The Disturbing Effects of Trauma and Intergenerational Trauma As Portrayed in the Novel Klara’s Truth

By Susan Weissbach

In my novel, Klara’s Truth, I explore the effects of both direct trauma and intergenerational trauma on the main characters’ lives. People generally understand the effects of direct trauma; however, the term “intergenerational trauma” was coined in the 1960s and 1970s when Holocaust survivors and their children were being evaluated through psychological research studies. It quickly became apparent that the emotional and psychological effects of trauma particularly a huge trauma, like surviving a concentration camp, can get passed down from a parent who directly experienced it to their children who did not, through behavioral and emotional dynamics as well as through epigenetics, many people now believe. Epigenetics examines how factors like environment and behavior can impact the expression of which genes are turned on or off and considers that these changes can get passed down from one generation to the next.

It’s now been understood and accepted in the fields of psychology and social science for a while that both direct and intergenerational trauma can lead to symptoms of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, (PTSD). PTSD includes symptoms of hypervigilance, anxiety, and mood dysregulation, like depression. The concept of intergenerational trauma gained further traction the 1980s with studies on Native American communities. It has since been applied to various groups affected by historical traumas, such as systematic oppression and war. Today the term, intergenerational trauma is widely used to describe the inherited effects of trauma such as child abuse, including physical, sexual, and emotional abuse and neglect as well as later negatively impactful large events like war, natural disasters, and attacks, in addition to systematic oppression.

In Klara’s Truth, the protagonist, Klara, experiences direct trauma from a mother who is quite narcissistic, critical and neglectful, apparent abandonment by her father at age six, and abuse by a close family friend as a pre-teen. As her father’s parents perished in a concentration camp, coming to a new country by himself as a teenager, he was easily cajoled into marrying Klara’s mother, an unloving person, and someone he likely would not have chosen for himself had he had the support of his own family. While he loved Klara, he had become a shell of his former self after the War and began drinking. Klara’s aunt, Rachel, her father’s sister, who continued to reside in Warsaw, was also impacted by the death of her parents in a concentration camp and then the forced separation from her brother. In addition, she had to hide her Jewish identity while she worked for a Nazi German family during the War. In raising her own child, Hannah, she was always worried about Hannah’s and her husband’s whereabouts, particularly if they were a second later than they were supposed to be, experiencing constant hypervigilance about her loved ones.

It is important to understand that people can behave quite differently following a trauma depending on a number of factors. For example, Holocaust survivors were so traumatized that many went to one extreme or the other of either retelling their stories over and again or staying silent. Unintentionally, many of these survivors’ children experienced depression, fear, anxiety and guilt in both scenarios. Even when there was silence and secrets were kept, there were often symptoms of anxiety and depression displayed by these parents which understandably often got passed down to their children.

 In order to help trauma survivors better manage their emotions and nervous systems which can get stuck in fight, flight, or freeze mode, psychoeducation and trauma-informed therapy can be very helpful. Ideally, this therapy would incorporate body work in addition to psychodynamic work, or talk therapy, as trauma often gets stuck in the body’s nervous system. When someone has been through a trauma and has emotional support afterward, they fare far better than if they did not have that support both in the short-term and most definitely in the long-term. As an author, I had the luxury of giving Klara something I could never give to her as a therapist, a family in Poland who were generally ready to welcome her. That and future psychotherapy sessions, including Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR), a well-known psychotherapy approach designed to help individuals heal from traumatic experiences through bilateral stimulation, supported Klara in being able to come out of freeze and begin to connect with herself and others in much more significant ways, thus having a fuller, deeper, and larger life.
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Susan Weissbach, LCSW (Friedman) has been a psychotherapist for over twenty-five years with a trauma -focused specialty and is the author of Klara’s Truth, her first novel, published by She Writes Press in June, 2024

KLARA’S TRUTH

It is May 2014, and Dr. Klara Lieberman—forty-nine, single, professor of archaeology at a small liberal arts college in Maine, a contained person living a contained life—has just received a letter from her estranged mother, Bessie, that will dramatically change her life. Her father, she learns—the man who has been absent from her life for the last forty-three years, and about whom she has long been desperate for information—is dead. Has been for many years, in fact, which Bessie clearly knew. But now the Polish government is giving financial reparations for land it stole from its Jewish citizens during WWII, and Bessie wants the money. Klara has little interest in the money—but she does want answers about her father. She flies to Warsaw, determined to learn more.

In Poland, Klara begins to piece together her father’s, and her own, story. She also connects with extended family, begins a romantic relationship, and discovers her calling: repairing the hundreds of forgotten, and mostly destroyed, pre-War Jewish cemeteries in Poland. Along the way, she becomes a more integrated, embodied, and interpersonally connected individual—one with the tools to make peace with her past and, for the first time in her life, build purposefully toward a bigger future.

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Category: On Writing