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Gloria Garfunkel's avatar

Hi, Jen: There has also been a great deal of research about intergenerational trauma among military veterans of all wars, though most of the studies began with Viet Nam veterans. Your tree image was apt, but regardless how badly a POW is traumatized, it is different in a thousand ways from Holocaust trauma, which was not just about the personal trauma experienced by a single POW who knows that somewhere home and family still exist. Holocaust survivors, like my mother and her sister were only children, 15 and 16 at the time of their traumas, and on top of the torture similar to POW treatment, they experienced the trauma of overwhelming grief for the wiping out of survivors' mostly annihilated extended families, friends, and homes. Both military veterans of Viet Nam and other wars, like in Iraq, returned to pass on intergenerational trauma. But regardless of Bach being German, POW PTSD in whatever language used in that culture, is more similar to POW's in other wars than they are to victims of the Holocaust. Veterans know they are fighting a war. Holocaust victims like my mother often said "One day, everything was the same. And the next, everything changed." She did not sign up for a war. At the time she believed that the entire world had turned into a Holocaust. She watched her mother and baby siblings walk to the gas chambers. She stood for hours in rags in freezing rain like POW's and other imaginative tortures on starvation diets. Your teacher clearly had intergenerational trauma, but it sounds to me more like a combination of his father's POW PTSD along with the possible familial trauma that he, too, as a child suffered from sexual abuse. That's just my opinion based on my 35 year career as a clinical psychologist specializing in PTSD from child abuse and incest while experiencing my own secondary PTSD from my parents' Holocaust stories and the resultant psychiatric aftereffects passed down to me directly as the oldest child, differently from each parent, as PTSD can have many manifestations, some more salient for some than others.

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