This profoundly important book is the first in-depth study of the ways in which the children of Holocaust survivors carry on the sufferings of their parents. Using psychoanalytically gathered case material, a worldwide team of analysts has studied and now presents data from 30 Jewish survivor-families and additional material derived from the analysis of children of Nazis. The authors describe the manifold ways in which survivors of the Nazi camps have been impelled to pass along remnants of their experiences to their children. As parents, survivors encounter special problems, because they were forced to witness the powerlessness of their own parents in the face of Nazi terror. Their camp experiences made it especially difficult for them to form new bonds and to find ways to be appropriately protective of their children. The children often walk a thin line between being the fair hope of a destroyed generation and the despised object of parental aggression. The parents have secrets that occupy the children's imagination and about which they dream. The children have fantasies that they cannot express to their parents. These clouds of memory haunt children of Nazis, too, as this book shows; and the secrets of the Nazi families are just as psychologically devastating to the next generation. To live through the Holocaust and yet marry and have children is a valiant and life- seeking act. This work pays tribute, then, to the vitality, as well as to the vulnerability, of human life. -- From the book jacket.

Part I. The background.The background of the study -- The experience of survivor-parents / Judith S. and Milton Kestenberg -- Discriminatory aspects of the German indemnification policy : a continuation of persecution / Milton Kestenberg. part II. The survivors' children. Survivor-parents and their children / Judith S. Kestenberg -- World beyond metaphor : thoughts on the transmission of trauma / James Herzog -- A daughter of silence / Yolanda Gampel -- A metapsychological assessment based on an analysis of a survivor's child / Judith S. Kestenberg. part III. The persecutors' children. The return of the persecutor / Erich Simenauer -- The formation of ideals in the succession of generations / Lutz Rosenk̈ötter -- Child of persecutors / Anonymous -- A victim of the other side / Anita Eckstaedt -- The shadows of the past / Gertrud Hardtmann. part IV. Theoretical and clinical aspects. Recurrent problems in the treatment of survivors and children / Martin S. Bergmann -- Hysterical features among children of survivors / Marion M. Oliner -- Thoughts on superego pathology of survivors and their children / Maria V. Bergmann -- Eplilogue / Martin S. Bergmann and Milton E. Jucovy.