Can trauma be passed down through the generations?

TALI FEINBERG

The strange thing was that these were not just postpartum fears, but real events that had happened to Bottner’s grandmother, Melly, during the Holocaust. The experience prompted Bottner to explore the very new field of epigenetics, which examines if trauma can have an impact on our genes, generations down the line.

It also led her to write a book about her family’s harrowing but miraculous experiences during the war, in which she reflects on how particular experiences could possibly lead to trauma being passed on, enhancing feelings of post-traumatic stress, depression, and fear in future generations.

Bottner presented her experience at a talk at the Cape Town Holocaust & Genocide Centre linked to its current exhibition, “Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race.” Hosted in partnership with the Jacob Gitlin Library, Bottner also signed copies of her book, titled Among the Reeds: The True Story of how a family survived the Holocaust.

“I called the book ‘Among the Reeds’ because it reminded me of the baby Moses, and how he was sent down the Nile to save his life, just like my father was placed in hiding during the Holocaust,” Bottner says.

The book is powerful because it turns Holocaust survivors into real people, foibles and all. In addition, Bottner writes from her grandmother’s perspective, taking on her voice in a first-person account.

We meet grandmother Melly’s father, Leopold, who was born in the town of Oświęcim, “and died there 56 years later in Auschwitz”. A man who slowly goes mad after poisoning himself during World War I to get out of army service, he later dreams that the Brownshirts are coming to arrest him.

The next morning, he flees his affluent life in Germany for Holland, and three days later, the Brownshirts arrive looking for him. His family then follow him to Holland as refugees, and later make their way to Belgium.

We meet Genek, who walks 1 000 miles (1 609km) to Belgium, never to see his family in Lodz again. He picks Melly as the woman he wants to marry, and the first she hears of it is when her mother tells her, at the age of 17, that there is going to be a wedding. “Whose?” She asks. “Yours”, is the response.

Carrying all this on her young shoulders, Melly gives birth to Bobby, the light of her life. But things are still scary, as Melly is a newlywed and a young mother at the age of 18, who doesn’t like her husband very much. Just three weeks later, the Nazis invade Belgium.

We follow the family’s decision to once again pick up their lives and flee, and how they are stopped at the border. We read how Melly makes the heartbreaking decision to place her son in hiding. Later, her baby daughter Irene is formally adopted by a non-Jewish couple, which saves her life. When her parents return to claim her, the trauma reverberates throughout the rest of their lives.

All of these very real scenarios demonstrate that survival was filled with heartache, terrible decisions, and deeply ingrained fears. In that context, it is no wonder they come to the fore at vulnerable moments – even for grandchildren.

After all, just a generation before, Bottner’s father, Bobby, was placed in hiding in a convent, crowded into a cellar where he wasn’t allowed to make a sound. And Melly is only 23 when the war ends in spite of having experienced a lifetime’s worth of horror and heartache that will reverberate for the rest of her life.

After the Holocaust, the family try to go to Israel, and are detained in Cyprus. They make it to the Jewish state, but later move to Canada, where they move many times. “These constant upheavals and the catastrophic thinking came from a place of never feeling safe,” says Bottner.

She explains that epigenetics looks at how life events modify genes and how they are expressed. “It is like dimmer switches. Trauma can make certain characteristics get ‘brighter’ or ‘dimmer’. Adverse childhood events can lead to certain health outcomes in later generations, like being susceptible to depression, heart disease, diabetes, or being overweight. In addition, survivors and their children often have altered levels of stress hormones.”

These events can also lead to increased resilience. Bottner points to her father Bobby, who had so many traumatic moments in his early years but was able to lead a relatively normal life. “Even if we are knocked down, the most important thing is to get up again,” she says.

• ‘Among the Reeds: The true story of how a family survived the Holocaust’ is available at the Jacob Gitlin Library, on Amazon Kindle, or on www.tammybottner.com.