In February 2024, I began work on a book that focus on intergenerational trauma in descendants of Holocaust survivors. A large piece of this project involves interviewing a cross-section of those descendants. That process is currently underway. I have already interviewed over a dozen second generation (G2) and third generation (G3) survivors. What caught my attention is the number of instances of epigenetics that I’ve come across.

A 2015 study suggests that children of Holocaust survivors may have been marked epigenetically with a chemical coating upon their chromosomes. This would represent a kind of biological memory of what their parents experienced. As a result, some suffer from a general vulnerability to stress while others are more resilient. I see this in my own family. Previous research assumed that such transmission was caused by environmental factors, such as the parents’ childrearing behavior. New research, however, indicates that these transgenerational effects may have been also genetically transmitted to their children. Integrating both hereditary and environmental factors, epigenetics adds a new comprehensive psychobiological dimension to the explanation of transgenerational transmission of trauma.

I have been on the fence when it comes to epigenetics but I’m quickly coming around. These are several cases that I’ve already come across. I don’t have an explanation for these incidents. I’m merely reporting what I have been told.

At some point, later in life, a survivor moved in with his daughter’s family. On the first day, the family was having dinner and there was bread on the table. He picked up a piece of bread and froze, staring at the bread. His 5-year-old granddaughter reached over and interrupted his episode by touching his arm and said, “granddad I know you died many times when you were a child, but you’re safe now. Eat the bread.” Because of her young age, she had never been told about the Holocaust. Yet, she seemed to have shared his flashback.

In another case, a young boy described memories of things shortly after he began speaking. There’s no logical explanation for the things that he knew and has said. He told his mother, that he didn’t want them to pull him out of her arms and that he didn’t want to go on a train. His great grandparents lost their first child while on the platform going to Auschwitz. The child had been ripped out of the great grandmother’s arms at gunpoint and put into a separate cattle car. The child was never seen again. This story had never been shared with young boy.

One survivor had permanent scars on his back from being whipped in the camps. His son described how he experienced dreams about being in the camps. This is not unusual. But he also developed red marks on his back as a child that resembled his father’s scars. At one point, the family’s doctor brought in the family because he suspected that the young boy was being beaten at home.

Memories are not just stored in your mind but in your body and in DNA. It is theorized that genetic memory can be inherited and be present at birth in the absence of any other sensory experience. Epigenetic changes are reversible and do not change DNA sequence but they can change the way a body reads a DNA sequence. I am sure I will come across further examples in my interviews.