The End of My Addiction

then-twelve-year-old cousin Steve Israeler, who, just before being captured, had seen his parents and five brothers and sisters killed by the Germans. Soon after, they were split up. My grandfather was sent to Mauthausen. Bidding farewell to my mother, he said, “I will not survive, but you and your mother and brother must.”
    My mother survived Auschwitz-Birkenau. My grandmother walked out of the camp at Skarżysko with a broken hip from a beating. My cousin Steve survived Flossenburg, and my uncle Zev survived, too: he was on Schindler’s list.
    My mother and her brother and mother and Steve made their way to Paris—where, looking for help, they turned to their distant relative, Helena Rubinstein.
    Not long after, my parents were married. Around the same time, my grandmother, my uncle Zev, and my cousin Steve emigrated to America. My older brother, Jean-Claude, was born on December 22, 1951; I came a year and a half later, on June 25, 1953; and our sister, Eva, followed on September 8, 1957.
    Seeing the confident affection between our handsome, athletic father and our beautiful mother, it was easy for my brother and sister and me to think that the happy ending was complete. Certainly my father never told us a sad story. Although his voice sometimes took on an edge of intensity, he recounted grueling night marches in the rain and mud, the lottery of death on the battlefield, and life as a prisoner of war as if they were episodes from an adventure story. He delighted us with his description of how teaching himself to play an accordion got him out of peeling potatoes, because both the other prisoners and the guards were so entertained by his playing.
    To the outside world, my mother showed the same lack of distress. In the 1990s she participated in the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation archive, which Steven Spielberg established after making Schindler’s List . In her videotaped interview, she says little more than, “The Germans were not very refined. They could have been more polite.”
    But when my brother and sister and I were little, she spoke very differently to us. She sobbed with grief and anger as she recited the horrors her family had witnessed and endured. When she lamented, “The Germans murdered my father,” or described how she dreamed of eating oranges, only to wake up and remember that she was in Auschwitz, my heart ached.
    She often expressed the fear that after the survivors died, no one would remember or believe what had occurred. When I was grown up, I asked her if she had ever considered seeing a psychiatrist about her experiences. She said that she had once consulted a young Jewish psychiatrist. When she told him about watching German soldiers tear still-living children limb from limb, he said, “You have a lot of imagination.” That was the last she had to do with psychiatrists until late in life, when she hoped that one of them might help me recover from alcoholism.
    It has been suggested that children of Holocaust survivors are at increased risk of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), severe anxiety, and depression because of the atmosphere in which they were raised. Some research has also pointed to genetic factors. A Mount Sinai School of Medicine study found a “higher prevalence of lifetime PTSD, mood, anxiety disorders, and to a lesser extent, substance abuse disorders…in offspring of Holocaust survivors.” Although “PTSD in any parent contributes to risk for depression, and parental traumatization is associated with increased anxiety disorders in offspring,” the study found that maternal traumatization has a greater impact than paternal traumatization. It noted that the children of women who survived the Holocaust are more likely to have low levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which would make them less emotionally resilient, and that the “tendency for maternal PTSD to make a greater contribution than paternal PTSD to [offspring’s] PTSD risk…paves the way for the speculation that epigenetic factors may be involved.” This could occur through a change in gene expression known as genomic imprinting, in which the genetic contribution of the father or mother outweighs that of the other parent. 2
    Do my early childhood experiences explain why I became anxious? An alcoholic? The old nature versus nurture debate remains undecided. A scientist looking at the impact of nurture on a category of medical problems and vulnerabilities might point to animal