....my mother also, deported from Paris by Nazis to do war work, took last train out of Berlin before it fell. My grandmother at age 11 holding her beloved father's hand when he was shot in the street during Russian revolution, then raped repeatedly by father's murderer for a year, etc. etc. etc. I only learned this last year, but she had unexplained dystonia-like episodes of extreme shaking for the rest of her life...... The Swiss doctor explained to me how my own dystonia - while apparently medication-induced - is also the exact image of a trembling young girl in terror fighting off her attacker... How can those experiences of stress not affect the hormonal composition of one's tissues, the cellular memory? They say that when our mothers were fetuses inside our grandmother's body, that fetus already had all the eggs that she would have for her life. So in a very real sense, we WERE there for some of those experiences....

Thanks, Trixidee, for the link to your mom's book. I will write to you personally over the weekend....