According to a new study conducted by researchers at Mount Sinai Hospital, Holocaust survivors could have passed to their children the trauma they suffered from.
The research was published in the Biological Psychiatry Journal and it contains 32 tests on Jewish men and women who had been at concentration camps during the Holocaust, witnessed or experienced torture, or had to hide from the Nazis during World War II. After examination of the genes of 22 of their adult offspring, researchers compared them to Jewish families who did not experience any of the events in Europe during the Nazis’ rule.
The children of Holocaust survivors were found to be less likely to handle anxiety when exposed to a traumatic event and 3 times more like to develop post-traumatic stress than demographically similar Jewish people whose parents did not experience the Holocaust. Also, children of Holocaust survivors were found to have the same genetic changes and abnormalities with their parents as well as with other people suffering post-traumatic stress disorder.
EVIDENCE OF THE EPIGENETIC INHERITANCE THEORY?
This is the first time that a research becomes an evidence to support the theory of epigenetic inheritance, according to which, environmental factors can alter the genes of offspring. In the past, a research showed that some chemical marks were able to pass to the next generation, but this is the first time we see life experiences of a person have an impact on future generations’ psychology.
The researchers though did not approach the study with psychological tests, as someone could suppose, but they focused on a gene which is affected by trauma and is known to be associated with the regulation of stress hormones. Both the survivors and their children showed epigenetic marks on the same part of that gene, which were not found of families who did not survive the Holocaust.
CHILDREN OF HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS STARTED THE STUDY
Dr. Yehuda, professor of Holocaust Studies at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, says that after setting up a clinic for Holocaust survivors at Mount Sinai hospital, they started receiving phone calls not from the survivors themselves, but from their children.
“They talked about feeling traumatized by witnessing the symptoms of their parents. And they talked about being traumatized by some of the expectations that the Holocaust had placed on them, such as that they are the reason their parents survived and, therefore, there was a whole set of things that they would now have to accomplish so that all the people that died— they could give their lives meaning. They had difficulty in any kind of a separation circumstance — divorce and those kinds of things. And they described essentially this problem in separating from their parents,” he said.
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