The trauma of the Holocaust has permanently altered the brain structure of survivors and may have had a biological impact on their children and grandchildren, a study has found.
Groundbreaking research which saw Holocaust survivors undergo MRI scans of their brains has revealed not only the psychological cost but also the biological toll of Hitler’s persecution of Europe’s Jews.
Over the course of three years researchers examined the brain function of 28 Holocaust survivors living in Slovakia and the Czech Republic and compared them with 28 individuals from the same region who were unaffected by the Holocaust.
The research, presented at the 5th European Academy of Neurology Congress in Oslo this week, revealed that the survivors — who on average were aged between 79 and 80 — showed a significantly decreased volume of grey matter in the brain compared to the similarly aged control group.
The Holocaust subjected millions of people and their communities to significant traumatic stress, through killing, propaganda, persecution and legislation, and researchers set out to explain the effect this has had on the behavioural, psychological and neurobiological functions of survivors. According to Professor Ivan Rektor, who led the study, the reduced areas of grey matter affect parts of the brain responsible for stress response, memory, motivation, emotion, learning and behaviour.
The study differentiated between survivors who were 12 or under in 1945 and those who were older. Researchers found that the reduction in grey matter was significantly more evident in younger survivors. This, they believe, may be because a child’s developing brain is more vulnerable to stressful situations.
The researchers are now investigating the impact of the Holocaust on survivors’ offspring and even their grandchildren. Early results in their children show reduced connectivity between structures of the brain involved in processing emotion and memory. Further research is set to identify biomarkers of stress resilience and post-traumatic growth as well as determining whether transmission to offspring is based on behavioural and psychological factors or on genetic factors.
Speaking to the JC from Oslo, Professor Rektor — who is head of the research centre at the Centre for Neuroscience at Masaryk University in Brno in the Czech Republic — said his research had a personal motivation. His parents, both Jewish, survived the Holocaust as they fled to the mountains of the former Czechoslovakia and joined a partisan group to fight the Nazis.
At 95, Professor Rektor’s mother was the oldest participant in the study, while his then 15-year-old daughter was the youngest. Born in 1948, the professor said: “Preliminary results from the second generation show that some changes in certain aspects are similar to the first generation.
“After more than 70 years, the impact of surviving the Holocaust on brain function is significant. We revealed substantial differences in the brain structures involved in the processing of emotion, memory and social cognition, in higher level of stress but also of post-traumatic growth between Holocaust survivors and controls and early results show this is also the case in children of survivors too.”
Of his own experience, he told the JC: “I feel myself that I am unable to look at a movie of a concentration camp. My emotions are involved, so I know that it’s had an impact on me and probably my children too. But the question is whether the transmission is social or genetic.
“Essentially, the findings suggest that we have the history of our ancestors in our biology.”
