Gated Grief: The Daughter of a GI Concentration Camp Liberator Discovers a Legacy of Trauma - Softcover

Leila Levinson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1934980552 ISBN 13: 9781934980552

Publisher: Cable Publishing, 2011

Synopsis

•             2011 President's Award, Military Writers Society of America!!

If you want to understand your father's, mother's, or spouse's war experience, if someone in your family has suffered combat trauma, then you need to read this book.  It will bring understanding and open the door to healing your family. Leila, who sought to heal multigenerational traumas, takes on a journey of healing that began when she discovered haunting photographs her father had taken when he helped to liberate a Nazi concentration camp at the end of World War II.   She learned from meeting other veteran liberators that what he witnessed deeply traumatized him and his fellow liberators.  And they brought their trauma home with them where it rippled through their families.  "Even though the subject is difficult, the book ads much to our understanding of trauma and is fast and easily digested, because Leila has confronted and unraveled the horror for us.  She embraces her own calling-- unique, courageous, necessary-- as the witness, chronicler, researcher, and preserver of a huge yet neglected portion of our World War II veteran population that still has much to teach us abut trauma."                               -Dr. Ed Tick, author of War and the Soul

About this title

From the Inside Flap

When I took off the lid, photographs spilled out.  There were hundreds of them.  A foot emerged from the chaos, a leg. Many legs. Grotesquely frozen faces. My fingers turned the photo over: "Nordhausen, Germany, April 1945."      After the death of her father, a WWII U.S. Army doctor, Leila Levinson discovers a concealed box of shocking photographs he had taken of a Nazi slave labor camp.     She learns that he suffered a breakdown after treating the camp's survivors and is compelled to seek out and interview dozens of WWII veterans who also liberated Nazi concentration camps.     Still traumatized by the unimaginable horrors they found, many of them revealed for the first time their painful experiences.     In this groundbreaking portrait of trauma's legacy, Gated Grief reveals that unspoken memories continue to imprison and haunt WWII veterans and how the emotional scars affected their loved ones as well--including the author and her family.  

About the Author

Leila Levinson is a veterans advocate who blogs for the Huffington Post and has appeared on CNN.  She has written for the Washington Post, the Texas Observer, and War, Literature, and Art and founded the online community veteranschildren.org that creates a bridge of stories between veterans and their children. A graduate of Vassar College and the University of Texas School of Law, she lives in Austin, Texas with her husband and two sons.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cable Publishing
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1934980552
• ISBN 13: 9781934980552
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272