Living with Generational Trauma: A Child's Perspective on the Aftermath of War

The word “war” conjures images of explosions, rubble, and headlines. But for many, the most enduring casualties are not visible. They take root quietly, shaping childhoods, distorting selfhood, and altering the rhythm of relationships. In A Child Of War, Ewa Reid-Hammer explores how the violence of conflict does not stop when the bombs do—how it lingers, morphing into silence, fear, and inherited sorrow.

To be the child of war is not only to survive it, but to absorb its aftershocks long after the world has moved on. Reid-Hammer recounts this through the eyes of a girl surrounded by the brokenness of adults who bore their own invisible wounds. Her trauma, though not shaped by frontline battles, grew in the emotional wreckage left behind. There is a haunting honesty in her realization that it was not the war she directly remembers, but the unhealed grief of those closest to her that truly shaped her. What’s inherited in such circumstances is not just memory—it’s a sense of self, deformed by loss.

This story unfolds as a quiet evolution: from a place of unnameable dread to a slow emergence into understanding. Reid-Hammer’s words chart the emotional territories of dissociation, denial, and despair, but also the painful process of integration. In this way, her journey reflects a broader truth about trauma—it is not the event itself, but its residue on identity that demands reckoning. Healing, then, requires more than forgetting or commemorating; it calls for a reconfiguration of who we believe ourselves to be.

At the heart of her reflection is a difficult tension: the need to remember without becoming consumed. As survivors, or descendants of survivors, there is a moral imperative to hold onto the past—to bear witness, to speak for the silenced. But there is also danger in too closely identifying with that pain. Reid-Hammer expresses how trauma, when unexamined, can become a lens so distorted that it prevents growth. When the past becomes too entwined with the present, it threatens to eclipse the future.

Her narrative ultimately gestures toward a kind of quiet redemption—not one of triumph, but of deepened understanding. Through reckoning with her inner life, Reid-Hammer discovers not only the meaning behind her suffering, but a truer version of herself. She shows that healing is not erasure, but the ability to carry memory differently. Her story becomes a testament to the human capacity to emerge from inherited darkness into light that is self-shaped, hard-won, and whole.