It was twenty-one years ago tonight, on a cold, windy, foggy Halloween night in San Francisco that about twelve of us gathered for the first night of an Adult Children of Holocaust Survivors group. The facilitator was Yigal Ben-Haim, an Israeli psychotherapist with a wooden leg, a survivor of the 1972 Yom Kipper War. We were all nervous, and had gathered there because although each of us, while successful in business, or the arts; had reached a point in our lives when things just weren't working.
We all had something ghoulish in common, one or both of our parents were either survivors of the death camps or survivors that were in hiding during the Holocaust of World War II. One by one, as we sat frozen in our seats around a big wooden table, we each told what our survivor parent/s had been through. Each of us had a different experience, yet we were instantly bonded through the manifestation of our traumatized childhoods. We had similar but different trauma, as we recounted our stolen childhoods, spent absorbing and processing the effects of the Holocaust on our parents.
Yigal wanted us to read the book Children of the Holocaust, by Helen Epstein. I remember ordering the book from a bookstore and dreading it's arrival. I read the book, page by page shaking and terrified to face what I knew had happened to me. I was not there, it didn't happen to me. Yet my life was shattered every bit as much as if I was a child of an alcoholic (which I wasn't).
My new friends in the group were diverse . One guy had been beaten regularly by his Survivor father. Every single one of us admitted to relationship problems. Several were divorced or never married. Half of the group were in Recovery. This was the beginning of understanding myself, of surrendering to the truth of why I am the way I am. Yes, it was 1988, the start of coming out of denial; and the answer about why I couldn't bring children into this world. Of why I was alone. Of who I would become.
We all had something ghoulish in common, one or both of our parents were either survivors of the death camps or survivors that were in hiding during the Holocaust of World War II. One by one, as we sat frozen in our seats around a big wooden table, we each told what our survivor parent/s had been through. Each of us had a different experience, yet we were instantly bonded through the manifestation of our traumatized childhoods. We had similar but different trauma, as we recounted our stolen childhoods, spent absorbing and processing the effects of the Holocaust on our parents.
Yigal wanted us to read the book Children of the Holocaust, by Helen Epstein. I remember ordering the book from a bookstore and dreading it's arrival. I read the book, page by page shaking and terrified to face what I knew had happened to me. I was not there, it didn't happen to me. Yet my life was shattered every bit as much as if I was a child of an alcoholic (which I wasn't).
My new friends in the group were diverse . One guy had been beaten regularly by his Survivor father. Every single one of us admitted to relationship problems. Several were divorced or never married. Half of the group were in Recovery. This was the beginning of understanding myself, of surrendering to the truth of why I am the way I am. Yes, it was 1988, the start of coming out of denial; and the answer about why I couldn't bring children into this world. Of why I was alone. Of who I would become.
