War, Epigenetics, & the Bodily Archive of Trauma
Have we forgotten the lessons of World War II?
Yesterday was Memorial Day in the United States, a holiday created to honor soldiers who served in the military from World War I onward. The term memorial derives from the Latin words that signify of or belonging to memory.
And yet, the celebratory long weekend-ness, the way the holiday augurs the beginning of summer, the lines upon lines of tiny American flags on graves all obscure the purpose of the holiday: to re-member the threads that connect our past, present, and future.
Today, I’d like to share a portion of my parents’ story through the lens of memory, how our bodies store ancestral memories, and how these re-memberings become the biological inheritance of future generations.
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In 1939, when my mother was seven years old, Hitler began WWII by attacking Poland from the West, Soon after, Soviet forces invaded from the East, violating a non-aggression pact signed seven years prior. The Soviet authorities declared Poland “nonexistent” and all Polish citizens to be Soviets.
Russia has long employed similar dehumanizing tactics with Ukraine and with the Crimean Tatar people, but this seems lost in the rhetoric, the back-and-forth of global thought and strategy about Russia’s war on Ukraine. Read about Russia’s persecution of the Crimean Tatars, one of Ukraine’s many indigenous populations, here and here.
In the middle of a cold February night in 1940, Russian troops came to our family’s small farm, gave them 30 minutes to gather their belongings, and ordered them at gunpoint on a train to Siberia. The soldiers placed hundreds of thousands of Poles on cattle cars—as many as 90 in each one—with slatted openings for ventilation. (Witness the way dehumanization targets bodies, equating human bodies with livestock in attempt to break the will of a people.) The cars were unheated; during the 4- to 6-week journey, many—often children and elders—died of cold or illness. The trains stopped each day to empty the bodies of the dead into the snowy tundra below.
For the next two years, my mother and her family were prisoners of war in the Gulag, the Soviet system of labor camps. The Russian soldiers treated them brutally; of those who survived the exodus from Poland, countless perished in the camps. Most did not attempt to flee; to do so would place them alone in the Ural Mountains in the bitter cold of winter, with neither provisions nor protection from wild animals.
For most of my life, I have harbored a fear of not having enough food, despite never having gone hungry. Just the prospect of running out of something—coffee, for instance, or arugula—triggers a compulsion to replenish it. I’ve never understood this fear; it has felt like a neurotic tic, an embarrassing manifestation of privilege.
During Covid, my siblings and I Skyped with our family in England. Over the course of checking in, I confessed my food anxiety, which had worsened during the pandemic. In response my aunt, now 94, shared a chilling story about our family’s experiences in World War II.
Daily rations, my aunt said, consisted of a single piece of bread for each person. My aunt, who was at ten the oldest, gave the pieces every evening to her younger sisters, who wept from the stomach pains caused by hunger.
One morning, my grandmother snuck into a field to gather small pieces of carrots and potatoes for her family, concealing them in the hem of her skirt. A Russian soldier and his guard dog discovered her; he let her go, warning her never to return. Just before dawn the next morning, however, she did return; it was a matter of survival. The soldier spotted her and gave chase. As dawn began to break, my grandmother recalled, a miracle occurred: A mist descended, so thick that it obscured her arms extending before her as she ran from the soldier. She eluded him and his dog, but became so lost herself that it took a full day to find her way back to camp.
In 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, which responded by signing an agreement to free Polish citizens who had survived the labor camps in order for the Poles to raise an army. For those imprisoned in Siberia, there was a small window of time for liberation. My mother’s family was sent, with legions of other prisoners, to Kazakhstan, Iran, and then finally to Uganda, where they settled for the remainder of the war.
My grandfather had survived a labor camp where the men would sleep side to side to summon enough body heat to survive. Each morning, he would turn his head to the left and then the right to check on his fellow prisoners; many mornings, he would find that both the one on the left and the one on the right had died. He walked and took trains to get to Uganda to see his family before enlisting. Just over thirty years old when the war began, he had lost fifty pounds, had a nimbus of white hair, and lacked several of his teeth; he looked so shockingly different that my mother and her younger sister did not recognize him.
Most people are not aware that an estimated 5.5 million Poles were killed in World War II; about half were Polish Jews. Another 150,000 Poles died at the hands of the Soviets.
My father, an American, served in the U.S. Army’s 3rd Armored “Spearhead” Division which liberated the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp near Nordhausen; he took shocking photographs there and wrote about the Holocaust. Despite this, he evidenced no outward signs of stress. It therefore came as a shock when, while home on a break from graduate school, I opened the medicine cabinet to find a prescription for Librium. “It’s for my anxiety,” he said casually, allowing that he’d lived with it for most of his life to an occasionally debilitating degree.
When he was 78 years old, my father had a quadruple bypass. I returned to the hospital early in the afternoon following his surgery with a pint of Cool Britannia, his favorite ice cream, to find him weeping inconsolably. “What’s wrong, Dad?” I asked, alarmed. “I should have killed you three myself,” he sobbed, “before they could exterminate you.” Amid the confusion caused by anesthesia, Dad’s recollections of Dora-Mittelbau had resurfaced. Thinking he was speaking with my ghost, he confessed that he would rather his children have died by his own compassionate hand than submit to atrocities worse even than death.
Epigenetics and the Bodily Archive of Trauma
An emerging body of research, still controversial but documented in highly respected journals, examines the epigenetic legacy of trauma—the way, in the words of scientists Rachel Yehuda and Amy Lehrner, it gets under our skin. The field of epigenetics explores how trauma orchestrates variations not in the DNA or genetic code, but in gene expression or suppression that can echo for multiple generations.
Yehuda and colleagues found, for example, that parents’ Holocaust exposure is related to blood genome-wide gene expression patterns in their adult children. In a 2016 study of the children of Holocaust survivors, they found lower baseline levels of the stress hormone cortisol (indicative of a dysregulated stress response), and a distinctive pattern of an epigenetic marker known as DNA methylation.
Epidemiological studies of people have revealed similar patterns. One of the best-known cases is the Dutch Hongerwinter, or hunger winter, a famine that gripped the Netherlands in the closing months of World War II. A German blockade stopped shipments of food and fuel, affecting nearly 4.5 million people and resulting in 22,000 deaths. Researchers found that the children of women pregnant during the food shortages died earlier than peers born just before, and had higher rates of obesity, diabetes, and schizophrenia. Studies of other groups suggested the children of parents who had starved early in life—even in the womb—had more heart disease.
Through the lens of my parents’ experiences, I have begun to reexamine my acute alarm at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as well as several chronic patterns: a vigilance toward danger and a need to safeguard family members. A history of auto-immune and inflammatory issues. ADHD. Chronically low levels of cortisol. Frequent bouts of fear of food scarcity. And, much harder to acknowledge, a lack of empathy toward today’s Russians, even those who fled their country to avoid transcription.
Memory is not just a cognitive or neural mechanism, perpetuated by electrical signals and chemical synapses and functional connectivity; it is an embodied one. Memory is a facet of embodied experience—and with this, it is a seed of social equity.
Autocrats, and those who aspire to be so, know this, which is why one of the key steps to establishing autocracy is to target, even to erase, collective memory.
The Importance of Cultural Memory
Historians have long documented the bone-jarring fact that Hitler drew upon the United States as “inspiration” for his genocidal aims. Thomas Jefferson talked about the “need” to “exterminate” Native people. The founding fathers wrote enslavement into the U.S. constitution. In the first months of the war, Hitler frequently referenced the American West. The Volga River (in Russia), he said, would be Germany’s “Mississippi.”
In his extraordinary and brutal December 2022 cover story in the Atlantic, Monuments to the Unthinkable, Clint Smith III documents the way Germany is coming to terms with and offering testimony to the crimes against humanity in their recent (and increasingly remote) past. Smith writes,
“The English translation for Stolperstein is “stumbling stone.” Each 10-by-10-centimeter concrete block is covered in a brass plate, with engravings that memorialize someone who was a victim of the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. The name, birthdate, and fate of each person are inscribed, and the stones are typically placed in front of their final residence. Most of the Stolpersteine commemorate the lives of Jewish people, but some are dedicated to Sinti and Roma, disabled people, gay people, and other victims of the Holocaust.
In 1996, the German artist Gunter Demnig, whose father fought for Nazi Germany in the war, began illegally placing these stones into the sidewalk of a neighborhood in Berlin. Initially, Demnig’s installations received little attention. But after a few months, when authorities discovered the small memorials, they deemed them an obstacle to construction work and attempted to get them removed. The workers tasked with pulling them out refused.
In 2000, Demnig’s Stolperstein installations began to be officially sanctioned by local governments. Today, more than 90,000 stumbling stones have been set into the streets and sidewalks of 30 European countries. Together, they make up the largest decentralized memorial in the world.”
One of the most effective devices at autocrats’ disposal is erasing the cultural memory of their people most connected to power and privilege.
At the close of 2021, Putin shuttered Memorial, a leading Russian human rights organization which has worked ceaselessly to document and honor victims of the Great Terror and Soviet oppression. He is working to erase the epigenetic record of past, present, and likely future atrocities. Nearly half of young Russians do not know that Stalin murdered between 3.5 and 7 million Ukrainians, or of the Great Purge, in which he killed 750,000 of his own people. In fact, a 2019 poll found that 70% of Russians actually approve of Stalin’s role in history.
And yet, of course, this isn’t something happening “way over there” in Russia.
Book Banning and the Rewriting of History in the U.S.
A battle of the same sort is raging in the United States today. In many states, far-right politicians have launched campaigns to prevent the accurate teaching of history, including the American perpetration of Native genocide and the enslavement of Black people. Despite the fact that over 70% of parents are against banning books, Pen America reports a growing number of bans that target books containing material related to race, history, sexual orientation, and gender, most recently and notably the banning of inaugural poet laureate Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem “The Hill We Climb.”
These politicians and their followers claim that the direct acknowledgment of systemic racism and inequity are delusions of the “woke left.” At the same time, they openly praise Viktor Orban, Hungary’s autocratic leader, or willingly confess their sympathies lie with Vladimir Putin.
We are also seeing laws that attack the bodily autonomy of women, LGBTQ+ folks, and a doubling down of systemic racism and oppression.
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The phrase Never Forget, invoked more frequently since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, refers to the atrocities of the Holocaust, as though those atrocities are far removed from our own countries.
But in order to never forget, we must first re-member.
In the U.S. today, the lack of ancestral memory for many of us is also a burden. The U.S. has not faced its trauma, and we can now see the way that this disembodiment is being enacted in harmful ways.
The field of trauma deploys a range of effective tools to treat posttraumatic stress. But epigenetic trauma poses clinical challenges. It requires that we exhume what Christina Sharpe and other scholars refer to as the bodily archive of trauma. This is not easy when the past is not the immediate one we’ve lived. The memories, emotions, and meaning associated with the trauma are buried in our ancestors’ experience; they drift, ghostlike, just out of reach only to detonate suddenly with a shocking immediacy and sharpness.
It’s time to birth a new field. A novel way of embodying historical trauma. A unique language with which to discuss it.
I firmly believe that we’re up to the task.
Recently, I found this video of my mother’s older sister, who is still alive, talking about the early hours and days of their deportation. If you have family members or ancestors that went through similar experiences, please take care watching.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=399641120872200