International Holocaust Remembrance Day and Our Long Road Trip

PSYCHIATRIC VIEWS ON THE DAILY NEWS

Today, time feels almost suffocating to me. Over 80 years ago, Jewish people were put in cattle cars for trips to concentration camps, sometimes euphemistically and cruelly called “work camps.” This International Holocaust Remembrance Day once again marks the day of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

I turned out to be what I belatedly considered to be a Holocaust-related baby of some sort, born on May 5, 1946, after my father joined the army as a lawyer and met my mother at a military base in Dayton, Ohio. I came to this interpretation not too many years ago, when I was asked to be the discussant of the movie “Hitler’s Children.” In a way, I thought I was one, although an uncountable number of circumstances leads to one’s birth. My ill mother was not supposed to be able to safely have children, but here I miraculously was, and then my sister 6 years later. As far as I have been able to tell, the whole rest of my family was gone. I write on their behalf.

I am now approaching 80, and my wife and I are planning to make our annual voluntary snow birding trip from Milwaukee to Houston, where we lived from 1977-1989. Now there is also a Holocaust museum in Houston.

I wondered about leaving today, not only because it is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, but because the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists are releasing their 2026 Doomsday Clock announcement. It is bound to get closer than its current 89 seconds to midnight.

What a one-two punch. The Holocaust and Nazi Germany, then the atomic bombing over Japan that helped to end World War II.

Perhaps, though, it still is not apparent enough what these 2 annual days, in a way representing the worse of what humans can do to one another, have to do with today and our simpler and presumably safer personal road trip. The past does not necessarily predict the future, does it? No, not unless we have not learned enough from past trauma.

But past trauma does not leave us. In fact, incorporating the word “Remembrance” in the designation of the day has mixed repercussions in my psychiatric thinking. Severe trauma is often not remembered, but displaced in the mind unless it is processed successfully, often needing much social support and sometimes psychotherapy. When this trauma is not remembered correctly, it has been easier to deny the rise in anti-Semitism that we are experiencing. Related triggers to such trauma are commo and may suddenly result in emotional outburst or numbing. But at least the title conveys that we should remember what we can.

There is a powerful modern classical music piece and recording by Steve Reich that illustrates this personal connection between the Holocaust and the present. In “Different Trains” from 1988, he presents it as an autobiographical recording, as he describes¹:

“The idea for the piece comes from my childhood. Due to my parent’s divorce, I travelled back and forth by train frequently between New York and Los Angeles from 1939 to 1942 . . . While these trips were exciting and romantic at the time, I now look back and think that, if I had been in Europe during this period, as a Jew I would have had to ride on very different trains. With this in mind, I wanted to make a piece that would accurately reflect the whole situation.”

To do so, he integrates brief spoken recordings of his governess who went with him, a retired Pullman train porter, and 3 Holocaust survivors’ testimonies. For me, when I was about his childhood age, I was allowed to go alone on a train from Chicago to Cincinnati to spend loving summers with my cousins.

In psychiatry, the Holocaust and atomic bombing of Japan, with the unnecessary scapegoating and internment of Japanese Americans on our West Coast, has surely left people and patients suffering from what has become known as the intergenerational transmission of trauma, which must also include Native Americans, Black Americans, and other traumatized peoples, as well as individual families. For Jews, the horrific experiences of planned trauma, loss, and displacement against them go back centuries and centuries. Breaking any intergenerational trauma cycle is quite a challenge, and one that psychiatry has not embraced. Throughout my career, I have worked with many second and third generation Holocaust survivors as well as violent perpetrators. Ensuing personal secondary trauma is hard to avoid.

We decided to wait on our road trip at least 2 more days due to the cold, snow, and power outages on the way. We both also developed bad colds. Assessing risks is so often challenging. As I age, I feel I have less to lose with taking risks, but also what time I have left is more precious.

Soon, I will try to keep my eye on the road and my mind from wandering with trauma triggers as we hopefully make our trip to our former home of Houston, with its psychological pain and remembrance—yet also so, so much of the best of human nature—coming along for the ride.

Dr Moffic is an award-winning psychiatrist who specialized in the cultural and ethical aspects of psychiatry and is now in retirement and retirement as a private pro bono community psychiatrist. A prolific writer and speaker, he has done a weekday column titled “Psychiatric Views on the Daily News” and a weekly video, “Psychiatry & Society,” since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. He was chosen to receive the 2024 Abraham Halpern Humanitarian Award from the American Association for Social Psychiatry. Previously, he received the Administrative Award in 2016 from the American Psychiatric Association, the one-time designation of being a Hero of Public Psychiatry from the Speaker of the Assembly of the APA in 2002, and the Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in 1991. He presented the third Rabbi Jeffrey B. Stiffman lecture at Congregation Shaare Emeth in St. Louis on Sunday, May 19, 2024. He is an advocate and activist for mental health issues related to climate instability, physician burnout, and xenophobia. He is now editing the final book in a 4-volume series on religions and psychiatry for Springer: Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Christianity, and now The Eastern Religions, and Spirituality. He serves on the Editorial Board of Psychiatric Times.

Reference

1. Different Trains. Music and the Holocaust. Accessed January 27, 2026. https://holocaustmusic.ort.org/memory/memorials/europe-during-war/