The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia

* This psychological inheritance can be handed down in various ways: in parents’ anxieties and phobias, in their over-protection of children, in the expectations with which they burden them, and even in the games they play with them. The Hungarian psychoanalyst Terez Virag, who specialized in the treatment of Holocaust survivors and their children, cites the case of a mother, for example, who lived through the siege of Leningrad as a child. The mother’s two-year-old daughter would not eat Father Christmas biscuits, and would cry in protest when she was given them. As a child herself, the mother had been traumatized by stories she was told of people killing children to eat them during the siege of Leningrad. According to Virag, the mother had passed on this trauma in the form of a bath-time game she played with her daughter in which she would take the infant’s foot in her mouth and say, ‘Now I will eat you’ (T. Virag, Children of Social Trauma: Hungarian Psychoanalytic Case Studies (London, 2000), p. 43).