ABSTRACT
Psychoanalytic work on the intergenerational transmission of trauma is mostly based on single cases in treatment rather than presenting data on generational features of transmission, on familial patterns and collective traits. The representatives of successive generations were administered open-ended interviews regarding their life as survivors or victims, or as the second/third generation of survivors/victims. The survivors of the Shoah also show a tendency to precocious ageing and a rise in the mortality rate at a younger age than is the average, factors which Krystal sees, however, as separate from alexithymia and anhedonia. Psychoanalytic reflections on the family dynamics of the Shoah generations show interesting patterns. The theme of the silence into which the first and second generation are often relegated is connected to the theme of exile, a position of radical and unspeakable extraneousness from the condition of the non-traumatised.
