Searching Chromosomes for the Legacy of Trauma

On 23 April 1945, my father, Gershon Glausiusz, was liberated from the Nazis. He was ten years old. Two weeks earlier, he and his mother and three surviving brothers had been packed onto a train along with 2,500 other prisoners of Bergen-Belsen, the concentration camp in Germany where my father had been incarcerated since 6 December 1944. Another brother, only 21 months old, had died in the camp. For 14 days, while the family survived on minuscule rations of scavenged raw potato peels and maize, the 'Lost Train' snaked haphazardly through Eastern Germany, blocked by the advances of the Russian and American armies, before halting in a forest near the small German town of Tröbitz.

“At 6 o’clock in the morning, the person in charge of our wagon looked out of the barbed-wire window and saw two Russian scouts on white horses emerging from the middle of the woods,” my father says. “And he started shouting, ‘Frau Glausiusz, Die Russen sind schon da — the Russians are already here.’ The reason why he shouted across to my mother...