The freedom to forget, but Holocaust memories return with age.

by ryan | August 29, 2007 at 08:41 am

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The power of memory, both in what one remembers and what one forgets, is not to be under estimated. Sometimes it's the ability to forget which protects the psyche from constant mental bombardment and lets the mind free from the burden of the past. But with the onset of dementia those protections seem to fall away as this woman experienced. With her age came the memories of her youth - the memories of Hitler's Germany and her experiences there.

The Los Angeles Times has a poignant story today on research that shows how the long-supressed memories of Holocaust survivors resurface with age.

It tells the story of 96-year-old Rachel Kane who experienced, but never discussed, things that beggar the imagination:

Instead, the university-educated Hebrew teacher who spoke seven languages regaled her daughters with stories about her “beautiful life” before Hitler’s armies stormed Poland, successfully locking the war years away until 1998.

That was when her second husband died. When she began to lose her battle with dementia. When she became convinced that the soldiers were coming for her, as they’d done so many years before.

For more than half a century, Rachel Kane kept the memories at bay.

There were her daughters to think of, twins born in a displaced persons camp in the aftermath of the second World War. Kane didn't want to burden them with tales of the Holocaust, of a husband shot to death by the Nazis, a baby who starved to death in the forest, an extended family wiped out in a mass execution.

She didn't explain the nightmares that woke her, screaming, in the long string of cramped apartments the family called home after resettling in Detroit and then Los Angeles.