Analysis Now blog co-editor Blair Casdin, LCSW, invites us on a journey into her family’s past and her patient’s present in an attempt to answer the unanswerable: How do we make sense of the impossible?
Nazis are back! They’re marching in Charlottesville, rallying with burning swastikas in Georgia, and running for Congress in Illinois. Even with all this news, when a client casually says to me, “Didn’t you hear about the guy in Brooklyn who got punched in the face by a neo-Nazi?”, I gasp in disbelief. As a grandchild of Holocaust survivors, I have always maintained a belief that I am safe here in New York. But recent events in the news and in my consulting room have made me more aware of how much I am affected by my grandparents’ experience, and how all of us are shaped by multigenerational transmissions, whether traumatic or not (Kahn, 2006).
The question of what it’s like to have grown up in the shadow of trauma came up recently in a session, when, to my surprise, I found myself speechless. My patient (I’ll call her Jennifer) uncharacteristically sobbed on the couch, imploring me to answer the question she had just posed: “How do people do it? Go on after losing so much?” In this moment, I am lost in my own reverie, wondering how my grandfather was able to go on with his life after experiencing so much loss.
But first, Jennifer. Her father died of a slow, debilitating illness when she was four years old. Her mother survived a bout with breast cancer. Devastated by her husband’s death, Jennifer’s mother denied Jennifer the experience of mourning. She kept her from attending the funeral, rarely talked about him, and even asked Jennifer’s school not to acknowledge Father’s Day. It was as if Jennifer had never had a father. Perhaps Jennifer’s mother was trying to protect her daughter through this silence (Auerhahn, 2013), but Jennifer felt the loss, even as it went unmetabolized. Now, as she prepares to move in with her boyfriend Mark of two years, the trauma reappears in a new form: overwhelming fear that new attachments will be lost. “What if Mark dies? Can I really bring children into this world? What if something happens to them? I don’t think I could go on.”
Loss has always been a theme in my family. Like Jennifer, I too was considered a “gift from heaven” and in many ways the reincarnation of those who were lost (Levine, 1982). Both of my grandparents survived the Holocaust, and my grandfather, Pop, lost everything—parents, siblings, friends, country, his entire life as he knew it. And yet, he managed to fall in love with my grandmother, marry, have a baby (my mother) in Budapest in 1945, move to America, have another daughter, and start a completely new life. What was it that enabled Pop to go on? Force of will to survive and carry on his family must have driven him, like many survivors (Berger, 2014; Levine, 1982). Luck also played a role, as he escaped capture on numerous occasions. And, I would argue, Pop’s rebellious upbringing contributed too to his ability to survive.
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To understand what it’s like growing up a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, I need to tell you a little bit about Pop, who died three years ago, just shy of his 98th birthday.
When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, he sewed money into an old jacket, threw a nicer jacket on top, grabbed his skis, and fled to the Carpathian mountains. For two weeks, he crossed the mountains, on skis and by train, making his way to Hungary. He spoke Polish and Yiddish, and a bit of Russian, Hungarian, and Czech, which enabled him to hide his true identity. Some of the stories he told of his escape included passing out during a firing squad only to crawl out over of a pile of dead bodies the next morning; hiding in a barn in a crate full of Passover dishes, barely avoiding notice when the gestapo rummaged through; having his nice jacket stolen, but allowed to keep the old, threadbare one with the hidden money; obtaining a train ticket from a gentile friend with whom he’d shared a sandwich while working as forced laborers for the Russians; being unintentionally hidden from SS soldiers on the train because the passengers had tossed their skis on top of the “dirty Jew.” When he finally, miraculously, made it to Budapest, he found work at a tailor shop and fell in love with the tailor’s sister, my grandmother.
In Budapest, he joined the Polish underground and rescued hundreds of Jews, preparing fake papers, finding for them places to hide, and helping get some of them out of the country. He also saved my grandmother who, like so many at the time, didn’t believe what she heard about the death camps. When an SS officer asked her if she was Jewish, she proudly announced, “Yes, of course I’m Jewish!” She was arrested on the spot and taken to an internment camp. During her incarceration, she attempted suicide by grabbing an electric fence. Realizing that the electricity had been turned off, she quickly climbed over and escaped. Soon after, she was arrested again, but this time Pop used his underground connections, created a fake ID, broke into the camp and rescued her.
But Pop wasn’t always a hero. Growing up on a horse farm in Poland, he never took anything seriously—he failed in school, disappointed his rabbi, hung out with non-Jewish friends, and refused to learn a trade. As a baker’s apprentice, he got fired after stealing some danishes. A tailoring apprenticeship lasted only a couple of months. He preferred skiing, swimming, and running around with friends.
And yet, some of these qualities that disappointed his family in the end saved his life. Several of his friends helped him escape; his athleticism helped him cross the mountains; he snuck out at night to steal food to feed his family; and finally, through his black-market connections, he made a deal with a rocket scientist (true story!) to obtain visas to the United States. All of this happened so soon after experiencing so much loss.
How do people do it? How do they go on after losing so much?
To be continued in “Making Sense of the Impossible: a trauma story, part II”…
Blair Casdin, LCSW, is a graduate of the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis, and is in private practice in Manhattan. At MIP, she is co-editor of the Analysis Now blog, co-chair of the Colloquium Committee, and teaches Ethics in Psychoanalysis.
References
Auerhahn, N.C. (2013). Evolution of Traumatic Narratives. Psychoanal. St. Child, 67:215-246
Berger, S. (2014). Whose Trauma Is It Anyway? Furthering Our Understanding of Its Intergenerational Transmission. J. Infant Child Adolesc. Psychother., 13(3):169-181
Kahn, C. (2006). Some Determinants of the Multigenerational Transmission Process. Psychoanal. Rev., 93(1):71-92
Levine, H.B. (1982). Toward a Psychoanalytic Understanding of Children of Survivors of the Holocaust. Psychoanal. Q., 51:70-92
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