in the munitions factory and how her sister died from typhus right there in front of her at liberation. It was terrible. I could see it in her eyes and I started to feel like what it must have been like for her. She was seventeen and I am not that much older and here I was, seeing myself in these places.
In another case, a twenty-seven-year-old granddaughter organized a tour to Treblinka that included her parents and her survivor grandmother:
We went to Treblinka. The first night we went to Treblinka, the city. We went to the hotel. When we went out in the morning, we were in the car, my grandmother did not look out the window, she was reading a book. Then we came to the camp. I remember, you are there and you feel the dead people around you. You just do. You can smell it. . . . You go in the forest and then you come to the stone with the sign and you go in. The minute you go in and you see the memorial, I saw them, the three of them together, my grandmother, my dad, and my mom. We found the stone from my grandmother’s village. We had candles. My Dad was crying and I was crying. It was very hard. Being there with my grandmother was really hard. It was not like before. I could see her pain and feel her fear. I just wanted to leave. [My grandmother] said, “No more, it’s enough for me. Let’s go.” I felt the same way. I just wanted to get out, to leave.
By comparison, other second-generation descendants reported visiting death camps as part of high school educational trips rather than with family members. These accounts too reveal the impacts of these sites on their identification with survivor fear and anxiety. A respondent who was raised in eastern Europe explained:
I remember that I heard stories before from my family members and I read books that were in my grandparents’ library. I read a lot of literature about Jewish destiny during the war and about the Holocaust itself. I read stories from people who survived Auschwitz and I saw the drawings. But it didn’t matter. The moment I was there it just didn’t matter. It shocked me so much. It was the feeling. It was stronger than anything I expected. I think it still resonates with me. I think of my grandmother and how her sister died and I realize now what freedom is. I could walk in both directions—in and out—but my grandmother’s sister could only walk in. And it just hit me afterwards, when I was sitting on the bus on the way home, that we are just going back home, passing the gate, just leaving. Until then I don’t think I really knew what it felt like to be so scared and trapped. When I got home, I got sick. I remember I got really sick when I got back, physically sick. It just transformed into sickness. My mom knew right away. She knew right away what was going on. I didn’t try to hide it.
Similarly, another grandchild, now twenty-eight, gave this account of a high school trip to Holocaust sites in Poland:
I remember vividly that we had a connecting flight in Frankfurt. The German soldiers, the way they dressed is very much like how the Nazi soldiers were dressed, just without swastikas. I saw that and I was like, I can’t do this. I stopped and turned around. I kept thinking about my family, the ones who lived and the ones who didn’t. I was very scared. I didn’t like being in Germany. I wanted to get out as soon as I could. I was really scared of just being in the airport. Then we went to Poland and it was like seven days, seven days which was cemetery, ruined synagogue, death camp, death camp. Your days are full with Treblinka, Auschwitz, Majdanek, Sobibor. You stand in gas chambers. You’re standing here, your family stood here, and there are Zyklon B cans and you’re numb but also terrified. I kept imagining it was me and that I was my grandmother and somehow we got out. There was something so emotional. When I got home, I couldn’t go to school for days. There was a ceremony and I read a paper about my family but as soon as it was over, I ran out the door and I was shaking and crying.
As the foregoing accounts illustrate, visits to death and labor camps illuminates the importance of place as a catalyst for the transfer of traumatic memory. While the presence of the survivor generation intensifies the identification with fear and anxiety, even in the absence of survivors, the trauma landscape is itself a powerful trigger for traumatic associations that remain embedded in the descendant’s consciousness.
Further, as the diversity of narratives reveals, the identification with survivor trauma also emerges at other Holocaust-related places, including prewar residences and villages that function as sites of terror and violence within the collective memory of the respondent’s family. In one such case, a participant returned to her family’s prewar home, a small German town where her mother and father had lived. In the postwar narratives of family remembrance, this area of Germany was recalled both as an idyllic village as well as a place of terror where neighbors had become enemies overnight. As this respondent, fifty-two years old, described her visit to this small German town, her account reflects the extent to which she identified with her parents’ anxiety and fear:
I went to visit some family we still had there. It was scary. If a dog [barked], I would jump. I twitched. I was hyper-vigilant the entire time I was there. People were very kind to us, these friends and family. It was a sort of wondrous trip, in part some really strikingly awful moments. I apparently looked like Mother did when she lived there. I literally walked into town and people’s heads turned and they called my mother’s name, as if my mother had come back. The number of people who recognized me immediately was mind-boggling. It wasn’t my favorite thing to go back as my mother. The scariest, creepiest thing was I knew who had done what, which neighbor had done what to whom. My father’s business was taken over by a Nazi. I was standing outside looking at the house and I could see someone inside looking at me through the curtains. He came downstairs. He was about my parents’ age. He stuck out his hand to shake my hand in the German way, and my hand developed atrophy at my side. It wouldn’t move. There was nothing I could do to get into the social grace, now take your hand out and shake his hand. I was having a hysterical reaction, I guess, my hand was not moving anymore.
This narrative reveals a number of important aspects of the descendant’s identification with the traumas of her survivor parents. The fear she feels in Germany is palpable, despite the kindness she was shown on her trip. In her visit to the town, the identification with her parents’ traumatic history is powerfully acted out, first in the respondent’s response to having been mistaken for her mother and second in the paralyzing fear she experiences at her father’s former home. This account thus illustrates the ways in which the child replaces the parent in a landscape of traumatic memory, arousing deep anxieties and fears in the succeeding generation.
A number of psychological studies of children of survivors have found similar forms of identity confusion (Kellerman 2001c), suggesting that the merging of identity between the child and a survivor parent may have a gender component as well (Davidson 1980; Vogel 1994). Miriam Vogel’s study of psychic trauma among children of Holocaust survivors concluded that, because of gender socialization and the relational dynamic of girls’ development, daughters are more likely to have a stronger identification with a traumatized parent than sons. Consistent with Vogel’s findings, identification with anxiety and fear was found to be more prevalent among women respondents who more frequently reported that they experienced themselves as victims of Nazi terror in the traumatic settings of Holocaust memorial culture. I now turn to the second set of findings, those that examine the identification with sorrow and grief, and a somewhat different gender pattern emerges. In contrast to reports of anxiety and fear, accounts of grief and sorrow at sites of terror were more commonly, though not exclusively, reported by men in the study.
Although it is difficult to disentangle narratives of atrocity from narratives of loss, the research on engagement with sites of terror indicates that these interactive forms of memorialization involve a complex set of emotional responses that include sorrow and despair, as well as anxiety and fear. While in some cases participants report a vacillation between sadness and anxiety, more typically there is a clear distinction between those respondents who carried the sorrow of their parents and those who were more informed by fear. With regard to the former, sons were more likely to provide accounts in which sites of terror were treated as gravesites where rituals of mourning were enacted, evoking feelings of loss and deep sadness. As with the research on anxiety, this finding may be an outcome of differences in gender socialization whereby the men in the study were more comfortable sharing narratives of grief rather than accounts of fear. In the following account, a fifty-five-year-old descendant recalled accompanying his father to the cemetery where his father’s adolescent sister had been buried in the aftermath of a violent ghetto assault. In this narrative he remembers in great detail the search for family graves and his connection to his father’s loss:
We spent two hours in the Jewish cemetery. The cemetery was gorgeous. You could see how beautiful a place it had been. But it was destroyed. Stones were broken in half. All the marble was taken or stolen. It was a very sad, sad place to be. It was overgrown, literally, like a jungle. We found my grandfather’s stone, the person I was named after. We found my dad’s mother’s stone. Then the most intense moment was when we found my father’s sister’s stone. He buried her there in 1941. She had something happen in the ghetto where a couple of SS got her. I don’t know if they raped her or what went on. She went into shock from the experience. She was diabetic. My dad got her outside the ghetto and got her to a hospital. He was in the hospital with her when she died. He took her and dressed her up as if she were alive and carried her on to this wagon, a rented wagon. From the ghetto gates, he had to carry her to his home inside the ghetto so they could do the ritual washing of the body. So they did that and he buried her with a little headstone. He was obsessively determined to find the stone. And I found it. I found this stone. He was very close to her. Of all the people in the family, he was closest to her.
Later in the trip, this respondent visited Treblinka, where most of the other family members had died:
When we got to Treblinka it was very strange. You drive up and you’ve got this building there, kind of an entry building there. . . . We took off and started to wander through the grounds. You walk in and there’s a wooded section and replicas of train tracks and stone monuments that have stories in English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Polish. Then you come into the big field and there’s a huge monument with all broken headstones for the towns all around, surrounding, with the big tar pit. We looked and found the headstone for our town. That was a very intense, sad moment. There was a guest book. . . . My dad wanted me to write for him in the book. I started to write in the book and the names started pouring out, all of these names of people that I had never known. That was the time I realized that this is where it was, Treblinka was the place where the whole family was wiped out. It was so intense. All the sadness they felt was also in me. It’s in me, no question. I picked up my dad’s intense feelings around this, and memory of most of it.
In this account, the memorial at Treblinka provides an emotionally powerful setting for the transmission of grief from father to son. Through the collective ritual of mourning and the writing of the names of the dead, the respondent felt the extent of his father’s tragedy and suffering as well as his own connection to a family that had been exterminated before he was born. Within this interactional framework, memorialization both at the cemetery and at the death camp ruins linked the descendant not only to a parent’s sorrow but also to his own feelings of familial loss.
The importance of sorrow and loss for the intergenerational transmission of trauma is further illuminated in the narrative of a twenty-year-old grandchild of survivors whose great-uncle died at Majdanek. A year before the respondent visited the camp, his grandfather received a letter notifying the family, nearly sixty years after the fact, that his brother had died in the gas chambers:
I made a copy of the letter that the Red Cross had sent and I had my zaidy [grandfather] write something in Yiddish to make a final message to his brother because I was going to bury that letter in the crematorium at Majdanek. Interestingly, I found out later that what he wrote was that he missed him so much and wished he could have seen him one more time. He also wrote that hopefully one day the Germans would get what they deserve for what they did to us. He wrote what you wouldn’t have expected him to write. I remember the exact date I went. It was July 3. Majdanek’s in Lublin. Everything is still intact. There are factory buildings all the way around. I remember we finally reached the crematorium. There’s a bar that separates you from the crematorium. I read the whole letter out loud, said a few thoughts as if my great-uncle were with me. I said a prayer and jumped over the bar and buried it deep within the oven. I made sure that I put it at the very far end so that nobody could get it. I don’t know if anybody did but that’s how I left it. It was my way of saying that I never met you and I wish I [had] known you. Wherever you are I love you even though I never knew you. It was my way of saying goodbye to my great-uncle for my zaidy.
Like the accounts of the first-generation descendant at Treblinka, this narrative reveals the function that sites of terror serve in linking succeeding generations to feelings of loss for family members whose deaths are felt more intensely at places where the violence occurred. For this young respondent, reading his grandfather’s letter at Majdanek not only fulfilled a responsibility to his grandfather but also established his own affective tie to his grandfather’s brother. Rites of mourning at sites of terror thus help to create closure for survivors and a means by which succeeding generations emotionally connect to family members whose memory has been filtered through the trauma of their families’ loss. Here as elsewhere in the respondents’ accounts, Holocaust sites serve as places of memorialization as well as spaces of memory transfer where the events of the past are recalled through the exchange of emotions during the recollection of traumatic family histories. In the foregoing examples, children and grandchildren of survivors act as memory keepers for the families, seeking out objects of memorialization that connect both the survivor and the descendant to a traumatic past. The exchange of emotions that accompany these engagements with sites of terror intensifies the connective bond between generations, strengthening the empathic attachment between survivors and their descendants.
Thus far in the analysis, the role of memory in the formation of survivor identity at sites of terror has focused on the engagement with the emotional dimensions of traumatic memory as these are expressed through feeling-states associated with fear, anxiety, sorrow, and loss. While gender appears to inform these two sets of findings, the data on the strengthening of empathic ties between children and their survivor parents reveal fewer gender differences in empathic identification. Further, given the often complicated relationships between first-generation descendants and their parents, the findings on empathic bonding at Holocaust memorials relate more strongly to children rather than to grandchildren of survivors. Previous research on empathic attachment in post-Holocaust families points out that, especially during adolescence and young adulthood, children of survivors tend to develop conflicting feelings toward their traumatized parents (Gottschalk 2003; Stein 2009b). In his work on emotion management among children of survivors, Gottschalk discusses the child’s need to suppress anger and guilt-laden “negative emotions.” Accordingly, as elaborated in the previous chapter, a number of respondents report an emotional legacy of unresolved anger that, because of their parents’ suffering, could never be expressed. Descendants thus describe a form of compromised empathy in which the child, deeply aware of a parent’s suffering, nonetheless develops a conflicting set of emotional feelings that includes anger, guilt, and what Stein describes as “cold detachment” (2009b, 42).
Given the emotional tensions surrounding empathic connection, sites of terror provide an emotional setting for repairing and forging empathic bonds across generations and thus serve as spaces of both traumatic identification and empathic connectivity. In this regard, one respondent explained that when she went to Auschwitz with her father, the site where his mother had perished, it was the first time she had ever seen him cry. Witnessing the expression of emotion in her elderly parent, she felt not for the first time but in a decidedly different way the suffering of the child/father who survived the horrors of genocide as a young orphan. Her empathy for him was thus both renewed and strengthened during their visit to the death camp.
For a number of other participants, returning with elderly parents to the places of traumatic suffering led to the retrieval of new memories on the part of the survivor and consequently a new appreciation for the extent of parental suffering on the part of the descendant. This phenomenon is illustrated in the account of a middle-aged daughter who traveled to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen with her mother, offering this recollection:
One night, while on the trip, she woke up in the middle of the night crying. I knew that was bad. I talked to her about it. She started remembering things, stealing a loaf of bread from the kitchen because a woman she was friends with was very, very sick, like dying sick, and needed more nutrition or she wasn’t going to make it. She was a Ukrainian. Apparently there were different camps for different nationalities. I don’t know if these were Jews. But they attacked her, they physically attacked her and I know that traumatized her. They took the bread. Stories like that came back to her that she never told me. Going with her, hearing these stories, I could understand my mother’s experience more, I could empathize more but I know now it is only a small percentage of understanding of what they really went through, how they could survive.
As this account reveals, the interactive nature of traumatic remembrance at sites of terror can result in the triggering of new memories for survivor parents. In recalling experiences in or near Nazi landscapes, parents and children thus engage in the sharing of new narratives and emotions that in turn lead to greater empathy among first-generation descendants whose own emotional states have been altered by their immersion in the memorial structures of Nazi genocide.
Further, the very nature of such a journey, when undertaken as a parent–child act of collective remembrance, extends the interactive aspect of traumatic immersion beyond the sites of memory. In a number of cases, such as the one cited above, respondents shared living spaces with a survivor parent. These trips thus provided an encapsulated social world for the sharing of memories and feelings both during the interactive phase of commemoration at the sites and in privatized social spaces where respondents returned, at the end of the day, to process their immersion experiences. A fifty-four-year-old male participant described how each night, after visiting the places where his father and mother had suffered and where his extended family died, he and his father would talk long into the night about the painful and horrific aspects of survival:
We talked a lot. During that whole time I was with my dad. We shared a room the whole time. In Germany, Poland, and the Czech Republic. It did for our relationship what nothing else could have done. We had this bonding between us. We spent so much time together just talking and sharing. That trip was the most important single event that I’ve ever done in my life. It was a transforming situation. The fruits of the trip are still born now, more than ten years later—the feeling of how important it is to leave a legacy, to not forget, and to leave some mark and some sort of understanding. I at least now have my own understanding of what happened. What’s there to be gained and learned from me growing up as a second-generation [child of survivors]. It’s huge. I’m fairly settled inside myself and fairly clear now about the meaning of it. But no one who goes through this is ever done with it. My father died two years ago and I am so thankful that we were able to do this trip together.
In this way, creating collective memories at sites of terror fostered the growth of intimacy between parent and child. In engaging both with the structures of traumatic memory and the feeling-states that such structures elicit, the descendants of the Holocaust gain a deeper connection to their parents’ suffering, even as they may feel overwhelmed by the incomprehensibility of the catastrophe of their parents’ lives.
It is significant to note that both daughters and sons reported this shift in empathic attachment to their parents. This finding suggests that while daughters are frequently characterized as more empathic than sons (Surrey 1991), under conditions of traumatic remembrance gender differences in empathic bonding become less important. Because visits to sites of terror reduce the emotional distance between the children of survivors and their parents, first-generation descendants move closer to a shared victimized identity with survivors. At the same time, the interactive nature of this type of terror-based memorialization also reminds the children of survivors that their identification with parental suffering, while intensely emotional, is not the same as having lived through the original trauma, as the following account makes clear: “Once you have been to the camps, once you have had the experience of trauma, it’s like I can understand my mother’s experience more but we can never give to ourselves a percentage of what they really went through. How can you understand? You can empathize, but can’t ever totally understand. Just being there you at least get a sense of what it must have been like, what she must have felt—how scared she must have been.”
While the interactive qualities of remembrance at sites of terror may intensify the knowledge of and emotional connection to the past, the engagement with the material culture of traumatic histories can also lead to a greater awareness of the differences between the “inheritance” of trauma and the firsthand experience of genocidal suffering. Thus, the social realism of these sites can help to remedy the problematic consequences of “postmemory,” as described by Hirsch (2008, 106), in which the survivor’s trauma displaces the descendant’s own experiences and memories. As the narratives, especially of empathic growth, reveal, immersion at sites of terror brings into sharper relief the emotional and experiential divide between the lived experiences of the descendants and the traumatic victimization of their survivor parents. Accordingly, they provide an interactive social network through which both the stories of the survivors as well as the stories of their descendants are brought into greater rather than lesser focus, diminishing the effects of postmemory on succeeding generations.
Overall, the findings in this chapter reveal how narratives of family remembrance are given new meaning in spaces of memorial culture, reaffirming that sites of memory serve as interactional webs where meanings are constructed by the families of survivors (Wagner-Pacifici and Schwartz 1991). Through interaction with the landscapes and material objects of Nazi genocide, the descendants of the Holocaust connect to the anxiety, fear, loss, and sorrow of their families. This connective dynamic of memorialization results in the development of stronger empathic ties to the survivor generation, contributing to a social identity that is marked by the memory of victimization. In bringing the trauma of the past into the present, these sites arouse strong feelings and emotions that connect descendants both to a sense of place and to familial suffering, as they experience through their own visual and emotional lens the places of tragedy that represent despair and survivorship. Immersion at sites of terror thus strengthens an identification with familial and historical catastrophe, deepening the descendant’s role as carrier of the memories and traumas of the Holocaust.