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The Truth Is In The Leftovers: Three Generations of Trauma and Food


Leah R. Abramson
Vancouver, Canada

There are always several loaves of bread in my grandmother’s fridge, and it’s not because she has a thing for sandwiches. Babi says she needs to know that she’ll always have bread—that she will not starve. Somehow, I can relate: when my life spins out of control, I buy bread. Right now I have a box of crackers, bagels, and a few buns on my counter.

Bread is almost an obsession for Babi, my mother, my sister, and I. I’m told it was used like currency in the concentration camps where Babi was imprisoned from 1942 - 1945, though food in general is also an obsession for our family and her. “When we were in the concentration camp we used to talk about what recipes we would make when we got out,” says Babi in her Czech accent. Babi’s chocolate-cherry rice pudding, my favourite, was one of her friend’s recipes.

After she told me that story, though it was my favourite dish, I could not eat the rice without imagining my grandmother’s suffering as she lay starving in her bunk, talking about food as if it were a far-away dream. I started to feel guilty whenever she made it.

Now I see that serving this dish to her family was probably quite meaningful for her. I say this in the past tense because at 94, after breaking her hip a few years ago, she says she can’t cook anything too complicated anymore. (Which for Babi means she only makes apple, chocolate—two kinds, and plum cakes, palacinky—Czech crepes, and occasionally some fish for my dad. But compared with the risky—Czech schnitzel, soup, pastries, vanocka—Christmas raisin bread, and more kinds of cakes she used to make, she’s really slowed down.)

She’s shrunken and thinner now, but she still serves us coffee and cake when we visit on Sundays. My parents bring her crossword puzzles and email letters from family (though she has trouble with the concept of sending letters through computers), and anything else she may need.

I know on Sundays that if I do not feel like eating cake, I should eat it anyway, or risk offending Babi. Feeding us makes her happy, which usually suits us fine, because our family likes to eat. I always had trouble with that, because I take after my dad—I really like to eat, and this made me a chubby child. I only realized that society thought chubby was bad when people started teasing me and telling me I was fat. But I didn’t know how to control something as pleasurable as eating. Because of Babi, I knew I was lucky to have so much food there for me to eat—didn’t that mean I should eat as much as I wanted?

In my family, food is a celebration, but it’s also an anxiety. We always think ahead to our next meal: when and what will we have for dinner? In Ruth Wajnryb’s book, The Silence, she illustrates the charged atmosphere created by her survivor family at mealtimes: “Food and death were connected, this I knew. We were not allowed not to eat. I became pretty expert at smuggling food off my plate into my lap, and off my lap into my room, and from my room out of the house. I’m told this is typical eating disorder behaviour. But as a child all I knew was that I would gag if I ate more—yet I had to eat what was on my plate. […] Food was an issue. There was plenty of it but it was an issue. I could never understand why it was treated with such reverence and why the reverence was bound up with so much panic and pain.”

In my family too, food is treated reverentially, not taken for granted. My mother used to eat my apple cores and still cuts the mould off old cheese and bread. We don’t waste food; wasting food is basically a sin. I never questioned this or even realized it was part of my value system until I moved away from home and lived with roommates. I remember being shocked and slightly offended when one of them cut out a bad spot on a vegetable and cut away a good chunk of the healthy part. I mentioned this waste reproachfully to my confused roommate, and realized then that it was my reaction, not his cutting skills, that was a little unusual by North American standards.

And so it was that while examining this anxiety-ridden relationship with food I first realized that I, like my mother and sister, have been impacted by Babi’s experiences 60 years ago.

No cake? What’s wrong, are you on a diet?
It’s fall and I’m eating like a squirrel preparing for hibernation. I huddle in my room with bowls of soup, and my roommate buys us chocolate bars late at night; I find it oddly comforting to eat a Kit-Kat at 11 p.m.

Though my relationship with food began pleasurably, as with many young women the beginning of adolescence was marked by its open hostility. In our society, chubby is not sexy, and I wanted to be sexy. So I dieted, binged, purged, and starved myself. Babi and my family noticed when I got too thin; so did my friends at school, but a lot of them said I looked great. Though I ate very little (except when I binged), I did not think it too extreme: in my mind, I compared my deliberate starvation to my grandmother’s time in the concentration camps. I knew that compared to her, I was not really starving, and the mere fact I could choose to eat or not, made me spoiled and weak for complaining to myself about it. I felt guilty for having the nerve to compare her extreme suffering with my self-created drama.

But I could never share these thoughts with anyone because they did not make sense to me at the time; I avoided thinking about the Holocaust during my teens, and so it was just a bunch of cloudy, emotional thoughts and visuals that I did not want to acknowledge until years later. While reading Helen Epstein’s Children of the Holocaust, a book of interviews with children of Holocaust survivors, I noticed that a great deal of my teenage thoughts were outlined in detail, and the echoes of Holocaust trauma were very real in subsequent generations.

“I find it impossible to confront the horror without interposing my parents,” confirms Wajnryb in The Silence. Evidently, imagining one’s parent, or in my case, grandparent, in the midst of Holocaust horrors is common among descendants. I realized that what I’d considered to be a simple case of an eating disorder common in teenaged girls was actually inextricably mixed with echoes of my family’s traumatic wartime history.

When I was a teenager, my mother handed me a first book by Helen Epstein and said, “Here, you can read Babi’s story.” Where She Came From was not actually about my grandmother, but a Jewish woman from Czechoslovakia roughly my grandmother’s age that had survived concentration camps and emigrated to the U.S.A.

I handled the book with trepidation. I’d already been given a lot of Holocaust literature as a child, and I didn’t want to think about it anymore. I couldn’t think about it anymore. Every time I thought about it, I imagined my grandmother starving, seeing her family die, and being lice and disease-ridden. The worst part was, as horrible as my daydreams were, I knew the reality was probably much worse.

Since I’d been told early on that Babi found it too painful to talk about the camps, I substituted Epstein’s story for my grandmother’s, like I knew my mother had. But I don’t blame Babi for not talking about it. Who can blame somebody who’s been through so much? Would knowing the details of her story really help me understand her experience or deal with my own?

1, 2, 3…generations is me.
“There is my uncle and my grandparents on both sides,” said my mother quietly, as I stood staring at a wall of pictures in an exhibition entitled Faces of Loss , shown at the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre last spring. And so my mother introduced me to her family who, with the exception of her parents and a few second cousins, were all murdered before she was born.

My mother’s side of the family now consists of Babi, my father, sister, and I, and a few second and third cousins scattered all over the globe by the Second World War. I thought of my family: cousins, grandfather, aunts and uncles—all my father’s relatives—and felt for the first time a flame of anger. Looking at the smiling faces my mother never had a chance to hug, kiss, or even meet, I understood that life is really not fair (like she often said while reminding me to clean my room).

But my mother seems to take it all in stride; whether it was landing in Canada at 19 as a poor refugee from communist Czechoslovakia or dealing with my grandfather’s suicide 13 years later, she has a dark view of humanity, but is not severely negative or desolate like Babi.

Just growing up with a mother like Babi must have presented challenges: Babi is the most bitter woman I have ever met. For years now, Babi has lamented her survival, saying, “Animals are lucky. When they get too old they are put to sleep. I wish it were like that with people.” She also claims to dislike most people in general, trash-talks almost everyone she knows, and thinks the Chinese government is on the right track. I am therefore quite thankful that my mother was able to overcome her influence.

Though Babi does have her tender moments, she also has good reason to be bitter the rest of the time. She’s had way more than her share of trials and tribulations—bad luck, she says, unlike me, so incredibly lucky to have been born in 1981, in Canada. But my mother still wonders why Babi is so negative and bitter, while other survivors remained much more positive about life. Babi herself claims it’s just her personality, but I wonder if that is true, considering nobody else knows what she went through during the war.

After deciding to write this article, I went to Babi’s with my parents and a copy of Wajnryb’s book about silence in survivor families, not exactly planning to show it to her, but hoping secretly that the opportunity would arise. After coffee and palacinky with jam, we went to sit down, my dad with the newspaper, myself on the couch between my mother and Babi, knitting a scarf. After Babi showed me a much faster European way to knit, my mother and I started discussing books we were reading.

I saw my chance and showed them the book. To my surprise, Babi reacted with interest, actually flipping through it reading parts. After she gave it back to me, she said she’d stopped reading at descriptions of Auschwitz; she didn’t need to read about it since she’d already been there.

The truth is in the leftovers

What I found interesting about bringing The Silence into a room with my family was not Babi’s reaction, but that of my parents. Mom and Dad understood my need to explore the Holocaust and its multi-generational trauma, but they were obviously uncomfortable with my decision to publish such personal and familial discoveries. Why did I feel the need to tell people about it, they asked. And I wondered, why are family tragedies so hush-hush? Are we ashamed, or worried that if it’s mentioned it might happen again? Does revealing our trauma to the world make us more vulnerable somehow?

As much as I now allow myself to think, write, and talk about my grandmother and her time in the concentration camps, she probably remains silent because “[trauma] has an intensity that defies description. Many traumatized people feel that they live in a personal hell in which no other human could possibly share,” writes Peter A. Levine in his book about healing trauma, Waking the Tiger.

I think my parents already know this and so they accept Babi’s silence and respect it by emulating her. They believe that bringing up the past is not always a healing process. Levine agrees that reopening old wounds is not always constructive, and that “…the solution to vanquishing trauma comes not through confronting it directly, but by working with its reflection, mirrored in our instinctual responses.” Instead of reliving the past and re-experiencing our trauma, in order to heal it we must find its reflection in how it has affected our bodies and habits, and resolve it through these manifestations.

Likewise, though I now say that my eating disorder ended in high school, when I am honest with myself, I know that what changed was mostly my extreme behaviour and not my mindset. Though courses in Women’s Studies loosened my mind’s corset strings, it is impossible for me to say that I am at peace with food and eating. That is because in my disordered eating is a reflection, an echo, or a fragment of Babi’s trauma. This fragment is now my own, and I see it as a splinter in one of those mirrors that always makes you look fatter than you are.

Though I don’t think I can heal Babi, I can try to heal the part of her trauma that she passed down to me. I still go through minor binges and diets, eat too fast, am unable to stop eating when I am full, and am routinely frustrated while trying to disassemble the mess of anxiety, fear, insecurity, and societal pressure that is always an unwanted dinner guest at my table.

I think of laying out this mess as portions on a plate, or performing a virtual self-autopsy, dissecting the contents of my stomach; I could monitor and measure my every bite, or not pay attention at all; or maybe just ask Babi for the chocolate-cherry rice pudding recipe.

Though at this very moment I am unsure of how to proceed, I am bound to find, if not answers, some peace for my family and myself. I, like Ruth Wajnryb, “…would like to believe that understanding is achievable. I have a naïve, unexamined conviction that understanding will bring with it some comfort or composure. I would like to think that there will come a time when I will cease being overwhelmed, reeling back with disbelief each time I am confronted with the savagery of Holocaust events.”

However, as Wajnryb also concludes, I feel that it may not be possible to stop feeling horrified and overwhelmed; the most we can do is try to make sense of the Holocaust within our own lives. Though I dread facing my ugly mess of food issues, it helps to believe that what I discover will help me become healthy and whole again. In the same way, as a child I watched Babi peel a wrinkled old apple I did not want to eat. “Look—it’s still good underneath,” she said. I took a piece from her and found out that it was.