At 96, my father is one of the last living Holocaust survivors. He also has Alzheimer’s. The disease has not brought him the forgetting that would be a gift to him.
Alzheimer’s progresses in a pattern that erodes the mind in reverse, stripping away recent memories first, then advancing into the regions that regulate emotion and suppress fear. Early memories, especially those charged with deep emotion, tend to last the longest.
So now, with his brain’s defenses weakened, the horrors he experienced as a child in a Jewish ghetto in Poland surge through him unfiltered. They come without warning, intruding even in moments of joy, as if he’s reliving them.
The growth of Holocaust denial and antisemitism presents a brutal irony. The people tormented by their memories can’t forget, and too many of those who should remember choose not to do so.
My father is not alone in his suffering. A large study by researchers at the University of Haifa in Israel found that Holocaust survivors were about 21 percent more likely to develop dementia, probably owing to the lasting neurological and physiological effects of extreme trauma and deprivation.
My father was 11 when the Nazis invaded Poland, and he had to start wearing a yellow star of David on the front and back of his clothing so that it could be seen from both directions. He and about 200,000 Jews in Lodz were eventually sealed off behind walls and barbed wire. In the ghetto my father and his family faced starvation and disease, and were forced into labor. My father worked in a shoe factory that supplied the German military. Dozens of his family members were tortured and killed.
The numbers blur. Was it 31 family members murdered? Or 50? While Alzheimer’s has left his pain, it has taken his precision.
When I was with him recently in Israel, a friend of his visited with her two sons. My father chatted with them, asking about their classes, then his eyes grew distant and he suddenly began to speak of his cousins Mirka and Chaskush, his voice cracking. He was flung back to 1942, grieving his cousins who, the last time he saw them, were the same age as his friend’s sons.
I had heard the story many times before, but now it surfaced sharper, rawer.
That year Chaim Rumkowski, the head of the Jewish council in the Lodz ghetto, begged Jews to comply with a Nazi order to surrender 20,000 of their own. He urged parents to give up their children who were younger than 10 and called on the elderly and the sick to come forward. It was a futile bid to save other lives.
Many tried to hide their children. German and Jewish police officers went house to house, dragging out children and older adults. When the police entered my father’s family’s building, they took 50 children while parents were screaming. His cousin Mirka took advantage of the chaos and grabbed her little brother and hid in the latrine under human waste, poking their noses out to breathe. They were 9 and 7.
My father paused while he told the story, his hands trembling. “But the rest — the ones who the Gestapo found — were taken and murdered,” he said. “Later Mirka and Chaskush were sent to Auschwitz to be gassed.”
My father seemed to be back in the ghetto. This was the suffering he’d once learned to contain.
The injury to my father didn’t end with the war. He was 16, six feet tall but barely 80 pounds, when the Soviet army liberated the ghetto. He and a group of other survivors walked free through the gates into the city for the first time in five years. He thought their skeletal bodies might stir sympathy among the townspeople. Instead, as he passed a group of women, he heard one shout, “The vermin are multiplying again.”
His first welcome into the world was a denial of his humanity. The woman’s disgust inflicted a secondary wound — what psychologists call traumatic invalidation. Dimming the hope that the world might still offer safety, this new trauma intensifies the existing pain and makes healing harder to reach. Like other emotionally charged experiences my father had, this too has resisted decay.
In time, my father rebuilt his life. He became an aerospace engineer in the United States, married and raised five children. In 1970, he helped NASA bring the Apollo 13 astronauts safely back to Earth. His resilience inspired me to study psychology and specialize in treating trauma survivors.
Now I catch only glimpses of his healed self. During a recent visit, my father broke into a favorite tune: Doris Day’s “I Love You, a Bushel and a Peck.”
He smiled wide, lit up with joy. I sang with him, trying to hold him there.
Orli Peter is a neuro- and clinical psychologist who has treated trauma for 30 years. She is the founder of the Israel Healing Initiative, bringing cutting-edge treatments to trauma survivors.
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