The Narrative Body: Body, Trauma, and Holocaust – Between Generations, Between Words and Movement

What does the “body that tells the story” mean to Holocaust survivors?

“The telling body” means that key parts of the trauma are not only preserved as a verbal story, but also as sensations, breathing patterns, muscular tension, freezing, jerky movements, and automatic body reactions.

For Holocaust survivors – and especially for those who experienced the war in infancy or early childhood – many experiences remain “wordless,” but continue to live in the body and appear through trembling, choking, avoidance of contact, alertness, or repetitive movements. Qualitative research on the “body as narrator” in the lives of Holocaust survivors has shown that life stories are told in both words and movement, and that during storytelling, clear physical clusters such as arousal, choking, passivity, activity, stagnation, and self-confidence appear.

In this sense, the body is not just a “bearer of symptoms,” but a source of knowledge: it tells where there was horror, where armor was built, and where the powers of survival and resilience were also preserved. In “Sea and Land,” we see the bodies of survivors and their families as full partners in the journey of rehabilitation: the body not only “responds,” but also leads – in water, movement, breathing, and safe encounters.

How was trauma from the Holocaust preserved in the body?

Trauma from the Holocaust is retained in the body through stress systems, regulatory patterns of the nervous system, and implicit physical memory that is not always dependent on continuous verbal memory.

Clinical studies of survivors indicate a high prevalence of PTSD symptoms, hypervigilance, intrusive memories, sleep difficulties, intense physical reactions to threatening situations, and somatization in old age. A recent clinical case of an 82-year-old Holocaust survivor describes an almost frozen body: shallow and almost invisible breathing, armored muscles, difficulty touching and surrendering, and recurring nightmares in which the body “returns” to the horrors even without clear words.

The concept of motor imprint – the physical imprinting of trauma – is used to explain how past events repeatedly stimulate brain areas related to movement, even when the person is unable to articulate exactly what happened. In rehabilitation, working with breathing, posture, small movements, or safe self-touch can sometimes open a door to a place where words still fail to reach – but the body already knows how to tell.

How was trauma from the Holocaust passed on to future generations?

Intergenerational transmission occurred through several channels simultaneously:

• Family emotional channel – a climate of anxiety, silence, guilt, idealization, or rigidity, in which the parents' trauma is "present" even when it is not talked about.
• Parenting relationship channel – patterns of overprotection, demand for achievement, difficulty expressing tenderness, or alternatively, excessive attachment and identification.
• Cultural channel – a social narrative of “We were amazed – we overcame – we built a strong army,” in which the Jewish body becomes a symbol of strength, but sometimes has difficulty admitting weakness.
• Biological-epigenetic channel – Studies on Holocaust survivors and their chil