As a fourth generation holocaust survivor, I would say that generational trauma does not go away, can not be ¨moved beyond¨, nor should it. It is unfair to minimize or shove behind you the trauma that people have suffered, and being able to live with, acknowledge, and respect it is incredibly important. Personally, while I felt for Spiegelman I thought he was incredibly uncaring and inconsiderate towards his father throughout the book. There are clear moments that show both of their trauma, such as Vladek´s need to do everything himself and not waste food, and Artie´s feelings towards his brother, that he wished he had someone to push his father off on.
I believe that the children of holocaust survivors, and from what I have heard and read most children with parents of any kind of real struggle, feel this need to prove themselves to their parents, to show that they are just as strong as them. They feel the guilt of living a happy life, of not having experienced and never being able to understand what it is that their parents went through, even if they get the play by play story as Artie did. Artie clearly struggles with the fact that his father does not approve of his career, or how he sees himself as a failure in the scene with him and the therapist. I see this in how the children of other holocaust survivors act as well, too. Both of my grandparents (and my mom and her siblings, as a result), along with great Uncles were and still are extremely high-achieving individuals. They continue to work, travel the world for conferences, and do everything they can to, I assume, prove their worth. I also see in my grandfather this incessant need to save money, to not waste anything, which I assume was pushed upon him by his parents. I never knew my great grandparents, who survived, but I hear stories of them from my mother, hear how much they impacted her life. Trauma often pushes people, pushes the next generation to do better.
I´ll be honest, the holocaust does not influence the lives of young people, or my generation, too much anymore. My theory is that you need to have sufficient contact with the original person with trauma to truly gain an understanding of how it affected them, and to be largely affected by it. Even Spiegelman, as Vladek´s child, does not really understand his pain. He tries to, of course, but while reading Maus it felt more like a telling of events than a capture of emotion. And he makes it clear that his father angers him, that he does not understand his thinking. He does not want to live with him, to take care of him. He wants to forget, to move on from the guilt he feels talking to his father (I know, it is not explicitly stated in the book, but as much as he tries to portray his true thoughts you can never trust the narrator). It is easier for him to forget entirely, and that is exactly why we can't allow it to happen.
An article on generational trauma in Maus states ¨it is possible to say that the transmission of the cataclysmic wartime experiences across generations has formed a significant part of the identity of the children of survivors, and has become one of the crucial constituents of their Jewishness, regardless of the extent of their assimilation¨, and I think this is so true (Stanislav 3). In current generations, trauma has become more a part of an identity, rather than an individual struggle. When I was younger, I wasn't even able to separate the two. I used to think that everyone who was Jewish were descendents of holocaust survivors, that it was normal, common even. That generational trauma is something I acknowledge, respect, but do not cry over, it does not bring pain. However I am pretty far down the line, and as I said I can see how it has affected closer descendants. I believe to move forward for them communication is key, as is understanding. The trauma that people have suffered can be respected without being forgotten. For example, my mom refused to let me learn German because of the memories she has of her grandmother breaking down whenever she heard it spoken even decades after the war. And my mom refused to use my dad's last name while in Israel, because it´s meaning (DeCapo, ¨The Kapo¨) still brought horrible memories to many. This is a way to acknowledge the pain that has been caused, but to still move on with your life, to not let it drag you down. Moving beyond the trauma of your ancestors is a disservice to what they went through, to their memory, and while it still affects people, over time wounds heal and stories are the only thing left to keep the memory alive.