The Shoah. The Farhud. This War. One Inherited Wound. |
What two catastrophes transmitted to their descendants, and what this war reactivated in both of us
I am a trauma specialist. I have spent twenty years studying how collective catastrophe travels across generations, not as memory, but as nervous system. As body. As the particular way your shoulders tense when certain words are spoken, the automatic scan of a room for exits, the instinct that arrives before thought.
I thought I understood inherited trauma. Then this war began, and I watched my husband’s face on the morning of October 7, and I realized I had been studying it in other people’s families without fully seeing it in my own.
We are two parts of the same people. Between us, we carry Europe and the Middle East, the camps and the pogroms. On that morning, two completely different inherited responses woke up in the same household, and I finally understood what catastrophe actually passes down.
It is not the story. It is the helplessness.
The Shoah and the Farhud look like different histories. They transmitted the same wound.
I was born in Paris, in the apartment from which my father had been taken.
July 1942. He was arrested with his parents, his brother, his sisters. He was the only one who came back. After the war, he returned to that apartment and raised his family there, pressing life back into the place where it had broken, as if continuity itself were a form of defiance.
I grew up in those rooms. I grew up surrounded by comfort and unprotected at the same time. Something older than my own experience kept whispering in my body: this place will not protect you. I could not have named it then. I had no language for what happened when a policeman appeared on the street, when I fainted in a crowded metro, when I felt that constant low weight walking through a city I deeply loved.
What I carried was not grief. It was the encoded memory of defenselessness, of a family taken in broad daylight with no one coming for them, no army, no state, no door that could hold.
My husband’s family came from Iraq and Lebanon, rooted for generations in the fabric of Jewish-Arabic life. His mother was a child in Baghdad on June 1, 1941, when the Farhud broke over the city.
The word means violent dispossession. Over two days, between 150 and 180 Jews were killed, hundreds wounded, some 1,500 homes and businesses looted and destroyed, riots incited by pro-Nazi officers and youth movements, fueled by years of antisemitic propaganda broadcast from Radio Berlin. Jewish communities had lived in Iraq for more than two and a half millennia. It did not protect them. His mother’s family survived because a Muslim neighbor hid them in his basement.
Seven years later, she stood on a street in Beirut with her father when the loudspeakers began to scream: Palestina bladna, ul-Yahud klabna. Palestine is our land, and the Jews are our dogs. Her father turned to her and said: We are leaving this country. They did, as did nearly a million Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, leaving places that had been home for centuries, taking almost nothing.
The Farhud was not the Shoah. It was a pogrom, a different catastrophe, different perpetrators, different geography. But it transmitted the same civilizational message: you do not belong here, and no length of history will protect you. The wound at its core was identical: helplessness in the face of a world that had turned.
What differs is not the wound. What differs is the survival blueprint each family wrote in response to it.
His family’s blueprint was written by a man who understood that when the street turns on you, the decision to flee is not defeat. It is the clearest possible act of protecting what you love. Move before they trap you. Read the signs early. Keep the exit clear.
My family’s blueprint was different, not stay and be passive, but never again be without the capacity to defend yourself. Hold ground. Build the capacity to fight back. Never again be taken with no one coming for you.
Neither blueprint is wrong. Both were written by people trying to answer the same unbearable question: how do we make sure this never happens to the children who come after us?
WHAT THIS WAR REACTIVATED
I watched him watching a speech by Nasrallah. I saw in his eyes not only the fear of a man witnessing the present, but the older, deeper fear of a child whose family had already lived this scene. His body did what it had been shaped to do: scan for the exit, protect the children, ask whether it was time to go. He could not understand how I could remain calm.
What I did not yet have words for, even as a trauma professional, was this: I was not calm because I was unafraid. I was calm because, for the first time in my life, I was on ground that fights back.
I had left France at nineteen. I immigrated to Israel in my forties. And here, in a country that has known wars and missiles and shelters its entire existence, I found something I can only call safety. Not the absence of threat. The presence of agency.
What this war reactivated in me was the knowledge, cellular and ancient, of what it means to be taken with no one coming for you. Israel’s capacity to defend itself did not frighten me. It held me. For the first time, I was living inside the answer to the question my family never got to ask: what if we could fight back?
Two people. One household. One war. Two completely different inherited responses, his the wisdom of flight, mine the relief of ground that defends. Both of us, without knowing it, being faithful to the dead.
WHAT YOM HASHOAH ASKS US TO HOLD IN 5786
Yom HaShoah commemorates the six million. But the trauma that lives in Jewish bodies is not only the Shoah. It is the Farhud. The pogroms of Eastern Europe. The expulsions from Beirut and Baghdad. The slow erosion of Jewish life across North Africa, Morocco and Tunisia and Algeria and Libya and Egypt, communities that had existed for two thousand years, until they simply could not remain.
One people. Many catastrophes. One wound that ran through all of them: the helplessness of a people with no sovereign capacity to defend themselves.
This war did not create that wound. It reopened it. And in reopening it, it gave us something rare, the chance to feel, in real time, what our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents felt, and to ask: what are we doing differently? What has changed?
What has changed is this: we are not helpless. We are not waiting for a neighbor’s basement or a forged document or a miracle. We have built, imperfectly and at enormous cost, the capacity to answer back. That is not nothing. In the long arc of Jewish history, that is everything.
To remember is not only to look back. It is to understand what is still alive in our bodies, the specific flavor of fear, the blueprint for survival, the inherited instinct that arrives before thought. And to ask: what am I being faithful to? What did the people who came before me need me to carry, and what did they need me to put down?
My husband and I did not choose our inheritances. But we chose each other. And every day, in this land, in this war, we choose to stay.
Ve’bacharta ba’chaim. You will choose life. We were told this before we had a land, before we had an army, before we had a door that could hold. We are still being told it now, in the only language our bodies have always understood.
We are still answering.
Dr. Cathy Lawi is the founder and CEO of EmotionAid®, an international organization specializing in emotional first response, physiological regulation, and collective resilience. She is based in Israel.