Wounded and sick survivors, Russians, Poles, and Jews, sitting on a bench inside a barracks in Buchenwald concentration camp.

Wounded and sick survivors, Russians, Poles, and Jews, sitting on a bench inside a barracks in Buchenwald concentration camp.

The original caption reads, "A benchful of diseased prisoners, largely Russian, some Polish. Here are many Jews in these barracks, some can be seen in the tiers of the beds which are behind the hospital group."

Psychological trauma and the Holocaust.
Do children and grandchildren of survivors suffer similar trauma?

Following the liberation of the concentration camps in 1945, Holocaust survivors set forth on their newest journey -- the quest for a new life, home, and family. Often they suppressed the trauma they sustained during the Holocaust, pushing it to the backs of their minds, distancing themselves from the terror and the grief to embrace their new lives. Despite their best efforts to “move on,” however, for many this shroud of wellness eventually gave way to a host of emotional and psychological difficulties. Their inability to mourn or to acknowledge their own suffering led them to exhibit a variety of symptoms. Over time, psychiatrists began to identify and to study these symptoms, grouping them under such names as “survivor syndrome,” “concentration camp syndrome,” and “post-traumatic stress disorder.” The trauma of the Holocaust, quite obviously, did not end at liberation.

Photo below :
Wounded and sick survivors, Russians, Poles, and Jews, sitting on a bench inside a barracks in Buchenwald concentration camp. —--United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Arnold Bauer Barach