The suffering of concentration camp victims at the hands of the Nazis during World War II Is having a distressing effect on their children who were born after the holocaust, a prominent psychiatrist said at a lecture here. Dr. Vivian Rakoff, a member of the department of psychiatry at Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, said that the children of concentration camp families were often extremely depressed or potential delinquents. Dr. Rakoff spoke at a meeting sponsored by the psychiatry department of McMaster University here.
“These kids were treated like young princelings,” he said. “Their parents felt that they were so precious that they wouldn’t discipline them or they were so tired they just didn’t have the energy to do so.” ‘The offspring of the camp survivors were expected to fulfill the lives of all those the Nazis destroyed.”
“These children found it difficult to express the anger and resentment they often felt toward their parents because of the realization of what they had suffered. But when they hit adolescence, the explosion is often violent,” Dr. Rakoff said. He cited two cases of attempted suicide by teen aged children of parents who survived Nazi concentration camps. “We must have been idiots to think that the effects of these terrible experiences wouldn’t be passed on to a future generation,” he said.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
