Symptoms of Psychological Problems among Children of Holocaust Survivors: Faye Sholiton's The Interview

Symptoms of Psychological Problems among Children of Holocaust SurvivorsFaye Sholiton's The Interview Gene A. Plunka (bio) At the conclusion of the Holocaust in 1945, survivors who had lost everything and were suffering from trauma often decided that marriage was a means to counter their misery. In many religions (e.g., Jewish and Christian), family and friends provide support for mourners of the dead. However, Holocaust survivors frequently lacked a support system and had no community to which they could return. Males and females who had nothing in common except the Holocaust married to assuage the pain and suffering they had mutually experienced and to reenter into cultural experience. Nearly 80 percent of survivors married other survivors, not out of love but out of mutual understanding and the desire to face the abyss together rather than alone.1 Yael Danieli notes, "Recreating a family was a concrete act to compensate for their losses, to counter the massive disruption in the order and continuity of life, and to undo the dehumanization and loneliness they had experienced."2 Moreover, survivors also wanted to become better safeguards than their own mothers and fathers, who were unable to protect their offspring from the Nazis and were often perceived as having abandoned their children.3 The children of Holocaust survivors soon became precious symbols of opposition to Hitler's goal to exterminate Jews. Children were often named after relatives who had perished during the Shoah and thus became constant reminders of the losses experienced by the parents. Designating these children as "memorial candles," Dina Wardi asserts, "These [End Page 1] little children were given the role of lifesavers for the confused souls of their parents. But the parents saw the children not only as lifesavers, but also as new content for their lives."4 The parents perceived of their offspring as the continuing generation that defied Hitler's wish to prevent the Jews from reproducing (e.g., the genocide of Jewish women and their children achieved this goal), thus filling their enormous emotional void. The child also functioned as a link to the survivor parents' own parents and siblings who were exterminated by the Nazis, thereby acting as a therapeutic object to rehabilitate their identities that had been obliterated by the trauma.5 The children therefore have a dual function: preserving the memory of lost relatives and strengthening the denial of the loss that the parents were unable to mourn during their more pressing attempts at survival. The children thus are viewed as blessings or miracles, symbols of victories over the Nazis and therefore emblematic of the future. This essay focuses on the traumatic psychopathology of children of Holocaust survivors as manifested in Faye Sholiton's play The Interview.6 After having endured near-death experiences related to suffering, fatigue, anxiety, and starvation, Holocaust survivor parents made sure that their offspring were not going to suffer as did the victims of the Holocaust and therefore tended to overprotect them.7 Paranoia derived from the Holocaust led to parents' fears that external forces would harm the child, resulting in overprotective behavior. However, although the children sensed their parents' overprotectiveness, they were unsure of the source of that anxiety because of their parents' silence about the trauma.8 Survivors were reluctant to discuss the Holocaust because they were at a loss for words that could communicate the vast extent of the trauma to their children. In their host societies, immigrants who had lived in various European communities were perceived as going to the slaughter like sheep, so they had difficulty explaining circumstances to others. Furthermore, discussing the Holocaust with their children only led to exacerbation of guilt feelings about the loss of loved ones and the loss of morality concomitant with the need to survive. In short, parents never sat down with their children to tell them the full story of their Holocaust pasts. Instead, the children were immersed in the Holocaust as a deep secret that threatened the well-being of their parents; the story was revealed to the offspring only as excerpts, hints, innuendoes, and snippets [End Page 2] of information. The children grew up in painful bewilderment but always were aware that the...