ABSTRACT
The author's choice of research area is grounded in the fact that research concerning the situation of people who were afflicted and who were children themselves during the Holocaust and during the Rwanda genocide in 1994 is very limited. Cross-scientific international research contacts with genocide scholars have strengthened the author's interest in understanding more of psychic trauma and the dynamics of violence. The descriptions of events that Emilia and other survivors gave on the telephone and in letters were repeated and developed during the interview that followed. It was clear that a recalling process began in the minds of the survivors from the very moment they filled out the application. The feeling that the interviewer can have at first of being an intruder is changed to an experience of being a "receptacle" for painful memories. A theory about the survivors' affect regulating has been developed—the "affect propeller"—showing the trauma- and generational linking processes within each individual.
