written by Nadia Rupniak, PhD
As the child of a WWII veteran, I was undoubtedly exposed to his combat trauma and presumably this may have affected me. However, pinning down exactly how I was affected has proved quite perplexing. Generational trauma is defined as: “the transmission of trauma or its legacy, in the form of a psychological consequence of an injury or attack, poverty, and so forth, from the generation experiencing the trauma to subsequent generations.” The characterization is so broad that I’ve struggled to tease apart the psychological impact of my father’s trauma from the experiences I’ve acquired in my own life.
I suspect that many of us don’t realize we’ve been affected by generational trauma. Perhaps we diminish our own struggles because they seem so insignificant compared with our parents’ trauma. Or, living in our competitive society, we think that asking for help is an admission of failure; better to present a stoic exterior to the world, say nothing, and plough on. Ironically, we may have learned these very patterns of avoidance and denial from our traumatized parent(s), an illustration of how that experience can keep us stuck in ways of thinking that prolong our exposure to unhealthy environments.
If we were raised by a veteran, first responder, law enforcement officer, someone who experience abuse, or survived a near-death experience, we may have been affected by their trauma and not even know it. Perhaps we are missing an opportunity to identify effective strategies to avoid triggers, push past irrational fears, and empower ourselves to take better control of our lives. This article illustrates the unexpected ways in which generational trauma intruded into my adult life and created new trauma. I also want to explain how these were not always negative influences and instead became a call to action that gave my life new purpose.
My father was a Polish WWII veteran. At the end of the war he had no home to return to because Poland had been betrayed by her British and American allies, sold out to Stalin as a communist state. My dad’s mother and three brothers were sent to the gulag because he was an officer in the army. If he returned to Poland, he would probably have been executed. His remaining family lived under a repressive regime that continued to send whole families to the gulag well into the 1950s.
After the fall of Poland, Churchill faced his “darkest hour” against Hitler in 1940. He welcomed the exiled Polish military to defend his country with open arms. In 1944, when the Allies stormed Normandy to liberate Europe, the Poles fought alongside British and American troops with the promise they would return home to a free country. Instead, the end of the war was a catastrophe for Poland.
Having served under British command, the Polish military were recalled to Britain at the end of the war. Unlike the warm reception they received in 1940, by 1945 the mood had changed beyond recognition. The British public had been deceived into believing that our ally, Stalin, had liberated Poland and that the rigged election to install a communist government was democratic. Why, then, should the British taxpayer have to accommodate these 150,000 foreigners? They should go home where they belonged! Newspapers accused the Poles of being spongers or of taking British jobs. Trades Unions opposed hiring foreign workers. The only jobs on offer were low-paid, unskilled, and without prospects for advancement.
The end of the war had a devastating effect on my dad and other Polish veterans. Returning to civilian life in such a hostile environment left him feeling resentful, betrayed, and isolated. With his country still under enemy occupation, he wrote to his brother that they had been “conned” into fighting for freedom – but for who’s freedom? I have no doubt that he was traumatized by the war. He had the telltale signs of PTSD – terrifying nightmares and an explosive temper that erupted unpredictably when he was upset. He never spoke to us about what happened to him. It wasn’t until after his death that I discovered his heroism and what had become of his family.
My dad married a Belgian woman who he met during the liberation of Europe. His letters to her warned of many hardships ahead if they married. But living in Belgium, where the Polish troops who liberated their country were venerated, my mum could not have imagined the discrimination they faced in England. When she married a Captain in the Polish army, she expected a standard of living befitting his rank and qualifications, not a life of grinding poverty on low wages. She begged him to move to Belgium, where they could have a good standard of living, but he flatly refused to live in a country that had capitulated so readily to Hitler. Separated from her friends and family, and forced to give up her career as a teacher because her foreign diploma wasn’t recognized in England, she became isolated and depressed.
To supplement his inadequate wages, she worked long days from home sewing an endless production line of dresses. Unlike my dad, Mum was vocal about her unhappiness. Chief among her complaints was Dad’s inadequate wages, which meant that three of our four bedrooms had to be given over to lodgers so he could pay the mortgage. She berated him constantly about his inability to support the family, but her words fell on deaf ears. She also resented him sending packages of food and clothing to his brother in Poland, saying that his first duty was to us, not them. Again, he ignored her. Decades later, I learned that his brother had been left destitute after the war and without Dad’s help, his family might not have survived.
Dad’s constant stonewalling and reticence in the face of such criticism was exasperating and made it impossible for me to understand him. Mum’s preoccupation with sewing dresses to meet her quota meant that I had to be quiet and stay out of her way. Neither had the time or inclination to cuddle or comfort me. Not surprisingly, I struggled with relationships when I grew up. If a man expressed his affection for me, I found his attention suffocating and avoided him. I was most comfortable around men who were emotionally unavailable, and this culminated in my marriage to an alcoholic.
Our relationship worked well in that each of us gave the other the space and independence we needed. He confided that he had experienced trauma as a child and so I made allowances for his drinking, until I was given a dire warning by his doctors that he could die of cirrhosis unless he stopped immediately. I begged him many times to quit, but he wouldn’t listen. In the heat of one argument, I came to a stark realization. Although my dad wasn’t an alcoholic, Mum had also found it impossible to communicate with him. To my astonishment, I saw that my marriage was a mirror-image of theirs.
As a young child caught in the crossfire of my parents’ arguments about money, I worried that Dad might leave us to go and live with his “other family” in Poland. It posed an existential threat; if he left there would be no money at all and then who would take care of me? How could I survive if my parents split up? Would I be sent abroad to be raised by strangers? What would become of me?
I went through adult life unaware that these fears had left a mark on me until I was forced to confront the prospect of my own divorce. The anguish of living with someone who was slowly killing himself was taking a toll on my mental health, and I knew that I must take action. As desperate as the situation was, I found myself unable to leave my husband, paralyzed by the fear that I couldn’t cope on my own. My over-riding thoughts were, “Who will take care of me? How will I survive?” At that time I was 42 years old, had a successful career, and had been the sole breadwinner in our marriage for many years. It took months of work to understand how my childhood fears were intruding into the present and holding me trapped in an unhealthy relationship. Eventually, I was able to step over the precipice into the unknown. It was the most difficult decision I’ve ever made.
My husband’s ill-health came to light shortly after we emigrated to America, at a time when I was also wrestling with another problem that had its roots in my parents’ trauma. Since they were both foreigners, there was no extended family on hand to help with childcare when I was a child. To give Mum some relief, I was packed off with my grandma to stay in Belgium for the summer. On the first occasion, I was perhaps four years old. Being banished to a foreign country to stay with people I had never met was quite an ordeal. I was too young to understand whether I would be returning home or was being sent away permanently because I was in the way.
This anxiety was compounded by a further trauma when my brother and I became separated from my grandma after going through separate passport lines. Grandma waved us on to board the ship ahead of her. Onboard the ferry, my brother left me alone on the deck to go and find her. I panicked as the ship pulled out of the dock, taking me further and further into the unknown. Where was my brother? Grandma? Had they deserted me on purpose? Would anyone ever find me? By the time my grandma finally appeared, I was inconsolable. Flustered from all the commotion, she demanded I stop crying and put a hard candy in my mouth to keep me quiet.
I had forgotten all about this incident until I arrived in America and had to navigate completely alien territory by car, something that filled me with outright terror. If I took a wrong turn and got lost (as happened frequently), I had to pull over and calm myself down from a blind panic that I would never be found and that nobody would rescue me. It wasn’t until I acquired a GPS navigation system that I felt more secure behind the wheel.
Since Mum was the one who was vocal about her unhappiness while my dad was secretive, I naturally had more sympathy and understanding for her than for him. She laid the blame for her misery squarely at his feet. When she finally managed to get work as a teacher in England, she used her earnings to dispatch the lodgers and set about a much-needed remodeling the kitchen and bathroom. Dad wasn’t interested in material possessions of any kind and didn’t participate in these projects, contributing not one penny towards them.
His failure to support Mum’s efforts to raise our standard of living amply confirmed his shortcomings as a husband, and I lost respect for him. Only now can I appreciate that his disinterest in home comforts was a result of the catastrophic losses he experienced during the war – the loss of his home, family, friends, and even country. How could he indulge in domestic luxuries when his family in Poland were so penniless?
When I discovered that Dad – of all people – had been highly decorated for his heroism during WWII, I was incredulous. As far as I was aware, he had been devoid of any ambition and never achieved anything in his life. It sent me into a tailspin of questioning every relationship I’d ever had. If I’d misjudged him so badly, how could I trust my judgement of anyone else? Consumed with guilt for the lack of respect and compassion I’d shown him, I embarked on a mission to uncover what he and his family went through during the war. It was a humbling experience that showed me how my dad’s war trauma deprived me of a close relationship with someone of exceptional courage, resilience, and strength of character.
My guilt drove me to visit my estranged family in Poland. Although we were complete strangers, connecting our British and Polish fragments felt healing as we celebrated the fact that our family had not been destroyed. On my visits, I recorded the harrowing details of what happened to my cousins during the war. For nearly five decades, Communist authorities suppressed the truth by teaching fake history in the school curriculum. Anyone contradicting the official version of events faced harsh punishment – arrest and deportation.
My cousins, in their eighties when I met them, were eager to share their stories with me, knowing that I intended to publish their accounts for all the world to see. They wanted to unburden themselves, to share their trauma with me and with anyone who would listen. I heard their accounts of starvation, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, horrific torture, banishment, and exile. Their stories left an indelible, unforgettable, mark on me. I can’t unhear what they told me, or unsee the hand-drawn images of sadistic mutilation of parents, children, and babies. The imperative to set the historical record straight has consumed me ever since.
I traveled with some relatives to west Ukraine, to the former Polish village from where our grandmother, Maria, and three uncles had been arrested by Soviet soldiers, never to return. It was a pilgrimage back home on their behalf – an act of rebellion against their expulsion, a defiant assertion that our family had returned. Looking out over the empty field where Maria’s farm had once stood, I felt protective of it, and angry. This was my land. It had been stolen from me.
I often think about Maria. Aged 68 at the time of her deportation, two years later she made a miraculous escape to freedom in Iran, travelling thousands of miles across Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan under exceptionally difficult conditions. Her endurance in surviving her ordeal is an inspiration to me and it grieves me that I never met this remarkable woman. Tragically, Maria died soon after arriving in Iran.
Nobody has ever been prosecuted or punished for the horrific crimes ordered by Stalin in Poland, a dictator just as ruthless as Hitler but whose atrocities were covered up to preserve Britain and America’s military alliance with him. I feel affronted by that injustice. The hypocrisy and double standards of our most revered wartime leaders have tainted my view of both England and America. It leaves me questioning my loyalty and patriotism towards the two counties of which I’m a citizen. I can imagine how disconnected from British society my dad must have felt after the war.
Stalin aimed to destroy the families he oppressed, dispossessing and banishing them to remote outposts from which there was no return. A poignant aspect of Maria’s story is that her grave in Iran has never been visited by a single member of our family. She was so determined to return home to them, it upsets me that she has never been reunited with us. More than anything, I hope to travel to Iran to sit by her grave; I want to tell her that she has been found and is not forgotten.
Meeting my Polish family has been a life-changing experience, immersing me in a history, language, and culture that previously meant nothing to me. Our family tragedy has given me a new purpose and passion. By giving a voice to our relatives’ stories, they can live on in us and our children. We will never forget their trauma.
Nadia Rupniak, PhD, is an internationally recognized neuroscientist with a special interest in depression and anxiety disorders. She has published over 140 articles, has given podium presentations at international conferences, and an article about her research was published in the Wall Street Journal. Despite her credentials, she had no idea that her own life had been affected by her father’s combat stress until she began researching his experiences during the war. If you would like to read her family’s experiences during the war, please visit www.nadiarupniak.com and YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEGGC43hyDPYQXJKuaBW46g.