Many Holocaust survivors thrived  – but have their children inherited their trauma?

She spent her twenties as an “anxious, troubled person” who received treatment for anorexia, but she never dared to broach the topic with her mother, Suzanna, who had spent three years in Theresienstadt concentration camp, Czechoslovakia, and lost her family to the Nazis.

“I didn’t talk to her about issues that were going on in my life,” the 69-year-old teacher remembers of her childhood in north London. “When you have parents who have experienced such hardship it’s impossible to burden them with your own stuff. I didn’t want to project my own problems.”

Her predicament chimes with a growing body of research indicating that trauma from the Holocaust, or other major historical events, can echo down the generations.

Holocaust survivors themselves tend to show a startling resilience that has driven many to success: a famous US study conducted by Dr William Helmreich in 1992 interviewed hundreds and found them to be more professionally successful and happy, on average, than other American Jews of a similar age.

But their offspring often tell a different story: a review last year by the European Journal of Psychotraumatology looked at 18 years worth of medical data and found that children of Holocaust survivors show a “heightened vulnerability for stress”.

For decades, it was considered a social phenomenon - those who have come through great suffering are less likely to talk to their children about their own problems, went one explanation - but recent research has found that it might be a biological one too: nature, rather than nurture.

It is not down to genetics, scientists say, but the more obscure field of “epigenetics”, in which tiny chemical tags are added to our genes in response to environmental changes, without changing our DNA code itself.

These tags tell our body to behave in a certain way: a starving person might receive tags telling their body to store more fat, for example. We used to think these tags were washed away during the fertilisation process, but scientists are increasingly coming round to the view that some tags can pass from parent to child.

In a 2013 study, researchers blew the scent of cherry blossom towards mice, zapping their feet with electricity at the same time, so they came to associate the scent with pain. The mice then had offspring, who also became jumpy and nervous whenever they smelt cherry blossom, despite never having received electric shocks.

Academics think a similar process might be at play in humans who have experienced great trauma. A 2015 study in New York found that children of 32 Holocaust survivors were more likely to suffer from stress disorders than those from Jewish families who hadn’t been directly impacted by the Nazis - a result that “could only be attributed to Holocaust exposure in the parents”, according to the author, Dr Rachel Yehuda.  

A much larger study, in 2018, found that sons of soldiers who had been imprisoned in squalid conditions during the American Civil War were more likely to die young than the sons of soldiers who had not been imprisoned - a finding that could only be explained by genetic inheritance, researchers said, once other factors such as wealth and upbringing had been taken into consideration.

“This is a growing field that truly links the social sciences and hard biological sciences,” says Dr Moshe Szyf of McGill University Medical School in Canada, and a world-respected authority on epigenetics.

But the science is controversial. Marcus Pembrey, professor of paediatric genetics at University College London, says that much of the evidence relies on animal studies, and in humans it has been difficult to get a clear answer. Dr Yehuda admits that her own study was blown out of proportion.

Kathy Brodbeck is certain that her own upbringing was affected by her mother’s Holocaust experience, but says it is “hard to know” whether it was a case of nature or nurture.

Suzanna was plucked from her home in Prague at 17, and taken by the Nazis in cattle trucks to Theresienstadt, along with her mother and grandmother. Her grandmother died shortly after arrival. Notorious SS officer Adolf Eichmann personally selected Suzanna’s mother to be taken to the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Suzanna, who survived because she was young and could make herself useful in the labour camp, didn’t realise it was the last time she would see her family, and always remembered the pain in her shoulder from where her mother embraced her tightly before being forced away.

After liberation, Suzanna married and moved to London with her husband, in 1948. “She loved England and the Royal Family. She always felt more at home here than in [Czechoslovakia],” remembers Kathy.

A glamorous beauty, her mother had two children and found a job in fashion working for the well-known textile designer Zika Ascher. She “embraced life”, becoming something of a Bohemian who loved the theatre, opera, and cinema. “As I grew up I remember everybody admiring my mother’s beauty. She was very chic and sociable,” adds Kathy.

Part of her success came from a refusal to dwell on her horrific youth. “She didn’t feel, ‘Oh woe is me, I’ve had this terrible experience’.” In fact, she barely discussed her memories until agreeing to take part in interviews for the Shoah Foundation - a project founded by Steven Spielberg, a year after his 1993 Oscar-winning film, Schindler’s List, to collate and preserve the testimonies of Holocaust survivors.

Kathy is “so different”. She knew, as a young woman, that she wouldn’t find a receptive audience in her mother to discuss her anorexia. When she became dangerously thin, Suzanna suggested that she was “punishing” her for how emaciated she had been in the concentration camp. “I don’t think she ever understood me,” says her daughter. Suzanna died aged 91.

Pearl Gabel, from Lambertville, New Jersey, is sure that she inherited epigenetic trauma from her grandmother, Ida, who lost her parents and eight siblings in the Holocaust. In the Thirties, Ida had travelled from her native Ukraine to Belgium to make money for her family, and was there when the Nazis invaded in 1940.

She only survived by immediately purchasing a wooden cross and pretending, for the duration of the war, to be Catholic.

Pearl, who is in her thirties and works in communications, suffers with depression and anxiety. A few years ago, her therapist suggested that her psychological problems might stem from her grandmother’s wartime experience, and encouraged her to join a support group for second and third-generation survivors.

“There was such a weight from [my grandmother’s] side of the family, like a darkness,” says Pearl - a trait that contrasts sharply with the happy-go-lucky attitude of her father’s family, she says, who moved to the United States before the Holocaust. “I’ve always felt like I was on the edge of doom, constantly on the precipice. I think we carry the memories in our bones.”

'The Windermere Children' is available on BBC iPlayer