Hitler Lives: How the Struggles of World War II Lives on in Generations

Kirsten Schuder, M. S., Mental Health Counseling

Published in

Kirsten’s Short Attention Span

4 min readOct 18, 2022

This is how my family still struggles

My grandmother’s eyes filled with pain and regret. In her broken English, she shared with my husband, “I closed down my emotions so I could survive the Holocaust. Unfortunately, I closed myself off from everyone around me. Now, I live with this regret.”

The lack of closeness I feel with my mother’s side of the family has made me aware of how the past could still haunt Holocaust survivors and the generations following WWII.

Age affords me enough healing and maturity now to consider all the factors in my life in my quest to accept myself as a whole and beautiful person.

I wonder what my relationship would have been like with my own mother if my mother did not have to grow up as the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. I wonder if we would all fair better if our lives had not been tainted by war and genocide. I also wonder how many of the problems I have faced in my life would be there if the Holocaust was not a part of our family heritage.

Maybe I would be estranged from my parents without the influence of WWII; there was a lot more going on in our family. Would I have connected enough with my mother, though, to have the type of relationship we need to work through our issues?

Holocaust survivors and their children are shown to have poorer mental health outcomes, according to a study in the European Journal of Psychotraumatology:

Various parent and child characteristics and their interaction were found to contribute to the development of psychological symptoms and biological and epigenetic variations. Parental mental health problems, perceived parenting, attachment quality, and parental gender appeared to be influential for the mental well-being of their offspring.

Moreover, mothers seem to affect the mental well-being of children more than fathers.

It’s a bit strange when you can verify research through personal experiences.

My mother insists my grandmother and the family were a bit off-color before the war. So did her older half-sister. However, they swore up and down that no one could believe a word my grandmother said, and both did not trust her at all.

However, that attachment issue observation hits close to home for us, the women in our family. I actually feel the same way about them as they did about their own mother.

I’m just thinking out loud. It’s not like I spend a good part of my day thinking about Hitler. I don’t know if he was hatefully thinking about how many Jewish families he would ruin for decades, maybe even hundreds of years to come. I don’t know if he ever had this insight.

I can’t speak for other grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, but I do know that the possibility of Hitler’s vision of negatively affecting Jewish families is still alive and well. Offspring of Holocaust survivors have been found to have irregular cortisol levels, the stress hormone, and children were more prone to the effects of stress.

In addition, the U. S. Department of Veteran Affairs reported on a study’s findings on “epigenetic” changes in Holocaust survivors that can pass onto their offspring. Epigenetic changes are changes that are expressed genetically, but do not mutate any DNA. Yet, they do show in their offspring nonetheless.

This makes Hitler’s continued effects on my family plausible.

I have had issues with stress my entire life. I always seemed extra sensitive to stress, on high alert like a rabbit. Stress would shut me down and stymie my mouth. I could not say anything or do anything in my own defense against bullies when I was a child and tween. Only now, into my fifties, do I feel that I have overcome this factor and have become more efficient in handling my day-to-day stress.

My daughter seems to have also inherited this trait. She shuts down very easily, so much so, she needs to actually decrease the stimulation around her so she can calm down.

The only thing I can hope is that because of the work my husband and I are doing with my daughter, that if there are any epigenetic effects, we can finally kick it to the curb, four generations later, and my daughter’s daughter can live a life without even the shadow of that terrible man and his legacy.