The Transcending Trauma Project, based at the Council for Relationships in Philadelphia, is an ongoing qualitative research project investigating three generations of Holocaust survivor families. The goal of the project is to understand how survivors coped with the horror and losses of the war and to understand the impact of their experiences on the second and third generations. In order to understand the survivor experience and the impact on families, from their own perspectives and in their own words, we conducted 275 in-depth life histories.

            Life histories are the examination of a whole life, which in this case involved questioning survivors about their lives before the Holocaust, going back to relationships with their grandparents, and extensively exploring their childhood experiences within their families of origin, their communities and their schools. We questioned survivors about their challenges, their values, their beliefs, and their relationships with family and others in order to understand who the survivor was before the Holocaust.

When reading about Holocaust survivors and other victims of extreme trauma, it is often as if the survivor was born the day of the catastrophe. The Transcending Trauma Project brings to life the personality of the survivor before the war, so that his or her responses during the war and after liberation can be understood as the continuation of a lifelong story not just a new beginning without a history.

            Children of survivors were asked about their childhoods with their survivor parents and their perspectives of family dynamics both as children and as adults with their own families. Grandchildren were asked about their survivor grandparents and their own nuclear families. Interviews were conducted over many meetings and with multiple members of each family. This provided an extraordinarily rich testimony that has taught us a great deal about surviving the unspeakable and how survivors were able to rebuild their lives.

            Survivors of the Holocaust have much to teach us about life in addition to bearing witness to horror and death. Survivors were not blank slates before the Holocaust enveloped them. They were human beings with full and vibrant lives. When they were liberated from the crematoria, work camps, forests and hiding places, and experienced the loss of everything they knew and held dear, what sustained them? The inner core of self has great endurance and most survivors rebuilt their lives by affirming the legacies of the past. We have come to realize that they were sustained and guided by the internalization of their loved ones and the meaning of their lost lives that they held inside. These are the stories that the Transcending Trauma Project is bringing to the Jewish community, the mental health profession and to lay audiences[O1] .

            A unique contribution of the Transcending Trauma Project is the study of families. By conducting in-depth life histories with three generations of survivor families, TTP acknowledges the centrality of families in developing individual identities. Intergenerational transmission is best described by those living it, in their own words, from the inside out. TTP is unique in its inclusion of multiple members of three generations of survivor families and in the depth and scope of the interviewing process. The study of their children's lives and their grandchildren's lives offers insights into the qualitative dimension of how survivors nurtured the next generation and how the Holocaust left its mark on subsequent generations. For some the mark is a long shadow of sadness, anger and anxiety. For others the mark is post traumatic growth shown in the ability to affirm life against all odds.

            We have examined the effect that Holocaust stories have on young children as they mature. We have learned that children took from the war stories not only the horror that the parents experienced, but who the parents were during the ordeal and who the parents are today. The child then tends to take on the positive characteristics of the parents as revealed in the war stories.

            We have learned that faith and religious practice were deeply challenged by the losses and suffering of survivors. We observed that for most survivors, faith in G-d was sustained and that survivors varied across a wide continuum in the nature of their traditional practice after the war. The quality of family life before the war was related to how survivors sustained Jewish tradition in their new lives. Many survivors talked about the questions that can't be answered about why they survived and their loved ones didn't. For them, being able to tolerate unanswered questions is an act of faith.

            The ability to be empathically connected to parents helped them be compassionate to the ways in which their parents still suffered from the war. If children were hurt by a parent's emotional outbursts, then the children had a harder time being empathic. If survivor parents could put their suffering aside to nurture the needs of their children, then the children were able to grow up less burdened by their parents' post war struggles.

            Considering the persecution experienced by victims of the Nazis it is an intriguing question to see how the war affected their attitudes of tolerance or intolerance toward the perpetrators and others. There are many reasons given by survivors to justify their attitudes, but we found that tolerance and intolerance were forged in childhood experiences.

            Communication patterns in Holocaust survivor families were found to be more complex than the standard dichotomy between survivors who "talked about the war" and those who "didn't talk about the war." In studying communication patterns, the importance of motives emerged from the examination of the life histories. Many different motives prompted survivors to talk about their traumatic experiences, which then influenced how they framed what they talked about to their children and others. Survivors communicated many messages to their children, how their children received these messages and lived their lives are essential themes in the legacy of Holocaust survivor families.

            The findings of the Transcending Trauma Project illuminate how individuals and families cope with devastation, pick up the shards of shattered lives to grab hold of the present and yearn for a better future. These findings reflect a great deal of variation among survivors and their families in terms of how well they coped. From the healthiest to the most disabled, survivors tell a story about the human psyche and its struggle for a meaningful life. The Transcending Trauma Project has revealed these stories and gleaned many lessons that offer hope and help for those who have suffered life's adversity and for those seeking the tools to handle life's challenges.

Bea Hollander-Goldfein Ph.D., LMFT, is director of the Post Graduate Certificate Training Program in Marriage and Family Therapy and  director of the Transcending Trauma Project. She is licensed as a clinical psychologist and as a marriage and family therapist.

Council for Relationships. She can be reached at l [email protected]