Aftermath of Genocide - The Fate of Children of Perpetrators

In this essay the author draws attention to an insufficiently acknowledged consequence of genocide. With the intention to generalize these thoughts to all genocide - allowing for their variances - focusing on the Holocaust, the most studied of genocides, much is said about the horrors it has and continues to visit on victims, the traumatic consequences that follow from this genocide, the "chosen trauma" it has become for the then-victimized society. Many Holocaust studies address just that. But much less is said of the consequences of this genocide on its perpetrators, especially on their children and grandchildren. The limited number of studies of the children of perpetrators show that for those studied, the genocide perpetrated by their fathers and mothers has created for them an unyielding sense of guilt and depression and especially of everyday-pervasive shame. These studies have demonstrated that their children and grandchildren seem stamped with a " ' chosen trauma' of shame" (Volkan, Fundamentalism, violence and its consequences, 2001), a yoke of shame they have great difficulty resolving. They too, like their former victims, live with an irreducible trauma of humiliation, but their humiliation is not one perpetrated by an enemy as it was for the Jews, but by their own fathers and mothers. Might not this knowledge, learned with the price of the Holocaust, deter some, or even many, who might in the future consider the path of genocide? Should we not add this to the strategies open to us for the reduction of genocide? Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.