The Medicine We Carry: A Reflection on Inherited Trauma and Healing
In The Medicine We Carry, writer Deena Stuerman reflects on her grandmother’s flight from Nazi Germany and the silence, resilience, and grief woven into her family’s story. Through the lens of a recent rupture in Boulder and her own journey of breaking silence, she explores how trauma is carried forward through generations and how memory rises to meet the present. This powerful essay invites readers into a pilgrimage of remembrance and healing, showing how the medicine we inherit can become the medicine we share—together.
WRITER’S NOTE: This story wasn’t easy to write, and it isn’t easy to share. There’s a voice that rises when I get this vulnerable—an old, inherited voice that asks: Is this safe? Could this hurt me or someone I love? That voice is real. But the pull to heal is stronger.
My grandmother fled Hitler’s Germany, leaving everything behind to survive. Her silence became part of my inheritance, and this writing is part of breaking that silence.
This is not a political statement. It is a remembering. A reflection on inherited trauma and the way memory echoes in our bodies and our lives—how grief lingers when it isn’t spoken, and how healing begins when it is. It carries the weight of silence and the power of breaking it, the ache of invisibility and the courage it takes to be seen.
Read with your heart open. Let it stir what it needs to. And when it does—follow it. You’re not alone.
With love,
Deena
The Medicine We Carry
June 1st. Pearl Street. 2025.
Boulder has always felt like a second home.
It’s where I graduated,
where I bought my first house.
Where I fell in love,
had my babies,
became a woman who could hold both grief and grace.
I’ve wandered Pearl Street in every season—
with a stroller, a heartbreak, a coffee, a prayer.
I’ve written myself back to wholeness on those sidewalks.
That place carries my becoming.
So when June 1st came—
and something cracked open there—
it didn’t feel distant.
It felt like it split through something tender and known.
Something in my backyard.
Something in my body.
What was meant to be a peaceful protest in honor of Israel
turned violent.
Several were injured.
One woman—a Holocaust survivor—died from her wounds weeks later.
It was heartbreaking.
It was horrific.
And though I wasn’t there that day,
a rupture moved through me.
Because this isn’t just about one protest.
Or one city.
Or even one war.
It’s about a wound passed down through generations.
About how trauma doesn’t just live in the past—
it reenacts itself.
It rises when memory meets the moment.
It’s about me.
And it’s about you.
When I was nine years old, I raised my hand in Hebrew school.
I asked the question that’s lived inside me ever since:
How could God allow atrocities like the Holocaust to happen?
My teacher looked at me and said,
“So we can learn from them—
and so history won’t repeat itself.”
At the time, I nodded.
But I didn’t understand what that meant.
Not really.
Because history has repeated itself—
again and again—
and for forty years I’ve carried that question inside me.
It has taken decades to begin to understand.
To begin to glimpse the answer to this question.
And I think it is beginning to come to light:
the medicine is the answer.
Because for decades I have asked myself and God/Spirit—
what have we not learned?
Why do these atrocities still happen,
today, in different forms—
but still unimaginable hate,
division,
separation,
violence?
Now—after Boulder, after Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, Gaza—
I keep asking, again and again:
What haven’t we learned?
Not just as nations or governments,
but as people.
As hearts.
My grandmother—Mama—fled Hitler’s Germany.
She escaped through channels of safety,
leaving behind everything familiar to survive.
She rarely spoke of what she endured,
but the story lived in her body—
in the way she moved,
in the silence that shaped our family.
When I was little, she gave me a Russian doll.
A story inside a story, inside a story.
Each layer holding quiet.
Even then, I knew—this was more than a toy.
It was an inheritance.
My DNA. My epigenetics.
The silence and the survival stitched into me.
Many years later, at a summer gathering I’d returned to for years,
the war in Ukraine was unfolding.
I arrived carrying more than I could name.
One night, I left the group early—
returned to my cabin to be alone.
Grief close. Memory awake.
I needed space to unravel.
Then—a knock at the window.
Someone I knew stood outside, laughing—dressed as Hitler.
“It’s mustache night,” they said.
They meant no harm.
But harm arrived anyway.
They didn’t know Mama’s story.
They didn’t know mine.
And in that moment, I realized—
How could they?
I had never told them.
It wasn’t hatred that arrived at the window that night.
It was ignorance.
The not-knowing that comes when stories stay buried.
And I see now—that part was mine.
Because I had never spoken it aloud.
How can anyone understand
what we don’t let them see?
Something inside me broke that night.
And I know now—it had to.
Because healing doesn’t begin in silence.
It begins with remembering—out loud.
That night, I began to understand
what it means to carry the medicine:
to be a Jew,
to be my grandmother’s granddaughter,
to speak what was once unspoken.
Because these moments—
the lake, Boulder—
they are not the same.
One born of hatred,
the other of ignorance.
But both reveal what happens
when we bury the story too deep.
Hatred thrives where memory is erased.
Ignorance lives where silence is kept.
Here’s what I’ve come to know—
with my whole Jewish heart:
It was never just about survival.
It was never just about the questions.
It’s about the answer.
And the answer is this:
We carry the medicine.
We, the descendants of those who endured the unimaginable,
carry stories shaped by fire—
and the capacity to transform them, to transmute them.
Not into revenge.
Not into silence.
But into something whole.
Now, as the world fractures,
and headlines echo pain we’ve known before—
in Israel, in Palestine, in Gaza—
we’re being asked again:
What will we do with this inheritance?
What I’ve learned is this:
We must remember.
We must heal.
We must forgive the wounded parts of ourselves
that still believe we have to be separate.
That still confuse protection with disconnection.
That still forget how to love.
To break the cycle,
we must carry the full story—
and meet it with a whole heart.
This is not about politics.
This is about patterns.
This is about remembering what trauma made us forget.
This is about choosing, again,
to become who we truly are.
This is the medicine we carry.
We come from people who knew how to sing in exile.
Who built sanctuaries in the ashes.
Who carried love across oceans.
Who stitched hope into silence.
And maybe that’s what the world still hasn’t learned:
That the deepest grief—
the kind Jews have carried for centuries—
can become the deepest healing.
But only if we allow it.
Only if we remember who we are.
Not separate.
Not superior.
Whole.
We carry the question and the answer.
The wound and the gold.
We carry each other.
And maybe, just maybe—
if we remember deeply enough,
healing can begin.
We reclaim wholeness.
We reclaim the story.
Not by changing what happened—
for those stories are sacred,
and we carry them with reverence—
but by releasing the story
and mending our hearts from broken into whole.
For once healed,
the possibility of a greater collective healing can begin.
To teach what the world is desperate to remember.
The answer to the question our ancestors carried.
What God/Spirit has always asked of us:
that history is not broken by silence,
and hearts cannot heal when they remain in pieces—
splintered by grief,
by vengeance,
by division.
History can only be broken open
through the deep healing of a sacred collective wound.
And I don’t know all the answers.
But I know this:
the path forward is the path of the heart.
To mend what has been broken.
To return to wholeness.
To make a pilgrimage back to the homeland of the whole heart—
again and again.
So I’ll ask you this:
What is the shape of your heart right now?
Is it ready to remember?
To soften?
To begin again—
to begin together?