Rena Katz: Exploring Intergenerational Trauma and the Holocaust

Joeita Gupta:
I'm Joeita Gupta, and this is The Pulse. Trauma leaves a mark. Going through a traumatic event or experience can forever alter the psychology and possibly the biology of a person or a group of people based on a shared identity. More recently, the concept of intergenerational trauma has gained currency. It is a concept developed to explain years of generational challenges within families. It is the transmission of oppression and the traumatic effects of a historic event to younger generations.
Intergenerational trauma is insidious in its effects. It can result in feelings of guilt or unresolved grief, as well as hypervigilance and fear. It can take decades, maybe entire lifetimes, to heal from inherited trauma and lead meaningful lives.
Today, we discuss inherited trauma. It's time to put your finger on The Pulse.
Hello and welcome to The Pulse on AMI Audio. I'm Joeita Gupta and I'm joining you from the Accessible Media studios in Toronto. Today my hair is pulled back in its customary bun and I'm wearing a pair of black headphones. I'm wearing a green button-down shirt. It's full sleeves and it has a collar. And today, I'm talking to Rena Lipiner Katz about her new book. It came out a few months ago, it's available as an audiobook as well, and an ebook. And it really describes her experiences as a second generation Holocaust survivor. The book is called A Life Inherited: Unraveling The Trauma Of A Second Generation Holocaust Survivor. Rena, thank you very much for writing your book and putting it out there in the world and sharing your story. And thank you very much for taking some time to speak to me about the book on the program. Welcome.

Rena Lipiner Katz:
Thank you for having me. I'm delighted.

Joeita Gupta:
Your book has a more or less linear narrative. If you read the book in a lot of ways, it starts in the second episode, where the linear ... the second chapter, where the linear narrative really progresses from your mother, Lucia, watching her mom Rose disappearing in search of food and her anxiety in that moment. And it goes all the way up to ... right up to COVID-19 and the pandemic and your family in Tel Aviv.
But the first chapter of the book is not following that linear format. It starts in 1991. Why did you start in 1991? What about that time in your life and that episode that you narrate in the first chapter made you diverge from the linear pattern of the book and say, "This needs to go first."

Rena Lipiner Katz:
Well, in terms of explanation, the book I wrote over about six years and I was really compelled, pretty much driven to write it, to tell the story. But as I wrote it, I began to understand more about myself, and about my past, and how being a child of Holocaust survivors completely affected who I was as a child, who I became as an adult, and who I chose to marry the first time.
And I think that first chapter, which describes where I'm pregnant and where my husband at the time is physically violent to me, it represented, when I look back in hindsight and why I put it first, excuse me, it represented a kind of flashpoint, a nexus where everything came together as I wrote it and reread it, the past, my present then in 1991 and my future, having children with this man. I started to understand that the experience of being a child of survivors had left me with the kind of guilt that there was just ... it was endless. It was buried, it was not conscious, but it was endless and it affected so much.
And I began to wonder as I wrote the book and as I reread what I had written, if I had not been primed to find my own Nazi, and I looked at that experience as not the beginning in a linear way, but the beginning in finally starting to put the pieces of this puzzle together and understand the choices I made.

Joeita Gupta:
You talk about both sets of grandparents in a lot of detail in the book. Your mother's side of the family deals with incredible hardship. There are very poignant images. There's that one scene where your mom says ... Where you describe your mom having a bath after, or sinking into a tub of warm water after five years and having lice fall out. And the shame she must have felt in that moment and the fact that her mom, your grandmother, was handing out her ... was giving away her food rations to her children because it was inconceivable that her children should starve. You've got that experience on the one hand where there's tremendous loss on your mother's side of the family, but your father's side of the family comparatively have a much easier time of it. So, you get these two very different experiences because your paternal grandmother in the book you say, they used to joke that she was the only woman who didn't have to really work in the refugee camp. She got to cook.
As you had these two very different experiences of the Holocaust and for your dad and his brother, it was almost a bit of an adventure. For your mom, it was terribly traumatic. How do you reconcile those two things as a person who inherits those two very different experiences of the Holocaust?

Rena Lipiner Katz:
Well, I spent an awful lot of time with my dad's parents. I adored them. They were full of joy and it was infectious. And I was able to leave behind some of this inherited guilt and fear when I was with them. But I think it needs to be explained why they were different. They were able to travel with all of their immediate family, meaning my grandfather's brothers. One was in Palestine, mandatory Palestine. One was in Philadelphia.
My grandmother's two brothers and sister, all younger, travelled with them, so based ... and they were unmarried. So, my mother's mother lost four siblings and all of their little children, and there were many, to the gas chamber of Auschwitz, and this haunted her till the end of her days and she lived to be 101, and it just possessed her. It was a depression.
And my father's parents didn't have that experience. So it was terrible, they lost only things. They didn't lose people. And it was just, I think with any tragedy, any trauma that happens and that is inherited by the child, that really makes a huge difference. Displacement is different than losing your [inaudible 00:07:55].

Joeita Gupta:
I think I mentioned this to you in the email when I was asking you for the interview, that the book resonated with me because I'm Hindu, but I'm married to someone who's Jewish, whose parents were survivors of the Holocaust. And he is very much in the same boat as you. And one of the things that was striking about meeting my husband were his bookcases. He has about four of them, and they are chock full of books, many of them dealing with the Holocaust, many of them dealing with the narratives of people who had survived the Holocaust. Many of them, I think, trying to make sense of what had happened in grappling with the enormity of the loss and the void in his life, but also in the life of his family.
The void in humanity, six million people gone, and their children, yes, countless gone, how do you ... because in your book you talk a bit about reading, and I wonder if you would share with us a little bit about whether reading for you was a source of distraction, solace, a way of making sense of the world? Because you do read quite extensively. So what did reading mean to you, especially as a child?

Rena Lipiner Katz:
Well, reading was a means, first off, to escape into a world which it is for so many people and to find joy there. But in particular, I began to read at about, I think age nine, the writings of the Holocaust survivors, Primo Levi, Simon Wiesenthal, who was a great Nazi hunter who I often fantasize being his apprentice. And I was going to find Mengele, and unfortunately, he was not found.
But so, reading for me, I was able to finally have a structure, a context. I feel this way, because this happened other people feel this way, other people have experienced much, much worse, and I can understand. There came to be a frame to my experience. So, it loosened me up a little bit. It loosened me up to feel that what my experience had been was not an anomaly and actually made sense. And so, it was probably the very, very beginning of starting to understand.

Joeita Gupta:
A lot of the book talks about your relationship with your mother and then also how her relationships during the war and her experiences during the war shaped her as a parent and how that in turn shaped you as a parent. I think that is really where intergenerational trauma, or inherited trauma, is most in evidence. How do you think your experience of being a second-generation Holocaust survivor has shaped you as a parent and bearing in mind that your sons and your family in fact went through a very challenging divorce in the late '90s?

Rena Lipiner Katz:
It's funny that you say that. I was a very fearful mother. As soon as I had my first child, I would have dreams every night about leaving him, like a parcel that you forget at Macy's or on the bus. I lived in a very bucolic pastoral area when they were very small. My husband at the time, his hometown, I was the only one, the only parent, who insisted that a fence be built around our backyard.
Just yesterday, my 30-year-old son, I'm battling with him over using sunscreen because he's well, and he doesn't care. He's an aspiring filmmaker, he's an artist, a writer, and he gets these red burns and I get literally ... It's not like a normal person, I'm sorry, who says, "You know, here's the sunscreen, honey."
I try everything, everything to get him to understand. And he says, "Mom, you're lecturing me on your fears." And this is something, when they were with their dad and their dad celebrates Christmas, I would say to their dad, "Are you remembering to pull out the Christmas tree plug?" Because one time, someone's Christmas tree went ablaze. To me, the most unusual thing that could happen was almost a certainty.
So, my parenting, I'm going to say I gave them while they were little, the most enormous love and that kind, and cared for them. But as they got older and needed to do things like cross the street on their own and suffer life and dignity, so they would get strong, I failed. I was always coming between them and problems and issues. That's not good. That's not the right way to mother. You have to do it in measure. And I was a social worker.

Joeita Gupta:
The funny thing is, as I hear you talking, I think about ... and I wonder if I should tell you this, my 89-year-old who is Jewish and grew up in Romania during the war, still to this day, she's 89, mind you and my husband is in his 50s, still to this day phones him to tell him to put on sunscreen and to wear a hat. So, I don't know if you're ever going to stop doing that, but I have to tell you, after reading your book, because this sort of thing, as someone who ... I haven't gone through the Holocaust, it's not in my genetic memory, it's not my legacy, it does ... but it gave me a lot of empathy for what she was going through. I used to wonder, why are you like this? Why are you doing this? I mean, you don't need to call him up, he's in his 50s, to tell him to put on sunscreen.
But it suddenly made me realize it was about watching your family decimated and wanting to keep them close because this is the way that they're going to be safe and they're going to be okay and control, giving you an aspect of ... and the other thing that I noticed, at least with my family is that with my in-laws, is that they don't want to throw anything out because not only did they lose a lot their home in Romania and travel, first they went to Israel and they came to Canada. But then there's all of the struggles as an immigrant, you don't speak the language, you don't have the right accent. Those things are very precious.
But one of the things I wondered about in your book, and I didn't read about it in the book, so you'll forgive me if I just missed it, but what sort of conversations have you had with your sons, you have two sons about the Holocaust? Because their father isn't Jewish, but you're Jewish. This is partly their legacy, but they also have this other legacy of growing up in a very small, idyllic town in America and having that family background as well. So, what kind of conversations have you had?

Rena Lipiner Katz:
Well, when they were little, they knew because they were very close to my parents, but they knew in outlines. We didn't talk about gas chambers, Auschwitz, but it was ... My parents were full of life and more like my paternal grandparents. So, seeing them was a joy because my dad was joyful. And my mom, she married my dad for a reason. He allowed her, he gave her permission, to feel joy. And I think my kids now as adults, they are tracing some of their issues to my issues, which they are giving me a little bit of a ... they're cutting me some slack that I grew up with it, but they're definitely feeling the effects in some way and identifying with being grandchildren of survivors.

Joeita Gupta:
It's really interesting to see this play out over the generations. You mentioned joy and you alluded to happiness. And in the second half of your book, when we get into the 2001, 2003, I suddenly start to feel like I'm talking to this whole other person. You just seem so happy in the book. You've met Ron, you have this wonderful romance, and you get married within six months. And yes, there are still issues and challenges, but you have someone in your corner looking out for you. You call him your bodyguard in the courtroom. And yet, you'll tell me if I misread the book, but those feelings of guilt and that fear seems to recede a little bit in the book at that stage. How did you learn to lead a life without feeling weighed down?

Rena Lipiner Katz:
I think much of it was unconscious in the beginning. So, I have spent a lot of time and the book has helped me make it conscious. Also, I've had good therapy and my husband, he's the kind of person that he puts himself completely last. And literally, his love and his support is so huge that it's like he was my grandparents, my father, my mother all wrapped into one. And Israel, satisfied. As I wrote in my book, it was the answer to every question I never knew I had. And there's something about this shared DNA that I literally feel on the steps of ... walking Tel Aviv.
And I think the book helped me come to a place where I think about the Holocaust more than I ever used to. I hear it, I feel it, but I've accepted that alongside is joy and I can find it and I can honour what happened and the people who were lost and carry them with me always, they'll always be a part of my skin, always.
But it is certainly, it's the prerogative of life, to live and to find joy and to ... I would hate the idea that I transmitted this weighed-down depression. We must not live, we must be sad, to my children. I got that from my father, and my mother. I mean, she was always ... her quest, she never went to high school, went one day and she's ended up writing a book, getting a master's degree. She's a Twitter celeb, reinvents herself. So, I had incredible role models for living, and I firmly believe intellectually and viscerally, that we must live, we must be good people. We must learn and share.

Joeita Gupta:
We have just a few minutes left and I wanted to invite you to read a short excerpt from the book if you would like to. You're more than welcome.

Rena Lipiner Katz:
Okay. I feel it might be a little sad, but it's important because it was really one of the first times I realized what had happened, and I watched the trial of Adolf Eichmann with my mom when I was six years old. She now is horrified that she let me, but she was 20, very young. So, here I go.
"Eichmann's expression was devoid of everything and it was not human. The contrast of his polite, studied stillness, as if he were the guest of honor at a dinner party with the survivors in the room, their faces twisted in remembrance, seemed a study in the casualness of evil. When he spoke in German, I asked my mother what he was saying. I remember looking at her lovely profile as she stared at the television. 'He's saying that he didn't do it,' she answered, and I understood exactly what it was he denied doing. I can still feel the nubs of the coarse fabric of the sofa, how they scratched at my dangling legs as I sat and watched the small black and white television. I knew that Eichmann had tried to kill my parents when they were little children, arousing in me the impulse to protect. But my mother and father had been carefully hidden away by their own parents in Russia, far from their homes in Poland, and so, Eichmann hadn't found them. Because of this Nazi incompetence, my brother and I had been born. This is what I knew then."

Joeita Gupta:
It's a really powerful excerpt from the book. The book is so poignant and it has so many powerful excerpts. It's funny because I didn't tell you to pick this, you picked it yourself. It's funny, but I was talking to my husband about the book and I said, "You really should read this, and I think you'd really like the book." I said, she talks about as a child of six, watching the Eichmann trial on TV. And that was the excerpt I pulled out to talk about with my husband over our ... because I was walking with him and I said, "This is a guest that I have on."
So, we've had many discussions about your book, and I really am very thankful for your courage and determination. It takes a lot of courage to put your story out there. You write this book and you wonder what sort of a reception is it going to get? So, thank you very much for speaking to me today and for putting this book out in the world.

Rena Lipiner Katz:
Thank you, Joeita, so you're so wonderful. Thank you for having me.

Joeita Gupta:
That was Rena Katz, who is the author of A Life Inherited? Unraveling: The Trauma Of A Second Generational Holocaust Survivor. That's all the time we have for today. If you have any feedback, you can write to feedback@ami.ca or give us a call at 1-866-509-4545. That's 1-866-509-4545. And don't forget to leave permission to play the audio on the program.
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