Books I have been reading suggest that holocaust survivors can sometimes resent the pleasure that their children are able to experience, as a result of not being subjected to the kinds of agonies that the parents had been subjected to.
Perhaps it is not so much a resentment that they feel, but rather more as if the children were like soothing pools of water threatening to be a mirage on a desert sojourn threatening to be a disaster. The desperate parents long to thrust their parched and blistered hands into the cool waters, forgetting that this attitude of desperation subjects their children to extreme emotional violence. For the child is not the parent’s resource to do with as they wish and tragically, the parent’s loss of an ability to feel pleasure cannot be remedied by commandeering the child’s life, as if to demand compensation for parental suffering, whilst denying the child the right to his own autonomous avenues of pleasure. The “cool waters” apparent in the child do, indeed, turn out to be mirages, from the parent’s point of view. The child cannot give up their soul for the parent without becoming parched and dead inside himself. Yet this is often what the desperation of the parent requires.
…..And the Rhodesian war was like a holocaust for many of my parents generation, especially those who lost.
