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This exploratory study looks at how families of Holocaust survivors work through the traumatic past by considering the coping patterns adapted by family members. Life-story interviews (Rosenthal, 1993) with 57 individuals from 20 families, in which there were two to three generations, were used in order to learn about the significance they attach to the Holocaust past. The interviews were analyzed using Rosenthal's methods and Danieli's (1988) typology of post-war adaptation (victim families, fighter families, those who made it, and numb families). Results showed that in order to differentiate between the coping styles exhibited by the families, two new categories had to be added to Danieli's typology. These were entitled "life goes on" and "split families." It was concluded that survivor families exhibit heterogeneity in the ways in which they cope with the Holocaust past.
Fam Proc 42:305-322, 2003
As the years go by, understanding the significance the Holocaust has for the survivors and their descendants often appears to become a more complex, rather than an easier undertaking. Until the end of the 1980s, many researchers tended to focus their questions on the problems of being a survivor (the first generation) or of being a child of a survivor (Danieli, 1982; Davidson, 1980; Kestenberg, 1980; Neiderland, 1968; Wardi, 1990). In the 1990s, this focus changed as scholars began asking how the descendants of Holocaust survivors, including their grandchildren, understand the meaning the Holocaust past has for them (Bar-On, 1995; Bar-On, Ostrovsky, & Fromer, 1998; Chaitin, 2000a; Rosenthal, 1998). While much, though by no means all, of the research on the first and second generations has tended to highlight the pathological elements found in clinical samples (Kestenberg, 1980; Lifton, 1988; Wardi, 1990), research on the third generation tends to investigate nonclinical populations and to focus on the significance young adults attribute to the Holocaust past.
Studying the long-term effects of the Holocaust on families has shown that the "legacy" of the Holocaust trauma has been passed on in some degree to the descendants of the victims of the Holocaust (Bar-On, 1996; Danieli, 1998; Solomon, 1998). However, there is still more to be learned about how families of survivors deal with the past. While much has been written about the intergenerational transmission of the trauma, including...