What two catastrophes transmitted to their descendants, and what this war reactivated in both of us

I am a trauma specialist. I have spent twenty years studying how collective catastrophe travels across generations, not as memory, but as nervous system. As body. As the particular way your shoulders tense when certain words are spoken, the automatic scan of a room for exits, the instinct that arrives before thought.

I thought I understood inherited trauma. Then this war began, and I watched my husband’s face on the morning of October 7, and I realized I had been studying it in other people’s families without fully seeing it in my own.

We are two parts of the same people. Between us, we carry Europe and the Middle East, the camps and the pogroms. On that morning, two completely different inherited responses woke up in the same household, and I finally understood what catastrophe actually passes down.

It is not the story. It is the helplessness.

The Shoah and the Farhud look like different histories. They transmitted the same wound.

I was born in Paris, in the apartment from which my father had been taken.

July 1942. He was arrested with his parents, his brother, his sisters. He was the only one who came back. After the war, he returned to that apartment and raised his family there, pressing life back into the place where it had broken, as if continuity itself were a form of defiance.

I grew up in those rooms. I grew up surrounded by comfort and unprotected at the same time. Something older than my own experience kept whispering in my body: this place will not protect you. I could not have named it then. I had no language for what happened when a policeman appeared on the street, when I fainted in a crowded metro, when I felt that constant low weight walking through a city I deeply loved.

What I carried was not grief. It was the encoded memory of defenselessness,........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)