23 August marks the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Totalitarian Regimes – a day on which we pay tribute to those who suffered as a result of the violence of totalitarian systems in the 20th century - systems based on control, repression and ideological enslavement. This year's campaign "Remember. 23 August", organised by the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity, focuses on intergenerational trauma – one of the most complex aspects of historical heritage. Although it leaves no visible scars, it can permeate generations and influence entire societies, shaping relationships, identities, ways of thinking and reacting.
We invited a distinguished researcher to reflect on this topic: Professor Michał Bilewicz, a social psychologist and author of Traumaland, a book on the social effects of violence and collective memory.
ENRS, Mariola Cyra: What exactly is intergenerational trauma?
Professor Michał Bilewicz: In psychology, intergenerational trauma is the phenomenon of traumatic experiences being passed on from one generation to the next – not only in a narrative sense, but mainly in a psychological dimension, affecting the mental health of descendants. This phenomenon became the focus of intensive study in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly in Israel. At that time, it was noticed that veterans returning from the war in Lebanon, whose parents were Holocaust survivors, showed significantly stronger symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than those whose parents had not had such experiences. Research conducted at the time by Solomon, Kotler and Mikulincera showed that trauma can affect the sensitivity of subsequent generations to stressors, causing them to react more strongly to new, difficult situations.
Systematic research on this phenomenon is still being conducted in Israel today. Among other things, there is a research panel involving descendants of Holocaust survivors and people with identical demographic profiles but from families without such experiences, such as those who lived in the former Soviet Union or the Middle East during the war. They are regularly surveyed, both in everyday situations and in times of crisis. In stressful situations, the differences are clear: descendants of survivors are more likely to experience mood swings, anxiety, symptoms of depression or PTSD.
At the same time, Professor van IJzendoorn's meta-analyses show that in everyday conditions there are no significant differences in mental health between descendants of trauma victims and people from families without such experiences. Differences only appear in response to stressors – and it is this increased sensitivity to threat that is one of the key mechanisms of intergenerational trauma.
Of course, this clinical understanding of the phenomenon is only one perspective. I am also interested in the social consequences of such trauma, such as heightened distrust, a tendency to believe in conspiracy theories, hypersensitivity and anxiety. These are traits that cannot be reduced solely to mental disorders – they are rather manifestations of a specific social functioning shaped by the legacy of past traumas.
To what extent have totalitarian regimes left their mark not only on history but also on the psyche of society? Can we talk about post-traumatic societies?
Yes, we can definitely talk about such societies. In transcultural psychiatry, but also increasingly in psychology, the term historical trauma is used in this context, which differs from transgenerational trauma. The latter refers mainly to psychological or psychiatric effects passed down from generation to generation. Historical trauma, on the other hand, is a broader phenomenon that encompasses the ways in which societies adapt to extreme experiences – war, occupation, ethnic cleansing or genocide – and how these adaptations persist even when external conditions change.
After the end of a war or the fall of a regime, people formally return to normal life, but their social functioning continues to bear the marks of those experiences. We see this, for example, in entrenched mistrust, especially towards strangers, representatives of other nations or states. Fears and anxieties arise easily and resonate strongly, especially when they concern children or women – groups that have been particularly vulnerable to violence in the past. In societies that have experienced mass child deaths, rape or other forms of large-scale violence, threats of this kind trigger very strong reactions – much stronger than in societies that have not gone through such trauma.
Although intergenerational trauma refers to the experiences of past generations, its effects can also be felt by those who did not themselves experience war, repression or persecution. How does this happen?
This is a very interesting phenomenon, which has been well described by Michael Wohl and Jay van Bavel in their research among Canadian Jews. They noticed that symptoms of transgenerational trauma also appeared in people who did not have direct victims of the Holocaust among their ancestors – their families were already living in Canada during the war. The key factor here was not family history, but the strength of identification with the community. People who strongly identified with the Jewish community showed more pronounced symptoms of transgenerational trauma.
This shows that the transmission of trauma is not limited to family relationships. Of course, there is a hypothesis of epigenetic trauma transfer – i.e. biological adaptation inherited by subsequent generations – but so far there is little hard evidence for this. Cultural or social transmission is much better documented.
Trauma can be transmitted through family stories, silence, parental behaviour, but also through education, the media, rituals of remembrance or anniversary celebrations. Cultural transmission – what is said (or not said) about the past in a given community – can shape the perception of history to the same extent as individual family experiences. It is this social dimension of trauma that causes even people with no personal connection to a past tragedy to experience it as part of their own identity and respond to it emotionally.
Can people born after 1990, who grew up in a free Europe, carry the emotional legacy of totalitarian systems? How does this manifest itself – in relationships, identity, language?
The way the younger generation of Poles functions – especially those born after 1989 – is indeed very interesting and sometimes even surprising. In the research conducted by my PhD student, Damien Stewart, an Australian who analysed the phenomenon of transgenerational trauma in Poland, an intriguing observation emerged: the highest level of transgenerational PTSD symptoms is not found among the children of people who survived the occupation, but in the third generation, i.e. the grandchildren of those who experienced the war. This surprising phenomenon shows that trauma can return with a certain delay.
This generation grew up in the reality of transformation and free Poland, but also during a period of a certain renaissance of traumatic memory, which began at the start of the new millennium with the establishment of the Warsaw Uprising Museum and later with the intensification of the narrative about the Cursed Soldiers. Memories of war and violence began to return strongly to the public sphere – in mass culture, museums and education.
How can mass culture, monuments, museum narratives and school textbooks contribute to healing or, conversely, deepening trauma?
If we look at school textbooks and reading lists, we see that young people learn about the occupation most often through the stories of Tadeusz Borowski – deeply challenging texts that depict the severely degraded reality of camp life, people who lost the will to live and became known as ‘Muslims’ in camp language or, in camp literature, ‘dojchaga’. These are individuals who are mentally and physically destroyed, on the brink of life and death.
However, while such images are accurate, they depict extreme cases. The history of the occupation also includes people who, despite everything, tried to live, function, and adapt — under extreme conditions, yet still managing to preserve their humanity. Unfortunately, education often presents this darkest fragment as the norm, which leads to a distorted image of the past.
Added to this are today's immersive techniques, which are increasingly used in education and museology. Students take on the roles of victims, participate in realistic games and VR experiences. This can be effective educationally, but it also carries the risk of psychological overload.
In my research among young people visiting the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, I found that several percent of students showed symptoms characteristic of PTSD a month after their visit – difficulty falling asleep, hypersensitivity, recurring images and nightmares. It is precisely for these young people that we must ask ourselves: How can we ensure that contact with a memorial site is an educational experience rather than a traumatic one? Remembering the past cannot be based solely on shock – its purpose should be understanding, reflection and the ability to incorporate this knowledge into a healthy identity.
So how can we talk to children about painful aspects of history when even a visit to a museum can provoke such strong reactions? What should we convey and what should we avoid?
I don't think we should avoid difficult topics or filter historical facts – that would be dishonest. It is equally dangerous to sensationalise cruelty, to focus exclusively on the most extreme and dramatic experiences, which, although true, were not the everyday reality for most people.
It is crucial to show agency. That is, to tell the story of how even in the most extreme conditions, people tried to cope, made efforts to preserve their dignity, help others, and resist – not necessarily with weapons in their hands. Often, this resistance was silent and civil. For some, religion was a form of resistance, for others it was culture, values or family ties.
Meanwhile, our education – in schools and museums – is dominated by heroic narratives: armed resistance, uprisings, guerrilla warfare. Rarely do we hear about everyday forms of survival: about someone transporting meat from the countryside to the city, enabling them to support their family; about someone hiding books banned by the occupiers or conducting secret teaching. These are stories that often circulate within families but are not passed on because they are not considered ‘heroic’. And yet they have enormous educational potential – they show how people were able to preserve their humanity, take action and care for others despite violence and fear.
It is important to teach children not only that evil and suffering existed, but also that people had a choice, that they were capable of solidarity, that they fought for survival – and that this history is not only a history of victims, but also a history of survival and courage in everyday life. This helps to build resilience, not just fear.
Isn't it silence that shapes future generations the most? Don't we remain silent too often? I ask this question personally – I am the great-granddaughter of an officer murdered in Katyn. Little has been said about the history that shaped the fate of our family.
It is definitely worth asking questions – and it is especially important when it is done by the grandchildren, the third generation. It is much more difficult for children to talk to their parents about traumatic experiences than it is for grandchildren to talk to their grandparents. There is often more emotional space and curiosity than resistance between grandchildren and grandparents.
Just as important as the question is what we do when the answer comes. Are we truly ready to listen? Many people from the generation of victims tried to speak out, but no one wanted to listen to them. As a result, many people withdrew from these attempts. They often sought community among people with similar experiences, which led to the creation of groups such as the Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Stutthof survivors’ associations. Though these names may sound unsettling today, they represented real efforts to build spaces where people didn’t have to speak about their trauma — they could simply be with others who understood it without words.
In the case of the Katyn families, silence was virtually enforced. For many years, talking about Katyn could be not only socially isolating, but also dangerous. It was a trauma pushed into the shadows – not only personal, but also political. I know that research has been conducted on how these families functioned after the war – how memory was frozen in them, passed on indirectly, through emotions and behaviour rather than words.
It was not until the 1990s and 2000s that some kind of social recognition of this memory emerged. Films such as Wajda's Katyn appeared, giving many families the feeling that they could finally speak. And that someone was finally listening.
To what extent can art – literature, film, theatre, photography – help heal intergenerational trauma?
Art can play a very important role in the process of coming to terms with and working through trauma. Sometimes it does so in a paradoxical way. If we look at the first post-war films about the occupation, we are surprisingly often confronted with comedy. Films such as Zezowate szczęście (Bad Luck) or Jak rozpętałem drugą wojnę światową (How I Unleashed World War II) were a way for the generation that had survived the war to come to terms with it. Ridiculing certain behaviours or situations allowed them to gain distance – and it is precisely this distance that is sometimes necessary to be able to integrate difficult experiences.
The same is true of other reactions that may seem inappropriate or even shocking to outsiders, such as laughter, jokes, or using a phone in places of remembrance, such as Auschwitz. We are studying these phenomena and finding that they often serve a defensive function. People are trying to come to terms with something that is almost unbearable.
This trend was also present in so-called Holocaust cinema. Films such as Train of Life and Life Is Beautiful attempt to talk about the crime in a way that not only conveys knowledge but also allows the viewer to alleviate the emotional burden at least a little.
However, it is important to remember that culture also has a darker side. It can also be traumatic. From research we have conducted, including among Polish Jews, as well as from analyses by Michael Wohl and Jay Van Bavel, we know that strong identification with a group carries with it a legacy of trauma. It can cause a person to experience secondary trauma. A culture that constantly reminds us of suffering and violence can reinforce feelings of threat, isolation and fear. It is therefore crucial how we talk about the past – and whether we give the audience the opportunity to enter this world while maintaining their own boundaries.
Can trauma teach us anything? Empathy, responsibility, freedom?
I think trauma can teach us something – though not necessarily what we would expect. In a sense, trauma prepares us for future crises. It leads to hypersensitivity and distrust, which may be destructive in times of peace but can be adaptive in moments of danger. This was evident, for example, after the outbreak of war in Ukraine in 2022. Poles did not wait for the state to act, but took grassroots action to help refugees. This is typical behaviour for a society that remembers trauma, even if it has never explicitly named it.
We see a similar mechanism at work in the context of living under constant threat, as in Israel or Ukraine. There, people learn to function in a reality of alarms, air raids and power cuts. At the same time, they are extremely distrustful of strangers. Sociologist Daniel Bar-Tal calls this the “ethos of conflict” – a daily way of life in the reality of war. It is something that may seem inhuman from the outside, but for people living in such conditions, it becomes the new norm.
And perhaps this is what allows us to better understand how the generation that lived under occupation functioned. For them, the sight of executions, ghettos and pacification was something they had to get used to in order to survive. In this sense, as Miłosz wrote, the carousel keeps turning – not because people are indifferent, but because they have to live. This is not cynicism, but a psychologically adaptive mechanism. It may outrage us, but this is how the human psyche works.
What would you like to change in the way societies relate to their future?
There is one thing that seems particularly important to me and that could change. Historically traumatised societies very often lack the ability to recognise the trauma of others. When we have experienced suffering ourselves – especially if our trauma has not been fully recognised by the world – there is a strong need to focus on our own pain. So strong that we begin to deny the trauma of others.
For me personally, writing Traumaland was a kind of exercise in empathy. I come from a family of Holocaust survivors – most of my family died in the Holocaust. I grew up in an environment where Jewish trauma was paramount – suffering of others, including the wartime experience of non-Jewish Poles, was treated as insignificant. Henryk Grynberg once wrote that in the case of Jews, decimation means that one in ten survived, while in the case of Poles, it means that one in ten died. And that these two experiences of occupation are completely incomparable. Yet losing 10% of the entire population is a huge historical wound. And it also deserves recognition.
A similar mechanism works in reverse – many Poles, focused on their own trauma, are not ready to acknowledge the pain of others: Ukrainians, Germans, Jews. People are reluctant to talk about crimes committed by Poles, whether during the Holocaust or after the war: in the camps in Świętochłowice, Łambinowice, during Operation Vistula. And yet, being a victim in the past does not absolve one from becoming a perpetrator in the future.
The history of genocide and violence clearly shows that perpetrators were very often victims themselves. This is a painful truth. Trauma, if not worked through, can lead to a readiness to traumatise others. That is why we need a psychological perspective that focuses on individual experience rather than national narratives.
Psychology, unlike history or political science, does not create narratives that justify one side's position. It gives space to everyone – because every trauma must be acknowledged in order to be healed. And this acknowledgement is, in my opinion, our greatest hope.
Why are defensive narratives so common? Is it natural that we prefer to see ourselves only as victims?
Yes, it's quite a natural psychological mechanism. In psychology, we talk about moral typecasting – we tend to see people in rigid roles: either victim or perpetrator. It is very difficult to accept that someone can be both. The stronger we build our identity on the role of victim, the harder it is to accept that we could also have been perpetrators. Only in a few cases, such as Germany after World War II or Rwanda following the 1994 genocide, has it been possible to create a space for acknowledging this difficult duality.
History and experience are not black and white. Just look at Kashubia or Pomerania, for example – before the war, people lived side by side, the borders were different. The divisions between perpetrators and victims are not clear-cut.
Exactly. And this shows the danger of national unification of historical narrative. In psychology, we see it as very harmful because it prevents individual expression and the sharing of personal experiences. This is clearly visible today in the exhibition Our Boys, which has provoked extreme reactions – often full of ignorance. Many people are unaware that hundreds of thousands of Poles were forcibly conscripted into the Wehrmacht – more than fought in the Home Army. And yet the fate of these people is suppressed, unwanted in the dominant narrative.
However, this is not a matter of evading responsibility. It is the result of the colonisation of Polish historical memory – first by one region, namely Central Poland, and then by one social class, the Polish intelligentsia. And it is the experience of this class, this geography, that has been extended to the whole of Poland, supplanting other histories. The history of the people of Kashubia, Pomerania and Galicia. People who could not always fit into heroic, insurrectionary narratives.
For me, as a psychologist, it is precisely these individual experiences – of people and families – that should be the starting point. Only then is it possible to truly acknowledge and work through trauma. Not through narratives imposed from above, which divide history into black and white.
Are there any countries or communities that you think have coped well with trauma and a difficult past?
Paradoxically, the more traumatised a society has been, the more difficult it is for it to deal with this trauma. I cannot name a nation that has truly come to terms with its past. For this work to be possible, there must be a starting point – acknowledgement of responsibility and calling crimes by their proper names. Germany and Rwanda are good examples. In both cases, there has been official recognition of genocide and its perpetrators, which has allowed a completely new narrative to be constructed, both educational and social.
In Germany, the Holocaust has become the absolute centre of historical memory. Research such as the MEMO-Studie by a team from the University of Bielefeld shows that most Germans know the history of their country from the moment of National Socialism onwards – earlier eras are almost absent from the collective consciousness. Teaching about the Holocaust is not questioned there – on the contrary, it is a fundamental element of civic identity.
The situation is similar in Rwanda, where tribal identities were completely abandoned after the genocide. Today, the younger generation does not know whether their families belonged to the Hutu, Tutsi or Twa. The justice system, including the Gacaca courts, not only punished the perpetrators, but also sought to reconcile local communities that had to continue living together. In this sense, one can speak of a successful internal reconstruction.
However, when we look more broadly – at Rwanda's relations with the Democratic Republic of Congo, or at the attitude of Germans in the eastern part of the country towards refugees – cracks begin to appear. Rwanda supports armed actions beyond its borders, and in Germany, the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) is growing in popularity and anti-immigrant sentiment is on the rise. One might therefore ask whether this success of memory – the recognition of one's own trauma – actually translates into broader social functioning. Or perhaps something has been repressed and is now returning in a different form. Dr Fiona Kazarovytska from the University of Mainz shows that Germans who are particularly proud of how their nation has come to terms with its past tend to treat the history of National Socialism as a closed chapter – which in effect makes them more susceptible to xenophobic or racist ideologies today.
All this shows that working through trauma is not a closed process, but an ongoing task – also for future generations.
Where should we start to make future generations more aware, mature and think differently about their past?
I think the starting point should be to rethink our story about the past. Poland's historical identity is today largely based on an image of suffering and moral innocence – we see ourselves primarily as passive victims. Meanwhile, history was much more complex. We need a narrative that shows agency – even in the most difficult times. We need to remember that not everyone was passive, that there were people who acted, who resisted, but also that there were different attitudes – including those that do not fit into the convenient narrative of exclusively moral victims.
How can we talk to young people about traumatic chapters of history without provoking resistance or feelings of blame? How can we break this cycle of interlocking trauma? The key is to show the complexity of history – to avoid black-and-white narratives. We need to talk about suffering and injustice, but not only through the prism of the perpetrators and their victims. It is also worth focusing on those who survived – on their choices, decisions and ways of coping. On those who, in extreme situations, showed agency, even in the smallest ways.
Instead of presenting history to young people as a story of guilt and accusation, it is worth showing it as a space for reflection on the fate of individuals – on how people reacted in extreme conditions. Only then can we hope for true understanding, empathy – and breaking the mechanism of passing trauma from generation to generation.
Professor Michał Bilewicz – social and political psychologist, professor at the University of Warsaw, where he heads the Centre for Research on Prejudice. He specialises in psychological mechanisms of reconciliation, collective memory, trauma and prejudice. Author of the book Traumaland. Poles in the Shadow of the Past.