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For one survivor, the sight of terrified mothers arriving at a Polish railway station evoked memories of his own family’s horrific plight
Trauma whereby somebody two generations later might still have some sort of imprint of that. >> well, look, so the epigenome is subject to chronic stress, pollution and diet. there's a researcher who i -- and physician who i interviewed for the book at mt. sinai who found children of holocaust survivors are three times as likely to display ptsd when confronted by a traumatic event. children of women who are pregnant at or near ground zero 9/11 displayed low levels of cortisol, i stress hormone as their mothers. and that's associated with ptsd. we know these things. how it gets from one generat...
>> he had his suspicions but he'd made peace with it. that's such a powerful moment in the book because it says so bch the real nature of love. it's not necessarily about the biology. love is a verb. it's how we act. but the biology plays such a key part in your story as well because a lot of it is about the inherited trauma that comes from, in this case, your grandparents surviving the holocaust and how that's expressed in your mother. you write about an emerging science that says trauma can be passed on genetically. >> it's the emerging science called epigenetics. it's subject to external fa...
Experiences can have impacts on families in other ways. and so in the case of my family in the holocaust, we know that not the experience of a survivor but the way they process that experience. the kind of family that they raise. the patterns say set as parents can affectly likelihood their children may develop mental health issues. i write about holocaust trauma but everyone has trauma. i think understanding the way this trauma can play a role one from generation to the next can hups move forward. >> what you're saying is mind-blowing. it's a totally different paradigm to look at trauma. we k...