The multiple studies that have examined the transgenerational transmission of Holocaust trauma from survivors to their descendants have yielded inconsistent results. These can be attributed to differences in assessment tools and to individual differences between survivors, such as their specific experiences during the Holocaust.

Following the trauma of the Shoah, many survivors took to writing their experiences in memoir. The trauma  memoir, a term defined in the body of this thesis, became a significant space to share real world experiences of a genocide that shocked the world. Trauma is continuous, it lives on through the repetitive behaviours of the survivor, a concept that Sigmund Freud conceptualizes as the “compulsion to repeat” (XVII 1920–1922 19).

This paper examines the relationship between transnationalism, cultural preservation, and transgenerational trauma in the United States (US) Indo population. The information being analysed was compiled by the author from two separate surveys which took place between 2012 and 2021. This data was initially intended to act as a census for the scattered US Indo community however the salient information necessitated that the census be ongoing and that another survey be developed to measure effects of lingering trauma which has been passed down generationally.

When a large group of Indo-Europeans had to repatriate to a country many had never set foot in, they set in motion an unforeseen culture of remembrance. The subsequent narratives of forced migration – or rather narratives of belonging – deal with memories of home. Whereas first-generation repatriates predominantly used literature to document their memories, the second-generation remembers the past in the cinematic field of the cultural imaginary.