The survivors’ children were three times more likely to suffer from PTSD, if they’d been exposed to traumatic events, compared with demographically similar Jews whose parents weren’t survivors. They were more vulnerable to clinical depression and anxiety. And their blood tests showed the same neuroendocrine and hormonal abnormalities as the survivors themselves. Clearly this population had a particular emotional inheritance—but how had it been transmitted? Did it have mostly to do with the way they’d been raised, with their relationships with their parents? Or was it also written somehow into
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