Natan P.F. Kellermann

“Even though I was born and grew up in a country far removed from the horrors of the Holocaust, I have lived with its images for my entire life. My mother, Lilly (Frischmann) Kellermann, was a fully functioning and loving mother, and told me very little about her traumatic experiences. But her Holocaust trauma has painfully permeated my inner life. Imagining the Holocaust comes almost automatically to me. It’s as if I have been there and have seen that before. Gruesome Holocaust associations fill my waking, and sleeping life and human suffering is a constant companion. As have so many other children of survivors, I have apparently absorbed some of the psychological burdens of my parents and share their grief and terror as if I have experienced it myself. It is no coincidence that I became a psychologist and a psychodramatist and that much of my professional interest has focused on individual (Kellermann & Hudgins, 2000) and collective trauma (Kellermann, 2007). Because, like a nuclear bomb that disperses its radioactive fallout in distant places even a long time after the actual explosion, any major psychological trauma continues to contaminate those who were exposed to it in one way or another in the first, second, and subsequent generations.”
― Natan P.F. Kellermann, Holocaust Trauma