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How My Parents’ PTSD Affected Me
I believe that my parents had undiagnosed PTSD. Here is how their symptoms affected me while I was growing up.
My parents went through a lot of trauma during World War ll.
My father was captured and kept in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp for five and a half years. After discovering some pen and ink drawings of his time there, I found out several stories from my mom. The postcard-size artwork showed officers with guns escorting prisoners to the camp among other things. One card featured a skull and crossbones and the word “hunger” (this is the German word for hunger and is pronounced differently).
After that, my mom and dad would tell a few stories of their experiences on rare occasions. Some are too gross to mention here. One traumatic event kept coming up. One day, some Russian guards took my father outside the prison camp and told him to dig his own grave. Fortunately, some of the guards’ superiors saw him shoveling and stopped the guards from killing him.
My mother also experienced a lot of trauma in Germany during the war. Her husband was killed. She had a baby boy who died under awful circumstances. Both my parents endured atrocities the Russians perpetrated when they were in Berlin. I suspect that my mother experienced horrible things that she never talked about.