How My Father’s Silence about the Holocaust Influenced My Becoming an Analyst

The Holocaust has been the great unknown in my life. It has undoubtedly contributed to my becoming a psychoanalyst.

My father, born in Germany in 1925, rarely talked about his childhood or his parents who sent him to England in the Kindertransport in 1939 and then were killed in 1942. I don’t remember him mentioning his mother until I was well into my teens, and I have only one recollection of him talking about my grandfather. Nothing he said about them dealt with the Holocaust. What little I knew my mother told me, and in words designed to shield me from the truth. When I was probably no more than six, she said something along the lines of “Daddy lost his parents.” I didn’t understand; I was a child who would wander off in department stores, “getting lost,” assuming that was what had happened to them.

It was in my early adolescence that I figured out on my own that the Nazis had killed my grandparents. It was a process of deduction. I knew my father was a German Jew and that his parents had died some years after my father had left. I’m not sure when or how I made the connection that they had been murdered.

No one told me that my father was in the Kindertransport. I knew my parents had met as children in England, where my mother, who was also Jewish, was born. My mother did tell me when I was in my teens that my grandparents had sent my father out of Germany because it would be easier for them to leave if they didn’t have to also care for him. When I learned in adulthood about the Kindertransport, I deduced that it had been my father’s escape route.

I grew up in a home that observed Jewish traditions like the Passover seder, which encourages the asking of questions. Instead, information was withheld in my family, I believe to protect me from the painful truth. However, as an analyst, I have come to understand that withholding was also an attempt to protect my father

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from the guilt, shame, and grief he carried, which he only began to barely reveal in the last decade of his life. At that point, I was already well on my way to becoming an analyst.

One of my childhood memories is of my mother saying that my father was angry with himself because, when Nazi soldiers were going through the family home one day, he was frightened and ran out into the fields where his father was, leaving his mother alone. That narrative remained undisturbed until my father mentioned Kristallnacht in an e-mail in the late 1990s, alluding to what his mother endured when Nazi soldiers stormed through the house. My grandfather was actually in Buchenwald at the time. Whatever happened that night is still a mystery to me, but I know it was something horrific that a 13-year-old boy could not prevent or stop and that the man he became could not talk about it.

How much he tried to lessen his pain by withholding became clear to me when I was about 40 and he about 70. My father had gone to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, to look up records about his parents, and he later told me the documents said my grandparents were “lost in the East.” After my father died, I looked up the records online. They are from the “List of murdered Jews from Germany.” The website says his parents were “murdered/perished in Eastern Europe.”

Why didn’t I ask my father about what happened to him and his parents? By my early 20s, I did want to know. My mother told me not to ask him; she said he didn’t want to talk about it, that he hardly ever mentioned it to her. That was enough for me to never broach the topic with him. I felt it was more important to protect him from pain than it was for me to get the answers I sought.

It is widely understood and accepted among analysts that one reason why we enter this profession is a desire, conscious or unconscious, to cure, fix, or help a parent. Psychoanalytic literature contains many theories about what motivates people to become analysts or therapists. Alice Miller (The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self, 1997) sums them up well: “The therapist’s sensibility, empathy, responsiveness and powerful ‘antennae’ indicate that as a child he probably used to fulfill other people’s needs and to repress his own” (p. 19).

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I was what is called a parentified child, although it was my mother whom my parents outwardly demanded I care for. In the last years of my father’s life, after he had a stroke and developed dementia, I was his emotional caretaker. Every other weekend, I drove from New York to Delaware to visit him. I was continually trying to anticipate his needs, lift his spirits, and soothe him when he was angry. Of course, I did this out of very great love for him. However, I also came to realize I had unconsciously acted as his caretaker for much of my life, and the reason was the wounded and traumatized child who had been through the Holocaust. Although I didn’t know the details of what happened to him, I knew he had suffered and continued to suffer, and I wanted to help and comfort him.

It was a natural progression then for me to become an analyst, entering a profession in which I listen to and provide care for people who are suffering. At least in the early stages of a treatment, I don’t know why they are suffering, much as I didn’t know in the first part of my life about my father’s pain. I am again repressing my needs in the service of caring for others. One might also argue that I do this in unconscious hopes of winning the approval of my patients, as I continually did with my parents.

It wasn’t until I was well into adulthood, and probably well into my two analyses, that I began to grasp just how much I had grown up in an atmosphere of “don’t ask, don’t tell.” The years of not knowing and not being allowed to know about my father and the Holocaust also contributed to my choice of work. As an analyst, I am free, within the bounds of good technique, to ask questions. I am allowed to know about my patients’ pain. They let me know over the course of our work what happened to them. I realize that I am seeking, through each patient, an easing of the prohibition against asking and knowing from my childhood.

I also provide for patients the holding environment that

D.W. Winnicott said a mother gives her child in “The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship” (The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1960). The holding environment is a place where a mother shields a child from what Winnicott calls impingements that would harm the child’s sense of self. It is an integral part of psychoanalysis. Analysts listen without voicing judgment. We toler-

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ate anger and aggression, even when it is directed at us. We don’t force patients to explore painful feelings, subjects, or events if it isn’t right for them.

That was the same holding environment that I created for my father. I let him withhold the truth when he needed to be protected from pain. I let him be angry and difficult as an elderly man who was raging not only at the circumstances at the time, but also unconsciously at the horrors the Nazis forced upon him. When I became an analyst, I was already well schooled and perhaps comfortable in providing a holding environment, having done so for my father for decades.

Yet with many patients, I can also use the holding environment to help them work through and move beyond some of their pain. My father lived a remarkable life given the emotional burdens he carried. I cannot say that he was ever able to work through the pain.

Many children of survivors grew up with parents who were silent about the past. The children—and not just those of Holocaust survivors—have a sense that there is a secret, that something is being withheld. One, Helen Fremont, reveals in her book After Long Silence (2000) that she and her sister didn’t know they were Jewish until they reached adulthood. There were many other things Fremont did not know, such as “What I didn’t realize was that all our names had been recently invented. … To this day, I don’t know what my mother’s real name is” (p. 18).

Fremont became a public defender, a profession where she can also seek the truth as does her sister who became a psychiatrist. My experience with a parent who survived the Holocaust wasn’t unique.

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