Holocaust Remembrance Day and Transgenerational Trauma
The weight we carry is not ours, but we are stewards of it as it gets passed down.
Updated April 14, 2026 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk
Tonight, at sundown, Israel and Jewish communities worldwide observe Yom HaShoah—Holocaust Remembrance Day—marking the memory of six million Jewish men, women, and children murdered by the Nazis. The date was selected by the Knesset in 1951, placed deliberately on the 27th of Nisan—a week after Passover, invoking the proximity of liberation and catastrophe in the same breath.
I don't mark this day from a comfortable historical distance. It lives in my office, on my wall, in a framed letter.
My grandfather came to the United States, having left his parents behind in Germany. The last letter they wrote him—days before their capture, days before they perished in Dachau—hangs behind my desk. Not as a relic, but as a reminder. Every day I look at it and remind myself that I do not have the luxury of giving up. They did not die so that I could languish.
My grandmother's story is its own kind of miracle. After Kristallnacht shattered what remained of Jewish homes and stores in Nazi Germany, she and her family fled on foot. They made it to Le Havre, France, and boarded what would be the last ship out of Europe. A few days later, that door closed, and fortunately, they were on the right side of it.
Their stories are the foundation everything else is built on.
What the Science Says About Transgenerational Trauma
Transgenerational trauma was first formally recognized in the children of Holocaust survivors. In 1966, psychologists began observing large numbers of these children seeking mental health support at clinics in Canada. The grandchildren of Holocaust survivors were overrepresented by 300 percent among psychiatric referrals compared to their representation in the general population. This represents a generation seeking to rise from the ashes.
Research published in Biological Psychiatry demonstrated for the first time in humans that epigenetic changes caused by trauma can be passed to children born after the event. This is not metaphorical inheritance. Descendants may have been marked epigenetically—a biological memory of what their parents endured—resulting in some who carry heightened vulnerability to stress , while others demonstrate remarkable resilience .
Here is what nobody tells you clearly enough: You did not earn these metaphorical trauma-filled bags. You did not pack them. They were handed to you by people who never unpacked them themselves—not because they were weak, but because survival didn't leave room for that kind of processing. The obligation that falls on each subsequent generation is not to pretend the bags don't exist but, rather, to open them and lighten the load. Pass them forward with meaning intact, but reduced in weight.
Frankl Knew This Before We Had the Science
Viktor Frankl witnessed anti-Semitism, persecution, brutality, and the loss of his wife, his parents, and his brother while being a prisoner himself. Through all of it, his conviction that the search for meaning is the fundamental drive behind human behavior was not just formed; it was confirmed. Among concentration camp inmates, Frankl observed that those who survived connected with a purpose and immersed themselves in imagining it. It was not blind optimism . Rather, it was something harder, and what I call "courageous optimism": the active, disciplined choice to pursue meaning despite circumstances that argue against it. The trifecta of moral will, moral skill, and courage .
My family did not survive the Holocaust as victims. They survived as people who decided that the meaning of what they endured was worth carrying forward. My grandfather built a life in a new country with a letter in his pocket from parents he would never see again. My grandmother raised children on a foundation of gratitude so fierce it bordered on defiance. Neither of them called it logotherapy. I don’t think they could even spell logotherapy. They were simply chicken farmers who just lived it.
Antifragility Is the Goal, Not Resilience
When building back from adversity, resilience is the wrong target. Nassim Taleb's concept of antifragility demands more—systems that don't just recover from stress but grow because of it. Research suggests that children of traumatized parents may inherit traits that promote resilience as well as vulnerability. The epigenetic signal cuts both ways. The same biological legacy that increases stress reactivity may also carry forward adaptive capacities forged in survival.
That letter on my wall is not a wound I keep reopening. It is the weight I carry that tells me exactly how strong I need to be. It is meaning, not burden.
Remembrance without transformation is just grief . The obligation we carry is to convert that weight into something greater than the trauma or ourselves. A career . A calling. A letter on a wall that your grandchildren will someday read and understand. For more than 20 years, I was a police officer to protect others in my community from the evil in society. Today, I work to help police officers grow and protect them from their own endured trauma.
Viktor Frankl survived Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and Dachau. He spent the rest of his life teaching the world that every human being has the freedom to change at any instant, saying that we do not simply exist, but always decide what our existence will be. That is courageous optimism . That is the antidote to inherited helplessness and pessimistic cowardice. That is what it means to honor and remember those who perished in the camps, by refusing to be diminished by the evil and hate that killed them.
We all have heavy bags that get passed from generation to generation. It is our duty to carry those bags, for they are our history. It is also our responsibility to open them and make them lighter for the next generation. For that will be your legacy.
Never again means never forget—but it also means never stop growing. On this Yom HaShoah, 75 years later, I stand as a proud grandson and great-grandson of both victims and victors to honor their sacrifice, grit, and anti-fragility.
Dashorst, P., Mooren, T. M., Kleber, R. J., de Jong, P. J., & Huntjens, R. J. C. (2019). Intergenerational consequences of the Holocaust on offspring mental health: A systematic review of associated factors and mechanisms. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 10 (1), Article 1654065. https://doi.org/10.1080/20008198.2019.1654065
Frankl, V. E. (2006). Man's Search for Meaning. Beacon Press. (Original work published 1946)
Kellermann, N. P. F. (2013). Epigenetic transmission of Holocaust trauma: Can nightmares be inherited? Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences, 50(1), 33–39.
Rakoff, V., Sigal, J. J., & Epstein, N. B. (1966). Children and families of concentration camp survivors. Canada's Mental Health, 14, 24–26.
Schulenberg, S. E., Drescher, C. F., & Baczwaski, B. J. (2021). Searching for meaning in chaos: Viktor Frankl's story. Frontiers in Psychology. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8763215/
Taleb, N. N. (2012). Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder. Random House.
Yehuda, R., Daskalakis, N. P., Bierer, L. M., Bader, H. N., Klengel, T., Holsboer, F., & Binder, E. B. (2016). Holocaust exposure induced intergenerational effects on FKBP5 methylation. Biological Psychiatry, 80 (5), 372–380.
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David Berez, MAPP, is a retired police officer and positive psychology practitioner.
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.