Helen Epstein felt deeply isolated and alone. Haunted by her parents’ harrowing experiences in Nazi concentration camps in World War II, she was troubled as a child by images of piles of skeletons and barbed wire, and, in her words, “a floating sense of danger and incipient harm.” But her Czech-born parents’ defense against the horrific memories was to detach. “Their survival strategy in the war was denial and dissociation, and that carried into their behavior afterward,” recalls Epstein, who was born shortly after the war and grew up in Manhattan. “They believed in action over reflection. Introspection was not encouraged, but a full schedule of activities was.”
It was only when she was a student at Israel’s Hebrew University in the late 1960s that she realized she was part of a community that shared a cultural and historical legacy that included both pain and fear. “I met dozens of kids of survivors,” she says, “one after the other who shared certain characteristics: preoccupation with a family past and Israel, and who spoke several middle European languages — just like me.”
Epstein’s 1979 book about her observations, Children of the Holocaust, gave voice to that sense of alienation and free-floating anxiety. In the years since, mental health professionals have largely attributed the second generation’s moodiness, hypervigilance and depression to learned behavior. It is only now, more than three decades later, that science has the tools to see that this legacy of trauma becomes etched in our DNA — a process known as epigenetics, in which environmental factors trigger genetic changes that may be passed on, just as surely as blue eyes and crooked smiles.
Neuroscientist Rachel Yehuda of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York had been keenly aware of the Holocaust since her childhood in a close-knit Jewish neighborhood in Cleveland. While her own parents were Israeli, she recognized in hindsight that the troubles of her friends’ European-born parents went far deeper than the normal dislocations immigrants feel. The descendants showed a greater sense of insecurity and instability, and focused on the potential for impending danger even when no danger was present. “Even in good times, some offspring seemed like they were waiting for the other shoe to drop,” she says.
Yehuda’s later studies revealed an intriguing distinction. These children not only were affected based on whether or not their parents had symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). She and colleagues also learned that offspring could be affected differently by parental Holocaust trauma based on whether it was the mother or father who was exposed. These differences were reflected in crucial changes in key brain circuits.
