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Remembering Rhodes and the Holocaust: intergenerational trauma, nostalgia and identity
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Date
2021
Abstract
This study examines the transmission of life experiences from Holocaust survivors and Jews of the diaspora to following generations within the family system. The focus is on the experiences of the Jewish community of Rhodes with its extensive international diasporic community. The Holocaust provides a representative example of transgenerational trauma with relevance to other threats of conflict. The main source for the Holocaust survivors’ experiences are the interviews conducted during the 1990s, available at the Visual History Archive of the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation. In a follow-on study, second and third generation relatives of those survivors were interviewed in 2019, in order to explore how memory, identity, trauma, and nostalgia are communicated across generations. This is a transactional study on the transmission of trauma, involving people from different nationalities reflecting the global community of diaspora: even unrelated from one another, they can have similar characteristics on transmission of trauma and memory; what binds them are these experiences in the narratives of trauma, nostalgia through creating a memory. The study discusses how survivors told their stories, and how their descendants face those experiences; what and how they know, and keep or transform them. The contents of interviews demonstrate aspects of transgenerational trauma and nostalgia; individual and collective memory, followed by the memorialization process; as well as the identity formation through the lens of the Holocaust, culture, and meaningful relationships. The study links history and psychology, and as such can aid people around the world to identify their personal and familiar traumas and develop their identities.
Supervisor
Description
Peer-reviewed
Publisher
University of Limerick