Dr. Mark Henry Kinn grew up both searching for and running from his parents’ tragic past. How do you live through a trauma that isn’t even your own? How does a child live with the poignancy and sadness of a generation, following him to school, to work, and out into a world that doesn’t understand?
Kinn’s mother, Sonia, evaded the Nazis by hiding in the forest, but she never forgot her murdered family. His father, Phil, joined the Russian resistance, but sneaked back into the ghetto to find his father and sisters. Sonia and Phil met in 1944 when both joined a secret caravan of Jews escaping from Eastern Europe; both were struggling to move past the memory of extreme brutality and overwhelming loss.
As Dr. Kinn explains, My sister and I were left with an apocalyptic sense that our parents’ world had been uprooted, killed, destroyed. They thought they were hiding their past, protecting us from the Holocaust and its atrocities, but this made it worse. They rarely spoke about the Holocaust during our childhood yet it was there every day, in everything, omnipresent but never acknowledged, never explained.
In stories pieced together from early childhood to adulthood, Under the Same Roof sensitively illustrates the impact of the Holocaust on second-generation survivors. You kids have Holocaust on the brain, Kinn’s mother would say when he asked her about her experience in the woods or his father’s time in the resistance.
This gentle and subtle memoir follows Mark Henry Kinn from a childhood full of secrets and unexpressed feelings (afraid of upsetting parents who had been through so much ) to an adulthood of trying both consciously and unconsciously, to heal his parents’ pain by becoming a doctor.
Under the Same Roof is about the consequences of unimaginable horror. It’s about the struggle to discover an identity apart from an all-encompassing legacy of fear, anger, guilt and sadness. Told with great love for his heroic parents and a wish for a better life in the face of an inescapable past, Under the Same Roof is an insightful illustration of the consequences of intergenerational trauma.
