Aging Holocaust Survivors Still Suffer From PTSD

From 1942 to 1945, Sonia Reich, a pre-adolescent Jew, was on the run. Orphaned and alone, she fought to keep herself alive while the majority of her extended family was executed in the Holocaust. When World War II ended, Sonia came to the United States, married a Holocaust survivor and built what her son, Howard, calls “the American Dream": a long marriage, children and grandchildren who went to college, a house without a mortgage, a car, and an extended life. From the outside, it seemed that Sonia had escaped the camps. On the inside, however, she struggled with undetected symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).