Worldcrunch
The memory of the Holocaust remains a painful and ever-present stain on Polish history. While the trauma continues to affect the living survivors and their families today, many survivors’ descendants are facing it head-on, and returning to Poland to learn about their family history and transform it into artistic works.
German journalist Laura Ewert found out that her grandfather had led a massacre of Italian civilians in 1944 during the Nazi era. Eighty years later, Ewert met descendants of the victims in San Polo and experienced reactions that she would not have expected.
New Zealand politics professor Richard Shaw comes to terms with how his family’s silences finds roots in the historical amnesia surrounding the acquisition of lands by Irish settlers in Taranaki, a region in the south west of the Aotearoa’s North Island.
As a psychoanalyst, Wolfgang Schmidbauer has researched the psychological effects of war on children — and in the process, also examined his own post-War childhood in Germany. In this article, he warns that parents tend to use their experiences of suffering as a method of education, with serious consequences.