Barbara Adde’s Reviews > Also Here: Love, Literacy, and the Legacy of the Holocaust > Status Update

“In her essay ‘Writing Advice for my Younger Self,’ poet and writer EJ Koh says, ‘To research is to rehabilitate … words cannot only heal previous generations, they can reverse the trajectory of damage into future generations.’”

“…in the kitchen, at the salon, holding a cane but not using it, that the third-generation experience. The loss appeared so far removed, it didn’t feel like loss anymore. It felt like an ocean, too wide to cross.”

“Being part of the third generation is not an experience of survival, but of the echoes of survival. An echo that sounds like living, like forgetting, like still somehow knowing. For me, the experience was a thin film over the rest of my life. Not central, not current, not pressing, but there. I felt separate from what happened to my grandma. That separateness, that distance to the relative across a table…

“… unresolved. She never knew what was around the next corner. She never knew what would bend and what would break.”

“I discovered another study they seemed to have met her and sat at her table. The research study, conducted in Israel, considered attachment and traumatic stress among female Holocaust survivors specifically. It found that female survivors had high levels of avoidant behavior, intrusive thoughts, unusual beliefs, autonomic anxiety, cognitive worry, and an unresolved state of mind.(19) Of course her mind was …

“…memory, motivation, emotion, stress response, learning and behavior. In other words, everything. The Czech study also found that younger survivors were likely to have less grey matter than older ones, suggesting that the human brain is more vulnerable to stress during its development. For children like Bubbie, the trauma was foundational.”

“‘We six turned on our heels and ran down the street…We were free-free to be hunted down if our luck should turn. But I remember the exuberance, the euphoria of these moments.’ Reading her words, knowing what would have come had they stayed, I feel euphoria too.)”

“Throughout the winter of 1945, approximately 250K prisoners died from exhaustion, starvation, murder, and exposure as evacuations by foot continued. Today, they are known as the death marches.
(It’s worth noting that people did escape during these marches, including several from the march from Christianstadt to Bergen-Belsen. Ruth Kluger, one of these survivors, writes in her book, ‘Still Alive’…