The Handbook of Psychoanalytic Holocaust Studies: International Perspectives 9780429292965, 9780367263720, 9780367263713

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“This book is an outstanding contribution to the existing panoply of publications that deal with the Holocaust and its horrific aftermath. Though much has been written and said on the subject, it adds an invaluable unique voice and perspectives. The usual areas of concern and focus – theoretical, clinical, transgenerational and cultural – are well represented, mostly from a lively contemporary psychoanalytic perspective. But its unique added value lies in that most of its outstanding international contributors speak deeply and movingly from their personal experience as it relates to the Holocaust and has affected and shaped their lives and thought. It is thus more than a mere scientific text – it is a testimony, collated and shaped by the painful and painstaking effort to make sense and meaning of what has come to be regarded as beyond comprehension. Reading it is an experience of moving personal absorption; it is a must reading for anyone who wishes to come closer to this most horrendous chapter of history.” –­H. Shmuel Erlich, Sigmund Freud Professor of Psychoanalysis (Emeritus), The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Training and Supervising Analyst and Past-­President, Israel Psychoanalytic Society; Chair, IPA Institutional Issues Committee; Author, The Couch in the Marketplace: Psychoanalysis and Social Reality “Can we look to the future with a deeper understanding of the past? The Holocaust remains one of the most urgent, enigmatic and still incomprehensible events of the 20th century. This extraordinary and important volume is a ‘triumphant transformation of anguish into creativity’ and a vital contribution and testament to humanity, as well as to the power of psychoanalytic thinking. Its profound, clinically illustrated studies address topics applicable to all human endeavors: mourning, resilience, inter-­generational transmission of trauma and guilt, and, of course, the problem of evil and the very essence of human nature. It constantly reminds us that ‘Between the legislated suppression of memory, the deep psychological need to forget, the capacity for self-­deception, and the fading of memory associated with the passage of time, it is an enormous personal and societal challenge to remember, never forget, stay mindful, own responsibility, and learn from the past.’ ” –­Howard Levine, M.D., Editor-­in-­Chief, Routledge Wilfred R. Bion Studies Series

“Ira Brenner has hit the proverbial nail on its head by gathering a remarkable and diverse group of authors in this book. They have reviewed the vast literature related to the Holocaust and have masterfully used psychoanalytic tools to examine the impact of the horrendous tragedy from different perspectives. The result is a comprehensive and beautifully written book, essential reading, particularly for those of us who have directly experience the immensity of the pain suffered by the survivors of the Shoah. It is also for anyone who is interested in understanding the magnitude and the scope of other inexplicably inhuman tragedies such as this one and in finding ways to try to ensure that this history does not repeat itself. This is the book I have always been waiting to read.” –­Moises Lemlij, M.D., D.P.M., F.R.C. Psych “Ira Brenner takes us readers of this outstanding textbook into ‘the darkest corridor in human history.’ Internationally leading psychoanalysts and Holocaust researchers from four continents try to find a language for the unspeakable from very different perspectives. An indispensable book for practising psychoanalysts in the country of the perpetrators and anywhere as well as for citizens of a world once again threatened by anti-­Semitism, xenophobia and right-­wing radicalism.” –­Prof. Dr. Marianne Leuzinger-­Bohleber, University of Kassel/­Mainz, Sigmund-­Freud-­Institut, Training Analyst, German Psychoanalytical Association; Vice Chair of the International Research Board of the IPA “This magnificent volume, broad in scope and detailed in focus, brings together a rich array of important and wise voices in the study of the Holocaust and its aftermath. Mostly grounded in their personal experience – always alive in ones touched by this unique a ­ trocity – the authors’ moving and scholarly essays distil a lifetime’s work into compelling narratives and conceptualizations that, together, constitute a triumph of the creative spirit over the dark forces embodied in the Nazis’ ‘final solution’. Beautifully conceived and masterfully put together, this inspirational book will become a classic – indispensable as an introduction and essential as a foundation for further study.” –­Fakhry Davids, Training Analyst, British Psychoanalytical Society, Author, Internal Racism: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Race and Difference

This book is dedicated to those who hate Jews and believe that killing them will save the world. May they have life-­changing experiences and become champions of ­universal human rights.

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The Handbook of Psychoanalytic Holocaust Studies This book is a unique compilation of essays about the genocidal persecution fuelling the Nazi regime in World War II. Written by world-­renowned experts in the field, it confronts a vitally important and exceedingly difficult topic with sensitivity, courage, and wisdom, furthering our understanding of the Holocaust/­Shoah psychoanalytically, historically, and through the arts. Authors from four continents offer their perspectives, clinical experiences, findings, and personal narratives on such subjects as resilience, remembrance, giving testimony, aging, and mourning. There is an emphasis on the intergenerational transmission of trauma of both the victims and the perpetrators, with chapters looking at the question of “evil”, comparative studies, prevention, and the misuse of the Holocaust. Those chapters relating to therapy address the specific issues of the survivors, including the second and third generation, through psychoanalysis as well as other modalities, whilst the section on creativity and the arts looks at film, theater, poetry, opera, and writing. The aftermath of the Holocaust demanded that psychoanalysis re-­examine the importance of psychic trauma; those who first studied this darkest chapter in human history successfully challenged the long-­held assumption that psychical reality was essentially the only reality to be considered. As a result, contemporary thought about trauma, dissociation, self psychology, and relational psychology were greatly influenced by these pioneers, whose ideas have evolved since then. This long-­awaited text is the definitive update and elaboration of their original contributions. Ira Brenner, M.D., is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Sidney Kimmel Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University, and Training and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. He chairs the Holocaust Discussion Group at the meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and has been widely recognized for his contributions to the field of psychic trauma.

The Handbook of Psychoanalytic Holocaust Studies International Perspectives

Edited by Ira Brenner

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Ira Brenner; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Ira Brenner to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-­in-­Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Brenner, Ira, 1950– editor. Title: The handbook of psychoanalytic Holocaust studies: international perspectives / edited by Ira Brenner. Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2019011973 (print) | LCCN 2019018819 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429292965 (Master eBook) | ISBN 9780367263720 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367263713 (pbk.) Subjects: LCSH: Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945—Psychological aspects. | Children of Holocaust survivors—Mental health. Classification: LCC RC451.4.H62 (ebook) | LCC RC451.4.H62 H356 2020 (print) | DDC 940.53/18019—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019011973 ISBN: 978-0-367-26372-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-26371-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-29296-5 (ebk) Typeset in Stone Serif by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Acknowledgments Notes on contributors Ira Brenner, M.D. (Editor) Foreword Salman Akhtar Introduction Ira Brenner

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Section I: History

1

  1 Lessons learned Henry Zvi Lothane

3

  2 Freud, Max Weber, and the Shoah Peter Loewenberg

18

  8 Aging: coping with re-­traumatization67 Sophia Richman  9 Mourning Anna Ornstein

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Section III: Transmission of trauma

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10 Second generation identity Eva Fogelman

83

11 Fifty years as a “2G” author Helen Epstein

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12 Intergenerational transmission Ilany Kogan

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13 Trans-­generational fallout Yolanda Gampel

103

14 Family dynamics Hanni Mann-­Shalvi

111

15 Third generation Rivka Bekerman-­Greenberg

119

  3 A non-­Jewish view Vamik D. Volkan

25

  4 Bearing witness Dori Laub

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Section II: On surviving

39

Section IV: From the dark side

127

 5 Resilience Robert Krell

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16 Problems in German remembrance Werner Bohleber

129

  6 Vagaries of memory Marion M. Oliner

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17 Transmitted unatoned guilt Friedrich-­Wilhelm Eickhoff

143

  7 A moment in time Vera Muller-­Paisner

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18 On evil Kathryn Ann Baselice and J. Anderson Thomson

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  Con te n ts Section V: Creativity

163

Section VI: Never again?

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19 Film Andrea Sabbadini

165

24 Toward reducing large group conflict Henri Parens

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20 Theatre, opera, and literature Bella Rubin

175

21 Challenges on stage Ira Brenner

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22 At the water’s edge: poetry and the Holocaust Janet R. Kirchheimer 23 A Kaddish for Auschwitz Sergio Lewkowicz

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25 Holocaust, Rwanda, and Palestine Janet Kestenberg Amighi 26 Holocaust as a weapon against the Jews Thane Rosenbaum

219

231

195

205

Afterword Ira Brenner

235

Index

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Acknowledgments

A work of this scope could not have come about without the collaboration with colleagues across four continents over many years. I owe a profound debt of gratitude to all of the authors for their selfless contributions, which have been drawn from the depth of their souls. We mourn the loss of one of these distinguished authors, Dori Laub, with whom I  worked for twenty years, co-­ chairing the Holocaust discussion group at the meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association. We “inherited” the group from Judith Kestenberg, Milton Jucovy, and Martin Bergmann, under whose leadership and guidance I thrived. Oliver Rathbone of Karnac Publishing initially accepted and supported my proposal for this project, which then came under the provenance of Taylor  & Francis. Many thanks to Russell George and his expert staff for picking up the ball and transforming the manuscript into this magnificent volume.

Geschichte und Psychoanalyse has given permission to reprint Peter Loewenberg’s paper. Mediatoons had given permission to reprint the images in Bella Rubin’s chapter and Thane Rosembaum’s essay first appeared in Tablet Magazine. Rod Koeltgen and Peter Hoffer translated Friedrich-­Wilhelm Eickhoff’s chapter and Mara Louise Bredahl Ciria translated Sergio Lewkowicz’s paper. Debbie Szumachowski has tirelessly and devotedly prepared this manuscript. She has postponed many of her responsibilities in order to achieve this mammoth task. It has taken a toll on her. Once again, her expert work has been indispensable to me, and I am extremely grateful to her. And, finally, my wife, Roberta Brenner, has quietly and patiently encouraged me to purge myself of my preoccupation with the Holocaust. She hopes that the publication of this textbook will have been curative. Time will tell.

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Contributors Ira Brenner, M.D. (Editor)

Salman Akhtar, M.D. is Professor of Psychiatry at Jefferson Medical College and a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. He has served on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and the Psychoanalytic Quarterly. His more than 300 publications include ninety books, of which the following nineteen are solo authored, from Broken Structures (1992) to Mind, Culture, and Global Unrest (2018). Dr. Akhtar has delivered many prestigious invited lectures including a Keynote Address at the 43rd IPA Congress in Rio de Janiero, Brazil (2005), the Plenary Address at the 150th Freud Birthday Celebration sponsored by the Dutch Psychoanalytic Society and the Embassy of Austria in Leiden, Holland (2006), the Inaugural Address at the first IPA-­Asia Congress in Beijing, China (2010), and the Plenary Address at the National Meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association (2017). He is the recipient of numerous awards including the American Psychiatric Association’s Kun Po Soo Award (2004) and the highly prestigious Sigourney Award (2012) for distinguished contributions to psychoanalysis. His books have been translated into many languages, including German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, Spanish, and Turkish. A true Renaissance man, Dr. Akhtar has served as the Film Review Editor for the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and is currently serving as the Book Review Editor for the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies. He has published nine collections of poetry and serves as a Scholar-­in-­Residence at the Inter-­Act Theatre Company in Philadelphia Henry Zvi Lothane, M.D., professor of psychiatry at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York. Historian of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, Paul Schreber, and Sabina Spielrein. Latest publications: Freud Bashers: Facts, Fictions, and Fallacies. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 66(5): 953–­969. Part 1, Chapter

Two. History. In: Akhtar, S. & Twemlow S. (eds.). Textbook of Applied Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge. Peter Loewenberg, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus of History and Political Psychology at UCLA. He is a Training and Supervising Analyst and former Dean of the New Center for Psychoanalysis. He was elected North American Representative on the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) Board. He Chaired the IPA China Committee, 2007–­ 2013. He is the author of many publications, including Decoding the Past: The Psychohistorical Approach (1996) and Fantasy and Reality in History (1995). He is Editor (with Nellie Thompson) of 100 Years of the IPA (1910–­ 2010) (2011). He was elected an Honorary Member of the German Psychoanalytic Association (DPV), was the Sir Peter Ustinov Visiting Professor at the University of Vienna, and received the Nevitt Sanford Award for his professional contributions to the field of Political Psychology. Vamik D. Volkan, M.D., is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA; President Emeritus, International Dialogue Initiative (IDI), and Past President, Virginia Psychoanalytic Society, Turkish-­American Neuropsychiatric Society, International Society of Political Psychology and American College of Psychoanalysts. He is a five-­time Nobel Peace Prize nominee and prolific writer. Some of his books include The Need to Have Enemies and Allies; Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism; Blind Trust: Large Groups and Their Leaders in Times of Crisis and Terror; Enemies on the Couch: A Psychopolitical Journey Through War and Peace; The Third Reich in the Unconscious; and A Nazi Legacy: Depositing, Transgenerational Transmission, Dissociation, and Remembering Through Action. Dori Laub, M.D. (1937–­2018) was a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine and a psychoanalyst at the Western New England Psychoanalytic Institute. He was most well known as the co-­founder

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  IR A BR ENNE R of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Studies in1979, the first of its kind to methodically record and study testimonies of survivors. Dr. Laub’s pioneering technique incorporated empathic, analytic listening into the interviewing process. He also co-­founded the Genocide Studies Program at Yale’s MacMillan Center, as well as being co-­chair of the Holocaust Discussion Group at the annual meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association, working with Dr. Brenner since 1990. Dr. Laub published extensively in such areas as survivor testimonies, listening, intergenerational transmission of trauma, traumatic memory, September 11th, the Rwanda genocide, and survivors of torture. He was internationally recognized and received a number of awards, including The Elise M. Hayman Award for the Study of Holocaust and Genocide in 2004. Robert Krell, M.D., survived the Holocaust in Holland as a hidden child. He is now Professor Emeritus in Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia. Having been director of Child and Family Psychiatry, he treated Holocaust survivors, their families, and Dutch survivors of Japanese concentration camps. He established the Vancouver Holocaust Education Center which teaches 20,000 students a year, started a survivor testimony archive, and served on the International Advisory Council of the Hidden Child Gathering in New York in 1991. He has received numerous awards, including the State of Israel Bonds Elie Wiesel Remembrance Award, the Boston University Hillel Lifetime Achievement Award, the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Medal, the Governor General’s Caring Canadian Award, and special recognition from the World Federation of Jewish Child Holocaust Survivors and Descendants for his lifelong dedication. A  sought-­after speaker and writer, he has authored and co-­edited ten books, twenty book chapters, and over fifty journal articles. Marion M. Oliner, Ph.D., is a psychoanalyst in private practice. She received her training from the New York Freudian Society and was accepted to membership in 1970. Over her long career she has been active in the Society’s governance and taught most major courses. In conjunction with her chairing the Ethics Committee she developed a course which was widely adopted. She is also a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association, the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis and the Metropolitan Institute for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. She was an active member of the group sponsored by the American Psychoanalytic Association dedicated to the study of the impact of the Holocaust on the children of the descendants. Her fluency in German and French has enabled her to enlarge her knowledge of the psychoanalytic literature. This led to the publication of Cultivating Freud’s Garden in France (Aronson 1988). She contributed to panels and published

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articles especially geared to issues of trauma. In 2012 Karnac published Psychic Reality in Context: Psychoanalysis, Personal History, and Trauma. This was published in German with the support of the Sigmund Freud Institute in 2015, and has now been published in France. The presentation took place January 18, 2018, in Paris of the book titled Histoire Personellle et Trauma, Campagne Premiere. Her latest publication, Psychoanalytic Studies in Dysphoria (Routledge, December  2018) continues the previous explorations and contains some articles that have never been published in English. All address the problem of the negative self-­image and its consequences. Vera Muller-­Paisner, LCSW, Psychoanalyst, has spent the last thirty years studying the chronicity and transmission of trauma. She is trained in EMDR and Cognitive Behavior Therapy, which assist in the processing of cognitive emotional difficulties including flashbacks, interference in relationships and problems at work. Her extensive experience includes treating adults, couples, and families for a variety of issues ranging from life transitions to depression and to anxiety and dissociative disorders. She is a former research consultant for the International Study group for Trauma, Violence, and Genocide at Yale University School of Medicine; has organized trained and supervised trauma interventions in Eastern Europe and has written extensively about the subject both for professional journals and for the general public. Sophia Richman, Ph.D., ABPP, is a psychologist and psychoanalyst who practices in New York and New Jersey. She is a supervisor at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, a supervisor and training analyst at the Center for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis of New Jersey, and a faculty member of the Stephen A. Mitchell Center for Relational Studies. Dr. Richman is a child survivor of the Nazi Holocaust and has written and lectured extensively about the long-­term psychological impact of catastrophic trauma. In addition to numerous articles and chapters on the subject, she is the author of an award winning memoir, A Wolf in the Attic: The Legacy of a Hidden Child of the Holocaust (Routledge, 2002) and Mended by the Muse: Creative Transformations of Trauma (Routledge 2014). Dr. Richman is also a painter with several solo exhibitions to her credit. Anna Ornstein, M.D., is a retired psychoanalyst, lecturer in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, supervising analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute and at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. Her publications range from the interpretive process in psychoanalysis, on psychotherapy, the treatment of children and families, and the recovery following the survival of extreme conditions.



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Eva Fogelman, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist in private practice in New York, a social psychologist and a filmmaker. She is the co-­director of the International Study of Organized Persecution of Children, a project of Child Development Research. Dr. Fogelman was the Founding Director of Psychotherapy of Generations of the Holocaust and Related Traumas, Training Institute of Mental Health. She is also a Pulitzer Prize nominee of Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust. Dr. Fogelman is the writer and co-­producer of the award-­winning PBS documentary Breaking the Silence: The Generation After the Holocaust. She co-­edited Children in the Holocaust and Its Aftermath. She has served as an advisor to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and is an international speaker, widely published, and a consultant on historical traumas, moral courage during the Holocaust, and sexual violation during genocide, among other topics. Helen Epstein is a veteran journalist who has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Jerusalem Post and many magazines. She has published ten books, including Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors, Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for Her Mother’s Memory, and most recently The Long Half-­Lives of Love and Trauma. Ilany Kogan is a Training Analyst at the Israel Psychoanalytic Society. She works as a teacher and supervisor of Generatia Center in Bucharest, Romania, and in various places in Germany, especially in Munich and Aachen. For many years, she worked extensively with Holocaust survivors’ offspring and published papers and books on this topic. She was awarded the Elise M. Hayman Award for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide (2005). She is the author of The Cry of Mute Children, London & New York: Free Association Books (1995); Escape from Selfhood, London: London: IPA Publications (2007); The Struggle Against Mourning, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, (2007); Canvas Of Change – Analysis Through the Prism of Creativity, London: Karnac Books (2012); Narcissistic Fantasies in Film and Fiction – Masters of the Universe, London: Routledge (2019). She was awarded the Sigourney Award for 2016. Yolanda Gampel, Ph.D., is a Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Psychology and Program of Advanced Psychotherapy, Sackler Medical School, Tel-­ Aviv University. She was the invited associated professor to l’Université de Paris Nanterre de 1985–­1987 et à l’Université Lumière II Lyon 2000–­2001; training analyst and past president (1989–­1991) of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society and Institute; vice-­president, European Federation of Psychoanalysis (2001–­2005); representative for Europe, Board of the International Psychoanalytic Association (2007–­2011); recipient of the Hayman International Prize for Published Work Pertaining to Traumatized Children and Adults, 2001;

and the Mary S. Sigourney Award, 2006. She has published many papers in various psychoanalytic journals in English, French, Spanish, and German and has also contributed chapters several books on the effects of social political violence in children, the analyst, and the psychoanalytic process. She has also published on Child and Adolescent Analysis. A book, Ces Parents Qui Vivent a Travers Moi: Les Enfants De Guerres was published in French by Fayard and translated into four languages. Hanni Mann-­Shalvi, Ph.D., is the Director of the Psychoanalytic Couple and Family Center in Israel, which is affiliated with the International Psychotherapy Institute in Washington, where she is an Adjunct Faculty to the Child, Couple, and Family Program. She was the Vice-­President of the IACFP – International Association of Couple and Family Psychoanalysis – and a board member since 2006, as well as a member of the scientific committee for the last five international conferences. Dr. Mann – Shalvi is also on the faculties of the Israeli Psychoanalytic Institute; the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and an IPA-­RTP Fellow. She is in private practice in individual and couple psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and supervision in Tel Aviv. In her extensive teaching, research, and writing she focuses on the Israeli Unconscious, Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma, and Couple and Family Psychoanalysis. Rivka Bekerman-­Greenberg, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist/­psychoanalyst in private practice in Manhattan, New York. She is a graduate of the New York University Post-­Doctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis as well as a supervisor and faculty member at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. One of her specialties has been the transmission of the Holocaust trauma through the generations. In the 1990s she was on the faculty of the Mount Sinai Hospital Traumatic Stress Treatment Program, which specialised in providing group therapy for Holocaust survivors and their children. In the past several years Dr. Greenberg has conducted several therapy groups for grandchildren of survivors called From Surviving to Thriving. Dr. Greenberg is also the writer of a play Breaking the Silence, which focuses on three generations of women in a family of a Holocaust survivor and explores the trans-­generational transmission of the Holocaust trauma. The play was produced in April–­ May 2012 at the Cherry Lane Theater in Manhattan as well as at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2013. Breaking the Silence was published in 2013 by Eldridge Publishing. Werner Bohleber, Ph.D., is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Frankfurt am Main, a Training and Supervising Analyst, and former President of the German Psychoanalytical Association (DPV). From 1997 to 2017 he was main editor of the journal Psyche. In 2007 he

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  IR A BR ENNE R received the Mary S. Sigourney Award. His research subjects and main publication themes are: late adolescence and young adulthood; psychoanalytic theory; history of psychoanalysis in Germany; transgenerational consequences of the Nazi period and the war on the second and third generation; nationalism, xenophobia, and anti-­Semitism; trauma; religious fundamentalism; and terrorism. His last book in English was Destructiveness, Intersubjectivity, and Trauma: The Identity Crisis of Modern Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac, 2010. Friedrich-­Wilhelm Eickhoff, Dr.med., is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Tübingen (BRD), training analyst of the German Psychoanalytical Association, co-­editor of the Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse, founding member of the association “Archiv zur Geschichte der Psychoanalyse” and of the foundation “Wolfgang Loch-­Vorlesungen”, author of the Supplement 29 of the Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse entitled “Primäre Identifizierung, Nachträglichkeit und ´entlehntes unbewißtes Schuldgefühl´, and selected writings on psychoanalytic themes 1976–­2008. Kathryn Ann Baselice, MD, is a resident in psychiatry at New York University, training at NYU Langone, Bellevue Hospital, and the Manhattan Veterans Administration Hospital. She graduated from the University of Virginia School of Medicine in 2017. She received her Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology from Johns Hopkins University in 2012, where she was elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society. Between her time at Johns Hopkins and the medical school, she worked as a mental health counselor at L.E.A.P. Day Program, which specialises in dually diagnosed individuals with major mental illness and intellectual disabilities. Her research interests and publications include postpartum psychosis, evolutionary psychology, the evolution of arrogance, and the insanity defense. Dr. Baselice plans to pursue a career in academic forensic psychiatry. J. Anderson “Andy” Thomson, Jr., M.D. is a psychiatrist in Charlottesville, Virginia. He received his B.A. from Duke University (1970), his M.D. from the University of Virginia (1974) and did his adult psychiatry training at University of Virginia (1974–­1977). His private practice is oriented toward individual psychoanalytic psychotherapy, forensic psychiatry, and medication consultation. He was the Assistant Director of the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction at University of Virginia, which was founded by Vamik Volkan, M.D. and involved interdisciplinary intervention and research in large group ethnic and political conflict, primarily in the former Soviet Union. He is a staff psychiatrist at Counseling and Psychological Services at the University of Virginia Student Health Services. He serves on the clinical faculty at The Institute of Law, Psychiatry, and Public Policy at University of Virginia. He has publications on narcissistic personality disorder, evolutionary theories of depres-

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sion, antidepressants, criminal behavior, the function of serotonin, post-­traumatic stress disorder, religion, suicide terrorism, and the psychology of racism. In 2010 his work with psychologist Paul Andrews on an evolutionary theory of depression was featured in Scientific American Mind and in The New York Times Magazine, “Depression’s Upside”. He co-­authored Facing Bipolar: The Young Adult’s Guide to Dealing with Bipolar Disorder (2010) and authored Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Introduction to the Science of Faith (2011), which has been translated into Spanish, German, Italian, Polish, Turkish, and Urdu. His current research interest is evolutionary psychology and its application to religious belief, well-­being, resilience, depression, suicide, the insanity defense, arrogance, violence, and psychiatric illnesses. Since 2006 he has had the privilege of serving as a trustee of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. Andrea Sabbadini is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society and its former Director of Publications. A  Chartered Psychologist, he works in private practice in London, is an Honorary Senior Lecturer at University College London (UCL), a Member of the IPA Committee on Psychoanalysis and Culture, the Founder Editor of the journal Psychoanalysis and History, the Director of the European Psychoanalytic Film Festival (epff), and a former trustee of the Freud Museum. His most recent books are Boundaries and Bridges: Perspectives on Time and Space in Psychoanalysis (Karnac, 2014) and Moving Images: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Film (Routledge, 2014). Bella Rubin, M.A., is a Senior Lecturer (retired) at Tel Aviv University. She has been involved in the teaching and research of academic writing for many years, and has coordinated a national writing project for Ph.D. students supported by the Wolfson Family Charitable Trust of England. She has published regularly in academic journals and presented her work at international conferences. She is also the co-­founder of the Israel Forum of Academic Writing and a co-­convener at several international conferences in Israel. More recently, she has been giving writing workshops as part of her work in the field of Holocaust Education. The workshops are intended for survivors and their descendants who need guidance in how to write their family stories. Some of her recent publications in this field are these: Kline, L., Rubin, B. (2015). The borrowed child. In S. Gold (Ed.), The Hidden Child Book Club Remembers: An Anthology of Holocaust Stories (pp. 45–­68). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Full Court Press, 2016, and Rubin, B. (2017). The end of innocence. PRISM: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Holocaust Educators, 9:44–­49. Bella Rubin has dual citizenship in the United States and Israel and is a member of the Bielski Family from Belarus (formerly Poland). Three of her mother’s brothers organized the largest Jewish family partisan camp in Poland during World War II.



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The 2008 Paramount Vantage film, Defiance, directed by Edward Zwick, tells the story of life in the forest and the Bielski Brothers Brigade who fought the Nazis and saved 1,200 Jews from being victims of genocide. Ira Brenner, M.D., is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Sidney Kimmel Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, and Training and Supervising Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia, where he is Director Emeritus of the Adult Psychotherapy Training Program. He has a special interest in the area of psychological trauma and has chaired the Holocaust Discussion Group at the meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association since 1990. He has authored of over 100 publications, co-­edited two special issues of The International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies and written five books: The Last Witness: The Child Survivor of the Holocaust, co-­authored with Judith Kestenberg (1996), Dissociation of Trauma: Theory, Phenomenology, and Technique (2001), Psychic Trauma: Dynamics, Symptoms, and Treatment (2004), Injured Men: Trauma, Healing, and the Masculine Self (2009), and Dark Matters: Exploring the Realm of Psychic Devastation (2014). A Distinguished Life Fellow of the APA, a Fellow of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, and of the American College of Psychoanalysts, he is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the Alpha Omega Alpha medical honor society. Dr. Brenner has received a number of awards, including the Gratz Research Prize for his work on the Holocaust, the Piaget Writing Award for his 2001 book, the Gradiva Award for his 2009 book, the Bruno Lima Award for his work in Disaster Psychiatry, Practitioner of the Year Award from The Philadelphia Psychiatric Society, and the Presidential Award from the Pennsylvania Psychiatric Society. He has also received The Hayman Award for Holocaust Studies from the IPA. He lectures nationally and internationally, and has a private practice of adult and child analysis in the greater Philadelphia area. Janet R. Kirchheimer is the author of How to Spot One of Us (2007). She is currently producing AFTER, a cinematic documentary that explores poetry written about the Holocaust featuring the works of renowned, contemporary poets. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies as well as on-­ line publications. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and received a Drisha Institute for Jewish Education Arts Fellowship. Janet teaches a variety of creative writing workshops and Jewish-­themed classes and is a gold-­star, licensed New York City sightseeing guide. Sergio Lewkowicz, M.D., is training and supervising psychoanalyst of the Porto Alegre Psychoanalytic Society (SPPA). He was president and chair of the Institute of the Porto Alegre Psychoanalycal Society where he teaches regularly in a weekly basis. He was member of

the Programme Committee of the 43rd Congress in New Orleans (2004) where he was the plenary session discussant of the Keynote Papers. He is a former member of the Publications Committee of the IPA (2001–­2009) and a former member of the website task force of IPA (2012–­ 2014). He is currently Latin American representative for the Board of IPA. He is the former Scientific Director of the Latin American Psychoanalytic Federation (FEPAL, 2012–­2014). He is professor and supervisor for psychoanalytic psychotherapy in the Psychiatry Department of the Medical School of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. He is former Latin American Deputy Editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and former Editor of the Psychiatry Journal of Rio Grande do Sul. Henri Parens, M.D., is Professor of Psychiatry, Thomas Jefferson University, and Training & Supervising Analyst (Adult and Child), Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. He is the author of some 270 publications, including twenty-­two books, five scientific films, one DVD documentary, and one TV series for CBS of 39 half-­hour programs. Dr. Parens is a Holocaust survivor. Some of his many books include Renewal of Life-­Healing From the Holocaust, Handling Childrens’ Agression Constructively-­ Toward Taming Human Destructiveness, and War Is Not Inevitable: On the Psychology of War and Aggression. Janet Kestenberg Amighi, Ph.D., is an eclectic anthropologist, with an MSS in law and social policy. Her books include The Meaning of Movement: Embodied Developmental, Clinical, and Cultural Perspectives of the Kestenberg Movement Profile, and The Zoroastrians of Iran: Conversion, Assimilation, or Persistence. She has written several articles relating to the Holocaust. Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist, and law professor, the author of numerous books of fiction and nonfiction including the novels, The Golems of Gotham, Second Hand Smoke, and, most recently, How Sweet It Is!, and the works of nonfiction, The Myth of Moral Justice: Why Our Legal System Fails to Do What’s Right, and Payback: The Case for Revenge. His forthcoming book is entitled Crossing the Line: The High Cost of Weaponized Speech. He appears frequently in such publications as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, L.A. Times, Washington Post, CNN, Slate, ABA Journal, Times of Israel, Jewish Week, Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, and the Daily Beast, among other national publications, writing on a host of topics, including the conflict in the Middle East, global anti-­ Semitism, terrorism, human rights, moral justice, and Holocaust memory. He is the legal analyst for CBS News Radio. He hosts The Talk Show at the 92nd Street Y. He is a Distinguished Fellow at New York University School of Law, where he directs the Forum on Law, Culture & Society. www.thanerosenbaum.com and www.folcs.org.

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Foreword Salman Akhtar

In February  2018, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany conducted a study which revealed that the knowledge of the genocide that killed six million Jews is fading among American adults. As many as ninety-­four per cent of the 1,350 individuals interviewed did not know that Jews were killed, besides Germany, in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, and sixty-­ three per cent were unaware that Jews were killed in Poland. Auschwitz was a name totally unrecognizable to forty-­one per cent and as many as twenty-­two per cent of the subjects between eighteen and thirty-­four years of age were not sure that they had heard of the Holocaust at all (Horowitz, 2008)! This is distressing. We – all of us – cannot afford to forget a human tragedy of such magnitude and of such diabolic intent. We need to remember it. Always. To be sure, this remembering must not be for the purposes of maudlin masochism, treating oneself as an “exception”, and mere “museumisation” whereby history is idolised and sequestered from lived experience. Remembering the Holocaust should be for the purposes of generational continuity, for safeguarding against future disasters, for honouring the souls of those perished, for enhancing curiosity about the evil crevices of the political mind, for understanding the psychology of the inert bystanders, and, above all, for deepening empathy for all those who suffer injustice, discrimination, and ethno-­racially motivated violence in our world. But let me not get ahead of myself. Let me take a few steps back and, in the spirit of didactic rectification, try to erase the ignorance cited here. Allow me to list ten basic facts about what happened when the sky of humanity turned dark and all light of tenderness was eclipsed.   1 The Holocaust was a genocide during the World War II in which Nazi Germany systematically murdered nearly six million Jews.

  2 The word “Holocaust” is derived from the Greek “Holos” (meaning, the whole) and “Kaustos” (meaning burnt offering).   3 Besides Jews, another five million people were killed, including the Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, and political opponents of various stripes. Killings were done by mass shootings, starvation, and the use of poisonous gases in the euphemistically designated “ showers”.   4 Presiding over this satanic mayhem was Adolf Hitler (1889–­1945), the democratically elected leader of Germany. His most prominent lieutenants included Adolf Eichman (1906–­1962), Paul Joseph Goebbels (1897–­1945), Heinrich Himmler (1890–­1945), and Reinhard Heydrich (1904–­1942).   5 Though the acts of massive violence mostly occurred between 1941 and 1945, Germany had begun excluding Jews from civic life in 1933. By 1939, over 42,000 detention sites housing Jews had been established.   6 Government officials identified Jews, confiscated their property, and scheduled trains to deport Jews to concentration camps. Ordinary pieces of property were destroyed and valuable pieces, including major collections of arts and antiques, were stolen with the help of the German National Bank.   7 Concentration camps where Jews were murdered were spread all over Germany and German-­occupied territories. Belarus, Belgium, Estonia, France, Holland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, and Ukraine all had concentration, detention, extermination, and/­or transit camps for Jews.   8 By mid-­1942, Jews were being transported in freight trains with subhuman conditions to extermination camps spread throughout continental Europe.   9 Proceedings of the notorious Wansee Conference where the “Final Solution to the Jewish Problem” in

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  Sa lm a n Akh tar the form of genocide was concocted reveals that the Nazis’ ultimate plan was to kill Jews in other parts of the world as well. 10 The noble profession of medicine was defiled by being used in the service of the demonic strategies of the Nazis. Thousands of concentration camp inmates were subjected to bizarre “medical” experiments, including injections of pigments in little children’s eyes to change their colour, freezing people to death, killing and dissecting twins, and making lamps out of human skins. With this unspeakable gore and horror as the conceptual backdrop – a background of unsafety, to paraphrase Joseph Sandler – let me move on to the triumphant transformation of anguish into creativity as testified by the book in your hands. Edited by Ira Brenner, a distinguished psychoanalyst, eminent Holocaust researcher, and my close personal friend for over forty-­five years, this book is a majestic compendium of essays that address the mid-­twentieth-­century Nazi attempt to exterminate the European Jewry and its long-­lasting effects from multiple perspectives. History, politics, evolutionary studies, unconscious psychodynamics, movies, memoirs, poetry, large group psychology, old and new anti-­Semitism, and transgenerational transmission of trauma all enter this textured discourse. The roster

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of contributors and endorsers is truly international and includes people from Brazil, Canada, England, Germany, India, Israel, Turkey, and the United States. And Jews are not the only ones who have been invited to express their thoughts in the pages of this volume; members of the two other great Abrahamic faiths, Christianity and Islam, have also lent their voices to this valiant chorus against man’s inhumanity to man. Brenner’s encyclopedic volume succeeds in the dual task of broadening our knowledge of a particular ethno-­religious large group’s tragedy and of deepening our insight of what dastardly acts we human beings in general are capable of committing. His book expands our range of empathy with victims and perpetrators of cruelty, fine-­tunes our grasp of trauma and resilience, and exhorts our spirit to come together as fellow inhabitants of this maddeningly troubled yet alluringly enchanting planet of ours. By shedding light on unimaginable vulgarity, dehumanisation, and mass killings, it paradoxically awakens us to seek peace, harmony, and mutual acceptance. I am confident that this great effort of my friend, Ira Brenner – for whose concentration camp survivor father, Leo Brenner, I had great fondness – will be enshrined in our memory for decades to come. It will help us become better clinicians, better friends, better citizens, and, above all, better human beings.

Introduction Ira Brenner

The path to my enlightenment has taken me down the darkest corridor in human history. This uncertain journey has not been by chance or by choice. From my earliest memories of the numbers on my father’s powerful forearm to the rededication of an educational fund established in his memory, the impact of his survival has inveigled its way into all aspects of my self. Now, after forty years of professional study and a lifetime of personal reflection, I am at a point whereby I can offer this text to those who are willing to hold it, and dare to read it. It is the culmination of my collaboration and friendship with colleagues throughout the world. Once again, I  am extremely grateful to my dear friend, colleague, and Muse, Salman Akhtar, who has an uncanny ability to help people find their unwritten books within. He gave me well-­timed advice, once again, to take on a major project pertaining to the Holocaust. He knew my father for over forty years and knew how important it would be to have my own voice be heard, also. My co-­ authored book with Judith Kestenberg in 1996, The Last Witness: The Child Survivor of the Holocaust, written when she was already quite ill, also came about as a result of his encouragement. While I  have always had a sense that I  was carrying around an enormous burden which filled me with indescribable emotion and borrowed nostalgia, it was not until my analysis that I acquired the tools and the strength to excavate what was inside and allow it to emerge. An absolutely essential aspect of my liberation, as it were, was my membership in the GPSEHSG, the Group for the Psychoanalytic Study of the Effects of the Holocaust on the Second Generation. Started in 1974 and led by Kestenberg, Martin Bergmann, and Milton Jucovy, this New York–­based group met monthly to discuss in-­depth psychoanalytic material, as well as have a strong presence at the meetings of the

American and International Psychoanalytic Association. I was accepted into the group in 1980 and was offered the honor of taking over as Chair in 1990 when the triumvirate retired. Since then, with Dori Laub as Co-­Chair and Vera Muller Paisner as Coordinator, we have conducted annual discussion groups at the winter meetings of APSA. In this volume, most of authors have either attended or have presented to this group over the years. Eva Fogelman, a member, will describe more about this group’s pioneering contribution in her chapter. With an ever-­expanding universe of Holocaust literature of all genres inundating the market, one may question the value of yet another tome. Indeed, one may ask: “Why is this text on the Holocaust different from all other such texts?” There are so many authoritative, historical, and clinical books, as well as deeply evocative personal memoirs, that what more can be said or learned? Isn’t it enough already? Apparently not: The recent legislation in Poland, in February  2018, outlawing any mention of Poland’s involvement in the genocide, other than it too being a victim, is yet another ominous and instructive lesson in how governments can legislate “truth” and revise history at will. While it is a historical error to describe Auschwitz as a Polish concentration camp simply because it was established in Poland by the Nazi regime, it is a major problem to deny that Jew hatred in Poland was rampant prior to its invasion by Germany in 1939. While identification with the aggressor no doubt has to be considered a factor in Polish complicity, the malignant seeds of Nazi ideology fell on fertile soil in Poland. This conclusion is almost axiomatic as it is based on numerous historical and eyewitness accounts, the acts of many courageous of “righteous gentiles” notwithstanding. Were that not the case, then the Polish massacres of over 350 Jews in,

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  Ira B re nne r for example, the villages of Jedwabne in 1941 and in Kielce in 1946 would likely not have occurred. Between the legislated suppression of memory, the deep psychological need to forget, the capacity for self-­ deception, and the fading of memory associated with the passage of time, it is an enormous personal and societal challenge to remember, never forget, stay mindful, own responsibility, and learn from the past. Healthy remembering is in contrast with fetishistic remembering for pathological and perverse purposes, such as what occurs in Holocaust denial. Even in natural disasters, the human tendency to ignore the past, to its great peril, is well known. A  recent case in point is the Fukushima tsunami, following a huge earthquake in 2011, in which a nuclear power plant was destroyed and over 20,000 people were killed. That area of the Japanese coastline was known to be vulnerable to tsunamis; large rocks, known as coastal stones, were carved by ancient survivors with dire warnings not to build there. They were placed all along the shore line after the major disaster in 1903. But a noted disaster specialist, Professor Imamura, of Tohoku University has concluded, “It takes about three generations to forget. Those that experience the disaster themselves pass it along to their children and grandchildren, but then the memory fades.” The recent survey by the Claims Conference cited by Dr. Akhtar corroborates this

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point and speaks to the importance of continued Holocaust scholarship. A number of the authors are survivors who were children or adolescents during their persecution. A  number of the authors are offspring of survivors, members of the “Second Generation”. Most of the authors are psychoanalysts, whose understanding of the world and its inhabitants is filtered through this most powerful lens, with an appreciation of unconscious motivation, conflict, interpersonal relationships and group dynamics. In addition, some of the authors are writers and poets; their fluid and creative minds have access to the same realm as we analysts and they often express themselves in a much better way. Taken as a whole, this text is in many ways the long-­awaited, contemporary response to the now classic Bergmann and Jucovy book, Generations of the Holocaust (1982) which grew out of the famous study group mentioned earlier. It offers rich clinical material, sophisticated and very well-­researched historical perspectives, powerful ideas, poignant personal reflections, and provocative creative writing. This book is very alive in its handling of death, destruction, survival, and its aftermath. It was written by gifted writers who most generously gave of themselves for this project. I am exceedingly proud to have been its editor.

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Section I History

1 Lessons learned Henry Zvi Lothane

Introduction Do people learn from their histories? If they did, there would be no work for psychoanalysts. Do nations and states learn from histories? If they did, there would be no World War II and no Holocaust. Here is Aldous Huxley’s (1959) trenchant answer to this question: “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach” (p. 309). The Holocaust (literally: totally burnt sacrifice) or Shoah (meaning catastrophe) is unique amongst twentieth-­century mass murders as Hitler and his Nazi executioners set off the total genocide of the Jewish people and their culture, or culturecide, as an integral part of World War II, which they started on 1 September 1939 by invading Poland. The word genocide, coined by Polish Jew Raphael Lemkin around 1943–­1944, was adopted in 1946 as a crime against humanity at the Nuremberg trials, and as a “crime of genocide” by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, since then a legal principle for prosecuting and punishing acts of genocide in war and peace. The total Jewish genocide and the heinous humiliating, harassing, and hounding of Jews as a race thus differs from such partial politically motivated mass murders as the Herero and Namaqua genocide in Namibia by Imperial Germany (1904–­1907); the Ottoman Empire, Greek, Assyrian (1914–­1925), and Armenian (1915–­1923) genocides; Stalin’s Holodomor, or starvation genocide and ethnic cleansing of Ukrainians (1932–­1933); the Cambodian Khmer Rouge genocide (1975–­1979); Bosnian Muslim and Croat genocide by Serbs (1992–­1995); and the Rwandan genocide of the Tutsi by the Hutu (1994).

The Nazi Holocaust was historically and substantially inspired and tied to the time-­honoured European anti-­ Semitism during millennia of demonisation and persecution of Jews as heretics from the Catholic religion, as Christ killers and ritual murderers (Poliakov, 1951, 1977), burned by the thousands in Inquisition’s auto-­ da-­fés and witch hunts. The other source was modern secular anti-­Semitism and its German variant. Despite the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the emancipation of Jews by Napoleon and their access to the liberal professions, German Jews as a race became a target of competitive political discrimination (Lothane, 1992, pp.  101–­102). Launched in the mid-­nineteenth century with Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of Human Races, pseudo-­ scientific politico-­racial anti-­Semitism was further promoted by Stewart Houston Chamberlain in Foundations of the Nineteenth Century and calls for the annihilation of the Jews by German writers, climaxing with Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg’s The Myth of the 20th Century and finally with Hitler’s anti-­Semitic and eliminationist ideas in Mein Kampf (Goldhagen, 1996) and beyond. Between 1939 and 1945 six million defenceless Jewish men, women, and children were detained, tortured, and murdered in ghettos, shot en masse by death squads (Einsatzgruppen), and buried in mass graves dug by Jews themselves, deported and worked to death in forced labour camps and concentration camps such as Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, or gassed and burned on an industrial scale in extermination camps such as Auschwitz. Nevertheless, the Holocaust should not be reduced to a “Jewish question” alone for Hitler’s war against the Jews was also indissolubly tied to his total war on the

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moral values of Western European civilisation (Kolnai, 1938; Vergin, 1932) and his plan to obliterate supposedly Jewish but actually Stalinist bolshevism, which latter had the tacit support of the West (Johnson, 1987). After devastating Poland and Russia and their cultures and converting their populations into illiterate serfs to give the Third Reich its lebensraum, or living space, as compensation for the African colonies lost in World War I, Hitler had another in the offing: the destruction of Christianity. The aftermath of World War II and the Shoah have shaped the world we live in today: the Cold War, the founding of the State of Israel, the nuclear arms race, the fall of the Soviet empire and the unification of Germany, the current proxy wars in the Middle East, the immigration crisis, and the populist and neo-­Nazi turn in Europe and the United States. This history is of particular interest to psychoanalysts: especially the effect of World War II and the Holocaust on the history and politics of organised psychoanalysis in Europe and the United States. It is especially relevant to acquaint the present younger generation of analysts with this history and to open their minds to further reflection and reading.

Public and private Holocaust histories The documented historiography of the Holocaust and personal memoirs runs into the thousands (Poliakov, 1951; Gilbert, 1985; Hilberg, 1961; Levin, 1968; Sievers, 1977). Born in 1934 in Polish Lublin, I became a refugee in 1939, fled with my parents to survive in the Soviet Union in 1941, returned to post-­war Poland in 1946, immigrated to Israel in 1950, and came to New York in 1963 to get training first in psychiatry and later in psychoanalysis. Already as a teenager I had read about the course of World War II on the Russian front and atrocities against Russian civilians reported in newspapers, films, and books. Back in Poland, I learnt about my parents’ loss of their families and visited the Majdanek death camp on the Lublin outskirts. I  read illustrated books about the Holocaust showing atrocities, emaciated people, and piles of twisted corpses. I  saw photographs of indignities committed against Jewish women and men, for example, a uniformed Nazi cutting off the sidelocks of a young Jewish man wearing a yarmulke with his fly opened to expose his genitals. It was an encounter with evil. Today we still face the problem of the Holocaust as evil. Since time immemorial evil pertains to morality, whether religious or secular, to acts immoral or illegal. Psychiatry and psychoanalysis define evil as pathology. Were the Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust morally evil

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or mentally ill? Which method will reveal how and why ordinary people became pitiless henchmen and sadistic torturers of innocent victims? A related question is this: is there a normal terror state? Bergmann and Jucovy (1982) wrote about “the shock and the drama” in the “aftermath of the Holocaust” (p.  5) of those who died and those who survived. In 2009 I introduced the concept of dramatology in life and literature to complete the already existing concept of narratology. Briefly, the lived event, action, and interaction with others at a particular time and place subsequently becomes the source of the varieties of narratives of the event. The event is a particular personal drama (from the Greek dran, to act), a scene (from the Greek, skene, stage), a situation in the here-­and-­now embodied in verbal and nonverbal communications, expressing feelings and emotions, showing either consensus or conflict, confrontation, and combat. A narrative is a report by a participant in a past event that may be factual and veridical or distorted by personal motivations, perceptions, and purposes: for example, the Rashomon effect, from Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon, where murder witnesses offer contradictory accounts and interpretations. Dramatology also deals with dramas of societies and nations: epoch-­making events, wars national and international. Events are historical facts that cannot be altered, narratives fluctuate with the zeitgeist. Narratives may be nonfiction, as chronicles, documentary films, encyclopedias, biographies, or autobiographies. Or they may be fictionalised in historic dramas, operas, novels, films, or in fiction proper. Fiction also carries the connotation of fabrication, lie, fake news instead of facts and truth. Such narratives may harbour denial, illusion, or delusion in the dramas of politicians and the narratives they spin, platforms of prevarication and propaganda for policies and programmes of their parties (Lothane, 2009).

Drama as trauma According to dramatology, drama can also be trauma writ large: in the lives of persons, communities, nations. Breuer and Freud (1895) first conceived hysteria as a traumatic neurosis caused by the traumatising stimulus of “event” and the traumatic fright reaction to it (pp.  5–­6): the stressor and the stress reaction to it are one. In 1920 Freud defined as “traumatic any excitations from outside which are powerful enough to break through the protective shield . . . the otherwise efficacious barrier against stimuli” (p. 29), which he applied to traumatic war neuroses, then commonly called battle fatigue, combat neurosis and shell shock, due not only “to the effects of mechanical violence but to fright and threat to life” (p. 31). Moreover, “there really does exist in the mind a compulsion to repeat which overrides

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the pleasure principle  .  .  .  [as in] dreams which occur in traumatic neuroses” (pp.  22–­23). However, in 1919 Freud erred in viewing war neuroses as “protecting . . . from mortal danger by taking flight into a traumatic neurosis in a national [conscript] army . . . [versus] an army of professional soldiers” (p.  209), or that “when war conditions ceased to operate . . . the neurotic disturbances . . . simultaneously vanished” (p. 207), forgivable first missteps. Nonetheless, Freud’s basic insights paved the way for our contemporary handling of chronic post-­ traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) seen in concentration camp victims and war veterans: the syndrome of recurrent reliving of traumatic conditions and events as intrusive memories of scenes of suffering, the flashbacks, in vivid waking hallucinations, distressing dreams and nightmares, haunting anniversary reactions, accompanied by somatoform complaints and functional disorders, including psychosomatic organic disorders. In Holocaust survivors, chronic or recurrent PTSD was regularly linked to chronic long-­ standing depression caused by the loss of loved ones; being uprooting from family, home, and homeland; and the loss of possessions or professional or social status, which was aggravated by aging losses due to illness. Traumatic memories were often triggered by everyday stimuli, such as seeing a policeman and remembering the Nazi camp guards, leading to social avoidance and isolation and anhedonia, culminating in mood disorders and psychotic reactions and even dementia. There is an important psychoanalytic Holocaust literature (Krystal, 1968; Bergmann  & Jucovy, 1982) that cites the seminal work of W.G. Niederland. By 1953, West Germany enacted restitution laws for payments to individual survivors and to the State of Israel (Pross, 1988). Since 1994 I have been a psychiatric examiner of Holocaust survivors for the German Consulate in New York. Early on German psychiatrists rejected survivors’ claims as due not to PTSD but to hereditary or predisposition, vigorously contested by Niederland. Of the many survivors, I saw only one religious Jew openly expressed anger at his former persecutors; others said their faith was not shaken, because God’s ways are mysterious.

From individual to social and mass psychology In 1921 Freud moved from individual to social psychology: “In the individual’s mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so from the very first individual psychology in this extended but entirely profitable sense of the words, is at the same time social psychology

as well” (p.  69). Repeatedly citing Le Bon’s 1895 classic published as The Crowd, Freud broadened his social psychology calling it mass psychology and emphasising the interaction between a leader and the led (Lothane, 2006). Freud’s other sociological works were published in the mid-­thirties (Lothane, 2012). Le Bon (1897) defined as follows: “A collective mind is formed, doubtless transitory, but presenting very clearly defined characteristics. The gathering has thus become  .  .  . an organized crowd, or  .  .  . a psychological crowd. It forms a single being, and is subjected to the law of the mental unity of crowds” (p.  2; his italics); “Crowds are everywhere distinguished by feminine characteristics” (p. 20). Hitler (1941), consummate mass psychologist, voiced similar ideas: The psyche of the great masses is not receptive to half measures or weakness. Like a woman, whose psychic feeling is influenced less by abstract reasoning than by an indefinable, sentimental longing for complementary strength, who will submit to the strong man rather than dominate the weakling, thus the masses love the ruler rather than the suppliant, and inwardly they are far more satisfied by a doctrine which tolerates no rival than by the grant of liberal freedom; they often feel at a loss what to do with it, and even easily feel themselves deserted. They neither realize the impudence with which they are spiritually terrorized, nor the outrageous curtailment of their human liberties, for in no way does the delusion of this doctrine dawn on them. Thus they see only the inconsiderate force, the brutality and the aim of its manifestations to which they finally always submit. (56) This shows Hitler’s power as a demagogue who in rousing firebrand speeches converted euphoric masses into frenzied followers at yearly Nuremberg torch-­lit rallies, augmented by Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda films “The Victory of Faith” and “Triumph of the Will,” and by anti-­Semitic broadsheets and gross caricatures of Jews by Julius Streicher. The corollary of this paradigm shift is that individual psychology is insufficient to explain leaders and seduced masses (Lothane, 2006).

The historical background of the third Reich Napoleon’s imperialist wars in the early nineteenth century were succeeded in its last third by two major events. The first was the unification of Italy as a kingdom in

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1870 under Victor Emmanuel. The second was the unification of Germany, after defeating France in the first Franco-­German war in 1870, by Wilhelm I, proclaimed emperor of the Second German Reich (=empire) in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles in 1871. Both countries would turn fascist in the 1920s and 1930s. Wilhelm II, the next Kaiser crowned in 1888, abandoned the previous policy of solving international disputes by diplomatic negotiations within the Three Emperors’ League of Austria, Russia, and Germany and forged a new alliance with Austria, making Russia an enemy of Germany. Consequently, France, England, and Russia formed the Triple Entente, the belligerents in World War I begun in 1914, with Germany fighting Russia in the east and France in the west. America’s entry into the war was crucial for clinching victory for the Allies. Similarly, Hitler, an admirer of Napoleon, fought World War II on two fronts, Poland and the Soviet Union and France (the third Franco-­German war), conquering most of Europe and declaring war on America after Pearl Harbor. While war is still viewed by mankind as a necessary evil, a new kind of evil emerged during World War I as noted by Freud in 1915: Then the war in which we had refused to believe broke out  .  .  . more bloody and more destructive than any war of other days, because of the enormously increased perfection of weapons of attack and defense.  .  .  . It disregards all the restrictions known as International Law . . . it ignores the prerogatives of the wounded and the medical service, the distinction between civil and military sections of the population, the claims of private property. It tramples in blind fury on all that comes in its way, as though there were to be no future and no peace among men after it is over  .  .  . and threatens to leave a legacy of embitterment that will make any renewal of those bonds impossible for a long time to come. (pp. 278–­279) Freud also alluded to Germany as one of the great civilized nations . . . [excluded] from the civilized community as “barbaric” . . . a belligerent state [that] permits itself every such misdeed, every act of violence, as would disgrace the individual. It makes use against the enemy not only of the accepted ruses de guerre, but of deliberate lying and deception as well – and to a degree which seems to exceed the usage of former wars. (p. 279) And Freud offered a solution to the problem:

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In reality, there is no such thing as “eradicating” evil. Psychological – or, more strictly speaking, psycho-­analytic – investigation shows instead that the deepest essence of human nature consists of impulses which are of an elementary nature which are similar in all men and aim at the satisfaction of certain primal needs. These impulses themselves are neither good or bad. We classify them and their expressions in that way, according to the needs and demands of the human community. It must be granted that all the impulses which society condemns as evil – let us take as representative the selfish and cruel ones – are of this primitive kind. (p. 281; emphasis added) It was Thomas Hobbes who warned that if mankind would succumb to its elemental passions, instead of being governed by a social contract and a civil society, it would end up in a state of “war of all against all” and “worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Leviathan, p. 78), confirmed by Collingwood (1942), and echoed by Lothane (2011, 2016). An evil of World War I  was the German invasion of neutral Belgium and Luxembourg according to the Schlieffen Plan: to bypass the Maginot line in the east and capture Paris in a blitzkrieg. The attack and the atrocities committed upon civilians were called “the rape of Belgium”. The occupying German army engaged in multiple large-­scale executions of civilians and caused the flight of hundreds of thousands of others and the destruction of historic and cultural buildings, for example, the library of the Catholic University of Louvain. Another earth-­shaking German World War I  ruse was to “allow Lenin to travel through Germany to Russia (Weech, 1944, p.  877) to foment a revolution, sign a separate peace with Germany and plunge it into a civil war, thus freeing troops to fight the Allies. According to historian Robert Gellately (http://­history. stackexchange.com/­questions/­14608/­did-­the-­germans-­ purposefully-­arrange-­to-­send-­lenin-­to-­russia-­to-­start-­a-­ revoluti), Lenin was given over ten million dollars so that he and his entourage were transported in a heavily guarded train to Petrograd’s Finland Station where he was greeted by an enthusiastic crowd and Stalin. The defeat of Germany in World War I  had ended with the armistice of 11 November  1918, followed six months later by the draconian Versailles Treaty. The victors redrew the map of Europe, stripping Germany of territory and colonies and imposing gigantic reparations. The German Army’s High Command declared that Germany was never defeated, branded the signatories of the armistice as “November criminals”, Bolsheviks, Democrats, and Jews, who “stabbed the army in the back”, and unleashed the 1918–­1919 November

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Revolution with soviet-­style councils. The monarchy was succeeded by the Weimar Republic, so named after the Weimar Constitution, while officially called the German Reich. The paranoid “stab-­in-­the-­back-­myth” persisted in the popular mind, political propaganda, and was depicted in defamatory cartoons and caricatures. In Mein Kampf Hitler (1941) wrote: “Kaiser Wilhelm II was the first German Emperor who extended his hand to the leaders of Marxism without guessing that scoundrels are without honor. While they were still holding the imperial hand in their own, the other was feeling for the dagger. With the Jews there is no bargaining, but only the hard either-­or. I, however, resolved now to become a politician” (p. 269). There were three periods in the fourteen-­year history of the ill-­fated Weimar Republic. The first was marked by repeated coup attempts, monster inflation, and political assassinations, for example, of the Jewish foreign affairs minister Rathenau, until Hitler’s failed putsch of 1923. The second was blessed by national and international stability and the flowering of culture to which Jews made important contributions: winning Nobel prizes and being active in theatre, opera houses, concert halls, and in literature and journalism, with names like Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer, Max Reinhardt and Alfred Kerr, journalists and writers like Kurt Tucholsky, Alfred Döblin, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Jakob  Wassermann, and others. In the third period, the 1929 Wall Street crash led to severe economic depression, rising unemployment and hunger, and recurrent government crises.

Hitler: from demagogue to dictator In the chaos in Germany it was easy to spread hate propaganda and destruction: “The Jews bear the blame for everything! Look at them in the bars, in the dancing halls! They always know how to skim the cream!” (Sievers, p. 248). In 1920, Gilbert (1985) cited: Hitler spoke . . . at a Munich beer cellar on the theme “Why are we against the Jews  .  .  . and promised that his party, and his party alone, “will free you from the power of the Jew! . . . There must be . . . a new slogan, and one not only for ­Germany – ‘Anti-­ Semites of the World, Unite! People of Europe, Free Yourselves!” – and he demanded  .  .  .  “a thorough solution,” in brief, “the removal of the Jews from the midst of our people”. (p. 24) In the 1920s headstones and monuments in Jewish cemeteries were regularly defiled, overturned, or smashed by the infamous Storm Troopers (the SA),

nicknamed Brownshirts, the paramilitary body organised by Ernst Röhm. Hitler’s political career began when he joined the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (NSDAP), that is, the Nazi Party, in 1921. On 8 April  1921 at a public meeting Hitler (1941) declared: “Germany awake: A workers’ movement has to keep itself free from Jews and capitalists. . . . But the reply to this most unheard-­of betrayal of the world and of the nation by the international powers can only be the resistance of the Organized National Force. We call you all to this resistance” (p.  531). On 6 May  1921, addressing German workers and youth he said: “Like a giant spider, the Jewish international world stock exchange capital creeps over the peoples of this earth, gradually sucking their marrow and blood” (p. 534). Also in 1922, in the Nazi Völkische Beobachter, Hitler published this appeal: “The terror of the Jewish stock exchange and its henchmen weigh heavily upon Germany. . . . Therefore, as the only movement in Germany, we have set out to form a STORM TROOP [SA, Sturmabteilung]. Its purpose and its task is the work of liberation of our German people from the Jewish terror” (pp. 550–­551). By 1922 Hitler’s oratorical skills earned him the leadership of the Nazi party. The aforementioned anti-­ Semitic rants against Jewish bankers foreshadowed the full-­fledged hate-­filled anti-­Semitism of his book Mein Kampf (Hitler, 1941). Pursuing the paranoid racist myth of Aryan superiority over the inferior Jewish race (Poliakov, 1974), Hitler asserted the following: “The Jew forms the strongest contrast to the Aryan” (412); “No, the Jew possesses no culture-­creating energy whatever, as the Idealism  .  .  . a genuine development of man towards a higher level” (413); “The Aryan  .  .  . first a nomad . . . settled down, but he never was, for this reason, a Jew. No, the Jew, is not a nomad . . . but always only a parasite in the body of other peoples” (419); “The Jew destroys the racial bases of our existence and thus eternally ruins our nation” (830); “Hence the Jew today is the great agitator for the complete destruction of Germany. . . . Just as both before and during the War, the Jewish stock exchange and Marxist press deliberately added fuel to the hate for Germany, until State after State abandoned neutrality and entered the service of the World War against their true national interests” (p. 906; his italics); “the bolshevization of Germany, i.e., the extermination of the national folkish (völkisch) intelligentsia and the exploitation of German labor power in the yoke of world Jewish finance . . . is . . . a preliminary . . . to conquer the world” (p. 906); “In Russian bolshevism we must see Jewry’s twentieth century effort to take world dominion into itself” (p. 960; his italics); “The struggle against Jewish bolshevization of the world requires a clear attitude towards Soviet Russia. You cannot drive out the Devil with Beelzebub” (p. 961; his italics).

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But this was pure projection: it is Hitler who desired world dominion and lied, legitimising his war against the Jews with their defamation: He is and remains the typical parasite, a sponger who, like a harmful bacillus, spreads out more and more if only a favorable medium invites him to do so. But the effect of his existence resembles also that of parasites; where he appears the host people die out sooner or later.  .  .  . In the Jew’s life as a parasite in the body of other nations and States, his characteristic is established which once caused Schopenhauer to pronounce the sentence, already mentioned, that the Jew is the ‘great master of lying. Life urges the Jew towards the lie, that is, to a perpetual lie, just as it forces the inhabitants of northern countries to wear warm clothes. (pp. 419–­420) This racist ideology had already been developed in the eliminationist writings of the last third of the nineteenth century by Paul de Lagarde (1827–­1891) whose views were described by Schemann (1920). For him the Jews were: “waste products” (Schlacken) that have to be eliminated, if we want to have a better life. . . . He devoted himself . . . in particular to a fight against the Jews in all their forms, in political and in social life as well, in speeches and in writing, in works scientific and literary, to his dying day. . . . With the exception of Lessing and Nietzsche, the best minds in the nation sided with him, Arndt, Fichte, and Treitschke’s “the Jews are our misfortune” still rings today in all ears today . . . anti-­Semitism is a force that empowers a regenerated German youth. . . . Very rapidly the Jews became the overlords of Europe. . . . With their national vice, usury of all kinds, they are becoming the vampire of nations, by whose ruin they benefit. . . . [We] empathize with those poor Germans, sucked dry, who – due to their humanity – cannot tell these Jews off, or are too cowardly to crush this pullulating vermin under foot!” Even worse is the psychological factor, the way the Jewish foreign body in the nation’s organism grows and erupts appallingly as a horrific carrier of decay. . . . Since the Jews are a misfortune in every European nation, our task is to destroy the Jews, to get rid of them, or else Europe will become a huge cemetery.  .  .  . The Jews can either leave Germany or become German. In any case: “Begone!” (pp. 232, 236, 237, all translations mine) Before Goldhagen, Leo Sievers (1977) cited not only Treitschke but also anti-­Semites Richard Wagner (p.  221),

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political journalist Wilhelm Marr (1819–­1904), author of numerous anti-­Semitic tracts and founder Antisemitenliga, an anti-­Semitic society, and philosopher Eugen Dühring (1833–­1921), author of The Jewish Question as a Race, Morals and Culture Question in which he reaffirmed Marr’s idea about the Jews as an inexorable enemy of culture and civilised nations must eliminate them to avoid their own destruction. Eliminationist views were also spread by historian Julius Langbehn (1851–­1907) in his best-­seller Rembrandt as Educator (Lothane, 1992, pp. 101–­102). As a fire-­brand orator, Hitler used his ideology to entice the German masses: As a whole, and at all times, the efficiency of the truly national leader (Führer) consists  .  .  . always in concentrating . . . on a single enemy. The more uniformly the fighting will of a people is put into action, the greater will be the magnetic force of the movement and the more powerful the impetus of the blow. It is part of the genius of a great leader to make adversaries of different fields appear as always belonging to one category only. . . . As soon as the wavering masses find themselves confronting too many enemies, objectivity at once steps in, and the question is raised whether actually all the others are wrong and their own nation or their own movement alone is right. . . . Also with this comes the first paralysis of their own strength. Therefore, a number of essentially different internal enemies must always be regarded as one in such a way that in the opinion of the mass  .  .  . the war is being waged against one enemy alone. This strengthens the belief in one’s own cause and increases one’s bitterness against the attacker. (pp. 152–­153) Hitler’s rabid anti-­Semitism became the official ideology of the Nazi party and the Nazi state as defined in Schmidt’s (1934) nazified dictionary: Antisemitism, a movement directed against the leadership and hegemony of the Jews on the spiritual, economic, and political realm, that perceives the Jews as an alien, culture-­destroying race, as a foreign body in the German national identity (Volkstum). Amd wants to have it treated as such.  .  .  . Based on biological and racial principles, antisemitism is one of the most important programs of National-­Socialism. (Schmidt, p. 31) It is instructive to cite two more definitions: National-­Socialism is Adolf Hitler’s German national politics based on the new and yet ancient

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weltanschauung based on the the belief in the worth of blood, in the primary and essential premise . . . that a certain type of a creative soul, a certain specifically formed character, a special spiritual stance is always paired with a specific racial shape (Alfred Rosenberg). “N. is a revival of the idea that all men of German blood, German fate, German history have the same relationship to the world” (Eschweiler). In lieu of Jewish-­Roman statics, N. proposes the dynamics of the nordic-­western soul; . . . in lieu of ecstatic altruistic love – the aristocratic ideal of personal insularity and seclusion  .  .  . the inwardness of Germanic mankind, the nordic race (Rosenberg) . . . N. is absolutely opposed to semitism, to any corporal or psychological mixing of races, to liberalism, democratism, individualism, parlamentarism, marxism, pacifism, intellectualism, and rationalism. Contrary to these “isms” N. insisits on purity of the race (the blood), eugenics, totality of the Nazi weltanschuung . . . of the Führer-­principle. (pp. 431–­432) The core of the national psyche is völkisch: Völkisch is the German translation of the word national since 1876 and then gradually used in the sense of a racially grounded national consciousness. Völkisch is the foundation of nationalsocialism. From the perspective of science, world view, university education (Ersnt Krieck), völkisch is the new conceptual unity that arises out of the interpenetration of the organic (i.e., holistic) and heroic worldviews. This attitude knows and acknowldeges a higher whole over and above the individual . . . there is no room here for individual indignation against the historical necessity of political revolution or war. Therefore:  .  .  . No more education of the spirit, no more humanity, no more culture as the highest goal and fulfilment of life but the education of the will, formation of character, vindication of acting in the service of völkisch-­historical becoming. (p. 706) Alongside the Holocaust, Hitler, a demon of destruction, malignant aggression, and necrophilia (Fromm, 1973), fought a war against civilisation, sacrificing universalist ethics of democracy, liberty, and respect for the individual to Nazi ethics and the rule of barbarity, brutality, and terror. Before 1939 dire warnings were voiced by Rauschning (1938), Heiden (1933), Kolnai (1938), and Vergin (1932) and only by one psychoanalyst, Wilhelm Reich, in his 1933 book Mass Psychology of Fascism (Lothane, in press).

Hitler’s Tyranny of terror After the seizure of power in 1933, Germany became a terror state whose eliminationist ideology became a three-­pronged war against the Jews: (1) a defamation and hatred crusade against the Jews in the press, broadsheets, books, and films; (2) disenfranchisement of Jews as citizens; and (3) organised violence of beatings, murders, and destruction of Jewish property, restrictions on professions, commerce, and wealth. On 30 January 1933, the Nazi Party achieved parliamentary majority through a coalition with right wing voters and Hitler was appointed chancellor of the Third Reich, with the SA Brownshirts charged to maintain law and order. Five days later the Nazis set the Reichstag on fire and by the end of February, 4,000 communists were sent to a concentration camps. In March 1933 the Reichstag passed the Empowerment Act, outlawing all the other political parties and making Hitler the Führer with the power to abolish the Weimar constitution (Hofer, 1957, pp.  57–­ 58). In September Hitler declared Germany a totalitarian state and in December signed into law the “Unity of the Party and the State” (Hofer, p. 61). In 1934, Nazi-­leaning jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt declared: “Hitler protects the law” and as “the supreme lawgiver  .  .  . the Führer and justice are one” (Hofer, p. 103). In March, in the Völkische Beobachter, the Nazi Party decreed a general boycott of Jewish doctors, lawyers, and businesses that began on 1 April. In Berlin shop windows of Jewish stores were painted by the SA with anti-­Jewish graffiti and entrances were blockaded by SA and SS troops. In April student organisations declared that “the Jew is our most dangerous adversary . . . he can only think Jewish, and when he writes in German, he is lying . . . we demand from the censorship office that Jewish works be allowed only to be published in Hebrew” (Sievers, p. 256). But the greatest liars were Hitler himself and his propaganda minister Goebbels. In May students were burning Jewish books in huge bonfires. In June  1934, during the Night of the Long Knives, Hitler had SS and Gestapo chief Himmler carry out his orders to murder SA chief Röhm and his men and the former Chancellor Schleicher and his wife. In August Hitler finalised his absolute dictatorship (Hofer, 1957, p. 70). In the June 1935 issue of the official medical journal Deutsche Ärzteblatt, Dr. Peltret wrote that Jews are “parasites that sustain themselves upon the body of the community. This is true of bacteria and Jews. It is also apt to compare Jews to tuberculosis bacilli” (Sievers, p. 258). In September Hitler enacted the “Law for the protection of German Blood and German Honor,” outlawing as race defilement (Rassenschande) both marriage and sexual intercourse between Jews and Germans and the right to employ German women under forty-­five as household

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help (Hofer, p. 285). The other Nuremberg law was the “Reich Citizenship Law”: A citizen can only be a person who is a fellow countryman. A fellow countryman can only be a person who is of German blood regardless of religious affiliation. Therefore no Jew can be a fellow countryman. §2. A citizen is only a national of German or congeneric blood who through is behavior demonstrates that he is willing and able to serve the German nation and state. (Huber, 1937, p. 71; my translation) In 1938 Hitler annexed Austria, which led to terror in Vienna. Anna Freud was interrogated by the Gestapo. Thanks to a ransom paid by Princess Marie Bonaparte and high-­level diplomatic intervention, Freud, Martha, Anna, and Minna found haven in London but his four elderly sisters did not get visas and perished in a death camp. That year Jewish doctors, lawyers, dentists, veterinarians, and pharmacists lost their right to be licensed to practice. Jewish passports were stamped with letter “J” for Jew and proper names were changed to “Sara” for women and “Israel” for men. In October, approved by England, France, and Italy, the German Army occupied the Sudetenland, paving the way for the imminent annexation of Czechoslovakia. Three weeks later Hitler ordered the expulsion of 18,000 Polish-­born Jewish citizens who had settled in Germany in 1918. In a brutal police and SS action the Jews were rounded up, allowed to carry their passports and ten marks, taken by train to the Polish border and left to camp in the open air or housed in pigsties and dirty stables (Gilbert, 1985). One of these Jews was Zindel Grynszpan whose son Herschel was a student in Paris. Informed by his father about the family’s plight, on 6 November a furious Herschel entered the German Embassy and shot the official Ernst vom Rath, who died on the 9 November. This provided Hitler and Goebbels with a pretext to order a pogrom (10 November) on the remaining 300,000 German Jews, nicknamed Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass. Brown-­shirted storm troopers murdered and beat Jews with truncheons, burned synagogues, torah scrolls, and prayer books, broke into thousands of homes and shops, and desecrated tombstones and graves. Thousands of Jews were sent to concentration camps and a fine of a billion marks resulted in confiscating twenty per cent of every Jewish property. Kristallnacht was a replica of the massacres and plunder of Jewish wealth by throngs of crusaders and townspeople in the eleventh century (Johnson, 1987) in various German cities including Speyer, Worms, Mainz, and Cologne. The Holocaust reminded Martin Gilbert (1985) of Martin Luther’s 1543 virulently anti-­Semitic tract offering “ ‘honest advice’ as to how Jews should be treated:  .  .  .  ‘their synagogues

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should be set on fire  .  .  . no one may ever be able to see a cinder or a stone of it’ . . . their homes should be ‘broken down or destroyed’ . . . [these] ‘poisonous bitter worms’ should be stripped of their belongings ‘which they have extorted usuriously from us’ and driven out of the country ‘for all time’ ” (p. 19). Luther attacked the Jews after they refused to be converted by him and in the aforementioned tract cited the portrayal of Jews as a Judensau, or Jews’ sow, with a rabbi gazing at her anus and other Jews suckling at her teats (Sievers, pp. 78–­79). In the speech to the Reichstag on 30 January  1939 Hitler declared: Today I  will once more be a prophet: If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe! (https://­en.wikisource.org/­wiki/­Adolf_ Hitler%27s_Address_to_the_Reichstag_ (30_January_1939) This was no prophecy; this was Hitler’s plan: to start World War II and to exterminate the Jews, aided and abetted by the Western allies and Stalin. By the 1919 Versailles Treaty and the 1925 Locarno Treaties with Germany, the Rhineland was to remain permanently demilitarised. The French started building the Maginot Line in 1929 and left the Rhineland; by 1936 Hitler had reoccupied and remilitarised the Rhineland encountering no French opposition. In September 1938 in Munich, France and England capitulated to Hitler’s demand to grab Czechoslovakia. In August 1939 Hitler and Stalin signed a non-­aggression pact, removing the last obstacle. World War II began in Poland on September 1; France and England declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939.

Events in Hitler’s war on the Jews When the German occupation began in Lublin and neighbouring towns of the area known as the General Government, Hitler’s oral orders to annihilate Jews were passed to Goebbels and Göring and to Heydrich and Himmler; “within hours occupation of a town or village, Jews were singled out for abuse and massacre by special SS ‘operational groups’ (Einsatzgruppen) acting in the rear of the German fighting forces” (Gilbert, p. 85). The other big action was trapping Jews in ghettos, a method not used since the Middle Ages. In the process, the total population of some 3.5 million Polish Jews swelled considerably by deportations of Jews rounded up in Western Europe to ghetto cities Lublin and Łódź or to forced

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labour camps in which able-­bodied men, separated from their families, were made to work in cruel conditions. In October 1939 a new kind of extermination was initiated in Piaśnica near Danzig: killing mental patients. That October, the only order Hitler ever signed launched the murder of hospitalised medically handicapped and incurable psychiatric children and adults: Berlin, 1 Sept. 1939 Reich Leader Bouhler and Dr. med. Brandt are charged with the responsibility of enlarging the competence of certain physicians, designated by name, so that patients who, on the basis of human judgment, are considered incurable, can be granted mercy death after a discerning diagnosis. (signed) A. Hitler (Friedlander, p. 67) The headquarters of the programme was located in “a confiscated Jewish villa at number  4 on the Tiergarten Strasse and  .  .  . adult euthanasia was soon known as Operation T4, or simply as T4” (Friedlander, 1995, p.  68). The principal euthanasia executors were physicians and psychiatrists and others in six killing centres. One of them is of particular interest: opened in 1940 in the Sonnenstein Asylum, where Paul Schreber had been a patient, it had a gas chamber for killing with carbon monoxide and a crematorium in the basement. Its chief was Sonnenstein director Dr. Paul Nitsche, who previously killed his patients with starvation diets or with barbiturate injections at Leipzig-­Dösen Asylum, where Schreber had died in 1911 (Lothane, 1992). In 1947 Nitsche was convicted by a Dresden court of crimes against humanity and guillotined. Between 70,000 and 100,000 Germans were gassed, a dress rehearsal for future death camps. The Einsatzgruppen first killed the Jews by shooting, which was not only slow but also traumatised the perpetrators. Looking for a better method, Himmler, their SS chief, realised that gassing was the more efficient and trauma-­proof method, specifically, by pumping carbon monoxide from running motors into hermetically sealed vans. The first death camp was operational in 1941 in Polish Chełmno utilising both stationary gas chambers and vans. Carbon monoxide was used in the next three death camps opened in Poland in 1942: Bełzec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. The fifth was Majdanek, near Lublin, where carbon monoxide was replaced by Zyklon B (KCN). The sixth was Auschwitz where only Zyklon B was used. In 1940, the fall of Belgium, France, Holland, Denmark, and Norway added another two million Jews displaced to Poland, new concentration camps, and the creation of the Warsaw ghetto to absorb old and new victims. The Warsaw ghetto, a trap for 400,000 Jews, was equipped with a special railway siding, the ill-­famed Umschlagplatz, that led to Treblinka. It is estimated that

of the pre-­war 3.5 million Polish Jews, ninety per cent perished between 1939 and 1945. On 22 June  1941 began Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of Russia, and concurrently the murder by Einsatzgruppen of some two million Jews living in annexed eastern Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, and western Soviet Union, including White Russia and Ukraine, along a front running from Riga in the north to Lwów and Odessa in the south. Moreover, the regular army (Wehrmacht) tortured and starved to death millions of Russian prisoners of war and hunted suspected bolsheviks, saboteurs, and ordinary citizens. In a radio broadcast, Churchill declared that the Germans were committing “the most frightful cruelties” and “a crime without a name” (Gilbert, p. 186). In 1946 the Nuremberg war tribunal would name it a crime against humanity. Following the aforementioned 1939 speech by Hitler in the Reichstag threatening the annihilation of the Jews in Europe, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and Germany’s declaration of war on the United States, Hans Frank, Governor-­General of Poland’s General Government, declared on 16 December 1941: “We must annihilate the Jews wherever we find them and wherever it is possible, in order to maintain the integral structure of the Reich” (Gilbert, p. 246). On 20 January 1942 the infamous Wannsee Conference took place, held in a confiscated Jewish villa and chaired by Heydrich, “Plenipotentiary for the Preparation of the Final Solution of the European Jewish Question”, regarding not only the millions in the already conquered territories, but also “some eleven million Jews throughout Europe” (Gilbert, pp.  280–­281). The conference was attended by officials of many ministries and bureaucrats, amongst them SS Adolf Eichmann as Heydrich’s “department head” (p.  284). Plans were drawn for the deportation and destruction of these masses, which required a vast logistical network of transportation, rolling stock, timetables and schedules, and confiscation methods, all requiring about a million administrators, bureaucrats, diplomats, and collaborators amongst anti-­Semitic local populations. Various methods of camouflage and deception were used, for example, calling it a deportation resettlement, due to strict secrecy required by wartime censorship. On 30 January, at the Berlin Sports Palace, Hitler blessed the Wannsee villains: The Jews are our old enemy . . . and they rightfully hate us, just as much as we hate them . . . the war will not end as the Jews imagine it will, namely with the uprooting of the Aryans, but . . . the complete annihilation of the Jews. . . . And – world Jewry may as well know this – the further these battles [of the war] spread, the more anti-­Semitism will spread. It will find nourishment  .  .  . in every [family’s]

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ultimate reason for the sacrifices it has to make. And the hour will come when the most evil universal enemy of all time will be finished, at least for a thousand years. (Gilbert, p. 285) After the conference, the murder machinery was launched on an industrial scale in Auschwitz, where nearly a million Jews were murdered by war’s end. The camp was run by the SS which included doctors in SS uniforms in charge of (1) selections at the railway ramp of men and women fit for slave labor whisked to the right and the old, young, and infirm to the left and the gas chambers; (2) selections for gassing of the weakest inmates in barracks and on grounds, the so-­called musselmanns, the sickest people on the verge of death; (3) horrific medical experiments on men, women, and children, the icon of which became the notorious “angel of death” Josef Mengele, who was never found. As noted by Gilbert, “On 10 March 1944 Adolf Eichmann and his principal subordinates met at Mauthausen concentration camp” to work out a deportation programme “for the 750,000 Jews of Hungary” (p. 662). Until then Hungarian Jews survived unmolested, protected by the country’s Regent Admiral Horty. On 19 March the German troops marched into Budapest and on 17 April Hitler and Ribbentrop met with Horty, pressuring him to collaborate in the annihilation of the Jews, with Hitler declaring: “The Jews are just pure parasites.  .  .  . In Poland  .  .  .  [t]hey had to be treated like tuberculosis bacilli. . . . This is not cruel . . . innocent creatures of nature, such as hares and deer, have to be killed, so that no harm is caused by them. Why should the beasts who wanted to bring Bolshevism be spared more” (Levin, 1968, pp. 607–­608). This was the only documented confirmation that Hitler had given the orders to murder Jews when it was clear that he was losing the war. Eichmann cunningly used the carrot and stick approach to blackmail Horty and deceive the Jewish Council that the orders for confiscations, ghettoisation, and deportations of Jews from rural areas to cities were only temporary and for some time the ruse worked. However, in April some trains were already being rerouted to Auschwitz. In mid-­May began fifteen massive deportations to Auschwitz. In June, Rudolf Kastner, co-­leader of the Vaada (the underground Aid and Rescue Committee founded by Hungarian Zionist Joel Brand that smuggled Jews into Hungary and Palestine), got Eichmann to allow 1,686 Jews to leave Budapest in a special train to Switzerland. Convicted in Israel as a Nazi collaborator in 1954, Kastner was murdered there in 1957. At the same time Eichmann was also negotiating with the Joel Brand the ransom for saving Hungarian Jews, described in detail in Chapter 30 by Levin (1968). On 25 April Eichmann proposed a deal to Brand: “I am

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prepared to sell you a million Jews. . . . Goods for blood” (p. 625), the goods being “ten thousand trucks and spare parts for use on the Eastern front and a few thousand tons of foods and soap” (p. 626). On 15 May Eichmann met Brand again and told him: “Twelve thousand Jews will be transported daily, but I am prepared to send them to Austria and not to Auschwitz. . . . If you aren’t back in good time, these people will go to Auschwitz” (p. 627). Brand flew to Istanbul where he was supposed to meet with Chaim Weitzmann, head of the Jewish Agency (the Sochnut) in Jerusalem, who would start negotiations with the British representing the Allies. Instead, Brand was met by Moshe Shertok, chief of Sochnut’s Political Department in Aleppo, in British Syria. But Shertok was powerless against the Foreign Office and Secretary Eden. Instead, Weitzmann, the future first president of Israel, and Shertok, who as Sharett was its first foreign minister, urged to bomb Auschwitz and the rail lines to it, which was rejected. Brand was arrested by the British and interrogated and an official named Moyne said this to him: “What on earth were you thinking of, Mr. Brand? What shall I  do with those million Jews? Where shall I  put them?” (p. 635). Anyway, there were no longer a million left to be saved: according to official German reports, by 9 July, 437,402 Jews had been deported to Auschwitz in 147 trains and ninety per cent of them were exterminated upon arrival. One of the survivors was Elie Wiesel. The gassing ended by the end of October 1944. In 1960, Eichmann was captured by Israeli agents in Buenos Aires, tried as a war criminal in Jerusalem in 1961, and hanged. The subtitle of Arendt’s 1963 Eichmann in Jerusalem, “a report on the banality of evil”, unleashed a storm of indignation from compatriot Gershom Scholem and Holocaust historian Hilberg (1961), and now mine as well (Lothane, 2016b). Having jettisoned her valuable idea of radical evil (Arendt,1951), she absurdly claimed that Eichmann “had no motives at all. . . . He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing” (Lothane, 2016, p. 238), confirmed by Cesarani (2007). Arendt never admitted she had erred. But there was another twist to this history: there was a different Eichmann in the early days of Hitler’s regime, when, as head of the Jewish Section of the Third Reich, and as described by Arendt (1963), he dealtwith emigration which he negotiated with the Zionist Agency in Palestine. Eichmann was then sympathetic to Zionism, had read Theodor Herzl’s book The Jewish State so that, as he testified at the trial, “one had to help these functionaries to act and that’s what I did. I treated them as equals, [their] requests and complaints and applications for support and [kept his] promises” (p. 57). Moreover, in 1933, threatened by the boycott of German goods by Jews in Germany and worldwide, especially in the United States, the Nazi Economic Ministry and the Jewish Agency together with the German Zionist Federation

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signed an agreement to stop the boycott and allow German and Polish Jews emigrating to Palestine to transfer moneys into the Anglo-­Palestine bank, a pact called the Haavarah, Hebrew for transfer. As recorded by Black (2001), “between late 1933 and 1941, over $30 million had been transferred directly and another $70  million had flown into Palestine via German commercial agreements. . . . Some of Israel’s major industrial enterprises were founded with those moneys  .  .  . one-­hundred settlements were established  .  .  . 20,000 German Jews directly transferred to Palestine, and another 40,000 . . . via indirect transfer . . . with replicas of their homes and factories and their culture” (p. 379). The good was the contribution this made to the future State of Israel.

World War II aftermath In January 1945, as the Red Army was closing in on the Germans, the SS guards were blowing up the machinery of the death and labour camps and taking thousands of emaciated inmates in closed or open trucks and wagons to camps Mauthausen in upper Austria, Bergen Belsen in north Germany, or Dachau in Bavaria, and more, or driving them in death marches for hundreds of miles. Tens of thousands of Jews who could not make it were shot and left lying or thrown into roadside ditches. In the West, American and British troops discovered emaciated corpses near the village of Ohrdruf and more, along with survivors, in Bergen Belsen and Buchenwald, the camp on the outskirts of Weimar, a city of culture and humanism, graced by monuments to Goethe and Schiller. In his testament Hitler continued to rant against the Jews ending with these words: And so, in this cruel world into which two great wars have plunged us again, it is obvious that only the white peoples who have any chance of survival . . . will be those who have shown themselves capable of eradicating from their system the deadly poison of Jewry. ( http://­www.hitler.org/­writings/­last https://­ www.ns-­archiv.de/­personen/­hitler/­testament/­ politisches-­testament.php_testament/­, p. 85) As Clémenceau said, “it is mankind’s nature to love life. . . . The German has a morbid and satanic love of death“ (cited in Barth, 1945), echoed by Conway (1987). Or as Paul Celan wrote in poem Death Fugue: “Death is a gang-­boss aus Deutschland”. In Poland, survivors of ghettos and deportations, death camps, and death marches returned to much-­ changed landscapes: the world they knew was no more. Gone was the rich traditional Jewish culture, synagogues were in ruins, entire Jewish villages and quarters vanished forever. Returning Jews were met with

mistrust, hostility, and pogroms instigated by blood libel rumours. Returning to Poland in 1946, I bore witness to this wave of anti-­Semitism. However, this also provided an impetus for my immigration to Israel. Another new beginning in 1945 was the way of ending World War II differently than World War I: instead of retribution, there was restoration of a new Germany, democratic and tolerant of other races and cultures. This message was implicit at the Nuremberg trials and endorsed by the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1945): Germans, learn from your past in the spirit of repentance, reflection, and responsibility. Early on German-­Jewish journalist H. T. Tetens (1961) warned that Adenauer’s Federal German Republic was filled with anti-­Semitic Nazis “From the Rogues’ Gallery” (p. 190) capable of reviving Hitler’s policies. However, despite a number of post-­war anti-­Semitic incidents, Tetens’ fears did not materialise. In fact, Adenauer’s government did try former Auschwitz guards in Frankfurt from 1963 to 1965. Moreover, rehabilitating ex-­Nazi officials and integrating them in society was in keeping with the United States policy of reconstruction instead of revenge, helping heirs of the Third Reich to embrace Western-­type democracy (Matheny, 2004), let alone snatching former Nazi rocket expert Wernher von Braun, future engineer of NASA’s large rockets. The new Germany has been a strong ally of Israel. The appeals to repent evoked a gamut of reactions in Germany and inspiring narratives of avowal and denial of the Holocaust down the decades. However, one aftermath of the defeat of Nazi Germany gave cause for concern: the rise of a vigorous neo-­Nazi movement in Germany, inspiring the populist trends and neo-­Nazism in Europe and the United States. In the torch-­lit parade in Charlottesville, angry far-­right nationalists wore swastikas and chanted the Nazi phrases “blood and soil” and “you will not replace us/­Jews will not replace us”.

Narratives of the Holocaust While the Shoah was a major drama and trauma to millions, Holocaust historiography after 1945 became a plethora of descriptive narratives and denial narratives on a spectrum from factual to false. People born after World War II get their information from reading Holocaust books, running into many thousands, hearing stories of survivors, visiting museums or death camps turned into museums, or watching documentary films. European Jews and non-­Jews were publishing accounts of their ordeals under the Nazis, Anne Frank, Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Władysław Szpilman amongst countless others; the veracity of personal accounts has not been questioned. On the other hand, with the exception of Holocaust deniers such as the French Paul Rassinier, British David Irving, and Americans Harry Elmer Barnes and

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David Hoggan, the bulk of post-­war debates, whether declaring or denying Hitler’s willing executioners as responsible for the Jewish genocide, took place amongst West German historians, philosophers, and sociologists. Germany’s responsibility became a burning issue again during the notorious Historikerstreit, historians’ quarrels, from 1986 to 1989. Revisionist historian Ernst Nolte created a furor by exculpating Hitler’s Holocaust as a legitimate defence against the Soviet threat to Germany’s existence and thus morally equivalent to Stalin’s mass murders and the Gulag. The noted philosopher Jürgen Habermas vigorously objected to this whitewash in newspaper articles, letters to editors, and other writings. Accusations and counter accusations were flying in both directions for many years. Hair-­raising claims were made in 1977 by British discredited historian and Holocaust-­ denier David Irving that Jews were not murdered by gassing in Auschwitz. In 1988 Irving testified in the trial of German-­born Holocaust-­denier and neo-­Nazi propagandist Ernst Zündel (Obituary, New York Times, 2017). In these debates, the notion of Sonderweg, or special path, formerly denoting the patriotic path of Germany, was used by historians characterised as functionalists to explain Nazi ideology and the Holocaust as the predictable outcome of antecedent socio-­political German history, thus not only of Nazi leadership’s pressure from above but to pressure from below from masses of the mid-­and low-­level bureaucrats who executed Holocaust policies. Holocaust historians Goldhagen (1996) and Lucy Dawidowicz (Rosenbaum, 1998) were intentionalists: Hitler and his executioners clearly intended to exterminate the Jews like nobody before them, while functionalism was represented by Jewish-­American Raul Hilberg and German Hans Mommsen. It was also claimed that Hitler was not the only mass murderer, Stalin was one too; but Stalin only murdered his own citizens, never Jews. A quite different functionalist was my compatriot Zygmunt Bauman (1989), nine years older, who like me survived and studied in the city Soviets renamed Gorkii. For Bauman, the Holocaust’s “events of exceptional dramatic power [called for]  .  .  . alternative groundings of ethical principles” (p.  175) in the “attempts to narrate the most horrifying of genocides” (p.  176). Espousing Emmanuel Levinas’ ideas Bauman declared: “my responsibility is unconditional . . . ‘The face [of the other] orders and ordains me’ ” (pp. 182–­182; italics in original). In the previous decade a more extreme functionalism emerged in Germany when philosopher Rolf Zimmerman (2005) legitimised Nazi ideology and the Holocaust with a new moral theory called particularism, opposed to traditional universalism, and defined by him as “rupture of species”. In the 2015 text he sent me, Zimmermann claimed that discussing Hitler’s Holocaust and Stalin’s murder by mass starvation . . . in the name of “morals”, [i.e.,] particularist

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vs. the universalist paradigms . . . [shows that] hopes for a priori justifications of universalism are vain. . . . I propose the term “rupture of species” (“Gattungsbruch”) to characterize the radicalism of Nazism in moral terms. The term is meant to signify the overthrowing of traditional moral limits in order to transform mankind in a new world of moral otherness. Himmler’s  .  .  . moral otherness was interwoven with a utopia of founding a new mankind which found its expression in a vision of an empire of thousand years  .  .  . the moral change induced by Nazism as a moral transformation of mankind as a whole. The Nazis were able to generate support on all levels of German society and abroad . . . [but] the specific sort of a morality of integration, the universalism of the equality of man and equal rights for all men, marks fundamental and insurmountable opposition to Nazi morals. (italics added) This sounds like an agreement with the aforementioned entries “National-­Socialism” and “Völkisch” from Schmidt 1934 nazified Dictionary and a denial of the criminality of both Hitler and Stalin. Moreover, Zimmermann asserted that: the strengthening of the German-­Aryan community under the guidance of the “Führer” (“Führerprinzip”) [and aforementioned] Carl Schmitt’s doctrine of “The leader defends the law” . . . on a higher sphere of lawmaking . . . to create a “true” law of the community.  .  .  . The universalistic type requires  .  .  . reconciling conflicts within a community by nonviolent processes.  .  .  . For the Nazi type, violence is a legitimate means of enforcing homogeneity of the community against its enemies, defined in racial terms or other “unhealthy elements.” Analogously, in Hitler’s opinion, the violent fight for a race domination in the context of a global struggle is the true human right of the community. By the same token, wars of aggression are declared actions of self-­defense. . . . The SS and its organizations were an exemplary community of moral transformation. In our context it is important to remember that the SS represents not only the highest type of Nazi community in respect of the militant combination of ideology and racial struggle. At the same time this community delivered the elitist paradigm of ideal Nazi socialization and moral transformation, which could serve as an educational model for the whole society. Ideal virtues like loyalty, obedience, honor, or comradeship were posed in direct relation to Adolf Hitler as a person and the representation of those concepts in every SS-­man’s oath of allegiance to maintain loyalty to Hitler to the death. This development shows the suspension of a concept of conscience in the

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Christian tradition which was open to each individual’s moral reflection (italics added). Hitler’s war and the loyalty to Hitler’s aggression with the ideal of loyalty to Hitler in the spirit of honor and comradeship, ideals fit for the whole German society. Extolling the “ideal virtues” of the Nazis as an “exemplary community” is like praising Mafia members for the honourable allegiance to their crime boss. No wonder ordinary people were turned into monsters of cruelty and destruction and the criminals at Nuremberg pleaded not guilty. Ernst Tugendhat (2009) offered a vigorous rebuttal: borrowing his ideas from Richard Rorty (p. 64), Zimmermann erred in asserting that universalism was as historically contingent as particularism (pp.  71–­73); that universalist eternal moral values conformed to Enlightenment and Christian-­egalitarian moral principles; that right by might and justice by injustice, emotionally conditioned Nazi ideologues (p. 73) saw “in the Jews an alien and malignant race and a threat to the benign Arian race” (p. 63). Functionalists were copiously cited in a recent troubling apologia for the Nazis by Zurich-­born philosopher and former director of the London Leo Baeck Institute, Raphael Gross (2010): his book’s title, “to have remained decent”, was taken verbatim from the ill-­famed 1943 speech by SS boss Himmler to his executioners: We shall now discuss it absolutely openly among ourselves, nevertheless we shall never speak of it in public. I mean the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish race. It is one of those things which is easy to say. ‘The Jewish race is to be exterminated,’ says every Party member. ‘That’s clear, it’s part of our program, elimination of the Jews, extermination, right, we’ll do it.’  .  .  . Most of you know what it means to see a hundred corpses lying together, five hundred, or a thousand. To have gone through this and yet – apart from a few exceptions, examples of human weakness – to have remained decent fellows, this is what has made us hard. This is a glorious page in our history that has never been written and shall never be written. (italics added; http://­www.historyplace.com/­ worldwar2/­holocaust/­h-­posen.htm) Himmler spelt out what decent means: One basic principle must be the absolute rule for the SS men: We must be honest, decent, loyal and comradely to members of our own blood and to nobody else. What happens to a Russian, to a Czech, does not interest me in the slightest. . . . Whether 10,000 Russian females fall down from exhaustion while digging an antitank ditch interests me only insofar as the anti-­tank ditch for Germany is finished. . . .

We had the moral right, the duty towards our people to murder this people who wanted to murder us. (internet) Gross (2010) evaluates this Nazi decency in the spirit of Zimmermann: The core concepts of  .  .  . Nazi theoreticians and politicians have to do with moral concepts, or with concepts with a strong moral charge: honor, loyalty, decency, fellowship, etc. Many authors have indicated that National Socialism is radically imbued with a biologization of the social. But only rarely has attention been paid to the existence and manner in which such biologistic concepts are at the same time connected with moral categories and only thereby obtain their aggressive character. As is well known, biology does not offer independent moral judgments, this is done by people who connect alleged biological differences with moral judgments, or as in National Socialism, develop racial theories that distinguish “good” from “bad” people. Therefore, it is especially necessary to investigate National Socialism from the perspective of such moral judgments and to integrate it with the history of morals. (p. 8; my translation) This amounts to a hair-­raising transvaluation of commonly held moral values, for example, the sixth Commandment “You shall not murder”. As Himmler stated, the pseudo-­scientific and anti-­Semitic Nazi racial theories justified murdering Jews and forcing women to dig ditches for the greater glory of Germany and acts of “the legal murder of the moral person” in the deportees (Arendt, 1948, p. 22). They were dehumanised and depersonalised by replacing their names with tattooed numbers; by being gassed with Zyklon B, previously used for exterminating lice and rats; and by converting their corpses into fat for soap, hair for mattresses, skin for lampshades, and bones for fertilisers, after extracting gold from their teeth. Though Himmler and his cronies congratulated each on being decent, they had been well aware of the criminal nature of their genocide: fleeing the advancing Red Army in January 1945, they destroyed evidence, blew up gas chambers and crematoria, and dragged thousands to other camps in open freight cars and on death marches. Gross and his co-­author Werner Konitzer also cited sociologist Harald Welzer (2005), according to whom In an altered moral framework also altered is the point of view of what is moral conduct – but that does not mean that morals play no role here. The relationship between mass murder and morality is not contradictory but is a condition of reciprocity.

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Without morals the mass murder could not have been accomplished. . . . It was based on the binding and fundamental particularist morality. (Gross, pp. 246–­247)

In conclusion We end with pacifist Huxley of 1937, upholding universalism: From Isaiah . . . the prophets have spoken with one voice . . . “Nation shall no more lift sword against nation” (p.  1); “war is a purely human phenomenon  .  .  . which is mass murder organized in cold blood. . . . Man is unique in organizing the murder of his own species” (p. 100); “A principal cause of war is nationalism, and nationalism is immensely popular because it is psychologically satisfying to individual nationalists” (p.  109); “an extremely important cause of war – the pursuit by politically powerful minorities within each nation of their own private interests” (p.  118); “nationalism first became a religion in Germany, during the Napoleonic wars. Communism took its rise some fifty years later. . . . The World War was a product of nationalism . . . welcomed by the great masses of those who found life pointless.  .  .  . Millions of young people embraced the new idolatrous religions [Communism, Fascism, Nazism, HZL], found a meaning in life and were ready to make sacrifices, accept hardships, courage, fortitude, temperance and indeed all the virtues except the primary ones, without which all the rest may serve merely as the means for doing evil more effectively. Love and ­awareness – these are the primary essential virtues” (pp. 141–­142); “Devotion to a human person who is still alive, who has been deified by general acclaim, can hardly fail to be disastrous in the long run. ‘Power always corrupts’, wrote Lord Acton. ‘Absolute power absolutely corrupts. All great men are bad.’ A deified man is morally ruined by the process of being worshipped”. (p. 275) Seeing what is happening in the world today, fourscore years after the events, we are facing a surfeit with and weariness from the Holocaust and a disillusionment with the lessons of history. But denying such lessons poses a peril to our survival. A most thought-­provoking trans-­denominational lesson of Auschwitz was offered by Arthur A. Cohen (1981). Another theologically moral lesson was offered in the imaginary conversation of Jew Yossel Rakover with God (Kolitz, 1995): God has veiled his countenance from the world, and thus has delivered mankind over to its most savage

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impulses. . . . The followers of the God of the nations, the so-­called God of love, who commanded them to love every creature made in the divine image, have been murdering us without pity, day in, day, out for almost two thousand years. . . . I am proud that I  am a Jew not in spite of the world’s treatment of us but precisely because of this treatment. . . . I am happy to belong to the world’s most unfortunate people whose Torah represents the loftiest and most beautiful body of law and morality. . . . I believe that to be a Jew is an inborn trait. . . . “There is nothing more whole than a broken heart” [Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav] . . . I believe in Israel’s God even if he has done everything to stop me from believing in him. . . . I will always believe in You, I will always love You! Yea, even in spite of You! (pp. 17–­26) Yossel’s conversation echoes Job’s dialogue with God and Paul Schreber’s discourse with the “distant God”, a deus absconditus, the hidden and remote God who ignores human suffering (Lothane, 1992, p.  401). We understand the lament, but we may not forget that human evil is after all man-­made, and for this we all remain forever responsible.

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Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the pleasure principle. Standard Edition, 20. Freud, S. (1921). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. Standard Edition, 18. Friedlander, H. (1995). The origins of Nazi genocide: From euthanasia to the final solution. Chaper Hill & London: The University of North Carolina Press. Fromm, E. (1973). The anatomy of human destructiveness. New York: Fawcett Crest. Gilbert, M. (1985). The Holocaust: A history of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War. New York: Henry Holt & Co. Goldhagen, J. D. (1996). Hitler’s willing executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Knopf. Gross, R. (2010). Anständig geblieben Nationalsozialistische moral (staying decent Nazi morality). Frankfurt: S. Fischer. Heiden, K. (1933[1932]). Geschichte des Nationalsozialismus/­Die Karriere einer Idee (history of national-­socialism/­success of an idea). Berlin: Rowohlt. Hilberg, R. (1961). The destruction of the European Jews. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Hitler, A. (1941). Mein Kampf. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock. Hofer, W. (1957). Der Nationalsozialismus Dokumente 1933–­ 1945. Frankfurt/­Main: Fischer. Huber, E. R. (1937). Verfassung (constitution). Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt. Huxley, A. (1937). Ends and means an inquiry into the nature of ideals and the methods employed for their realization. New York: Harper & Brothers. Huxley, A. (1959). Collected essays. New York: Harper & Brothers, p. 308. Johnson, P. (1987). History of the Jews. New York: HarperPerennial. Kolitz, Z. (1995). Yossel Rakover speaks to God: Holocaust challenges to religious faith. Hoboken, NJ: KTAV. Kolnai, A. (1938). The war against the West. New York: The Viking Press. Krystal, H. (1968). Massive psychic trauma. New York: International Universities Press. Le Bon, G. (1897[1895]). The crowd: A study of the popular mind. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Levin, N. (1968). The Holocaust: The destruction of European Jewry 1933–­1945. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co. Lothane, Z. (1992). In defense of Schreber, soul murder and psychiatry. Hillsdale, NJ and London: The Analytic Press. Lothane, Z. (2006). Mass psychology of the led and the leaders/­ masses and mobs, democracy and demagogues/­or how prejudice of the leader becomes mass paranoia. International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 15, 183–­192. Lothane, Z. (2009). Dramatology in life, disorder, and psychoanalytic therapy: A  further contribution to interpersonal psychoanalysis. International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 18(3), 135–­148. Lothane, Z. (2011). Evil as the death instinct. In J. H. Ellens (Ed.), Explaining evil (Vol. 2, pp. 268–­291). Lothane, Z. (2012). Freud’s civilization and its discontents and related works: A  reappraisal. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 32(6), 524–­542. Lothane, H. Z. (2016). Violence as a manifestation of evil. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 36(6), 454–­475. Lothane, H. Z. (2016). The lie of the banality of evil: Hannah Arendt’s fatal flaw. In R. C. Naso & J. Mills (Eds.), Ethics of evil/­psychoanalytic investigations (pp. 233–­264). London: Karnac Books. Lothane, H. Z. (2019). Wilhelm Reich revisited: The role of ideology in character analysis of the individual versus charac-

ter analysis of the masses and the Holocaust. International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 28(2), 104–­114. Poliakov, L. (1951). Bréviare de la haine Le III Reich et les Juifs. Paris: Calmann-­Lévy. Poliakov, L. (1974[1971]). The Aryan myth a history of racist and nationalist ideas in Europe. Forge Village, MA: Meridian. Pross, C. (1988). Paying for the past: The struggle over reparations for surviving victims of the Nazi terror. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Rauschning, H. (1938). Die Revolution des Nihilismus. Kulisse und Wirklichkeit im Dritten Reich (Revolution of Nihilism/­behind the scenes and in reality in the third Reich). Zürich: Europa Verlag. Rosenbaum, R. (1998). Explaining Hitler: The search for the origins of his evil. New York: Random House. Schemann, L. (1920). Paul de la Garde. Ein Leben und Erinnerungsbild (a life and reminiscences). Zweite Auflage. Leipzig: Erich Matthes. Schmidt, H. (1934). Philosophisches Wörterbuch (philosophical dictionary). Leipzig: Kröner. Sievers, L. (1977). Juden in Deutschland Die Geschichte einer 2000jährigen Tragödie (Jews in Germany the history of a 2000 years long tragedy). Hamburg: Stern-­Magazin im Verlag Gruner+Jahr. Tetens, T. H. (1961). The new Germany and the Nazis. New York: Random House. Tugendhat, E. (2009). Der moralische Universalismus in der Konfrontation mit der Nazi Ideologie. In W. Konitzer& R. Gross (Eds.), Moralität des Bösen Ethik und nationalsozialistische Verbrechen (pp. 61–­75). Frankfurt: Campus. Vergin, F. (1932). Subconscious Europe. London: Jonathan Cape. Original Das unbewusste Europa Psychoanalyse der europäischen Politik. Wien: Hess & Co. Verlag, 1931. Weech, W. N. (1944). History of the world. London: Oldhams Press Limited. Welzer, H. (2005). Täter Wie aus ganz normalen Menschen Massenmörder werden (perpetrators how quite normal people become mass murderers). Frankfurt. Zimmermann, R. (2005). Philosophie nach Auschwitz, Eine Neubestimmung von Moral in Politik und Gesellschaft (philosophy after a reclassification of morality in politics and society). Reinbek: Rowohlt. Zimmermann, R. (2015). Holocaust and Hiroshima moral otherness and moral failure in war. Read at the conference “The Theory of Just War,” Warsaw, October 13–­14, 2015. http://­i sites.harvard.edu/­f s/­d ocs/­i cb.topic519973.files/­ Hitler%20speech%20to%20the%20Reichstag%20Jan.%20 30%201939.pdf. https://­socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/­econ/­ugcm/­3ll3/­hobbes/­ Leviathan.pdf. http://­history.stackexchange.com/­questions/­14608/­did-­the-­ germans-­purposefully-­arrange-­to-­send-­lenin-­to-­russia-­to-­ start-­a-­revoluti. https://­socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/­~econ/­ugcm/­3ll3/­lebon/­ Crowds.pdf. https://­en.wikipedia.org/­wiki/­Herschel_Grynszpan. https://­en.wikipedia.org/­wiki/­Joel_Brand#Early_life. www.historyplace.com/­worldwar2/­holocaust/­h-­posen.htm. http://­germanhistorydocs.ghi-­dc.org/­sub_document.cfm?doc ument_id=1513. https://­a rchive.org/­s tream/­T heTestamentOfAdolfHitler/­ TOAH_djvu.txt. www.history.ucsb.edu/­faculty/­marcuse/­classes/­133c/­133cproj/­ 04proj/­MathenyTetens043.htm. www.ny.times.com/­2017/­08/­07/­world/­europe/­ernst-­zundel-­ canada-­germany-­holocaust-­denial.html.

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2 Freud, Max Weber, and the Shoah Peter Loewenberg

Introduction As a totality and as a concept, the Shoah is incomprehensible, we cannot claim to understand it. Before the task of explanation, the disciplines of history, the social sciences, and psychoanalysis must throw up their hands in despair. The Shoah forces historians to confront the limits of representation. As Saul Friedlander put it, “Even the most precise historical renditions of the Shoah contain an opaqueness at the core which confronts traditional historical narrative”.1 Dominic LaCapra writes: “I  do not think that conventional techniques, which in certain respects are necessary, are ever sufficient, and to some extent the study of the Holocaust may help us to reconsider the requirements of historiography in general”.2 Conceptualization, if not representation, is necessary and possible. It is so within the classic armamentarium of Western humane letters, psychoanalysis, and social science theory. When confronting the Shoah, we are in the presence of a ferocity of hatred and a welter of primitive feelings in the perpetrators and impotent rage in the victims which in turn releases primitive feelings in ourselves that make understanding difficult, if not virtually impossible. A special attribute of psychoanalysis is that it gives us a set of concepts based on clinical observation with which to organize and structure, and therefore to comprehend, the most archaic destructive impulses which have been acted out in history. The two prophets of the twentieth century who offer the appropriate conceptual tools with which to begin to

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understand the Final Solution are Max Weber and Sigmund Freud. Modern psychoanalysis has made us sensitive to ambivalence about achievements at mastery. The fact that order, structure, discipline, and the rule of law have been secured means that the contrary emotions of impulsiveness, violence, and destructiveness, have been controlled. The sanction to unleash these repressed forces is always tempting, particularly when it may be done under the cloak of official legitimacy. The Final Solution was a specifically modern enterprise in total bureaucratic domination which could only have been realized by a highly developed, tightly disciplined, well-­trained, and organized state and industrial bureaucracy. This is why the question posed by Ernst Nolte: “Did the National Socialists perpetrate, did Hitler perpetrate, an ‘Asiatic’ deed only because they viewed themselves and their kind as potential or actual victims of an ‘Asiatic’ deed?”3 constitutes such an offensive displacement of both historical locus and of responsibility. The Final Solution is integral to the achievements of rationality as developed in the West.

Weber Weber gave us an ideal typology of that most modern and Western instrument of domination that was central to the essence and instrumentalization of the Final Solution, bureaucracy. The Nazi Final Solution is distinguished from other genocides, such as the Armenian Massacres of 1915 or the Rwandan of 1994, by its

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particularly technological rational-­functional character. The Endlösung was an organized industry of destruction. The bureaucratic rationality that was required to transport millions of Jews across Europe to death factories, and the narrow bureaucratic diligence which was necessary to organize the assembly-­line mass murders effectively and in an administratively “correct” way is firmly on the ground of Max Weber’s bureaucratic rationality. Weber celebrated the “virtue” of the calculating rationality of bureaucracy as the essentially modern mode of domination. He pointed to the specifically dehumanizing quality of bureaucratic domination, Its specific nature, which is welcomed by capitalism, develops the more perfectly the more the bureaucracy is dehumanized, the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation. This is the specific nature of bureaucracy and it is appraised as its special virtue.4 Weber’s special “virtue” of the “dehumanized” machine enables us to understand how an order could be given in an office in Berlin and carried out in Sobibor, Belzec, or Mauthausen. It was this bureaucratic instrument, which Weber gave us the tools to analyze and comprehend, that enabled in Treblinka “150 people to kill 900,000 in 18 months at a cost of 5 cents per person”.5 Adolf Hitler was a charismatic leader, not merely in the colloquial sense of having a persuasive style and a devoted following, as might be said of Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, or a rock star. We may use the term “charismatic authority” for Hitler in its precise Weberian meaning, as a personal authority which “knows only inner determination and inner restraint. The holder of charisma seizes the task that is adequate for him and demands obedience and a following by virtue of his mission”.6

Freud Sigmund Freud’s concepts grant us insight into political leaders and their followers, their personalities of the second-­rank implementers of ideology, the role of anxiety in politics, and to the complex and controversial relationship of persecutor and victim. Freud’s tract on leadership stressed the unidirectional affectual bonds between followers and their leader. The leader is a narcissist explicitly on the model of Nietzsche’s Übermensch: “The leader himself need love no one else, he may be of a masterful nature, absolutely narcissistic, self-­confident and independent”.7

The adherents to a movement turn over their superego and their ego ideal to the leader. Said Freud: “It would be more to the point to explain being in love by means of hypnosis than the other way around”.8 The group members also have ties to each other based on their mutual love for one person, their leader: “Many equals who can identify themselves with one another, and a single person superior to them all – that is the situation that we find realized in groups which can sustain themselves”.9 Hitler communicated power, certainty, and control, he had an easy explanation for how Germany arrived at its current predicament and an action-­oriented program for the future. He offered security, a sense of community (Volksgemeinschaft), comradeship, and the promise of national strength and order in place of impotence and chaos. He appealed to all the psychic needs of those Germans who felt desperate hopelessness and futile rage at an abstract economic system and a humiliating peace. Heinz Kohut has given us the valuable concept of narcissistic rage and a differential diagnosis to distinguish it from other forms of rage. The specific distinction of narcissistic rage is “the need for revenge, for righting a wrong, for undoing a hurt by whatever means, and a deeply anchored, unrelenting compulsion in the pursuit of these aims, which gives no rest to those who have suffered a narcissistic injury”.10 As with Freud’s advanced theory of anxiety, this Kohutian formulation has an application to politics and history which is as relevant as its individual clinical use. Less than fifty years after the defeat of France and the triumphant creation of the Second German Reich as the dominant military power in Europe, Germany experienced what was perceived as the shameful humiliation of defeat, dismemberment, guilt, and ostracism from the community of nations, and the imposition of reparations payments for what was then the bloodiest war in history. The emotional program of National Socialism was narcissistic revenge on the Allies who had humbled Germany and imposed the “War Guilt” clause, Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty of 1919. The perceived injustice of the internationalization of Danzig, the Polish corridor, the loss of the Saarland, and the payment of reparations were to be righted by re-­militarization, threats, power, and, ultimately, coercion. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. once said, “We live by symbols”. This is especially true of crisis politics and the search for stability. Donald W. Winnicott defined the transitional space between mother and child as the arena of first symbolization and creativity.11 The symbolic codes of German politics constituted transitional objects which gave security against anxiety in a world of chaos, where the multiple traumas of defeat, inflation, depression, and a weak Weimar government meant uncertainty, instability, and lack of continuity.12

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An example of the importance of Hitler and the emotional charge of his message as a symbolic transitional object, in distinction to its cognitive content, is the experience described by two sisters in 1934 upon hearing Hitler for the first time at a rally in Kassel. The sister’s family name was Heder, from the region of Fritzlar, their ages were 19 and 21, and their father had been killed on the Russian front in 1915. As the first sonorous and warm words sounded, deep silence befell the place. Never again in life did an event exert such a deep hold on us, as did this first speech of the Führer. And then the words fell, destroying, accusing, blazing and rousing, pulling along everyone including those who were doubtful. He spoke with force to the mass and yet again to each individual and he fascinated them. His fateful words engraved themselves deeply into our hearts. Again and again the enthusiasm interrupted the silence and transmitted itself to the thousands who listened outside the tent to the broadcast. Then it was over. The Horst-­Wessel song reared the sky. We saw flowers over flowers, but the man in the unpretentious brown uniform with a face marked by an inflexible will, with small eloquent hands wasn’t there any more. We don’t how we got home. This evening we could not sleep; the experience was still too strong. Many a prayer ascended to heaven on this evening asking for the protection of the Führer.13 We note the sisters were so elated on their first encounter with their new savior/­father/­leader that they could not sleep. The prayed for him. The imperial colors, black-­white-­red, the image of Bismarck, and the implied continuity with his Reich and its splendid triumph over France, the figure of the Junker Generalfeldmarschall Paul von Hindenburg as the President who called Hitler to power, are positive symbolic codes of continuity with cherished ideals, security, and success. The images of the “November Criminals” and the “Dolchstoß” [“stab in the back”] who betrayed Germany in World War One, the “Jude” and “Sozi-­Bonzen” [“Socialist big-­wigs”] who were Germany’s “misfortune” symbolized the negative images to be obliterated and, mercilessly, overcome. On August  22, 1932 five Nazi SA murderers received death sentences for hacking and kicking a Communist organizer to death in Potempa, Silesia. Hitler used the occasion to demonstrate to the German public his brutality, ruthlessness, and contempt for normative rules of political conduct. His public telegram to the killers congratulated them and promised they would soon be released as “a question of honor”. He assured them he was linked to them in “boundless loyalty [. . .] in the face of this monstrous, bloodthirsty sentence”.14 Further examples of his trampling upon

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the normative values of German and Western conduct and culture were the burning of books and the banning of “degenerate” art. He projected an image of barbaric, irresistible power and an extraordinary capacity for excessive violence, independent of moral norms. The emotional message was that opposition was hopeless, and resistance was futile.15 Adolf Hitler promised decisive action, certainty, power, and mastery of the world. These are the best antidotes to feelings of helplessness, bewilderment, weakness, passivity, humiliation, and vulnerability. Hitler and Nazism constituted Germany’s answer to collective historical narcissistic injury. He gave an integrated, simple explanation of the past, the crisis of 1929–­1933, and a vision of a glorious future. He appeared to contain anxiety and threats of hopelessness. He posed as the representative of order, morality, and power. He restored an active sense of purpose so the German people could experience society as stable, vital, disciplined, supportive and dependable. Hitler posited a regime of unity at home, a new respect in the world, dynamic energy, and the end of disorder in the streets and the government.16

A Step Towards Understanding The historical comprehension of the Final Solution can also benefit from a singular discovery of Freud: the intimate intrapsychic object relationship between enemies, between lovers, and between persecutor and victim. In the midst of World War One, when two of his sons were on the front in the uniform of Austria-­Hungary, Freud exposed the law of ambivalence of feelings.17 These theoretical writings had a special personal relevance to Freud’s feelings about potential wounding and death of his sons in the military.18 Freud was writing about our attitudes toward death – specifically the death of loved ones which, in addition to the pain, loss, and grief, was also positively greeted because in each beloved person, a hostile alien also resides.19 He referred to our most intimate relationships: the death, or the risk of death, of someone we love, a parent or a partner in marriage, a brother or sister, a child or a dear friend. These loved ones are on the one hand an inner possession, components of our own ego; but on the other hand they are partly strangers, even enemies. With the exception of only a very few situations, there adheres to the tenderest and most intimate of our love-­relations a small portion of hostility which can excite an unconscious death-­wish.20 Freud’s acute focus on the ambivalence within us and within all people must be supplemented with an object-­ relational understanding of the splitting of good and

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bad internal objects and the Nazi identification with the projected bad object in the Jews. This also means bad, guilty, compliant, and passive projections forced onto the victims. This intimate intrapsychic relationship, which was acted out on a continental European scale for twelve years, holds a key to understanding the psychodynamics of the Final Solution. A demonstration of the intrapsychic relationship of the persecutor and victim is a meeting of high ranking Reich officials that Goering convened in the Reichs Air Ministry at 11 a.m. on November  12, 1938, three days after Kristallnacht. The source is a stenographic protocol that presents verbatim dialogue of the leaders of the Third Reich identifying with the Jews they were tormenting. They are speaking of measures to be taken against Germany’s Jews – the immediate subject is new restrictions on Jewish life-­space in travel on Germany’s railways: I think it more reasonable to give them their own compartments. Goebbels: But not when the train is over-­full. Göring: Just a minute! There is only one Jewish carriage. If it is occupied, the others must stay at home. Goebbels: But let’s suppose there are not so many Jews travelling to Munich on an express train. Let’s say two Jews sit in the train and the other compartments are overflowing. These two Jews would have a special section for themselves. Therefore we must say: the Jews only have a right to a seat after all the Germans are seated. Göring: I  would not formulate it specially that way. Rather, I  would give the Jews a coach or a compartment. And if it came to the situation you speak of, that the train is full, believe me, we will handle it as is. For this I need no law: The Jew is thrown out, even if he has to sit by himself in the toilet for the whole trip.21 Göring:

The top leadership of the Reich are here identifying with a Jew who wishes to travel, taking the express train to Munich. They are placing themselves in fantasy in the emotional position of a Jew whose life and options are increasingly stigmatized, circumscribed, harassed, and plagued. In order to do this, a part of the self must be able to project what it feels like to be despised and must share that feeling. A  deprecated, worthless, unfavorable part of the self is being exorcised. The vulnerable, ugly, unacceptable, animal, lascivious,  and dirty parts are placed on the Jews, and it feels good. As the conference progressed Göring said: Moreover, I have to repeat once again that I would not wish to be a Jew in Germany. A little later Goebbels reflected:



At the moment he [the Jew] is small and ugly and stays at home.22

How could Hermann Göring know that he “would not wish to be a Jew in Germany”? He has to have made the emotional identification with the Jew whose life he has made intolerable. What did Josef Paul Goebbels know of smallness and ugliness and what it is like to hide at home? He knew because he recognized those feelings in himself. The psychoanalytic object-­relational response to the epistemological problem of the perpetrators of the Final Solution is: “I  know because I  feel and I can feel because I have been there with a part of myself”. Abominations and perversions in the politico-­social world are created through persecutions and foulness in the inner fantasies, conscious and unconscious, of the perpetrators. A  moment’s reflection will convince us that we are only able to postulate a characteristic or trait in another because it has been to some degree known to us in fantasy, either consciously or unconsciously. The Nazis found in the Jews an available and vulnerable target on whom to project their bad internal objects – a sense of inferiority, of being despised as parasites. An enormous amount of Nazi energy and material resources were directed to the symbolic manipulation of that portion of the world controlled by the Third Reich in the service of forcing projective identifications of bad inner objects onto Jews and intimidating them into passivity, into believing that they were guilty.

VII The personalities of the second rank of Nazi leaders, the administrators of the Final Solution (people such as Heinrich Himmler, Adolf Eichmann, Rudolf Höß, Commandant of Auschwitz, and Franz Stangl, Commandant of Treblinka and Sobibor), were emotionally sterile and impoverished. Based on a study of Himmler’s adolescent diaries from ages ten to twenty-­four, I have detailed how empty and withdrawn from true feeling and emotions his inner life was.23 Adolf Eichmann was psychiatrically examined in Israel and given virtually every known projective psychological test, including the Rohrshach, TAT, Object Relations Test, Wechsler, Bender, Drawing Test and Szondi. He is described as “mechanical, lifeless, dehumanized and formal [. . .] with an unlimited capability of using fellow men as inanimate objects for the attainment of his goals. [. . .] The subjective world in which E. lived was inhuman, biological at best, and fundamentally mechanical”.24 These descriptions are in accord with what psychoanalysis terms the schizoid personality, which Fairbairn wrote of as treating other people “as if they were lower

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animals”. Schizoids have, he said, the “tendency to treat other people as less persons with inherent value of their own [. . .] repression of affect and an attitude of detachment which leads others to regard them as remote – and, in more extreme cases, even as inhuman”.25 Harry Guntrip defined the schizoid personality as emotionally inaccessible, cut off. This state of emotional apathy, of not suffering any feeling, excitement or enthusiasm, not experiencing either affection or anger, can be very successfully masked. If feeling is repressed, it is often possible to build up a kind of mechanized, robot personality. The ego that operates consciously becomes more a system than a person, a trained and disciplined instrument for ‘doing the right thing’ without any real feeling entering in [. . .]. Duty rather than affection becomes the key word.26 Helene Deutsch defined the “as if” – personality as “a highly plastic readiness to pick up signals from the outer world and to mold oneself and one’s behavior accordingly. The identification with what other people are thinking and feeling is the expression of this passive plasticity and renders the person capable of the greatest fidelity and the basest perfidy”.27

Conclusion In the case of Europe’s Jews, these projections were syntonic with a theology of guilt and an historic tradition of successful coping with aggression by obsequiousness, accommodation, and subservience to authority. These patterns were an integral part of the pre-­Nazi, pre-­Israeli, European Jewish socialization process. We may see this pattern of orderly compliance with the norms of decent, dutiful, everyday society in the reaction of Rabbi Leo Baeck, head of the Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden. When on January  27, 1943, the Gestapo came to his home in Berlin to take him to a concentration camp, he asked for time to write postal cheques to pay his gas and electric bills. Only then he was ready to go to the Terezin concentration camp.28 The sins he needed to avoid were dishonesty, hubris, Aufdringlichkeit. Baeck was told in August 1943 by Grünberg, a Czech engineer, that Auschwitz, the so-­called resettlement camp in the East to which people were being sent, was in reality an extermination camp where inmates were gassed. Baeck decided to withhold the truth and keep silent: I went through a hard struggle debating whether it was my duty to convince Grünberg that he must repeat what he had heard before the Council of Elders, of which I was an honorary member. I finally decided that no one should know it. If the Coun-

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cil of Elders were informed the whole camp would know it within a few hours. Living in the expectation of death by gassing would only be the harder. And this death was not certain for all: there was selection for slave labor; perhaps not all transports went to Auschwitz. So I came to the grave decision to tell no one.29 We should acknowledge the insights of the late Viennese-­born psychoanalyst, Bruno Bettelheim, whose contribution to the discourse on the Final Solution was to develop the psychoanalytical point of the need to see and deal with reality, to cut through fantasy and illusion because they may be lethal, and to act in an appropriate and timely manner to preserve life. Bettelheim confronted, in the concrete historical situation, the most delicate experiential and existential province of the relationship of victims to their persecutors and to their own destruction. He argued that the very solid, stable, law-­abiding, bourgeois family-­oriented values of the Jewish victims, and their eager desire not to provoke further hostility by any act or gesture, made the destruction process of the Final Solution an easy one. Bettelheim’s most penetrating, and to some morally offensive, position comes into focus in his critique of the sentimentality and denial in the popularity of the Diary of Anne Frank, which has sold over 16 million copies.30 His point of view was ego psychological and adaptational. Bettelheim charged that the father of Anne Frank chose to go on with intimate family life as usual, including the teaching of academic subjects, instead of preparing escape routes and instructing his children in how to make a getaway. He pointed out that thousands of other Jews in Europe tried to escape to the free world, and that for those who could not the best chance to survive was the hard and painful choice to break up the family and hide out singly, each with a different Dutch family. Bettelheim went further – he suggested that the Franks, who were well-­connected, should have secured a gun and killed at least one or two of the “Green Police” who came for them. He postulated: “The loss of an SS with every Jew arrested would have noticeably hindered the functioning of the police state”. He bristled at the adolescent Anne Frank’s declaration of faith in the good of all men by which millions of readers were moved and wept. Bettelheim interpreted: What is denied is the importance of accepting the gas chambers as real so that never again will they exist. If all men are basically good, if going on with intimate family living no matter what else is what is to be most admired, then indeed we can all go on with life as usual and forget about Auschwitz. Except that Anne Frank died because her parents could not get themselves to believe in Auschwitz. And her story found wide acclaim because for us

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too, it denies implicitly that Auschwitz ever existed. If all men are good, there was never an Auschwitz.31 Bettelheim’s position was not, as Peter Blos is quoted in the New York Times as saying, that “he felt that to some degree the Jews provoked some of the actions of the Nazis”.32 His point was precisely the contrary – that the Jews’ very compliance and law-­abiding innocence was a denial of the extreme situation in which the conventional rules of morality and conduct did not hold. The Shoah was a radically new and historically unprecedented situation that demanded radical adaptation for survival. The latent psychodynamic meaning which Bettelheim derived from Freud’s postulate of the relationship of persecutor to victim, and which he applied to the destruction of the European Jews, was that every aggression and every violence requires at least an active and a passive actor. The clinical scenarios of family violence, alcoholism, gambling, and drug addiction are the psychodynamics of passive collusion and facilitation by “innocent” loved ones. Indeed the most difficult therapeutic task is to help the most innocent victims to gain insight into their own unwillingness or refusal to take appropriate protective measures. The very “goodness”, defenselessness, and lack of knowledge or awareness of the victim is an essential component of the atrocity. An indepth psychodynamic and historical understanding of these terrible events we have recounted as a social and psychological preparation for dehumanization and murder may show us how to identify, contain, and prevent such processes. For, while each historical situation is unique, the forces we have considered are not. As Albert Camus concluded in his great allegory of the Shoah: the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; [.  .  .] it can lie dormant for years in furniture and linen chests; [. . .] it bides its times in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; [. . .] perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.33

Notes 1 Saul Friedlander (Ed.), Probing the limits of representation: Nazism and the final solution. Cambridge, MA, 1992, 5. Friedlander has now successfully confronted this challenge in Nazi German and the Jews, vol. I: The years of persecution, 1993–­1939. New York, 1997. 2 Dominic LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: Reflections on the Historians’ Debate, in: ibid., 110. 3 “Vollbrachten die Nationalsozialisten, vollbrachte Hitler eine ‘asiatische’ Tat vielleicht nur deshalb, weil sie sich and ihresgleichen als potentielle oder wirkliche Opfer

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einer ‘asiatischen’ Tat betrachteten?”. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 6, 1986. “Ihre spezifische, dem Kapitalismus willkommene, Eigenart entwickelt sie umm so vollkommener, je mehr sie sich ‘entmenschlicht’, je vollkommener, heißt das hier, ihre spezifische Eigenschaft, welche ihr als Tugend nachgerühmt wird, die Ausschaltung von Liebe, Haß und allen rein persönlichen, überhaupt aller irrationalen, dem Kalkül sich entziehenden, Empfindungselementen aus der Erledigung der Amstgeschäfte gelingt.” Max Weber, Grundriß der Sozialökonomik, III. Abteilung: Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, Tübingen, 1925, 662. (Trans. and ed. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber, Essays in Sociology. New York, 1958, 215–­216. [Italics are mine]). Michael Berenbaum, New York Times Magazine, April  22, 1990, 48. “kennt nur innere Bestimmtheiten und Grenzen seiner selbst. Der Träger des Charisma ergreift die ihm angemessene Aufgabe und Gehorsam und Gefolgschaft kraft seiner Sendung.” Weber, Grundriß der Sozialökomik [fn. 4], 754; The sociology of charismatic authority, Gerth & Mills (Eds.), From Max Weber [fn. 4], 246.) “Der Führer selbst braucht niemand anderen zu lieben, er darf von Herrennatur sein, absolut narzißtisch, aber selbstsicher und selbstständig”. Sigmund Freud, Massenpsychologic und Ich-­Analyse [1921]. In Studienausgabe, vol. 9, Frankfurt/­Main 1974, 115 (Group psychology and analysis of the ego. Standard Edition, vol. 18, London 1955, 123 f.) “Es (wäre) zweckmäßiger, die Verliebtheit durch die Hypnose zu erläutern als umgekehrt.” Freud, Massenpsychologie, ibid., 107 (Group Psychology, ibid., 114.) Viele Gleiche, die sich miteinander identifizieren können, und ein einziger ihnen allen Überlegener, das ist die Situation, die wir in der lebensfähigen Masse verwirklich finden.” Freud, Massenpsycholgie, ibid., 113 (Group Psychology, ibid., 121 [translation is mine].) Heinz Kohut, Thoughts on Narcissism and Narcissistic rage. In Paul H. Ornstein (Ed.), The search for the self: Selected writings, 1950–­1978. New York, 1978, vol. 2, 637 f. Donald W. Winnicott, Playing: A  theoretical statement; Playing: Creative activity and the search for the self; Creativity and its origins; and the location of cultural experience, in: idem, Playing and Reality, London, 1971. See for example, “Symbole und Namen des Nationalstaats” and “Die Sedan Feier”. In Theodor Schieder, Das Deutsche Kaiserreich von 1871 als Nationalstaat, Köln, 1961, 72–­87, 125 f.; Andreas Kaiser, Denkmalsbesetzung: Preussen wird aufgelöst, Berlin, 1982. “Als dann die ersten klangvollen und warmen Worte fielen, lag tiefe Stille über dem Raum. Noch nie wieder im Leben hat uns ein Ereignis so tief gepackt, wie diese erste Führerrede. Und dann fielen die Worte, vernichtend und anklagend, lodernd und aufrüttlelnd, jeden, auch die Zweifelnden mit sich reißend. Eindringlich sprach er zu der Masse und doch wieder zu jedem Einzelnen und zog sie in seinen Bann. Fest gruben sich seine schicksalsschweren Worte in u[nsere] Herzen. Immer wieder zerriß die Begeisterung die Stille und pflanzte sich fort zu den Tausenden, die ausserhalb des Zeltes die Ubertragung hörten. Und dann war Schluß. Aufbrauste d[as] Horst-­W[essel] Lied. Wir sahen noch Blumen über Blumen, aber der Mann in der schlichten braunen Uniform und dem von unbeugsamen Willen geprägten Gesicht und den schmalen sprechenden Händen war nicht mahr (sic) da. Wie wir nach Hause kamen, wissen wir nicht. Den Abend konnten wir

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14 15 16

17

18

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lange nicht einschlafen, noch war das Erleben zu stark. Manches Gebet wird diesen Abend zum Himmel gestiegen sein, den Führer zu behüten”. Marlene Heder, Kleinenglis, Kr. Fritzlar, Cases No. 41 and 42, Abel File, Hoover Institution on war, revolution and peace, Archives, Stanford, CA. Joachim C. Fest, Hitler, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, New York, 1973, 342. Fred Weinstein, The dynamics of Nazism: Leadership, ideology, and the Holocaust. New York, 1980. For the first and still very credible integration of psychoanalytic object relations with the understanding of the needs of individuals for social stability, see Talcott Persons, Social Structure and Personality, Glencoe, Ill. 1964, including “The Superego and the Theory of Social Systems”; “The Father Symbol: An Appraisal in the Light of Psychoanalytic and Sociological Theory”; “Social Structure and the Development of Personality: Freud’s Contribution to the Integration of Psychology and Sociology”. “Das Gesetz der Gefühlsambivalenz, das heute noch unsere Gefülsbeziehungen zu den von uns geliebtesten Personen beherrscht.” Peter Loewenberg, Aggression im Ersten Weltkrieg: der “tiefste Teil” von Sigmund Freud Selbst-­Analyse. SOWI: Sozialwissenschaftliche Informationen, 3(2001), 53–­61; also: Aggression in World War I: The deepest part of Sigmund Freud’s self-­analysis. In Günther Baechler  & Andreas Wenger (Eds.), Conflict and cooperation: The individual between ideal and reality. Zürich, 2002, 81–­92. “War ihm ein solcher Tod doch auch recht, denn in jeder der geliebten Personen stak auch ein Stück Fremdheit.” Zeitgemäßes über Krieg und Tod [1915]. In Studienausgabe, vol. 9, 53 (Thoughts for the times on war and death, Standard Edition, vol. 14, 293). “der Tod oder die Todesgefahr eines unserer Lieben, eines Eltern – oder Gattenteils, eines Geschwisters, Kindes oder lieben Freundes. Diese Lieben sin uns einerseits ein innerer Besitz, Bestandteile unseres eigenen Ichs, anderseits aber auch teilweise Fremde, ja Feinde. Den zärtlichsten und innigsten unserer Liebesbeziehungen häng tmit Ausnahme ganz weniger Situationen ein Stückchen Feindseligkeit an, welches den unbewussten Todeswunsch anregen kann”. Freud, Zeitgemäßes, ibid., 58 (Thoughts, ibid., 398). Göring: Da finde ich es viel vernünftiger, dass man ihnen eigene Abteile gibt. Goebbels: Aber nicht wenn der Zug überfüllt ist. Göring: Einen Moment! Es gibt nur einen Jüdischen Wagen. Ist der besetzt, müssen die übrigen zu Hause bleiben. Goebbels: Aber nehmen wir an: es sind nicht so viele Juden da, die mit dem Fern-­D-­Zug nach München fahren, sagen wir: es sitzen zwei Juden im Zug, und die anderen Abteile sind überfüllt. Diese beiden Juden hätten nun ein Sonderabteil. Man muß deshalb sagen: die Juden haben erst dann Anspruch auf Platz, wenn alle Deutschen sitzen. Göring: Das würde ich gar nicht extra einzeln fassen, sondern ich würde den Juden einen Wagen

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25 26 27

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30 31 32 33

oder  ein Abteil geben. Und wenn es wirklich jemals so wäre, wie Sie sagen, daß der Zug sonst überfüllt ist, glauben Sie: das machen wir so, da brauche ich kein Gesetz. Da wird er herausgeschmissen, und wenn er allein auf dem Lokus sitzt während der ganzen Fahrt. Niederschrift von einem Teil der Besprechung über die Judenfrage unter Vorsitz von Feldmarschall Göring, im RLM (Reichsluftfahrtministerium) am 12. November 1938, 11 Uhr, in: Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, November 14, 1945–­October 1, 1946 (Nuremberg 1948), vol. 28, 499–­540 (hereinafter cited as Ministerbesprechung, 12 November 1938). The quotations are from pp.  508–­509. For an analysis of the conference in the context of the Reichskristallnacht, see Peter Loewenberg, The Kristallnacht as a Public Degradation Ritual. Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute 32 (1987), 309–­323. “Im übrigen muß ich noch einmal feststellen: Ich möchte kein Jude in Deutschland sein. [. . .] Im Augenblick ist er [der Jude] klein und häßlich und bleibt zu Hause.” Ministerbesprechung 12 November 1938, 538 f. Peter Loewenberg, The unsuccessful adolescence of Heinrich Himmler. In idem, Decoding the past: The psychohistorical approach. New York, 1983; Berkeley 1985; New Brunswick, 1995, 209–­239. I.S. Kulcsar, Shosanna Kulcsar, & Lipot Szondi, Adolf Eichmann and the third Reich. In Ralph Slovenko (Ed.), Crime, law and corrections. Springfield, IL, 17, 18, and 25. W. Ronald & D. Fairbairn, An object-­relations theory of personality. New York, 1954, 12, 15. Harry Guntrip, Schizoid phenomena, object-­relations and the self. New York, 1968, 37 f. Helene Deutsch, Some forms of emotional disturbance and their relationship to Schizophrenia [1942]. In idem, Neuroses and character types: Clinical psychoanalytic studies. New York, 1965, 265. Leonard Baker, Days of sorrow and pain: Leo Baeck and the Berlin Jews. New York, 1978, 280. Leo Baeck, A  people stands before its God. In Eric H. Boehm (ed.), We survived: Fourteen histories of the hidden and hunted of Nazi Germany. Santa Barbara, CA, 1966, 293. Robert S. Wistrich, To womanhood and death. Times Literary Supplement, April 13–­19, 1990, 393. Bruno Bettelheim, The informed heart: Autonomy in a massage. New York, 1971 [1960], 248f. New York Times, March 14, 1990, A15, col. 1. “Le bacille de la peste ne meurt ni ne dispararît jamais, qu’il peut rester pendant des dizaines d’années endormi dans les meubles et le linge, qu’il attend patiemment dans les chambres, les caves, les malles, les mouchoirs et les paperasses, et que, peut-­être, le jour viendrait ou, pour le malheur et l’enseignement des hommes, la peste reveillerait ses rats et les enverrait mourir dans une cité heureuse”. Albert Camus, La Peste, Paris, 1962 [1947], 1474 (The Plague, New York, 1972, 287).

3 A non-­Jewish view Vamik D. Volkan

Introduction In June  1988, an international meeting took place at the Sigmund Freud Center in Jerusalem to examine the persistent shadows of the Holocaust as experienced by those not directly affected by it, either as victims or perpetrators (Moses, 1993). The main focus of this meeting was to bring together Israeli Jewish, Diaspora Jewish, and German psychoanalysts to discuss this historical event. In the audience, there were psychoanalysts and other scholars not only from Israel and Germany but also from the United States, Holland, Sweden, Switzerland, Australia, and other countries, as well as Sephardi Jews from North Africa and the Middle East. As one of the keynote speakers, I began my speech by telling the audience that I was born to Turkish parents on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. In 1957 I came to the United States eight months after graduating from the University of Ankara Medical School in Turkey and settled there. During my speech I  referred to my Jewish friends, my Jewish analyst, and my Jewish patients who had awakened my awareness of the Holocaust in an emotional way. My theoretical focus was on complications of individual and societal mourning following the Holocaust. I also illustrated how the Nazi horrors have become universal symbols for any unspeakable situation and how these symbols even appear in the fantasies of patients who are not only without any direct experience with Nazism but are themselves not Jewish (Volkan, 1993). I recall that the evening after I gave my speech, in my hotel room, I felt honoured to have participated in the meeting, but also wondered why I had been chosen to be the only keynote speaker who was not Jewish

or German and who had come from a Muslim culture. I also questioned myself as to why during the day I found myself intently watching many Jewish persons in the audience whose faces were expressing pain and anger while we were listening to a German speaker who was explaining the history of the Holocaust in a particularly intellectualised fashion. Why did I identify with these people who were experiencing anguish? I believe that I have better answers to my questions now.

Nazis during my childhood Cyprus was a territory of the Ottoman Empire from 1571 until 1878 when it became a British protectorate under Ottoman suzerainty. It became a British colony in 1925. I was born eighty-­four years ago when Cyprus was a British colony. At that time there were about 350,000 people on the island. Two ethnic groups, Greeks and, in lesser numbers, Turks, lived in the same cities, towns, and some villages, while in other villages only Greeks or Turks lived. There were also small numbers of Armenians, Maronites, Phoenicians, and, of course, British on the island. When I  was a child my family lived in Turkish villages where my father taught in elementary schools, but mostly I grew up in an old Turkish section of the capital city, Nicosia. Our block was home to only one Greek family, and they lived next door to our house. I  never learnt to speak Greek, even though sometimes I tried to communicate with the daughter of our Greek neighbour. Since Cypriot Greeks had a different language and a different religion and their children went to different schools, I never had a Greek friend while growing up.

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During my childhood and when I  was a teenager, I do not recall knowing a single Jewish person, but I certainly knew about the Nazis early in my childhood, since World War II was taking place at that time. Many Cypriot Greeks and Cypriot Turks enlisted in the British military and fought the Axis Powers. I knew none of them, but I heard their stories, including news about their deaths in battle. I  was aware that something was changing in my environment. Sikhs in the British Indian Army, wearing their traditional headgear, roamed the streets of Nicosia, and I heard my parents speak about the Nazis. On 20 May  1941 Germans began an airborne invasion of another Mediterranean island, Crete, which they conquered in thirteen days. This event was the first mainly airborne invasion in military history. Cypriots believed that after conquering Crete the Germans would target Cyprus using the same military airborne operation. By then I  was nine years old. We already had an underground bunker in our garden. Periodically, sirens informing the public of the arrival of Italian or German airplanes would sound and my parents, my two sisters and I – I was the youngest one – would rush into this hole and wait for the all-­clear siren to inform us that the danger had passed. Sometimes this happened at night, waking us up, and we would hurry to “safety” in the bunker, taking blankets if the weather was cold. I remember listening for the sound of airplanes while in the bunker. One day, during recess at our elementary school for Turkish boys in Nicosia, my playmates and I  looked up and saw an Italian plane being pursued by a British Spitfire. The Italian plane was hit and exploded above us, and we saw the Italian pilot parachute down. Some older boys joined a group of adults as they went to the location where the plane had crashed. Some of these boys brought items collected from the airplane to the school, and one of them gave me a small piece of glass. I kept this piece of glass with me for decades. Much later in my life, after I became a psychoanalyst, I realized that this item was a kind of “linking object” (Volkan, 1981) connecting me to an exciting but fearful day in my life. It was as if by having ownership of this piece of glass I could master my bewilderment and anxiety. As a child, I  did not have a name for my anxiety. However, I  recall how this unpleasant feeling became my companion after my father brought a particular book to the house and locked it in a big wooden box where he kept other books. My sisters told me that the new book was a German dictionary, and it was my father’s plan that when the Nazis came to the island he would talk with them in German and ask them not to hurt his children. My sisters also told me that my father had done something forbidden when he bought the German book. Today, I suspect that buying a German dictionary might not have been a criminal act, but at that time I believed that my father had done something illegal to

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protect us. This circumstance confirmed for me that the Nazi invasion surely would take place. In another incident, a man appeared in our neighbourhood one day informing people that there might not be enough wheat to bake good bread, and it was his duty to teach people to make bread with other ingredients. He gave us a sample piece of black-­looking bread. I took a bite, and the eating of it was like internalising an actual dangerous future. Since it was expected that the Nazis would bomb British bases in or near Nicosia, my father sent my mother, my sisters, and me to a village, Kambili (now called Hisarköy), for safety. We had relatives in this village, which is about twenty miles from Nicosia. We lived there in a village house for, I think, about eight or nine months. We had no radio or telephone. My father, who was teaching in Nicosia, would join us most weekends. Sure enough, small German war planes began to fly very low over Kambili and bomb places near Nicosia. I recall standing on a hill and seeing Nazi pilots waving at me as they passed over the village, although today I do not know if my memory of their waving to me is correct or a fantasy. We would wait until the weekend for an old bus to arrive from Nicosia and only then find out that my father was still alive when he emerged from the bus. Psychoanalytic colleagues can imagine how these experiences affected my oedipal issues. In the end, the Germans did not conquer Cyprus. I  must emphasise here that while the Nazis affected my life as a child, I  had no understanding of what was happening to the Jewish people. Most likely I heard stories and, when I was older, read news about the Jews but, right now, I do not recall any special occasion that caused me to focus emotionally on the tragedies caused by the Third Reich.

Jewish people in Turkey After finishing high school in Nicosia in 1950, I  went to Ankara for my medical education. During the last decade or so there have been serious attempts by the ruling political party to change the Turkish identity and make it a religious one, but in those post-­war days, Turkey was different. People in Ankara in the 1950s were excited about modernisation processes that had started with Kemal Atatürk’s revolution (Volkan  & Itzkowitz, 1984). Almost half of my medical school classmates were women, and not one of them ever thought of covering her head; no one was preoccupied with religion. There were also professors at my medical school who were Jewish and who had earlier escaped Nazism and settled in Turkey. On 17 September  1933, Albert Einstein, who then was living in France, had written to the Turkish government with a request that it might “allow forty professors and doctors from Germany to continue their scientific and medical work in Turkey. The

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above mentioned cannot practice further in Germany on account of the laws governing there now” (Volkan, 2011). We now know that the ten-­year-­old, very poor Turkish Republic had allowed some German-­Jewish scholars to come to Turkey to escape danger even before Einstein’s request (Günergün, 2006; Reisman, 2006). These were the first Jewish people I got to know, at least from a distance. My mother’s youngest brother was the chairperson of the Department of Ophthalmology, and one of his assistants who used to give us lectures was a Turkish Jew. Most likely he belonged to a family whose ancestors had fled the Spanish Inquisition and come to the Ottoman Empire more than 500  years earlier. I  do not recall his name now, but I remember he spoke Turkish with an accent. Since I had come from Cyprus I also spoke Turkish with an accent. I  recall liking him and in a sense identifying with him. By then, especially by going to see movies about World War II, I had considerable knowledge about the Holocaust. But still, I did not have deep emotional reactions to what I was learning. I would feel the emotional impact of the Holocaust after my arrival in the United States.

Linking Racism and Nazism to my “Survival Guilt” Elsewhere, I wrote about my childhood and also about the bloody conflict between the Cypriot Greeks and the Cypriot Turks after I  came to the United States (Volkan, 1979, 2013). Some authors referring to my writings thought that Cypriot Turks had racist ideas about Cypriot Greeks and vice versa. This is not correct. My family members and Turkish Cypriots I  knew when I was growing up perceived the Greeks and other ethnic groups on the island as human beings like themselves. When Cypriot Greeks and Turks began fighting in the early 1960s after the British rule ended and the Republic of Cyprus was established, empathy for the Other’s suffering was lost for some time, but still there was no racism (Volkan & Itzkowitz, 1994). I would learn what racism was when I came to the United States. I had my residency training in psychiatry at the Memorial Hospital at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill from 1958 to 1961. My main mentor was a Jewish professor who was not directly affected by the Holocaust, and I  do not recall talking with him about Jewish history. The first big emotional impact the Nazis’ treatment of the Jewish people had on me occurred when I was treating a young man in the inpatient unit. He was complaining of marital problems and exhibiting depression. He would cry during his sessions with me. I could see him crying intensely, but I would not hear him. It was very peculiar to observe someone crying so hard in silence. Slowly I  learnt that his family had hidden in the attic of a house belonging to a Christian

family at a location in Europe occupied by the Nazis. As an infant he had to sleep in a drawer of an old chest. One day, Nazi soldiers came to the house looking for hidden Jewish people. When the baby started to cry, his father put his hand over the infant’s mouth afraid that the Nazi soldiers would hear his son’s crying. Of course, my patient as an adult did not remember this incident, but while he was growing up the family would refer to it again and again. I sensed that the father had experienced a great deal of guilt and shame for silencing his baby for the sake of saving himself and his wife. Working with this young man connected me emotionally to the history of the Holocaust. Later in my career I would treat another patient, Jacob, who as an infant also lived in hiding in Belgium for seventeen months. In talking about that period, he would report memories as if he had been an adult at the time. He would say, for example, “My mother salvaged strings of spinach from garbage and made soup.” He exhibited helpless regression to the primary identification with the depressed mother (Volkan, 1993). My salary as a psychiatry resident was very small. In order to earn a few more dollars to survive in a new country, after I finished my residency, I agreed to work for two years in a state hospital for mentally disturbed individuals in North Carolina. I  was sent to Cherry Hospital in Goldsboro as a new staff member. The year was 1961, and Cherry Hospital was designated for only African-­American patients. Similar to not knowing any Jewish people as a child, I had met only two black persons while growing up in Cyprus. There was a black man whom I  would see infrequently here and there, and there was a black Cypriot Turkish woman who was one of my sister’s friends. She was an elementary school teacher like my sisters were. I had no idea why her skin colour was different. In 1961 at Cherry Hospital I  was reading “scientific” papers telling me directly and indirectly how black persons’ brains were not as advanced as those of white people. All physicians at Cherry Hospital, like me, were new immigrants to the United States. We would each take our turn administering electric shock treatments to the patients. I still remember the day I was helping a physician from Eastern Europe when it was his turn to use the electric shock machine. This physician and his family had escaped communism and the Soviets, and because of this, I think he was an angry man. He showed enthusiasm for performing shock “treatments.” I  recall seeing perhaps more than 100 black patients lined up, two by two, waiting helplessly for their turn to lie down and be “electrocuted” by this white man. What I saw reminded me of scenes from movies showing lines of concentration camp victims. I  felt guilty for my “treating” the black patients the same way on other occasions. I  particularly remember four African-­ American high school kids who had been sent to Cherry Hospital diagnosed as having schizophrenia. They were

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some of the first students sent to a white school after desegregation became a law in North Carolina; they were simply bewildered kids (Volkan, 1963, 2009). In 1963, I  moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, and began my tenure as a faculty member of the Medical School of the University of Virginia for thirty-­nine years until my retirement and becoming an emeritus professor. I started my personal psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic training soon after I became a faculty member at the University of Virginia. For some years I drove from Charlottesville to Washington, DC, a few times every week for analysis. My analyst was a classical psychoanalyst and Jewish. At that time, psychoanalysts – outside of a few exceptions – were discouraged from pursuing political and diplomatic processes in their daily clinical practices and thus also traumas linked to such processes. Freud had set this tendency in motion early in his career when he put less emphasis on the sexual seduction of children as experienced in the external world in favour of the stimuli that come from the child’s own wishes and fantasies for formation of psychopathology (Freud, 1905). Later, a major dispute evolved between Freud and Sándor Ferenczi about the influence of actual trauma and actual sexual abuse on individuals’ internal worlds (Rachman, 1997; Falzeder  & Brabant, 2000; Paláez, 2009). In spite of this dispute, classical psychoanalysts continued to follow Freud’s path and placed less emphasis on the impact that actual seduction coming from the external world had on the developing child’s psyche, and this was generalized to include a de-­emphasis on the psychic impact of external real events. In 1933 Freud provided another example to avoid the external world, this time a political one dealing with major societal danger. In that year Albert Einstein wrote a letter to him asking the following questions: “Is there any way of delivering mankind from the menace of war?” “How is it possible for [a small group with political power hunger] to bend the will of the majority, who stand to lose and suffer by a state of war, to the service of their ambitions?” and “Is it possible to control man’s mental evolution so as to make him proof against the psychoses of hate and destructiveness?” (Freud, 1933, pp. 199–­201). In his response to Einstein, Freud expressed little hope for an end to war and violence or the role of psychoanalysis in changing human behaviour beyond the individual level. My roommate during my last years in the medical school in Ankara was another Cypriot Turk who, like my younger brother, was murdered by a Cypriot Greek terrorist after I  had moved to the United States. In August  1960 Cyprus won its independence from the British. At the time of my analysis Cypriot Turks, including my family members, were forced to move to enclaves (from 1963 to 1974) occupying only three percent of the island in inhuman conditions. Such “external” events were not brought into my analysis. I still recall a day on

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my analyst’s couch when I  thought that my analyst’s “silence” might be due to his feelings about the Holocaust, although to this day I  do not know if he or his family members were directly involved with Nazism. Later I would read several Jewish analysts’ examination of how tragic historical events, especially the Holocaust, are avoided in the clinical setting because they induce anxiety (Moses, 1984; Blum, 1985; Loewenberg, 1991; Brenner, 2002; Rangell, 2003). Decades after I  finished my analysis, I  realized how I handled my “survival guilt” (Niederland, 1968) due to my living in safety in the United States while my family and friends suffered in Cyprus and my roommate was murdered. Emotionally I became a “peace-­seeking” person and a “protector” of people exposed to racism and humiliation. When I  became the medical director of one of the University of Virginia hospitals, I hired an African-­American woman as my assistant medical director (she was extremely dedicated and effective). I developed a habit of taking her to lunch often and seeking out a special place at a downtown restaurant where people outside could see a black woman and white man sitting together. Meanwhile I  chose William Niederland, who had coined the term “survivor syndrome,” as my long-­ distance mentor and communicated with him often. He even came to visit with me in Charlottesville. I was preoccupied with the effects of the Holocaust on its survivors. Only much later I would recognize that my feelings for African Americans and Jewish peoples’ suffering were connected with my helplessness over what was happening to my family and my inability to mourn the loss of my roommate. Even after I realized this, during the last twenty years or so, I could not speak freely about what had happened to my people in Cyprus at meetings where societal traumas and especially the Holocaust were being discussed. Historically speaking, my peoples’ suffering during the eleven years they lived as if they were prisoners cannot compare with the Holocaust. This prevented me from telling my story. However, individual suffering and individual “survival guilt” are personalized issues. My having deep emotional feelings about the Holocaust is mainly due to my associating my family members and friends living in an enclave for eleven years because they had a different ethnic identity from those who forced them to experience such a miserable “imprisonment.” Obviously, my feelings were also connected with my childhood experiences with the image of Nazis who were expected to conquer Cyprus and, in a sense, put me and my loved ones in “prison.”

My involvement in international affairs On 19 November  1977 the then president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, went to Israel and at the Knesset declared

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that seventy percent of the problems between Arabs and Israelis could be ascribed to a psychological wall between the opposing parties. This event led me to develop a new career. At that time, I was a member of the American Psychiatric Association’s Committee on Psychiatry and Foreign Affairs. After Sadat’s speech at the Knesset this Committee was given the task to evaluate whether or not Sadat was correct. The committee started to bring together influential Israelis with influential Egyptians and, after the first three years when I became the chairperson of the committee, influential Palestinians as well. This process, which took place prior to the Oslo Accords, lasted for six years. Following this experience, I opened the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. With my interdisciplinary team from this center, I began to work in many conflicted or traumatized areas of the world. This work also included bringing “enemy” representatives, such as Soviets and Americans, Estonians and Russians, Croats and Serbians, Georgians and South Ossetians, and Turks and Greeks, together for unofficial diplomatic dialogues (Volkan, 1988, 1997, 2004, 2006, 2013). I chose a Greek-­American psychiatrist as my assistant director during these activities. He remains one of my best friends. The organizers of the 1988 meeting at the Freud Center in Jerusalem were familiar with my investment in the Israeli-­Egyptian-­Palestinian dialogues and my other work in the international arena. This is why I  was chosen to be the keynote speaker at their gathering.

PAKH During the 1988 meeting in Jerusalem, a Jewish-­German psychologist approached me and asked if I  could help her and her colleagues end the “silence” about the Holocaust within therapeutic settings and within the German society. She also wanted guidance for an investigation into the psychology of the transgenerational consequences of the Holocaust for the children of the survivors as well as the perpetrators. I learnt in July 1995 of an organization called Psychotherapeutischer Arbeitskreis für Betroffene des Holocaust, PAKH e.V. (Psychotherapeutic study group of persons affected by the Holocaust) that was founded in Germany. Most of PAKH’s founders, ten individuals, were psychoanalytic psychotherapists. Four of them were Jewish-­Germans. Besides finding ways to talk about Holocaust-­related issues while conducting psychotherapy, PAKH’s purpose was to work, through Aufklärung (enlightenment), to acknowledge the persecution and genocide that occurred under National Socialism – previously neglected topics – and to utilise psychoanalytic understanding of human nature to prevent xenophobia and anti-­Semitism in Germany. PAKH associated itself with the Institute of Psychosomatic and

Psychotherapy at the University of Cologne. In 2007, its name was changed to Arbeitskreis für intergenerationelle Folgen des Holocaust, ehem. PAKH e.V. (Study group for intergenerational consequences of the Holocaust). Since they believed that the impact of World War II and the Holocaust on the offspring of survivors and perpetrators had not been properly examined in Germany by psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, the founders of PAKH planned to have an international symposium to deal with the “silence.” They faced many difficulties, the major one being the relationships amongst themselves. Starting in February 1997, I met with this group on four occasions (several full days each time). I describe my meetings with them in detail elsewhere (Volkan, Ast,  & Greer, 2002), but, in summary, the members of the PAKH core group were people with similar interests, not enemies. However, their German and Jewish parents, grandparents, and relatives had lived under completely different circumstances. They had been enemies, victims, and perpetrators, and the next generation had carried forward this ill-­starred heritage on both conscious and unconscious levels. Although half a century had passed since the Nazi period, they carried within themselves the inexpressible trauma of the war and of annihilation. After Germans and Jewish-­German founders of PAKH had worked through their major obstacles to the joint project, PAKH’s international symposium took place in Düsseldorf in August  1998. It was named Das Ende der Sprachlosigkeit? (End of speechlessness?) (Opher-­ Cohn, Pfäfflin, Sonntag, Klose,  & Pogany-­Wnendt, 2000). I have kept in contact with PAKH members over many years and joined them again during the tenth anniversary of the establishment of their organisation. I  am aware of their expanding vision and influence, including their work with scholars in South Africa who are finding ways to tame the impact of Apartheid (Gobodo-­Madikizela & Van der Merwe, 2009). My work with the members of PAKH and my many lectures in Germany resulted in some German analysts asking me for supervision or consultation about their clinical work, especially when they worked with the descendants of rather well-­known Nazi figures. This kept my preoccupation with the Nazism-­related issues part of my life active. I  co-­authored a book about the Third Reich in the unconscious (Volkan et  al., 2002) and published a book describing the total analysis of the grandson of a senior Nazi (Volkan, 2015).

The Holocaust is not a “chosen trauma” I was very pleased when I  was chosen as an Inaugural Yitzhak Rabin Fellow at the Rabin Center for Israeli Studies in Tel Aviv in 2000–­01. I  was also surprised to receive this honor. My wife and I lived in Israel for four

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months. I  learnt how much some important Israelis knew about my years of work on Jewish-­related issues. My most pleasant memory of this time is spending a day with Mr. Rabin’s sister at her home at the Israel-­Lebanon border and learning about her late brother. However, my focus as an Inaugural Rabin Fellow was understanding the societal fragmentation in Israel and its role in the continuation of the Israel-­Palestine issues (Volkan, 2013). During my decades-­long work with international affairs, I came up with the concepts of “chosen glory” and “chosen trauma” (Volkan, 1988, 2004, 2006, 2013). Ethnic, national, religious, and ideological large groups often have ritualistic recollections of events and heroes whose mental representations include a shared feeling of success and triumph amongst its members. Such events and the persons appearing in them become heavily mythologised over many decades or centuries. These mental representations become large-­group markers called chosen glories. In stressful situations or times of war, leaders reactivate the mental representations of chosen glories and heroes associated with them in order to bolster large-­group identity. While no complicated psychological processes are involved when chosen glories increase collective self-­esteem, the role of a related concept, chosen traumas, in supporting large-­group identity and its cohesiveness, is more complex. A chosen trauma is the shared mental representation of an event in a large group’s history in which the group suffered a catastrophic loss, humiliation, and helplessness at the hands of enemies. When members of a victim group are unable to mourn such losses and the threat of injury to large-­group identity continues for a while, they pass on to their offspring the images of their injured selves and psychological tasks that need to be completed. All such images and tasks that are handed down contain references to the same historical event, and as many decades pass, the mental representation of this event links all the individuals in the large group. Thus, the event’s mental representation emerges as a significant large-­group identity marker. Political leaders may initiate the reactivation of a chosen trauma in order to fuel entitlement ideologies. I  documented in detail how after the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, when Serbs were attempting to consolidate their “new” identity, Slobodan Milošević and those who assisted him drastically reactivated a Serbian chosen trauma, the shared mental representation of the Battle of Kosovo that had taken place in 1389 between the Ottomans and the Serbs (Volkan, 1996). This led to atrocities against Muslim Bosniaks and Kosovar Albanians when the Serbs linked the image of these people with the image of the Muslim Ottomans in the reactivated chosen trauma. Some diplomats and academicians whom I  knew have hinted or even believed that Israel was using the

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shared image of the Holocaust as a re-­activated chosen trauma and their doing so has been the main psychological obstacle for peace with the Palestinians. I  want to state that this is not true. First of all, the Holocaust has not evolved as a chosen trauma as I have described it. While living in Israel I  spoke with and interviewed hundreds of Israeli Jews and never noticed any of them using the shared mental representation of the Holocaust as a political or military tool. This does not mean that the Holocaust is forgotten; it is still being mourned and certainly has had psychological effects on Israeli society. During the American Psychiatric Association–­sponsored dialogues between Israelis, Egyptians and Palestinians, Alouph Hareven, a participant in the dialogues who had been in Israeli military intelligence and an official in the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, theorized that the Holocaust had made the Israelis extremely vulnerable in respect to issues of security and intolerant of ambiguity (Volkan, 2013).

Last words As I  stated earlier, the Nazi horrors have become universal symbols for any unspeakable situation, even for persons like myself who are not Jewish and who have not been directly affected by the Holocaust. Many years ago, I was taken to Yad Vashem for the first time by an Israeli friend. After we finished going through this Holocaust remembrance center, my Israeli friend asked me, “What do you think?” I  recall feeling like hitting him because, for a minute, I  thought that he had insulted me. He should not have asked me such a question; he should have known what I was thinking and feeling.

References Blum, H. P. (1985). Superego formation, adolescent transformation and the adult neurosis. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 4, 887–­909. Brenner, I. (2002). Foreword. In V. D. Volkan, G. Ast,  & W. Greer (Eds.), The third Reich in the unconscious: Transgenerational transmission and its consequences (pp. xi–­xvii). New York: Brunner-­Routledge. Falzeder, E., & Brabant, E. (2000). The correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, Vol. 3, 1920–­1933. Trans. P. Hoffer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Freud, S. (1933). Why war? Standard Edition, 22, 197–­215. London: Hogarth Press. Freud, S. (1905). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. S. E., 7 (pp. 123–­243). London: Hogarth. Gobodo-­Madikizela, P. G., & Van der Merwe, C. (2009). Memory, narrative and forgiveness: Perspectives on the unfinished journeys of the past. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars. Günergün, F. (2006). İkinci Dὕnya Savaṣı ve Tὕrkiye (Second World War and Turkey). Cumhuriyet Gazetesi, Science and Technology Supplement, 3 November.

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Loewenberg, P. (1991). Uses of anxiety. Partisan Review, 3, 514–­525. Moses, R. (1984). An Israeli psychologist looks back in 1983. In S. A. Luel & P. Marcus (Eds.), Psychoanalytic reflections on the Holocaust: Selected essays (pp.  52–­70). New York: Ktav Publishing House. Moses, R. (Ed.) (1993). Persistent shadows of the Holocaust: The meaning to those not directly affected. Madison, CT: International Universities Press. Niederland, W. G. (1968). Clinical observations on the “survivor syndrome.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 49, 313–­315. Opher-­Cohn, L., Pfäfflin, J., Sonntag, J. B., Klose, B., & Pogany-­ Wnendt, P. (Eds.) (2000). Das Ende der Sprachlosigkeit? Auswirkungen traumatischer Holocausterfahrungen über mehrere Generationen (End of speechlessness? The effects of experiencing the Holocaust over several generations). Gießen: Psychosozial Verlag. Paláez, M. G. (2009). Trauma theory in Sándor Ferenczi’s writings, 1931–­1932. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 90, 1217–­1233. Rachman, A. W. (1997). The suppression and censorship of Ferenczi’s “Confusion of Tongues” paper. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 17, 459–­485. Rangell, L. (2003). Affects: In an individual and a nation. First Annual Volkan Lecture, 15 November, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA. Reisman, A. (2006). Turkey’s modernization: Refugees from Nazism and Atatürk’s vision. Washington, DC: New Academia Publishers. Volkan, V. D. (1963). Five poems by Negro youngsters who faced a sudden desegregation. Psychiatric Quarterly, 37, 607–­617. Volkan, V. D. (1979). Cyprus – war and adaptation: A psychoanalytic history of two ethnic groups in conflict. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. Volkan, V. D. (1981). Linking objects and linking phenomena: A study of the forms, symptoms, metapsychology and therapy of complicated mourning. New York: International Universities Press.

Volkan, V. D. (1988). The need to have enemies and allies: From clinical practice to international relationships. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Volkan, V. D. (1993). What the Holocaust means to a non-­ Jewish psychoanalyst. In R. Moses (Ed.), Persistent shadows of the Holocaust: The meaning to those not directly affected (pp. 81–­117). Madison, CT: International Universities Press. Volkan, V. D. (1996). Bosnia-­Herzegovina: Ancient fuel of a modern inferno. Mind and Human Interaction, 7, 110–­127. Volkan, V. D. (1997). Bloodlines: From ethnic pride to ethnic terrorism. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Volkan, V. D. (2004). Blind trust: Large groups and their leaders in times of crises and terror. Charlottesville, VA: Pitchstone. Volkan, V. D. (2006). Killing in the name of identity: A study of bloody conflicts. Charlottesville, VA: Pitchstone. Volkan, V. D. (2009). The next chapter: Consequences of societal trauma. In P. Gobodo-­Madikizela  & C. van der Merve (Eds.), Memory, narrative and forgiveness: Perspectives of the unfinished journeys of the past (pp. 1–­26). Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Volkan, V. D. (2011). Psychoanalysis, Turkey, and the IPA. In P. Loewenberg & N. L. Thomson (Eds.), 100 years of the IPA (pp. 419–­434). London: Karnac Books. Volkan, V. D. (2013). Enemies on the couch: A psychopolitical journey through war and peace. Durham, NC: Pitchstone. Volkan, V. D. (2015). A Nazi legacy: A study of depositing, transgenerational transmission, dissociation and remembering through action. London: Karnac Books. Volkan, V. D., Ast, G., & Greer, W. F. (2002). The third Reich in the unconscious: Transgenerational transmission and its consequences. New York: Brunner-­Routledge. Volkan, V. D.,  & Itzkowitz, N. (1984). The immortal Atatürk: A psychobiography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Volkan, V. D., & Itzkowitz, N. (1994). Turks and Greeks: Neighbors in conflict. Cambridgeshire, England: Eothen Press.

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4 Bearing witness Dori Laub

Introduction When reading literature dealing with genocidal events, a set of recurring questions comes to mind: What position does a psychoanalyst take? What can psychoanalysis contribute to a better understanding of the event and of the experience of genocide? By and large, such literature conveys a sense of immediacy, of being closely in touch with the experience, even though it may have occurred decades ago. At the same time, there is often an attempt to make sense, to comprehend, and to explain. Balancing these two dialectical poles can prove difficult. Sometimes, it is as if the available theoretical tools built no bridge between the observed and its interpretation and understanding. While this does not come as a surprise to the psychoanalyst, other disciplines in the social sciences that study genocide do not consistently consider the human mind – on an individual or collective level – as an intervening variable. Neither do they utilise psychological processes or data derived from clinical work in their theory building. The explanatory power of such theories is limited at best. I have therefore come to see my role as a psychoanalyst as twofold: first, to attempt to bridge the gap between immersion in raw field data and the intellectual effort at formulating, comprehending, and making sense of it; and, second, to do so employing time-­honoured concepts familiar from clinical work, such as the unconscious, projections, identifications, repression, denial, rationalisation, and the return of the repressed. What cannot be emphasised enough is that the collaborative work of analysts and scholars of other disciplines, and historians in particular, is a two-­way

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street. A real world exists out there, and analysts cannot help their patients, especially where traumatic experience is involved, if they limit themselves to acknowledging intrapsychic reality. In fact, historical reality and psychic reality can both be infinitely refined, nuanced, and rendered truly authentic when informed by their mutual interdependence.

The women from the Rosenstrasse Let me illustrate this with a vignette from my private practise as a psychoanalyst. A  patient came into treatment stating, “I  will never have a family.” He was the son of an Auschwitz survivor and a mother who was a “mishling” (that is, whose mother was German and whose father was a Jew). There was a story in the family that at some point (they were living in Berlin), the Gestapo came and arrested the Jewish grandfather. The grandmother, who was of the Prussian nobility, went to the Gestapo office, knocked with her fist on the desk, and said to the German officer, “I am a better German than you are. Free my husband right away!” And, lo and behold, the Gestapo officer got frightened, and started clicking his ballpoint pen. (There were no ballpoint pens in 1942–­43, I thought to myself, reflecting my scepticism when listening to him.) Finally, the officer said, “Take him, take him, and go!” When I heard this story in 1989, I knew of nothing in the history books to suggest that such an event was possible, and so I treated it as a family myth, telling my patient, “Why don’t you look it up in the historical texts of Hillberg or Davidowitz, and if you find something like that, we can talk about it.” And so we worked for a number of years with a family myth

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about this powerful image of the Aryan grandmother who was rescuing and protecting. Then, in 1992 when I was attending a family bar mitzvah, a history professor from Long Island College happened to mention an article on the German resistance in that September’s Atlantic Monthly. I asked him to send me a copy. And there it was. The three known incidents of German communal resistance. One was a movement against euthanasia led by Bishop Von Galen, another a town that defied a Nazi order against wearing the cross. The third was an action taken in Berlin in March of 1943 by 2,000 Gentile women whose husbands and children were arrested to be taken to Auschwitz as a final step in making Berlin “Judenrein” (cleansed of Jews) – a present for the Fuehrer’s birthday. The round-­up began on February 27, 1943. Ten thousand Jews in Berlin, working in the ammunition factories, were arrested. Eight thousand were sent to camps, primarily Auschwitz. Two thousand – mostly husbands of German wives, but also children of mixed marriages – were interned in the former social welfare centre of the Berlin Jewish community on Rosenstrasse 2–­4. The Gentile relatives of the detainees demonstrated day after day, chanting “Give us our husbands back.” When machine guns were trained on them, they dispersed. Within ten to fifteen minutes, however, they all came back. They came back and came back, day after day, until every single one of the 2,000 men was freed, including twenty-­five who had already been sent to Auschwitz. The release of the prisoners began on March 6, 1943. I realised that my patient’s story might also have a historical dimension. When I  pursued the matter, I found out how little had been known or published on the Rosenstrasse demonstrations until the late 1980s and 1990s, when there appeared two brief film clips on German television, a book by Gemot Jochhein, Frauen Proteste in der Rosenstrasse (1993), and, finally, Nathan Stolzfus’s book The Resistance of the Heart, published in 1996. Even the official city guide, Droste’s Berlin-­Chronik (1995), which accurately chronicled what had happened in Berlin during every week of World War II, including March  1943, contained not a single word about the women’s demonstrations in the Rosenstrasse. This gap in the historical record alerted me to the ubiquitous phenomenon of public oblivion and private amnesia that has proven again and again to be an integral ingredient of genocidal events. In such cases, my patient and others like him are often the only bearers of suppressed or overlooked historical information. As long as I had no clue to the historical event, I could only interpret my patient’s story about his grandmother as a family legend. Once I found out about the Rosenstrasse communal resistance, it began to look much more like a historical possibility (Stolzfus, 1992). This is not to say that I thought my patient was talking about the fact of his grandmother being one of the women in

the Rosenstrasse. Rather, with this historical context in mind, knowing that there was such an act of communal resistance, I could better listen to my patient both as an analyst and a historical witness. Being both also enabled me to hear the informational silence I had encountered and fallen victim to.

The place of psychoanalysis in listening to history: creating a vocabulary for verbal, cognitive, and affective blind spots and silences Psychoanalysis’s greatest contribution to the study of trauma may be its focus on what is not conveyed through manifest content. Historians who report on genocide mention the events, the numbers, the locales, and sometimes how the atrocities were perpetrated. Though they may proceed to note an enormous psychological traumatic effect, they generally fall silent at this point, seemingly unable to say more about it. The historians’ silence at this moment emphasises the unspeakable, an aspect of history as trauma that defies narrative and description through ordinary human vocabulary. It takes a Roméo Dallaire – the Canadian commanding officer of the UN troops in Rwanda in 1994 who asked for and was denied permission to intervene in the slaughter, and who, two years after his return home, suffered full-­blown PTSD (which he attempted to drown in alcohol) – finally to bear witness to the psychological effects of the Rwandan Genocide. In the twentieth century, historians indeed found themselves facing a situation without precedent. Walter Benjamin (1968), in his essay “The Storyteller” describes the resulting demise of both storytelling and the sharing of experience: With the [First] World War a process began to become apparent which has not halted since then. Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent – not richer, but poorer in communicable experience? What ten years later was poured out in the flood of war books was anything but experience that goes from mouth to mouth. And there was nothing remarkable about that. For never has experience been contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation that had gone to school on a horse-­drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but

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the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body. (84) This crisis intensified when it came to genocides, in particular the Holocaust. Historians found themselves facing events that could not be articulated in customary categories and that rendered them speechless. (Indeed, the term “genocide” did not exist until it was coined by Lemkin [1944].) Traditional narratives about political processes and military operations simply would not suffice. Documents cover a mere fraction of what happened. Neither do traditional historiographic approaches account for the continuance of the past into the present, of its impact on present and future events. Making matters worse, there has emerged a historiographic approach that literally breaks with the past and, what is more striking, totally discounts its impact. As historian Carl E. Schorske (1981) from the University of California, Berkley, quite succinctly puts it: In the last one hundred years [.  .  .], modern has come to distinguish our perception of our lives and times from all that has gone before, from history as a whole, as such. Modern architecture, modern music, modern philosophy, modern science – all these define themselves not out of the past, indeed scarcely against the past, but in independence of the past. The modem mind has been growing indifferent to history because history, conceived as a continuous nourishing tradition, has become useless to it. This development is, of course, of serious concern to the historian, for the premises of his professional existence are at stake in it. But an understanding of the death of history must also engage the attention of the psychoanalyst. (xvii) To admit to one’s speechlessness is experienced by scholars and scientists as a surrender to mystification and sacralisation – hence, as tantamount to a self-­ betrayal, or rather a betrayal of the self-­ideal. Acknowledging the presence of the irrational, of the unconscious, and the role it plays in the rational mind calls for the involvement of the psychoanalyst. Equipped with the psychoanalytic approach, one can understand these phenomena of speechlessness and non-­comprehension amongst historians as “countertransference” – that is, as their own vicarious traumatisation through partaking of the genocide by being its witness. The speechlessness constitutes the ultimate step in an unconscious empathic identification with the victim or witness, for whom the atrocities make no sense whatsoever and cannot even be experienced as real. It is thus, paradoxically,

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that historians register and begin to know historical trauma in its utmost authenticity. Explanatory theories attempting to deal with this sense of bewilderment blend common sense with the insights of a particular discipline. Hence, it might be held that people became murderers strictly for financial or personal gain or because of group pressure and obedience. Other explanations might rely on concepts like changes in the power structure, the preaching of particular religious beliefs, commonly held utopian myths, or the need to stabilise military conquests. Yet such theories have postulated no intervening variable even remotely related to the way the human mind functions on an individual and societal level between the motive and the actual committal of an act. A telling example of the limits of such a disciplinary explanatory theory can be found in Peter Novick’s (1999) work on Holocaust remembrance. Noting how “The evolution of Holocaust memory in the United States has been, in the main, the result of a series of choices made by American Jewry about how to deal with that memory – in practice, usually choices made by Jewish leaders[,]” he states that through the mid-­1960s, Jewish communal leaders downplayed the Holocaust, believing, for various reasons, that to center it wasn’t in the best interests of American Jewry. [. . .] Over the last quarter century, American Jewish leadership, in response to a perception that needs had changed, has chosen to center the Holocaust – to combat what they saw as a “new anti-­Semitism”; in support of an embattled Israel; as the basis of revived ethnic consciousness. (279, 280) What is missing in all the theories enumerated here is the recognition that this falling silent is a testimony to the process of traumatisation that robs its partakers, victims, and perhaps even perpetrators of the ability to register, know, transmit, and remember it. Events of mass genocidal killing could only happen if their actors – perpetrators in particular, but to some extent also bystanders and even victims – took no notice of what was taking place, did not give themselves a full account of the real. A suggestive example of this phenomenon can be found in Gerald E. Markle’s 1999 study of reports of the Holocaust in Michigan’s Kalamazoo Gazette between 1938 and 1945. He found no fewer than 245 articles, sometimes on the front page, reporting atrocities against Jews all over Europe, yet nowhere was the conclusion drawn that this constituted a genocide. It remained in the eyes of the reporters, commentators, and editors a series of discrete, outrageous incidents. One can only imagine the self-­inflicted ignorance and blindness of the actual perpetrators. The haunting question remains to this day: How is it possible that such genocidal patterns

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remained undiscerned? What is the nature of such blind spots in public perception and in the historical analysis of a genocidal situation? While there has been a great deal of progress in alertness to and recognition of genocidal patterns, the same political paralysis – feeling at a loss as to how to respond, even when the stark evidence stares one in the face – persists, as evidenced by the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda (Semelin, 2003). It became increasingly evident that other disciplinary contributions were needed to break this speechlessness and impotence in grasping and transmitting the genocidal event. The courtroom became one place where historical truths were pursued: for instance, during the Nuremberg and Eichmann Trials, the various trials of Nazis that followed in Germany in the 1960s, and the Truth Commissions in South Africa and South America. The courtroom, by its very nature, including its strict adherence to jurisprudential procedure, had its limitations. Questions had to be specific and narrowed down. Testimony had its vulnerability and fallibility and could not be allowed to evolve freely. A striking example from the Eichmann Trial is the witness Yehiel Dinur, known by his pen name, K. Zetnik, who wrote extensively about the death camps. He started to speak about “that other planet” where people kept leaving him behind before going to their death, but when asked to respond to questions from the court, he fainted, falling into a deep coma that lasted for days. He could not bridge the two separate worlds, the two separate identities of the author and the survivor. He could not be Yehiel Dinur while testifying about Auschwitz. While formally his testimony was a failure – a crucial eyewitness, called to testify that he had personally met Eichmann in Auschwitz – he failed to offer this information to the court. He effectively informed the judges of the limitations of the legal process in articulating historical truth. As they themselves wrote, If these be the sufferings of the individual, then the sum total of the suffering of the millions – about a third of the Jewish people, tortured and slaughtered – is certainly beyond human understanding, and who are we to try to give it adequate expression? This is a task for the great writers and poets. Perhaps it is symbolic that even the author, who himself went through the hell named Auschwitz, could not stand the ordeal in the witness box and collapsed. (State of Israel, 1994, The Trial of Adolf Eichmann, Vol. 5, p. 2146) What is important to note here is that the judges took notice of this event – as part of the very testimony they asked for and explicitly did not get, but could experience through its collapse. When it became clear that law alone could not encompass such trauma, however,

it joined history in allowing other disciplines to enter. Art became a vehicle of transmission of the unrepresentable, unknowable, massive trauma. Lanzmann’s film Shoah (see Chapter 19) has probably done more for knowledge of the Holocaust than many historical and judicial accounts. Testimony became a central pillar of this gathering of truth and its transmission. Literature, poetry, theatre, philosophy, and dance were all drawn in to express the unsayable, for which words did not exist.

The testimonial event Testimony is distinguished in the first place by the very distinct and indispensable conditions under which it comes into existence. A protected space has to be provided, one containing not only the physical place and the necessary time but also a totally present and committed listener.1 These external conditions must be complemented by a readiness in the witness to confront what is inside her, the real event of her life that is known to be there, yet only as discrete fragments, to which she is both relentlessly drawn and from which she recoils in terror. The witness is, therefore, in possession of information that has yet to be recorded and brought to an addressee, to a party interested in receiving it. Testimony is a transmittal of information, requiring both an internal unrelenting pressure to convey and an external readiness and eagerness to receive it. In such settings, testimony can assume a life of its own and witnesses’ memories exponentially increase. Many Holocaust survivors I interviewed over the years stated that at the end of the testimony they were amazed by how much they did remember and could put into words. In this sense, the giving of testimony was a process of creating new information. They had always pushed their knowledge to the side, considering it too upsetting to themselves and too burdensome to others. In spite of the terror and sadness they felt during their interview, they experienced a powerful urge to bring their narrative to completion. To tell their stories, Holocaust survivors must partially relive them. The nature of extreme trauma means that memories of the atrocities cannot always be related as past events, but break through the coordinates of time and place in which we commonly organise experience. This is what often gives survivor testimony its quality of immediacy. Massive trauma is fundamentally ahistorical, and testimony is an attempt to create a sequential narrative framework with a before and an after. In this respect, testimony provides a level of historicization. Therefore, what sets testimony apart from other instances during which survivors speak of or allude to their persecution is its conception as a “whole,” in the intimacy of a dialogue with a totally present and attuned

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listener. Its purpose is relief from a threatening, oppressive burden and transmission to a receptive audience.

Traumatic erasure and traumatic parapraxes The German intent in the Holocaust was not only physically to eliminate the Jewish people but also to erase them from history and from memory. The genocidal act would itself become nonexistent. All that was to remain of world Jewry was a collection of relics of the “vanished race” to be exhibited in a special Museum in Prague. An array of euphemisms – like cleansing, relocation, special treatment – disguised the true nature of the killings. The Jews of occupied Europe were quite cognisant of this attempt and did whatever they could to counteract it. They frantically documented what was happening to them, attempting to create what the French historian Annette Wievioka (2006) has called “writings from beyond the grave” (19) that would outlast them and serve as evidence of their destruction. Knowledge of genocide cannot come from documents alone, however, especially since there are vast areas of genocide for which no documents exist. Six hundred thousand Jews were murdered in Belzec and only two were able to escape. To this day we know very little as to what took place there. No documentation exists of the death marches and of the uprisings in Auschwitz and in Treblinka – except for survivor testimony. For the Holocaust to be a real, informative event there must be the voice of the “I” who experienced it. Our engagement with survivors’ testimonies helps them alleviate a doubt they always had: whether what they experienced and remembered really happened. One can detect here the effect of the German intent of erasure. Our interest and willingness to listen serve to confirm survivors’ inner reality. While it is possible that survivors can be retraumatised through giving their testimony, especially when the listening conditions are not optimal, the risk of remaining silent is much greater. It should be evident by now that I  do not consider testimony to be a monologue. It is, rather, the product of a dialogic interaction. The witness/­survivor has experienced a real event “out there” and is under strong internal pressure to transmit it to someone who wants to know it. The interviewer has that willingness. It comes as no surprise, then, that the interviewer experiences strong countertransference feelings during the testimonial process. These enactments sometimes take the form of sweeping countertransference parapraxes, such as an analyst not knowing for more than a year and a half of analytic work that her patient’s family had the same Holocaust background as her own, or an interviewer not noticing that a mother and a daughter,

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describing in each other’s presence the murder of a baby by the camp Commandant, told quite different versions of the same event. Such countertransference feelings and enactments are an invaluable source of information about the traumatic experience itself.

Traumatic memories – theoretical considerations Extreme trauma impacts its own reception, recording, remembrance, and transmission. Knowing the specifics of such impacts provides us with the grammar necessary to understand Holocaust testimony. Because traumatic experience happens in the here and now, survivors may speak in the present tense. They may be at loss for words and the narrative flow may be interrupted. Accompanying affects are immediate and intense. When the re-­ experienced emotions are too intense, the testimony may break into discrete fragments. At such moments, the supportive intervention of the interviewer is crucial to helping rebalance the narrative, letting it resume its flow. In survivors who were psychiatrically hospitalised in Israel for most of their lives, the interviewer had to be much more present and active to facilitate testimony (Laub, [2005], [2017]). On their own, survivors were unable to initiate or sustain the narrative flow. Trauma theory helps both generate and decode the testimony. In the first place it informs the interviewer how to listen and respond. It identifies those moments when what has been endured exceeds the capacity to symbolise, to form a transmittable memory. The interviewer can offer his own symbolising capacity, providing the words the witness cannot find. The viewer then becomes herself the witness to this dialogic process and can grasp the full dimension of the experience. She can capture it in the text or in the video testimony she views.

Psychoanalysis and testimony: continuities and differences Testimony is a meeting place for the mutual witnessing and repair of trauma-­fragmented memories and psychic disruption. The process of witnessing calls upon and addresses the unmet needs of the trauma survivor. A  psychoanalytic understanding of the interviewer-­ interviewee relationship during the testimonial event can not only contribute greatly to our understanding of traumatic damage, but also inform us as to the healing processes that need to be set in motion to repair it. Although psychoanalysis and testimony share central commonalities, they nevertheless are fundamentally different processes. The goal of psychoanalysis is to allow for the emergence of the unconscious through

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free association and the elucidation of the transference experience and its working through. Instead of being driven by an inner compulsion, by a story that reaches for words, it is a surrender to the wanderings of the mind, protected by the analyst’s nonjudgemental presence and neutrality. It has a rhythm set by the frequency of the sessions and it lacks an endpoint in time. There is no explicit addressee in analysis, although the analyst’s emotional presence implicitly fulfils that function. Dreams, parapraxes, transference experiences and enactments, and, last but not least, remembrances provide the scaffolding along which the analytic narrative unfolds. Reading and registering it demands ongoing self-­reflection. Psychoanalytic literature is replete with references to the internal good object. Beginning with Freud’s (1932) concept of the oceanic feeling – being one with the universe – that arises from the oneness with the mother, and continuing with Margaret Mahler’s (1963) developmental phase of symbiosis, a good object is required for Winnicott’s (1953) “transitional space”, Henri Parens’ (1970) “inner sustainment”, Mahler, M, Pine, F. and Bergman, A. (1975) “object constancy”, and Kohut’s (1971) “self object”. Psychoanalysis has described these processes that are essential for internal representation and symbolisation, and which also manifest themselves in testimony. Testimony itself, however, is an event of a different genre. There is always an event, an experience, even if it has hitherto not been consciously formulated. It is this information that has yet to be recorded, brought to an addressee or to a party interested in receiving it. It is thus a transmittal of information and there is an internal, unrelenting pressure to convey as well as an external readiness and eagerness to receive it. Testimony always requires an addressee, even if only a symbolic one, such as future generations. The interviewer represents that addressee. He matches the witness’s need to tell with his own interest in hearing and knowing. At bottom, therefore, testimony is a joint endeavor. Once it is accomplished, the survivor no longer is or feels alone with the inexpressible extreme experience. She is less helplessly prey to its devastating impact. The internal caldron of sensations and affects has been put into the frame of a sequential narrative, enabling them to be remembered, transmitted, and forgotten. Such a narrative is, however, never complete. Highly charged blank spots of the almost unimaginable experience persist, exerting their magnetic power over the survivor, who feels compelled endlessly to revisit them even as she constantly flees their proximity. It is these intense affect-­laden voids of memory, which can obliterate the traumatic experience in its entirety, that drive testimony and press for its deliverance. This holds true for a broad range of experiences of extreme trauma. It has recently been observed that cancer survivors, when feeling safe in the company

of other survivors, are likewise driven to “tell their story” of their encounter with death. In Israel, as mentioned earlier, a group of chronically hospitalised, “psychotic” Holocaust survivors interviewed in recent years experienced the same internal pressure to bear witness. Unfortunately their capacity to symbolise, free associate, reflect, and verbalise had been so profoundly damaged by the chronicity of their decades-­ long condition, by their social isolation, and by the somatic treatments they had received (insulin shock, ECT, and psychotropic medication) that all they were able to create was a constricted, static, and fragmented narrative.

Conclusion The three elements that differentiate testimony and psychoanalysis are these: the internal pressure to transmit and tell, the real story that is “there,” and the yearning for and presence of a listener who receives it. On closer scrutiny, however, these differences seem far less absolute. Both processes – testimony and psychoanalysis – are in essence dialogic. The analysand does not speak into a void, even if he speaks to himself. It is his own internal good object projected onto the analyst that he addresses in such cases. In both processes, the narrative deepens and branches out, taking turns that may come as a surprise to the narrator. Freud’s (1933) dictum, “where the id was, there the ego shall be”, applies to both, although in psychoanalysis this can go much further than in single-­session testimony. On the other hand, both set in motion a process that can continue on its own, far beyond the timeframe of the psychoanalytic or testimonial event. This process includes, but is not limited to, symbolisation, self-­reflection, and remembering. While psychoanalysis, unlike testimony, does not depend on a particular event that serves as an organising principle, it too leads to the recovery of memories that may become building blocks of the psychoanalytic narrative. If psychoanalysis is a therapeutic endeavor, the primary goal of testimony is documentation. The fundamental difference between the two processes, then, may be limited to the inner intense pressure to transmit and the experience of transmittal, both of which are at the center of the testimonial event. The latter can be seen as a piece of psychoanalytic work that is limited in scope and does not include parapraxes, transference, or dream work. Testimonial momentum may be also operative, however, in traditional psychoanalysis when traumatic experience is involved. At such a juncture it is the process that fuels the therapeutic action and provides the impetus for clinical movement and flow. It would be methodologically very difficult to isolate and study this process

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in the context of traditional psychoanalyses. Therefore, the nontraditional modality of the testimonial event is needed to provide the most suitable research setting for capturing that momentum and making it available for further investigation.

Note 1 The role of the camera in this endeavour has not yet been fully explored, although experts in media studies (for example, Pinchewski, 2012) have started to do so.

References Benjamin, W. (1968). The storyteller: Reflections on the works of Nikolai Leskov. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books. Freud, S. (1933). New introductory lectures on Psycho-Analysis. S. E. 22, pp. 3–182. Kohut, H. (1971). Analysis of the self. New York: International University Press. Laub, D. (2005). From speechlessness to narrative: The cases of Holocaust historians and of psychiatrically hospitalized survivors. Literature and Medicine, 24(2), 253–­265. Laub, D. (2017). The Israel project story. In D. Laub  & A. Hamburger (Eds.), Psychoanalysis and Holocaust testimony: Unwanted memories of social trauma (pp.  195–­201). New York: Routledge.

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Lemkin, R. (1944). Axis rule in occupied Europe. Concord: Rumford Press. Mahler, M. (1963). Thoughts about development and individuation. In M. Mahler (Ed.), The selected papers of Margaret Sangers, Vol. 2 (pp. 3–­19). New York: Jason Aronson. Mahler, M., Pine, F.,  & Bergman, A. (1975). The psychological birth of the infant. New York: Basic Books. Markle, G. E. (1999). The Holocaust and sociology. In P. Hayes (Ed.), Lessons and legacies, Vol. III, Memory, memorialization, and denial. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Novick, P. (1999). The Holocaust in American life. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Parens, H. (1970). Inner sustainment: Metapsychological considerations. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 39, 223–­239. Pinchewski, A. (2012). The audio visual unconscious in the video archive for Holocaust testimonies. Critical Inquiry, 39(1), 142–­166. Schorske, C. E. (1981). Fin-­de-­Siècle Vienna: Politics and culture. New York: Random House. Semelin, J. (2003). Analysis of a mass-­crime: Ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, murder in historical perspective (pp. 353–­370). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. State of Israel, Ministry of Justice. (1994). The trial of Adolf Eichmann: Record of proceedings in the district court of Jerusalem, Vol. 5. Jerusalem: The Ministry. Stoltzfus, N. (1992, September). Dissent in Nazi Germany. The Atlantic Monthly. Retrieved from www.theatlantic.com/­ magazine/­archive/­1992/­09/­dissent-­in-­nazi-­germany/­532725/­ Wievioka, A. (2006). The era of the witness. Trans. Jared Stark. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Winnicott, D. W. (1953). Transitional objects and transitional phenomena. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 34, 89–­97.

1

Section II On surviving

5 Resilience Robert Krell

Beginnings 5 May 1945 is indelibly etched into my memory. I was not quite five years old on the day of my liberation. Liberation was not as liberating as it sounds, not for a Jewish child emerging from nearly three years in hiding. I believed that my Christian rescuers, Albert and Violette Munnik, were my parents and their daughter, Nora, my sister. I had forgotten my parents. Never mind that I was a boy with black, curly hair in a sea of blondes. I  had become Robbie Munnik. They were my family and I did not know differently. However, my parents miraculously survived, each in a different hiding place in The Hague, Holland, where I was born on 5 August 1940. The three of us, what was left of our family, were re-­united. My father’s and mother’s parents (my grandparents) and their brothers and sisters (my uncles and aunts) had all been murdered. My Jewish parents reclaimed me and I was returned to Leo and Emmy Krell. For nearly three years as a hidden child, I had not complained or cried. I knew somehow that it was dangerous to do so. But I recognised freedom sufficiently to cry about three years’ worth when I had to leave the Munniks. That was the second time I  lost my family in addition to other separations in the crazy days following the order to assemble for “resettlement to the East” on 19 August 1942. I was a child whose sense of security had been ruptured. I had lost my bearings. A fragile beginning. Nor did I know I was a Jew. How could I? Upon return to my parents, I  became Robbie Krell again and was enrolled in a Catholic school near our home for an entire year. I  was the Mother Superior’s favourite, either because

I was a good student or perhaps more likely a promising prospect for conversion. After living with my Christian rescuers, then brainwashed by Catholic nuns, I  learnt about being Jewish at home, hearing stories from survivors who returned. They spoke of Auschwitz and other mysterious places in Yiddish, ably translated by my second cousin, eight-­year-­old Milly, who had returned from Switzerland with her parents. We heard things no child should hear and therefore listened all the more attentively. That was my introduction to Judaism, an unforgettable litany of horrors visited upon Jews that was imprinted on my mind. Seemingly from nowhere, I had a Hebrew teacher. Mr. Krakauer, who tried to teach me at our home. A good student at school, I was unable to absorb Hebrew, not even a prayer. I did not know what the problem was. Now I do. How can a depressed child learn from a depressed teacher? He was a concentration camp survivor and G-­D only knows what torment he experienced and transmitted. If learning Hebrew was meant to make me more Jewish, why should I  co-­operate? So far I  knew only that being a Jew meant death, for everyone was dead, save one first cousin, and Milly. We had lost the privilege of growing up as children steeped in play and security. Childhood transferred into adulthood overnight, a dangerous adulthood. We had become “elderly children” (Glassner & Krell, 2006). My six-­year-­old cousin remained with his Christian rescuers. He declined our offer to live with us. Understandable. He thought they were his family. Had my parents not returned, I  would have remained Robbie Munnik. I once asked my Moeder if she had wanted my parents to die. Her response, “Of course I thought of it.

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Then you would have been mine. But because I  loved you, I wanted them to live.” After the war, I was shared by my two sets of parents. Albert and Violette Munnik attended both my graduation from medical school in 1965 and my wedding to Marilyn in 1971. They were my angels. But while they saved my life, they could not fix my life. My personal recovery began the day in 1951 that we left for Canada aboard the Diemerdijk, a freighter with passenger accommodation, via the Panama Canal on a five-­week journey to Vancouver. The prisoners who worked in the “Kanada compound” in Auschwitz were right about naming the storage place of furs and treasures after Canada, the country they imagined to have an abundance of food and natural wealth. The compound held the goods plundered from Jews arriving to the camp. To this ten-­year-­old immigrant, the opportunities were obvious. Even with loving parents who did their best, I knew I was on my own (Krell, 2016). I hit the ground running, learnt English, mowed lawns, delivered newspapers, and joined Habonim. Then I  worked my way through university, medical school, an internship in Philadelphia, and residencies in psychiatry at Temple University Hospital and child psychiatry at Stanford. I  returned to Vancouver where I  became professor of psychiatry at the University of British Columbia (UBC) Medical School. I barely looked up. The task of being normal when you know you are not is all encompassing. Shy beyond belief, I  was nevertheless the lead in the school play the moment I  arrived. Who better to play Franz Schubert than a kid with an accent who could play the piano? Next I was on stage winning spelling bees. And then, strangely, without electioneering, I  was voted class president, then grade president, a trend that continued throughout university where I became the medical school president and a representative on student council. What was this, this ability to be elected without campaign speeches, without self-­ promotion? At least in part, it was the child survivor in me. I  had mastered the art of silence. Silence was the language we child survivors learnt and in silence we manoeuvered. Although those ten formative years determined the arc of my life, for a time I severed my ties to that decade. It was less easy for my parents to do. My father told me when I was fourteen that we were broke. He had been a successful furrier in The Hague but not in Vancouver. Eventually he achieved modest success in real estate. My mother remained unhappy. Nevertheless she had a son at age forty, a brother for me with a fifteen-­year gap between us. She had a second chance to raise a son and she burdened him with stories of the war. It was like two families living side by side but involving the same cast, a Dutch family with me and its Canadian iteration with

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Ronnie. He was affected by the presence of the Shoah in our lives. I saw it. Despite that burden, he raised a fine family. Were my personal successes a matter of resilience? Perhaps. If resilience also includes a healthy measure of good luck, then I had the good fortune of having great friends and the early determination to rely on no one but myself. Resiliency implies the restoration of normalcy. As a child Holocaust survivor, a friend wrote, “Some intellectual ability certainly helped. It helped in my capacity to adapt to new situations and to develop a chameleon-­like quality which allowed one to fit in wherever and whatever way was necessary. By the time I arrived in Canada, I spoke nine different languages” (Rotenberg, 1985). I learnt English in a few months and played soccer and baseball. At my fiftieth high school reunion, some who had known me at elementary school said they looked forward to seeing “the Dutch kid who always smiled.” But the school librarian told my wife that I had been the most serious child she had ever encountered. Working on being normal was obviously a serious matter but one that required a carefree appearance. What I did not realise then was how deeply affected we children were by the events of the Shoah and how intimately the traumatic consequences were intertwined with our daily existence.

The failure of psychology/­ psychiatry in caring for Holocaust survivors In the mid-­1970s, as a thirty-­five-­year-­old psychiatrist, I  began to read some of the available medical, psychiatric, and psychological literature on Holocaust survivors. With a few notable exceptions, the literature to that time was unhelpful. Few health professionals were prepared to attempt the treatment of survivor trauma. Having myself been taught the psychodynamic concepts pertaining to guilt, identification with the aggressor, and the psychologic defences of denial and repression – I found these concepts in the literature on survivor psychopathology inadequate to describe experiences that defied conventional pre-­war terminology. The horrors of the Shoah demanded a revised language to describe massive trauma (Krell, 1997). I had not yet thought of survivors in terms of resilience, a common enough concept emerging in child psychiatry and developmental psychology of that time. My early teens were lived surrounded by “resilient” Holocaust survivors. They were our community, our social circle. In shul (synagogue), I sat behind Anshel Bogner, a broad-­shouldered man, with an equally broad smile, whose shoulders would shake on Yom Kippur while

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reciting the Kaddish. He was crying for his murdered wife and two children. Standing behind him, I  would cry with him. To my right, a few seats over, sat Boris Wydra, a lover of great literature and history and the father of Eva Hoffman. She wrote brilliantly of the Shoah and its aftermath (Hoffman, 1989; Hoffman, 2004). A little further over was Leon Kahn, with whom I had a special, close relationship. He was my senior by about fifteen years. Leon, a Lithuanian partisan, witnessed the murder of everyone in his town from his hiding place overlooking the cemetery, including the rape and mutilation of his cousins. His sister was bayonetted before his eyes (Kahn, 2004). He and Yaffa Eliach were childhood friends. She became a noted Holocaust historian and created the Tower of Faces, photos of her shtetl Eishyshok’s murdered Jews is displayed at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC (Eliach, 1998). As I  learnt more details of various survivor’s dreadful experiences, their responses differed from psychopathology described in the post-­war literature. Survivors were said to be consumed with anger, to have social and sexual impairment, to live in denial, and to be resistant to psychotherapeutic treatment. Yes, they were deeply wounded, sheltering from outsiders their darkest preoccupations, but the manner in which they moved in the world reflected a measure of dignity and of considerable good-­natured humour. Not so dignified was the psychiatric literature that appeared demeaning of people who had endured endless trauma without escape or relief, short of death. The inability of mental health professionals to understand and empathise was reflected in their observations (Eissler, 1967). Instead of revising the psychologic language, they retained archaic concepts inappropriate to the sadistic torment inflicted by the perpetrators and legions of collaborators. If survivors did not speak, their silence, which was often fear of not being understood or failure to find words to describe what had happened, was simply labelled denial. Sadly, the therapists themselves were in denial, too guilty or too afraid of what they might hear and instinctively knew they could neither bear nor treat. In the therapeutic context, if you ask the question, the answer commits you to try to assist. Better not to ask. Better not to step into that abyss (Krell, 1984). In addition, there was a diagnostic rush to judgment. A patient of mine was admitted to hospital with a psychotic break. She was a Dutch woman who had been in a Japanese prison camp with her mother. Liberated at age six, she had suffered lifelong depressive episodes but never psychosis. She had been hospitalised for several days before I  was notified of her admission. Her

diagnosis: schizophrenia rather than the dissociative episode she had suffered. Another patient, a Jewish concentration camp survivor, was referred for consultation. She was verbal, intelligent, and aware of her struggle with intrusive memories. I was away for the week in which she suffered a breakdown and upon admission to hospital was diagnosed as a schizophrenic. The former prisoner of a Japanese concentration camp had recently taken in Japanese exchange students in an attempt to overcome her fear of Japanese people. Their arrival triggered her psychotic episode. The Jewish camp survivor experienced her breakdown upon hearing news that Iraq had fired Scud missiles into Israel where her sister lived. This diagnostic dilemma was noted in hospitalised Holocaust survivors in Israel who had been children during World War II, and were diagnosed to be schizophrenic rather than suffering trauma induced post-­traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) with psychosis. It appears in retrospect that the symptoms were severe enough to cause these patients to retreat into isolation but not as a result of a schizophrenic disorder, rather a consequence of the severity of trauma endured and subsequent dissociative symptoms (Felsen, 2016). While the postwar decades focused on the psychopathology of the victims, relatively little was done to examine the process of recovery. Did any Holocaust survivors recover? If so how? While large-­scale demographic studies revealed few or no differences in a cohort of survivors versus non-­survivors, (Eaton, 1982) (Leon et al., 1981) those of us who have interviewed hundreds of survivors for various reasons and under a wide variety of circumstances, know that each carries his or her own particular burden of memories. The right combination of triggers may release unwanted thoughts, even behaviours, but mostly they are actively suppressed in favour of more normal activities. William B. Helmreich conducted 170 in-­depth interviews with survivors. From this project, he suggested ten general traits present in survivors that helped them to lead successful lives, including such qualities as flexibility, assertiveness, optimism, intelligence, courage, and finding meaning in one’s life (Helmreich, 1992). My source comprises 120 audio-­visual testimonies made in a documentation project I started in 1979, plus my contact with survivors for psychiatric care and those with whom I have shared life and community. All are precious examples of surviving after survival, many having developed the ability to compartmentalise their personal tragedies from daily life. Sometimes the effort fails (Krell, 1996). As happy as my mother was to join us for Shabbat and be with her children and grandchildren, she also saw who was missing from that table. It is the fate of the survivor to be reminded of their extensive losses at otherwise happy events.

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Resilience and overcoming adversity When we speak of resilience it is usual to think in terms of children and childhood. I had been a child psychiatrist for ten years and had written and spoken of the children of Holocaust survivors. My limited private practice hours were devoted largely to survivors and their children, the so-­called Second Generation. Helen Epstein had identified the sons and daughters of Holocaust survivors and noted some consequences of Holocaust imagery and mystifying parental behaviours (Epstein, 1979). I  was aware of this identifiable group (Krell, 1979). Then I experienced a life-­ changing moment. I discovered child Holocaust survivors at the 1981 World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors in Jerusalem. Rabbi Lau spoke: “My name is Israel Meir Lau. I am the Chief Rabbi of Netanya. My father was the Rabbi of Piotrowsk. He was murdered in Treblinka. My mother died of hunger in Ravensbrück. I was the youngest survivor at Buchenwald. I was eight years old.” I had not thought of cousin Nallie at age six or Millie at age eight or myself as Holocaust survivors. No one had asked about our experiences, nor if we had memories. Surely, no one noted that we had suffered and that perhaps there were consequences. The German invasion of Poland on 1 September  1939 signalled the destruction of European Jewry. Every nation occupied by the Germans doomed that country’s Jewish population. Being a Jew was a death sentence. Every Jewish child was a target for murder. Children were not only at the mercy of the killers but almost entirely reliant on the kindness of strangers for their survival. Precious few survived. Whereas the historian Debórah Dwork estimates that ten percent escaped death (she includes in those numbers Kindertransport children and those rescued by Youth Aliyah), the number is probably closer to seven percent. Either figure allows for no more than one Jewish child in ten to be alive at liberation (Dwork, 1991; Krell, 2001), The majority of this remnant was saved in hiding – in Christian homes, in convents and monasteries, in caves and forests. Of those sent to concentration camps, only a handful survived. Amongst the approximately 1,000 children found in Buchenwald were children from other camps marched or transported from Poland to Germany. They were protected within the camp by political prisoners (Hemmendinger & Krell, 2000). At Auschwitz, a few children were found, barely alive, including those subjected to Mengele’s gruesome “medical” experiments (Lagnado & Dekel, 1991). Hence, any discussion of resilience in child survivors of the Holocaust must take into account that climate of death. For while we know that no one escapes having to deal with adverse conditions in life – illness, surgery, loss of a family member, mental health issues – in this

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case we are talking of children who precipitously lost everyone and who themselves faced betrayal, capture, and death. There was virtually no escape. Within months of my self-­discovery as a child Holocaust survivor, I  delivered the Kristallnacht lecture in Vancouver titled “The Emergence from Powerlessness: Views of a Child Survivor.” Early in 1982, while on sabbatical at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, I met Sarah Moskovitz. We were lecturers in a Simon Wiesenthal Center series. Amazingly, Sarah had just completed her worldwide search and interviews of twenty-­four child survivors, half of whom had been found at Terezín in 1945 and brought to Lingfield, England, for their recovery. She gave me a draft to read prior to the publication of her extraordinary book (Moskovitz, 1983). Sensitively written by this sensitive professor of developmental psychology, and written without emphasis on psychopathology, this work is focused on resilience and recovery. Sarah and I  began our work together, and I  helped found in 1983 the Los Angeles Child Survivor organisation that grew to 300 members. This led us to consider healing on a larger scale. Sarah had done individual therapy and was forming therapy groups for child survivors. I had been working with individuals as well as Second Generation groups at that time. But now everything changed. We had helped to launch a movement and if Sarah was its mother, I was her little brother. Child Holocaust survivors everywhere were in a mode of self-­discovery in the early to mid-­ 1980s. Frieda Grayzel, a child survivor of Auschwitz, had founded a group in Boston in 1983. Stephanie Seltzer, who survived in hiding, was similarly engaged in the Philadelphia area and founded a group whose nucleus consisted of those who were interviewed by Ira Brenner for the Kestenberg project. In New York, the psychoanalyst Judith Kestenberg had interviewed child survivors since 1981 for her pioneering project, “The International Study of Organized Persecution of Children.” She was joined by Eva Fogelman in 1984 and they also began monthly meetings for child Holocaust survivors. Stephanie organised an important Gathering in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1987. The movement grew and its dynamic was such that by 1991 a gathering took place in New York of 1,600 persons, a majority of whom were child Holocaust survivors. It proved to be a major step in healing and recovery.

Various aspects of “healing” in Holocaust survivors Not all survivors became patients, but all were in need of healing. My work with Holocaust survivors showed me that conventional “treatment” was frequently unrealistic.

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It helped to hear Elie Wiesel address several hundred health professionals at Cedars-­Sinai hospital in 1982 on “The Holocaust Patient.” At the conclusion of his challenging remarks, there was a profound silence. Finally, a physician asked: “When we have a Holocaust patient how shall we treat him or her?” Wiesel responded and I paraphrase: “Listen to them. Listen to them carefully. The survivors have more to teach you, than you them” (Wiesel, 1982). Sometimes survivors did not talk in order to protect those who were close, including therapists, from their pain, from knowing the worst that a human being could experience. It was seldom simply denial. When survivors did talk, they were frequently silenced. My mother, when once asked what happened during the war, said “I  gave my two-­year-­old son to strangers.” She was instantly interrupted by her friends with stories about being deprived of butter and sugar during wartime in Canada. My psychiatric residency at Temple University Hospital offered group therapy to all residents. Asked about my life, I mentioned being born in Holland, then hidden for three years. A senior resident shouted: “We are not here to talk of such matters.” Since the prestigious psychoanalyst from another university did not intervene, I  knew not to talk and remained silent for that entire year. It was 1966. The concept of healing in our lives rests essentially on uncovering the personal resilience and the capacity to overcome some of the extraordinary adversity of trauma and tragedy that exceeds the scale of most human experience. It requires the possession of an optimistic personality combined with a few sustaining good memories and a degree of intellect to devise coping strategies. As Moskovitz and I wrote: “We all face the challenge to live a meaningful life, but the survivor’s awareness of death may inspire an even deeper call to not live life trivially. Therefore, in light of all that has happened to the survivor’s family and people, there exists a potentially creative, dynamic force – derived from a horrendous past – to lead a socially constructive and self-­healing life” (Moskovitz & Krell, 1990). Within therapy, the therapist needed to be prepared to join the survivor in a journey that demanded flexibility and innovation (Krell, 1989). For example, for the older survivor, those aged sixteen to seventeen in 1945, reviewing their personal history was aided by using maps. Some had only been asked for their place of birth and names of camps. I provided a large and detailed map of pre-­war Europe for them to trace their bitter journey. Memory was triggered and stories emerged, frequently in chronological order rather than in sporadically recalled fragments. Considerable time was devoted to recapturing memories of pre-­war family life which in most instances were recalled as warm and comforting, perhaps to some degree

“idealised” and which invariably strengthened recovery. Some youngsters had rebuilt their lives almost entirely on the tiniest fragments of childhood memories. One survivor patient taught me the real meaning of restitution. He was referred following a one-­day admission to a psychiatric ward for depression. The basement hospital ward had reminded him of mine shafts in which he was a slave labourer. So he walked out. He agreed to see me but also insisted that if he wanted to kill himself, I not interfere. “Don’t try to stop me.” I heard his story and it was devastating. The most “healing” work to be done involved assisting him to fill out the complicated restitution application forms. Compensation was at first rejected because he had misdated a concentration camp stay in the sequence of his torturous journey. The entire process took three years of correspondence, correcting forms, answering insulting questions about details that no survivor would be able to provide under their unique circumstances, all this to finally achieve a colossal failure, a cheque in the amount of $1,300.00. I called him. My voice faltered. “I  apologise. They awarded you $1,300.00.” He came to see me, beaming. I had never seen such a broad smile on his face. He reassured me that I did not understand. He was elated. It was his first victory, ever. The compensation was incidental to the confirmation that he had been wronged. He said, “They acknowledged that I was there. They committed an injustice and admitted it. I won.” He helped me understand the meaning of restitution (Slyomovics, 2014). Some years later, I  applied for compensation from Holland, wanting to experience the process. I was interviewed by a Dutch representative of their government claims office. After recounting being moved from home to home, separated from my parents and losing my grandparents, aunts, and uncles, she said: “Well, my husband (a Dutch youngster of a Christian family) suffered too (of hunger) and he never asked for anything.” What could I say? That life on 5 May 1945 resumed for him with virtually no consequences? That after he was fed, his entire family was still there for him? I said nothing. Silence remained my comfort zone. As part of the application I was to see a psychologist or psychiatrist for an evaluation. I chose one whose work had been with severely deprived children. I reported for my two-­hour assessment without trepidation. I  was in my mid-­fifties, a successful professor of psychiatry, with a beautiful family and a good reputation as a community leader. Mine was a story of success. I opened my mouth to say “I  was born in The Hague, Holland” and then cried for an hour before I  could continue. I  remained in therapy for the next three years. The Dutch government paid for the cost of my therapist, a hollow victory indeed. Of the surviving children at Buchenwald, 426 boys were brought to Ėcouis, France, for their recovery. They

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were told by a visiting psychiatrist that they would never recover. In fact, initially they were not viewed as particularly worthy of the efforts expended to feed or educate them. After all, they must have been sociopaths or psychopaths in order to survive when all others perished. Yet many of these children demonstrated a remarkable resilience, the ability to re-­invent themselves on the slimmest of threads from the past – a recollection of family Shabbats or of being a favoured child who accompanied grandfather to Shul. Even the tiniest of fragments of memory featured prominently in their recovery. From this group of surviving children and adolescents emerged Israel Meir Lau who eventually became Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel; Rabbi Menashe Klein (with a massive following); Kalman Kalikstein, a professor and colleague to Albert Einstein; Elie Wiesel, writer and human rights activist and recipient of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize; and Naphtali Lau-­Lavie, who became Israel’s Consul General to New York. There were a large number of physicians and surgeons as well as successful businessmen and community leaders. A  follow up by Judith Hemmendinger, who as a young social worker looked after about 100 of these boys at Ambloy, also noted a low incidence of divorce (Robinson  & Hemmendinger, 1982). Throughout their lives, many of the Buchenwald boys retained close connections with each other, whether in Israel, Australia, France, or the United States. A vast support system developed. They knew that healing was a lifetime job. As noted, the survivors who presented for treatment taught me what they needed. Once the various crises that had precipitated their referral had settled, it became possible to hear their concerns. Their preoccupations involved personal and public memory as well as an urgency to tell of their experiences in order to warn future generations of what happened and what is possible. With two colleagues, I founded a symposium on the Holocaust for high school students. Since 1976 we have taught 1,000 students annually, primarily through survivor witness testimony. I recruited many of the speakers, some understandably reticent. However, once they had related their accounts and received feedback from the students lauding their courage and inspiration, most continued as Holocaust educators for life. Without fail, participants in the teaching programme reported these activities as a healing experience for them, no matter that each rendering caused pain and, sometimes, a brief depression. Recalling memories of loss on such a scale can do that. In order to speak, child Holocaust survivors had to overcome the initial post-­war experience of being instructed to forget the past, and being told they had no memory and therefore did not suffer. Of course, those

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assertions proved unhelpful and eventually the younger survivors also benefitted from relating their accounts. Repressed memories re-­emerged, often surprising the speaker. In the pioneering days of Holocaust education, I  began to record audio-­visual testimonies in 1978. There was a healing dimension to offering the accounts that otherwise remained unspoken, traumatising pre-­occupations. In order to secure our various Holocaust education programmes, I  wanted to build an administrative centre and, with help from fellow survivors, the Vancouver Holocaust Centre Society for Remembrance and Education was incorporated and obtained charitable status. Several survivors pointed out a more pressing need. It was 1985 and I was unaware of several meetings held in 1966 to build a Holocaust memorial. The existing pre-­ war Jewish community failed to provide survivors with a memorial site where Kaddish could be recited for murdered family. I asked that our funds for a Holocaust education centre be redirected towards creating a commemorative site. In 1987, the Memorial was unveiled in the presence of 1,300 persons, including the entire survivor community numbering approximately 350, with their children reading the names of the 1,100 murdered family members inscribed at its base. That initiative was more healing than any other “therapy” at that time, best illustrated by my own father who participated in reciting Kaddish for his lost family. Until then, he had refused to set foot in any Jewish cemetery. In the following year, several of my patients reported making regular pilgrimages to this symbolic gravesite. The “healing” provided to the survivor community led to their participation in establishing the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC) and its opening in 1994.

Coping in the face of adversity The extraordinary struggle of Holocaust survivors is revealed in an ever-­growing number of memoirs. Amongst the earliest accounts by child Holocaust survivors are those by Jack Kuper and Saul Friedlander (Kuper, 1967; Friedlander, 1978). In later life they produced further memoirs (Kuper, 1994; Friedlander, 2016). Jack Kuper also produced film documentaries including A Day in the Warsaw Ghetto: A Birthday Trip in Hell and Children of the Storm (Kuper, 1991, 2000) and Saul Friedlander contributed critically important historical studies (Friedlander, 1997, 2007). Given the complexity of their early lives and the challenges encountered, these contributions to film and scholarship are powerful examples of constructive attempts to deal with a traumatic past.

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The 1991 Hidden Child Conference in New York highlighted the existence of child Holocaust survivors, most of whom had not spoken of their childhood experiences. The majority of such children, especially those from hiding, had perfected living silently. Survival so often depended on not being noticed, being inconspicuous, on the ability to suppress tears, ignore pain. Grief was borne in silence; so was rage. Silence is the language of the child survivors (Krell, 2007). But they were ready. Fully forty-­six years post-­war they spoke and several survivor accounts were written: Jane Marks (Marks, 1993), André Stein (Stein, 1993), and Paul Valent (Valent, 1993), the latter two both child Holocaust survivors. Non-­survivors also added to this valuable literature (Bluglass, 2003) (Glassner  & Krell, 2006. An interesting dimension to resilience was noted when various scholars began to explore links between their childhood Holocaust experiences of massive trauma and eventual career choices. Robert Melson and Ervin Staub wrote scholarly works on genocide (Melson, 1992), (Staub, 1989). Nechama Tec authored numerous Holocaust studies (Tec, 1986, 1993). Both Melson and Tec wrote moving personal memoirs (Melson, 2000) (Tec, 1984). Did their Holocaust past inspire them in their pursuit of these areas of scholarship? Peter Suedfeld, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of British Columbia, explored the connection between a child/­adolescent Holocaust past and chosen careers by seven survivors (himself included) and eight refugees – all social scientists, primarily psychologists, involved in research (Suedfeld, 2001). The aforementioned Staub, a contributor to Suedfeld’s book, describes that his early work on controlling and reducing fear escaped his attention as being connected to his Holocaust past. Later in life, while studying the origins of genocide, altruism, and how to reduce violence, the connections became clear to him. He had also attended the 1991 gathering and found talking with other child survivors “easy and natural.” Suedfeld, a friend and colleague who survived as a child in Budapest, realised only well into his career that memories of his early experiences determined many aspects of his scientific choices. Amongst other things, he noted “that all of my research deals with people who are facing ‘or have survived’ adversity, novel and strange situations.” His research on decision making and on estimating the availability of “psychological and other resources” and the complexity needed for a good solution demonstrated that respondents recalled using appropriate problem-­oriented strategies for dealing with the horrendous events of the Holocaust and have generally gone on to lead happy and successful lives. In terms of coping, survivors have not become permanent and hopeless psychiatric casualties (Suedfeld, Krell, Wiebe, & Steel, 1997).

Coping is also well described by child Holocaust survivors in anthologies of accounts such as those produced in Los Angeles (Kaufman, 2011, 2016), Montreal (Lindeman, 2007), and England (Child Survivors Association of Great Britain, 2011). Michael Berenbaum, commenting on child Holocaust survivors in How We Survived: 52 Personal Stories by Child Survivors of the Holocaust Los Angeles: Notice how many went into the healing and teaching professions, how deeply committed to education they were, even when they had to begin all over again, in a new language and a new country, studying with children much younger and much more innocent. Notice how much they have achieved; beginning with so little, they too represent the embodiment of the American dream. But remember while survival was a matter of luck, no one, not even children, survived without considerable skill, perseverance and endurance. It should also be noted that although there are many stories of success, a survey of child Holocaust Survivors conducted in 1998 about their experiences for war-­related consequences told a different tale (Moskovitz, Krell, Moskovitz,  & Askren, 2001). One thousand questionnaires were distributed at a time when child survivors were aged approximately in their mid-­50s to mid-­60s. They were asked: “As you look back on your life, how do you think you were affected by your Holocaust experiences in childhood physically, socially, emotionally, educationally and economically?” There were 664 responses. Three-­quarters of the child survivors in this survey reported themselves to have suffered serious to severe life-­long effects emotionally as a result of their traumatic past. Despite their personal successes and achievements, they self-­reported being seriously and permanently affected to this day: emotionally eighty-­one per cent, socially sixty-­nine per cent, physically sixty-­seven per cent, educationally sixty-­six per cent, and economically sixty-­five per cent. In other words, their general success in life was achieved despite their self-­perception as functioning less well than others.

Institutional healing through participation in education, gatherings, and memorialisation The Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre’s mandate is to remember and teach. The Centre became a “home” for the survivor community of whom many became teachers to students by sharing their accounts. Some survivors only joined the Centre for its monthly social

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gatherings and special events, such as a communal Passover Seder. All found comfort in talking with supportive staff. A  volunteer lawyer assisted with applications for restitution, an arduous and emotional task for most survivors. A  VHEC committee worked with the Jewish Family Services Agency to help survivors in need. And a publishing arm of the VHEC supported the publication of books, primarily memoirs. These activities provided therapeutic benefits and continue to this day. The survivors who had been children during the war found comfort with one another in the group started in 1990. The older survivors who had retained pre-­war Jewish traditions generally joined a synagogue. Whether for religious, traditional, or social purposes, they went there and found community. Strong bonds were forged and friendships developed. Without family, they needed one another. It was not so for children who arrived and were assigned to foster homes. Few had developed a strong Jewish identity. In fact, the majority had survived in hiding with Christians, as Christians. The Child Survivor group of Vancouver numbers about forty individuals, meets monthly, and several attend the annual gatherings of the World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Descendants (WFJCSHD) held in such places as New York, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Houston, Toronto, Montreal, Warsaw, Prague, Jerusalem, and Amsterdam, even Berlin. The 500 to 600 participants include a stalwart group of committed regulars, including the organisers and workshop leaders, and attract the child survivors residing within the community hosting the event. The format promotes “healing,” opening with a welcoming Shabbat dinner. Saturday morning’s keynote lecture addresses themes that concern child survivors, followed by workshops facilitated by experienced therapists drawn from psychiatry, psychology, and social work. Most workshops are designated for child survivors only, others for their children and/­or spouses. There is no recording. Participants are free to speak, and most do. For many it is the first such opportunity in the presence of listeners who truly understand. “Like all the first timers I  spoke with, we were so sorry we hadn’t had this experience sooner. Being with and hearing stories from all the generations, hearing and feeling how our experiences were understood and shared, and seeing what our responsibilities for the future were, was just huge” (Perl, 2017, p. 2). The workshops continue for three days. The atmosphere is one of camaraderie and reunions, stories of rescue and gratitude as well as the darker side of survival, those who had suffered abuse and lived in chronic fear of their “saviours.” It is a shared opportunity to examine consequences of survival, and, through sharing, realise that one is neither alone nor that the preoccupations are

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as strange as they had seemed. Those preoccupations are reflected in a sampling of workshop titles: Fear of Abandonment. Who am I, Christian or Jew? Guilt and Loneliness of Surviving. Lost Childhood. Holocaust Trauma and Fear of Relationships. Still Hiding After All These Years. Hiding and the Problem of Identity in Our Current Families. Over the years workshop themes have evolved to include issues of abuse, health consequences, aging, and effects on succeeding generations. The process of healing through participation in a child survivor group revealed an interesting dynamic. Childhood was relived. In my group I  thought myself simply a member. That seemed true for years and then I  noticed much anger directed towards me. As the founding president of the VHEC, I had become viewed as an authoritarian father-­like figure who controlled rather than enabled the child survivor group. If I missed a meeting, it was taken as a personal affront. If I  was present, I was subjected to hostile questions. It was a rebellion! It was adolescence! It was individuation! Not so easy to spot or deal with when the adolescent is fifty-­five years old. Sarah Moskovitz anticipated developmental issues and organised a bat mitzvah for seven of her “girls” who had no such ceremony because of the war. The ceremony allowed several dozens in the congregation to experience “growing up by proxy” simply by attending that celebration. In effect, childhood and adolescence were recaptured in these adults deprived of a normal childhood. They experienced a second chance. Child survivors, without Jewish education and without personal experience of the death of a family member in the post-­war years (most or all family had already been killed), were unfamiliar with Jewish rituals. They did not know how to recite the Kaddish. Learning to say that prayer for a father and mother lost in the Holocaust and doing so publicly in the presence of community provided another healthy step in their re-­visited emotional development. A productive source for learning about coping skills that have aided the child survivor to overcome adversities related to the Shoah can be found in descriptions of strength and judgment in personal recollections. Three examples from the Los Angeles Survivors Group are offered (ibid.; Kaufman, 2011, 2016). Eva Chava Brettler (born in 1936), during one of many escapes, tore away from her father to run home to her mother. Her father, who survived, shared this story as tribute to Eva’s resourcefulness and her self-­ reliance. She always found someone to protect and help her, even in Ravensbrück and Bergen-­Belsen. At eight and a half years of age, she describes herself as “hardened and very defiant” and in 1946 as “feisty and self-­ sufficient.” Her widowed father had remarried and his new wife’s family in Los Angeles took her in. Eva studied psychology at UCLA and became a social worker with

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Jewish Family Services. She and her survivor-­husband raised four children and have nine grandchildren. Eva remained religious. Marianne Trompetter Dazzo, born in Holland in 1935, narrowly escaped a raid in 1942. Later she was taken with her mother and little sister Sylvia to the Schouwburg, a Jewish theatre converted to a collection place for Amsterdam’s Jews. A  crèche across the street sheltered children. Sylvia, aged two, was spirited to South Holland but Marianne was in hospital with scarlet fever. She heard that the Germans were coming to empty the hospital. Marianne at age seven, left the building all alone. Everyone else was deported. She states: “I  think that I  was a brave little girl to escape from the hospital on my own.” Miraculously, her father survived Auschwitz and the family of four reunited. They left for America in 1949, her father insisting they never speak of the war again. “Forget the past. No war. No memories, like amnesia.” She described herself as “filled with rage and grief.” It was not until 1991, at the first Hidden Child Conference in New York, that she found “others like me, hidden children. It was a weekend of healing and new beginnings.” Jack Lewin was born in 1927 in Poland. At age twelve and a half, he saw his grandfather cry, humiliated by German thugs in Łódź. The family was moved into the Łódź Ghetto. His dad volunteered to work in Poznań and disappeared forever. In the summer of 1944, Jack and his mother were transported to Auschwitz-­Birkenau. In a selection conducted by Dr. Mengele “My mother was sent to the other side.” Jack was sent to the gypsy camp in a barrack with over a 1,000 youths of similar age. He had endured beatings and a death march prior to liberation. Married at age twenty in Brussels (May  1947), he and his wife emigrated to Australia in 1950 where, besides work, he participated in a Yiddish amateur theatre group. Eventually moving to Los Angeles in 1965, he remained active in the Yiddish Culture Club of Los Angeles and joined as a speaker for the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance to relate his life experiences in teaching students.

Discussion I am reasonably certain that survivors were done a great disservice in the first few decades after liberation. They were viewed as flawed, sometimes assumed to be psychopaths (after all, who else could survive but those without conscience). There was an inversion of reality with the focus on the victims and what they did or did not do, rather than on the perpetrators. My long-­time friend Rudolf Vrba – who was one of only five prisoners to escape Auschwitz and who, with his friend Alfréd Wetzler, wrote the Vrba-­Wetzler report (the Auschwitz protocols) that warned Hungarian Jews of imminent

deportation – taught me about perpetrators. “Robert,” he said one day, “Everything was permissible.” Think about that, a universe where for the perpetrators everything was permissible and for the victims, nothing. The attempts to describe the atrocities committed reveal the paucity of language. The human need outside the death camps to see the Holocaust as some kind of continuum in the spiritual (if not the physical) history of man repeatedly stumbles over the limits of language. An entire vocabulary which for generations furnished a sanctuary for motive and character, no matter how terrible the external details, has been corrupted by the facts of this event. (Langer, 1982, p. 84) Psychiatry failed to adapt the concepts and constructs that were left irrelevant by the experiences of Holocaust survivors in conditions that were determined by the persecutors to lead to only one outcome – death. Health professionals were faced with people who had survived a world so bizarre that their liberation could not offer a return to normalcy and where an attempt to be normal was infused by the overwhelming experience with atrocity. Even we children who were in hiding experienced a convoluted and fearful childhood and realised subsequently that we were not normal despite our attempts to look normal. The biases prevailed until psychiatrists, sometimes themselves survivors, forced a reevaluation. A  more rational approach to the unrelenting traumatic consequences of massive psychic trauma was evident in the early work of two child Holocaust survivors who became psychiatrists, Emmanuel Tanay and Dori Laub (Tanay, 1968; Laub & Auerhahn, 1993). Anna Ornstein, herself an Auschwitz survivor, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst, describes “the evolution of the survivor syndrome as a credible ‘diagnosis’ for conditions that simply did not look like other diagnostic categories” but she reminds the reader that it is not itself a disease. And she recognises that “our insights into psychopathology, pathogenesis, and symptom formation by far exceed a more problematic area, namely, our failure to understand how recovery – in and outside of the therapeutic situation – may occur” (Ornstein, 1985, p. 104). In the mid-­eighties there was a change in the persistently negative psychological view of the survivor. And like other major Jewish milestones, it required the biblical forty years. While it is possible to understand that the older survivors suffered more intensely due to their cognitive awareness, their efforts to rebuild were enhanced by their recollections. Children had no model to follow

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and they were considered to have suffered less on the presumed absence of memories. This turned out to be wrong. Children have plenty of memories borne of severe trauma; however, these memories are mere fragments and seldom sequential. Sometimes they do lack the memories that could serve as building blocks for a new life (Krell, 2007). As a consequence, child Holocaust survivors faced a series of obstacles different from those encountered by adult survivors. A number of child Holocaust survivors struggled with the meaning of it all: Yaffa Eliach, Dori Laub, Peter Suedfeld, Robert Melson, Nechama Tec, and Samuel Oliner, a sociology professor and himself a child survivor from Poland who examined in a massive study entitled The Altruistic Personality the characteristics of persons who rescued Jews at risk to their lives (Oliner, 1988). These various explorations reflect not only a need to understand personal survival but also the need to contribute knowledge based on experience and research. This work informs all who attempt to provide care to victims of contemporary genocides and to recognise helpful concepts such as resilience and post-­traumatic growth. Studies on growth borne of trauma, despite massive trauma’s dispiriting consequences, are pointing the way to meaningful therapeutic approaches (Brom, Pat-­Horenczyk,  & Ford, 2009). Our contemporary knowledge of the consequences of trauma rests on the shoulders of pioneers: psychiatrists who devoted a lifetime to the pursuit of knowledge in this complex field (Keilson, 1992; Kestenberg & Brenner, 1996). The survivors somehow managed to remain faithful to memory and have inspired the building of memorials, the creation of meaningful centres of Holocaust education, drawing lessons from their experiences as a warning to future generations, engaging in research and writing to further knowledge about the Shoah, preparing a generation of new teachers, including those drawn from the Second Generation, who are themselves living proof of a resilience that defies the vast majority of dire predictions of their vulnerability. Vulnerable, yes. Yet the majority have succeeded to live life as survivors, not victims.

References Books Bluglass, K. (2003). Hidden from the Holocaust: Stories of resilient children who survived and thrived. West Port: Praeger. Brom, D., Pat-­Horenczyk, R.,  & Ford, J. (Eds.) (2009). Treating traumatized children: Risk, resilience and recovery. London: Routledge. Child Survivors Association of Great Britain. (2011). We remember: Child survivors of the Holocaust speak. Leister: Matador.

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Dwork, D. (1991). Children with a star. New Haven: Yale University Press. Eliach, Y. (1998). There once was a world: A 900-­year chronicle of the Shtetl of Eishyshok. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Epstein, H. (1979 vs 1988 in your book 574). Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with sons and daughters of survivors. New York: Penguin. Friedlander, S. (1978). When memory comes. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Friedlander, S. (1997). Nazi Germany and the years of persecution: Volume 1: 1933–­1939. New York: Harper Collins. Friedlander, S. (2007). The years of extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews 1933–­1945. New York: Harper Collins. Friedlander, S. (2016). Where memory leads: My life. New York: Other Press. Glassner, M., & Krell, R. (Eds.) (2006). And life is changed forever: Holocaust childhoods remembered. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Helmreich, W. (1992). Against all odds: Holocaust survivors and the successful lives they made in America. New York: Simon & Schuster. Hemmendinger, J.,  & Krell, R. (2000). The children of Buchenwald: Child survivors of the Holocaust and their postwar lives. Jerusalem: Gefen. Hoffman, E. (1989). Lost in translation: A life in a new language. New York: Penguin. Hoffman, E. (2004). After such knowledge: Where memory of the Holocaust ends and history begins. New York: Public Affairs. Kahn, L. (2004). No time to mourn: The true story of a Jewish Partisan fighter. Vancouver: Ronsdale Press. Kaufman, M. (2011, 2016). How we survived: 52 personal stories by child survivors of the Holocaust Los Angeles. Los Angeles: Child Survivors of the Holocaust Los Angeles and Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust. Keilson, H. (1992). Sequential traumatisation in children. A clinical and statistical follow-­up study on the fate of the Jewish war orphans in the Netherlands. Jerusalem: The Magnes Press. Kestenberg, J., & Brenner, I. (1996). The last witness: The child survivor of the Holocaust. New York: American Psychiatric Press. Krell, R. (2007). Child Holocaust survivors: Memories and reflections (2nd ed.). Victoria: Trafford. Krell, R. (2016). Memoiries: Sounds from silence. Vancouver: Behind the Book. Kuper, J. (1967). A child of the Holocaust. Toronto: Key Porter. Kuper, J. (1994). After the smoke cleared. Toronto: Stoddart. Lagnado, L. M., & Dekel, S. C. (1991). Children of the flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the untold story of the twins at Auschwitz. New York: Penguin. Langer, L. (1982). Versions of survival: The Holocaust and the human spirit (p.  84). Albany: State University of New York Press. Lindeman, Y. (2007). Shards of memory: Narratives of Holocaust survival. West Port: Praeger. Marks, J. (1993). The hidden children: The secret survivors of the Holocaust. New York: Fawcett Columbine. Melson, R. (1992). Revolution and genocide: On the origins of the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Melson, R. (2000). False papers: Deception and survival. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Moskovitz, S. (1983). Love despite hate: Child survivors of the Holocaust and their adult lives. New York: Schocken. Oliner, S. (1988). The Altruistic personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe. New York: Free Press.

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Slyomovics, S. (2014). How to accept German reparations. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Staub, E. (1989). The roots of evil: The origins of genocide and other group violence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stein, A. (1993). Hidden children: Forgotten survivors of the Holocaust. New York: Penguin. Suedfeld, P. (Ed.) (2001). Light from the ashes: Social science careers of young Holocaust refugees and survivors. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Tec, N. (1984). Dry Tears: The story of a lost childhood. New York: Oxford. Tec, N. (1986). When light pierced the darkness: Christian rescue of Jews in Nazi-­occupied Poland. New York: Oxford. Tec, N. (1993). Defiance: The Bielski Partisans. New York: Oxford. Valent, P. (1993). Child survivors: Adults living with childhood trauma. Port Melbourne: William Heinemann Australia a Part of Reed Books.

Book chapters Glassner, M.,  & Krell, R. (Eds.) (2006). Child survivors of the Holocaust: The elderly children and their adult lives. In And life is changed forever: Holocaust childhoods remembered (pp. 1–­11) Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Krell, R. (1989). Alternative therapeutic approaches to Holocaust survivors. In P. Marcus & A. Rosenberg (Eds.), Healing their wounds: Psychotherapy with Holocaust survivors and their families (pp. 215–­226). New York: Praeger. Krell, R. (1996). Hiding during and after the war: The fate of children who survived the Holocaust. In H. G. Locke & M. S. Littell (Eds.), Holocaust and church struggle: Religion, power and the politics of resistance, studies in the Shoah. Vol. XVI (pp. 279–­ 284). New York, London: University Press of America. Krell, R. (1997). Survivors and their families: Psychiatric consequences of the Holocaust. In R. Krell & M. Sherman (Eds.), Medical and psychological effects of concentration camps on Holocaust survivors, Volume 4 (Genocide: A critical bibliographic review) (pp. 23–­31). NJ: Transaction. Moskovitz, S., Krell, R., Moskovitz, I., & Askren, A. (2001). The struggle for justice: A  survey of child Holocaust survivor’s experiences with restitution. In J. K. Roth  & E. Maxwell (Eds.), Remembering for the future: The Holocaust in an age of genocide (pp. 923–­937). New York: Palgrave. Tanay, E. (1968). Initiation of psychotherapy with survivors of Nazi persecutions. In H. Krystal (Ed.), Massive psychic trauma (pp. 219–­233). New York: International Universities Press.

Periodicals Eaton, W. (1982). Impairment in Holocaust survivors after 33 years: Data from an unbiased community sample. American Journal of Psychiatry, 139(6), 737–­777.

Eissler, K. R. (1967). Perverted psychiatry? American Journal of Psychiatry, 123(11), 1352–­1358. Felsen, I. (2016). Encounters with chronic psychiatric Holocaust survivors: Trauma, psychosis and functionality. Kavod, (6), 1–­36. Krell, R. (1979). Holocaust families: Survivors and their children. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 20, 560–­568. Krell, R. (1984). Holocaust survivors and their children: Comments on psychiatric consequences and psychiatric terminology. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 265, 521–­528. Krell, R. (2001, Summer). Jewish child survivors as displaced persons. The Hidden Child. Newsletter published by Hidden Children Foundation ADL. Vol. X. No.1 4, 10, 19. Krell, R. (2007). Elderly children as grown-­ups: Child survivors of the Holocaust. Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 5(1), 13–­21. Laub, D., & Auerhahn, N. C. (1993). Knowing and not knowing massive psychic trauma: Forms of traumatic memory. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 74(2), 287–­302. Leon, G., Butcher, J, Kleinman, M, Goldberg, A., & Almagor, M. (1981). Survivors of the Holocaust and their children: Current status and adjustment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 41(3), 503–­516. Moskovitz, S., & Krell, R. (1990). Child survivors of the Holocaust: Psychological adaptations to survival. Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related Sciences, 27, 81–­91. Ornstein, A. (1985). Survival and recovery. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 5(1), 104. Perl, E. (2017). World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Descendents-­28th Conference, Woodland Hills, CA, November  4–­7, 2016. In Newsletter Child Survivors of the Holocaust, Los Angeles 2017, 2. Robinson, S., & Hemmendinger, J. (1982). Psychosocial adjustment 30 years later of people who were in Nazi concentration camps as children. In C. D. Spielberger, I. G. Sarason, & N. Milgram (Eds.), Stress and anxiety (Vol. 8, pp. 397–­399). Washington, DC: Hemisphere. Rotenberg, L. (1985). A  child survivor/­psychiatrist’s personal adaptation. Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, 24(4), 385–­389. Suedfeld, P., Krell, R., Wiebe, R. E., & Steel, G. D. (1997). Coping strategies in the narratives of Holocaust survivors. Anxiety, Stress and Coping, 10, 153–­179.

Films/­audio-­visual Kuper, J. (1991). A day in the Warsaw Ghetto: A birthday trip in Hell. Documentary. Producer. Kuper Productions Ltd. Filmakers Library Inc. Released in 1993 by Filmakers Library. 30 minutes, New York. Kuper, J. (2000). Children of the storm (Video-­recording) Kuper Productions Ltd. In association with Vision TV. Toronto. 98:15 min. Wiesel, E. (1982). Lecture. Cedars Sinai Hospital, Preserved on audio-­visual tape.

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6 Vagaries of memory Marion M. Oliner

Prologue 2017 At the time I  accepted Dr. Ira Brenner’s invitation to contribute to this book, I chose a 2009 essay written in German addressing the members of the German Psychoanalytic Society on the occasion of a meeting dedicated to “External and Internal Reality”. Both at the time when I wrote the essay and at the time I accepted to publish it in English, my intention was to warn against overestimating the function of remembering. Therefore, I  gave the original title as “Don’t Turn Around Mrs. Lot” (Oliner, 2011). The essay assumed that at this late date, 2009, the audience and I were facing similar but not identical problems. The catastrophe of World War II and the German attempt at genocide was the event which memory had to assimilate. The differences were of course that I  had experienced it personally, and for the audience it was the history of their families as possible perpetrators. While I  expressed my misgivings about calling it nevertheless a shared catastrophe, I  assumed that the audience was also negatively affected by this heritage. My focus was on factors affecting the assimilation of the historic catastrophe, the Zivilisationsbruch (rupture in civilisation). Consequently, I  assumed that we shared the concern for remembering this history. Our motives for wanting to forget this history may have differed, but they were powerful, while at the same time recognising the need to remember. In the case of the victim as well as the perpetrator, the need to forget was based on the danger inherent in remembering a catastrophe of such dimensions that it could threaten the vitality of the individual who is implicated in this history. Hence, I appealed to the analogy to Lot’s wife who was warned against turning into a pillar of salt. Mental hygiene requires it.

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It never occurred to me that by the time I  started the translation of the article in late 2016 that I  had changed. I  can no longer feel the benevolence toward Germany that I expressed then. Since this change is not logically compelling, I  have to consider the negativity one of the vagaries of memory and therefore gave this chapter, which contains both the old and the new, this title: The Vagaries of Memory. In 2009 I felt secure in calling the Nazi period history. Since then the results of the election of 2016 in the United States have revived the strong emotions evoked by the memory of the past and the security derived from its being history has been seriously shaken. The present and the past and the similarity between the Trump’s devastating picture of this country that he will make it great again was reminiscent of Hitler’s promise of Deutschland über Alles. That the conflation of the two events made sense cannot be disputed but that it too was based on my forgetting a more recent event only came to me in the course of writing this chapter. The shock I am experiencing has reverberated beyond the borders of the United States. It is illustrated by the reaction of the Mayor of Andernach, my birthplace, who said in January, 2017, that last year he was questioning how much longer Germany needed to observe the day of the liberation of Auschwitz whereas now he does not doubt that it must be remembered and act as a warning.

Before Trump After 11 September  2001, I  was essentially confident that the United States government would and could protect its citizens. This mood is described in my article:

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“The Root of War is Fear; The Rest is History” (Oliner, 2016a, pp. 167–­188, Oliner 2016b, pp 107–­122.) where I compared my reaction to the invasion of Belgium with the attack on the World Trade Center. When the Germans invaded Belgium on 10 May 1940, the Belgians regained their command of the German language to trade with the occupying force and we were in danger. This is when the war started for me. The full impact of that realisation was brought back to me on 11 September 2001. The weather that day reminded me of the invasion of Belgium in 1940. As I saw the cloudless sky in New York on TV and the horror that was unfolding on the tip of Manhattan, I said to myself: “Not twice in one lifetime”. I  worked hard to establish the difference: “Now I am a citizen of a strong country that will defend me; then I  was a refugee”. Does this reflection in 2001 mean that in 1940 I knew how defenceless we actually were? Did I react then to the anxiety my parents felt or did I invent the contrast as an adult in order to fight against the terror caused by the similarity? September 11 was not traumatising whereas 10 May 1940 was. I based the difference in feeling on the capacity of the United States to defend itself and therefore protect me. This ability to differentiate between the horrifying past and the stable present and to be reassured by the power of the United States to defend “our country” failed me when shortly after 11 September we had dinner with a couple who also had survived the war in Europe. Every table in the restaurant was decorated with little American flags and the waiters wore neckties made of the Stars and Stripes. I was stunned by the atmosphere that greeted me. It reminded me of how Nazi Germany displayed its power. Upset, I requested that the flag on our table be removed. The other woman reacting to my request with self-­righteous indignation declared: “I love this country”. She had set herself up as a patriot and in so doing implied I was not. My objection to the display of flags was for her a short step to my not loving the United States. This leap is typical of the emotionally charged, self-­glorifying partiality that according to Freud (Freud, 1915) characterises thinking during war. Both the woman and I had experienced the vulnerability of Jewish children during the war: she in Poland, and I in Germany and the occupied countries. Based on our childhoods, we had reason to be afraid, but she distanced herself by disparaging me. In her mind the proper love for the United States included what I  regarded as a worrisome sign leading to possible excesses. Instead of the two of us identifying with each other around the experience we shared, she accused me of being disloyal to the country that would protect us. My horror at the sight of the flags may have been exaggerated, but the similarity between then and now was not an illusion. It was based on factors that the past and the present had in common. I had reason to fear the response of the United States to the 9/­11 attack because

it was evident before the attack that upon his election in 2000 President Bush took positions contrary to those of his father, President George H. W. Bush. The latter had insisted on keeping the Gulf War limited to the goal set by a coalition: driving the Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. The people now in power had argued for an extended war in Iraq leading to the fall of Saddam Hussein. The attack on the World Trade Towers gave this group the pretext it needed to start the war they had clearly wanted. At issue was revenge and a show of strength. This led to my memories of the past becoming fused with my fears of a future war aimed at undoing the supposed “weakness” the country had shown by ending the Gulf War when it did. Obama had made clear that he considered the invasion of Iraq “stupid” so that his election dispelled the fears that this war might escalate further. Eight years later Trump’s candidacy appeared so outrageous that the episode with the flags and the threat I felt at that time seemed like a forgotten dream. When New York woke up to the victory of the most bigoted elements in this country, we were not prepared: Daniel Blum’s (Blum) article “America, Fascism and the Failure of Imagination” defined well the reason for our confidence. The danger was too great for me to entertain a Trump presidency even in fantasy as I had been able to anticipate that Bush would invade Iraq. Gone now is the comforting conviction that we are protected by the safeguards in the Constitution of the United States, and the belief that events similar to those that took place in Germany cannot happen again has been shattered. Emotionally I am back in the past. My experience of being transposed into history revives the insecurity which had at times receded into the background when I trusted the government (never totally, I  was always aware that officials can get carried away by their power). Soon after the end of the war I  knew that the Germans could not confront the debt they incurred toward the victims and resolved to accept this for the sake of my own sanity and avoided Germany until 1996. I put my energies into a new life, determined that I would never again let a German deny me any request. My attitude during most of my adult life has been aimed at remembering only as much as would not destroy my capacity to lead a “normal” life. It turned out to be an illusion: the damage required years of analysis and – as can be seen – quickly can almost overwhelm my attempts to maintain hope in the face of great adversity. It is of course neither possible nor desirable to forget history, but my attempt then to put it behind me was at least partially successful in as much as I have a small loving family and a satisfying profession. As is also evident, life was always limited by the shadow of the past. Yet the intention of this work was and remains to dispel the notion that enthrones remembering as an unquestioned virtue. As in all psychic phenomena,

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memory can be used and it can be abused, as it does by those individuals, groups, or countries that cultivate their having suffered humiliation as a legitimate cause for lifelong resentment and vengefulness. This kind of Nachträglichkeit is not inevitable. According to Avishai Margalit, professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as cited by Jonathan Lear, humiliation is a moral emotion. About which he wrote the following: By moral emotions I  mean emotions that motivate our ethical or moral conduct. The idea is that moral emotions motivate our moral behavior not just, and not even predominantly, through the way emotions are experienced but through the way they are remembered.  .  .  . The memory of humiliation is the bleeding scar of reliving it  .  .  . Humiliation, I believe, is not just another experience in our life, like say, an embarrassment. It is a formative experience. It forms the way we view ourselves as humiliated persons. Forgiveness does not require forgetting the wrong done, but it does require getting beyond certain moral emotions, like humiliation and resentment, associated with it. .  .  . it is a case of overcoming resentment and vengefulness, of mastering anger and humiliation. Such overcoming is a result of a long effort rather than a decision to do something on the spot. It is a duty we have to ourselves. (Margalit, 2004, p. 109) Our fate was such that to refuse the attempt to put it behind us was self-­destructive, especially since it took years for the Germans to turn a more generous eye on our fate. The title of the paper was “Don’t Turn Around Mrs. Lot”, referring to the admonition against the petrifying effect of living in the past. Without a doubt this applies also to victims who judge themselves and others about the way they dealt with their fate. It took me years to return to Germany, but once I returned to the little town in which I was born, being careful not to be alone at airports or other places of transit, I felt validated as a person. I realised that coming from a family that had lived in Germany for centuries, the culture was passed down to me and was part of me. The paper I wrote in 2009 comes from a time when I did not experience my life as determined by the tragedy that befell me and recognised the need for victims and perpetrators to refrain from falling prey to stultification.

Don’t turn around Mrs. Lot (2009) Introduction: our common catastrophe I was somewhat hesitant to confront the task which accompanied your invitation to speak to you about your

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psychic and external reality despite my clear resolve to do so and to emphasise that the audience and I  have a common problem: the need to remember the Holocaust. It is not easy to recognise that the Nazi era and its crimes are a catastrophe for you as well as for me and that this may be reason you invited me to speak here today. My being here today implies that you expect me to understand your conflicts and to support you in the belief that every one of us needs defences in order to deal with this catastrophe. My hesitation is based on the conviction that even though the events influenced our history, my reference to a shared historic event should in no way overlook the difference between those of us who were victims and those who are the descendants of the aggressors. In the background the treatment of this problem lurks the danger of betraying the victims – including my own family. Despite those misgivings, I intend to speak about the defence mechanisms all of us need. I shall speak about a partial blindness necessary in order to clarify that this was a legitimate reaction for your Society in the interest of its survival. My hesitation rests on apprehension that my talk will be understood as an excuse for genocide. I hope that you do not take my talk to mean that because it is truly impossible and, even if it were, this is not my aim. I shall try to help you to forgive yourself, in case you need this help, but I am compelled to maintain my identification with the victims in order to deal with my own survivor guilt. As clinicians we must think realistically, even if this evokes scruples and on an emotional level constitutes an untenable attitude. I want to elaborate on this immediately so that my reticence regarding my intention is clarified. The history of the Nazi era in Germany was a catastrophe for all those whom it touched: this is what the link is between us. The difference lies in the discrepancy between the generations and between perpetrators and victims. To be sure, this distinction is very important emotionally and leads to the scruples, to which I  keep referring, but the difference cannot obscure the fact that everyone attempts to make sense of a catastrophe. I hope to do it in a way that leads to greater understanding and that it will enable to you to look at the history which we share and which divides us in a new way. My comment on this paragraph: it was an expression of what I experienced during my earlier visits to Germany. The reception through many visits was considerate, showing the awareness that for a Jew a trip to Germany was never an unquestioned event. The colleagues I met appeared to be aware of my problems. They were part of those who studied seriously the Nazi phenomenon and later the events in East Germany. They welcomed my contributions and published them in books or in Psyche, and during my visits their hospitality was unquestioned. My friend Christian Schneider, a sociologist, thought that the concern for the victims was at times excessive so as to threaten the judgment of well-­ meaning Germans. This concern led me to caution against

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possible stultification as a result of a fixation on historic events. When writing this chapter, I became aware that the election of Trump led to the firm resolve not to return to Germany. I explained this reaction by the resemblance between Trump and Hitler which the Germans would use to exonerate themselves. This did not make complete sense to me, but that issue did not preoccupy me. It is at this point in the manuscript that my self-­deception came to light. Suddenly I remembered that only six months before the election I returned from Germany convinced that I would never return to Germany. I was convinced that what I feared had actually happened but I chose to forget this and projected the events I feared into the future instead of being a painful experience of neglect. The trip in May 2016 was the result of an invitation which was extended in the most undisguised reluctance by the person charged to deliver it. The plan had been for me to discuss the German translation of my book Psychic Reality in Context. But by the time of the actual invitation, the ugliness of the election was in full swing in this country. I am assuming that this played a part in the lack of hospitality that I experienced: the change in the attitude of my German hosts was dramatic; the invitation to the events involving the publication were vague, almost forgotten, partly not confirmed, partly not well planned. It was as if those put in charge felt put-­upon. Two invitations for dinner were forgotten by those who issued them, and one dinner was planned but the hosts forgot to let me know. During the social hour after my talk I had to fill out papers so that I was deprived of the contact with the audience. The dinner I anticipated, because it was routine in the past and mentioned again for this event, was replaced with the question: are you hungry? When upon my return home I had yet to be reimbursed for travel expenses, a friend decided to advance the money. She spared me having to deal with the person in charge. I believe that there is indeed a relationship between the childhood experiences and the current ones which clarify the reason I choose avoiding Germany from now on. What is more mystifying is the reason why I forgot the recent event even though I found my explanation of the past for avoiding Germany not totally convincing. I tend to believe that it is easier to tell oneself that history is catching up with me than to realise that certain painful events had actually taken place in the present. I took the change in their hospitality as a sign of their pleasure and self-­justification: my being part of a country in which racism or genocide is happening now while their government welcomed refugees. They could judge us the way they felt condemned previously. Despite the fact that this essay is travelling through time, having touched on the original time in 2009, the attack on the World Trade Towers in 2001, the invasion of Belgium in 1940, and my experiences in Germany last year which I had forgotten, the focus is on remembering and forgetting, and at this point the reason for my forgetting a specific event should be our subject. But I shall forego the discussion of

psychoanalytic terms until later and simply elaborate now on the resemblance between the timeless memories of Nazi Germany and its devastation and the way Proust describes the scene in which he was put to bed and he lost his mother to her adult world as “no scenery was necessary”; this compares to the experiences I had five months earlier in Germany which led to my resolve then that I would not return to Germany, whose specificity resembled the quality of the famous madeleine that Proust remembered as the key to a lost world back to life. Because it was so vivid and so real it was more threatening and caused the resentment to be more intense. The 2009 paper continues: The shared catastrophe, similar to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, was followed by God’s prohibition against look back at the devastation. He cautioned against calcification and Nachträglichkeit and commanded intentional blindness. Lot’s wife did not obey, looked back, and turned into a pillar of salt. This not being allowed to look quickly becomes not wanting to see. I became aware of this when I  agreed to grant my daughter’s wish to visit Andernach in 1976. Soon after we arrived, I  learnt that a former neighbour insisted on seeing me. I knew who she was: her parents owned the house in which we rented the second floor. Her need puzzled me, even though I  knew that we lived in the same house. However, I  was equally clear that I  had no interest in her, but I  did want to know the reason for this discrepancy in how we felt. She found us in a restaurant and spoke about herself – she suffered greatly during the war – and about her friendship with my mother about which I had no recollection. She liked my mother so much that she gave her daughter the same name as my mother gave me. Still the story left me cold despite the awareness that she was not lying. I  thought that my mother preferred her sister. The mystery surrounding my emotional reaction was lifted when she mentioned her brother. First I was surprised that she had a brother: I could only remember the two girls. Slowly it dawned on me: Martin joined the Hitlerjugend after which the contact between the families came to an end. The woman said that, after that, it became dangerous for them to be renting to Jews, and in 1936 we moved from Andernach to Cologne. My coldness was explained by the fact that each one of us remembered another time. From that day, I resigned myself to the fact that certain truths can only be assimilated partially, when they deal with unspeakable loss and trauma. I did not blame the woman because she knew my mother’s fate, but a friendship between us was impossible and I  never saw her again. It is a trivial example, but it shows the degree to which our emotions can be a guide to the truth which transcends reason and cannot be derailed by facts.

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Events as trauma? Analysts are familiar with the important role emotions play in our being, which is easily apparent when case discussions invariably change from the event to the experience. Even though this tendency is well known, discussions of catastrophes or trauma refer back to the events as if they were the cause for psychic disturbances. In this context Nachträglichkeit emerges as if it were a possession leading to the repetition of an event. It is a bit more complicated when scientists add to this the assumption that the person who reenacts the past does so without being aware of its nature. Even in the more subtle theories of trauma we can encounter explanations based on an event, as if it could continue to live on inside the individual. Jean-­Jacques Blévis, a French analyst, comments on this subject in the context of the survivors of concentration camps (Blévis, 2004, pp. 752–­753): I must admit that I  neither grasp nor share the position of some, among them many psychoanalysts, who object to the very idea that the trauma of survivors should be conceived beyond the concentration camp experience itself. No interpretation, no approach to the survivors’ traumatic destiny, especially if it is psychoanalytically oriented, seems acceptable to them. In the mere fact of envisaging a project like the present one, they see a sort of blasphemy, a repetition of the insult and humiliations, ultimately of the crime already perpetrated. . . . The opposite reasoning nevertheless presses itself upon me with urgency, demanding that we not abandon the life and destiny of these men and women exclusively to the criminal fate inflicted upon them by the Nazis. Similarly, for the rare survivors, it is of considerable importance not to let their traumatic survival be defaced by viewing it solely in the gloomy light of the camps. (Blevis, 2004, pp. 752–­753) The French analysts César and Sára Botella challenge the assumption trauma which stems from Freud: “To conceive of a diagnostic term, traumatic neurosis, in the manner of Freud involves serious [theoretical] problems since it assumes that it functions independently from the unconscious and neurotic conflict” (Botella & Botella, 1992 p. 25). I want to be clear: I  think that the Nazi period was an experience for the German Psychoanalytic Society, whereas for most of you it was a historic event to which you are urged to own up. For me the Nazi era was an experience from which I have learnt for years and today I am no longer reluctant to tell you the lessons I have learnt from this experience. Whatever it is, it does not

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correspond to the professional literature. This made me reluctant for many years to use my experiences on which to base generalisations. Rather I took myself to be the “false accord in the Divine Symphony” as Baudelaire described this state of mind. Today I  believe that the strategies that I used to survive are valid. For many, of course, the degree to which they apply depends on each individual. For children the stage of development at the time of the experience also plays a role. Gradually these convictions crystallized and to this day I remember my strategy to insure a future for myself.

My reaction to the event Close to the end of World War II, our conversations at dinnertime concerned the fate of Germany. The participants in this exchange were members of my foster family who had to assume that most of their relatives perished in German concentration camps. They invented murderous scenes in order to take revenge on the Germans. My scenario was different. My abhorrence for the violence and the cruelty led me to invent another solution which made murder unnecessary. In this picture the earth opened up, like during an earthquake, or like the way certain toilets function, swallowed Germany and buried it. Afterwards the earth moved to cover the hole and France bordered on Poland. There did not even remain a gap to remind us that Germany was missing. It was a peaceful solution although I  was conscious of the cruelty it implied, but to cause something or someone to disappear is a way to settle accounts that is easier to reconcile with a humanitarian approach than blood and murder. The solution resembled an act of God and God, especially the Christian one, is not cruel. In this scenario, I am the judge who pronounced the sentence. As you know, I had little success in realising this wishful fantasy in the real world but I did not remain with it being unrealisable. I did what many helpless individuals do in order to fulfil their wishes at least partially: I did it autoplastically. This autoplastic change that makes such catastrophes tolerable and insures survival is the theme of my presentation. At that time I  was a fifteen-­year-­old adolescent. I  knew that I  could not assimilate my past without drowning or turning into a pillar of salt. As many survivors I too strove forward. This strategy, as far as I assess the Anglo-­Saxon literature on the subject, is labeled dissociation whereas the French, for example, André Green (Green, 1998), tend to call it negative hallucination, thereby remaining with concepts closer to Freud’s formulations. My preference for this formulation is not based on orthodoxy, which you have a right to fear, but I consider it a better way to explain trauma and its aftermath than the more current ones. This way of thinking does not exclude will, one’s own or the command of a

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hypnotist. For me it resulted in not-­seeing, not-­looking which served me for many years until I could afford to face the massive losses I had sustained. I do not have to tell analysts how much of life gets lost in the process. I have spent my life working on assimilating my experiences and that of the people close to me. It was never entirely feasible. Only late in life did I realise that I had to guard not only against hatred and resentment but also against the ties between me and the land of murderers. I am being blunt, because only that can explain my total detachment from Germany until late in life. Previously I  attributed my coping strategy which presupposes a contact with external reality which does not involve the pleasure principle to the instinct of self-­ preservation. This in turn leads to one’s actions being considered adaptive to the external environment as well as muting the consciousness of oneself and one’s wishes. This approach is attributed to the repetition compulsion, especially by those who believe in the death instinct: the pleasure principle is out of action, replaced by the repetition compulsion, which signifies for the individual that it is dominated by more primitive urges. It concerns thus a regression to a lower level of functioning in which consciousness of oneself is inhibited in the interest of self-­preservation. This is the cause for the unmediated relationship between the individual and external reality. But precisely this unmediated (not led by the pleasure principle) relationship to external reality is based on an illusion that stresses that which is present while simultaneously suppressing the awareness of that which was lost. The French psychoanalysts Braunschweig  & Fain (1981) thought that this is equally applicable to psychoanalytic theory inasmuch as in Freud’s writings there is always something, a tendency he compares with fetishism. In my 1996 article on external reality, I  discussed this danger, but maintained for many years the conviction that the instinct of self-­preservation is still the best concept that explains the posttraumatic relationship to external reality. Much as external reality introduces the idea of loss into minds unwilling to accept it, nevertheless it lends itself to reinforce denial of loss by making it possible to substitute one perception for the other that is missing. Freud discovered this to be an important component for fetishism, in which the existence of the substitute relieves castration anxiety, just as the screen memory takes the place of another, more troubling one. Here actual perceptions are used to hide conflicted, denied, or affect-­laden material, and their reality, their existence on the outside, reinforces defences in a way that mere fantasy is powerless to do. This has been amply discussed in the literature, and it is relevant in the present context because the reinforcing quality of perception yields the conviction of something being really there.

The theory is good, but it does not prevent something else from existing The idea of survivors being subject to the instinct of self-­ preservation consistently would imply that victims of catastrophes are devoid of an inner life, like the German Wirtschaftswunder which was built without mourning because they had to cover over the void; similarly the Jews who founded the State of Israel aimed at obliterating the image of the Jew as victim. It is a calculated self-­image built on massive denial of the losses both suffered. We know it was historically necessary precisely because of the enormity of the suffering and losses, but the only lesson that can be learnt is that these defences were necessary. This view must be kept for the survival of extreme trauma but is a disservice to those who need to understand the full scope of possible reactions to misfortunes. Were this not true, it would be difficult to distinguish between the constructive denial necessary for survival and psychosis which is based on the denial of loss followed by a serious break with aspects of external reality. The additional difficulty in the most prevalent ways of thinking about trauma is related to the need for repetition. Repetition of events suggests the imperfect nature of denial. Some part of the painful past is repeated – is part of the psyche – but it is not generally attributed to the synthetic function of mind. The repetition compulsion as it is conceived as a manifestation of the death instinct is defined as involuntary cause and is determined by events that mandate the suspension of the pleasure principle. It is unmotivated. Ultimately this quasi-­biological way of thinking creates a widening distance from psychically determined motivation, implying an ever-­widening gulf over analytically determined thinking. Individuals who were traumatised thus occupy a category of patients different from the rest of humanity because their suffering is attributed to historic events that explain their fate. When I  examine the scenes attributed to the repetition compulsion, they appear more self-­centred than event-­centred, or better yet, the events do not take place without a subject. The conviction of the absence of a subject in the repetition disturbs me because it is based on the assumption that victims carry their trauma inside without knowing it. I consider the assumption illogical that something is being repeated, thus living somewhere in the individual, that could not be experienced in some part of the individual. This dissatisfaction has preoccupied me for many years and now I believe that the insight into the insufficiency of these theories lends itself to pay attention into more fertile ground where we can examine the suppressed inner life and learn from it in order to take a distance from the purely biological conception of a repetition compulsion using Loewald’s

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notion of reproductive activity which gives meaning to an experience (Oliner, 2013, p. 153).

The suppressed inner life What was lost – corresponding to the confusion between the result and its cause – is the recognition in Freud’s earliest work of a second path to the outside world which explains repetition better than calling it a miscarriage of the defences against memory. I  realised that the dream work attempts to integrate outer reality – the experiences of the day before the dream – with the inner world of the dreamer. Nighttime, the unconscious, and all that the traumatised individuals could not integrate during the day are part of the psychic processes that are experienced during sleep. Eventually the catastrophe that has to be assimilated can become part of the “day’s residue”. As has been shown in the first part of this paper, the experience of massive losses like those following the Holocaust can hardly ever be rendered harmless. While survivors may have willed themselves to concentrate exclusively on the external world by suppressing their own being with its wishes and unconscious dreams, at night these come to the fore and are sometimes remembered as dreams. The capacity to sleep is therefore essential for the working through of experience. It constitutes a delicate equilibrium which succeeds only when all factors work in some kind of harmony. Here those dreams that have sensory qualities are privileged. Previously I mentioned how Proust compared the lack of specificity in certain memories with the richness inherent in memories like the taste of a madeleine. They are the result of a special aspect of the dream work that Freud described as concern for sensory qualities. As an example of a disturbance in the process, I remember only one dream from the worst time of my life when I had to deal with being without my parents and not knowing where they were. I dreamed that they returned and we were in India on an elephant in some kind of parade. Instead of experiencing joy or triumph I  had to devote all my attention to keep myself from slipping off the elephant. I do not know if I remembered more dreams at the time but this one was unforgettable and clearly depicted the realm of uncertainty between wish fulfillment and the acceptance of the loss. This dream had the specificity of a drama which may have contributed to my remembering it. The images that make up the remembered dream attempt to find the similar satisfactions in the outside world; however, since it concerns dream-­like wishes, the identity of perception does not lead to gratification. This is how it has to be in order to discriminate between inner life and material reality. This search confronts everyone with the chasm that lies between dream

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images and whatever can be obtained in the external world. It concerns absence. In normal development the absence can be assuaged through the process of the imagination; however, in case the loss is too radical to be elaborated in the psyche the relationship between the inside and outside differs. In some cases important elements remain fixated in the search that does not even know what it concerns. These are, I believe, the concrete patients who cling to sensory elements. Of importance is that the object of the search can be figured in order to be found if only in dreams that can be remembered. Formulated in this way the repetition compulsion in those who have been traumatised can be viewed as the result of a normal development which remains stuck or regresses to a stage in which the search for the lost object cannot be replaced by a representation. It is important to remember that the search is initiated by a loss and that trauma consists of the victim’s inability to figure the loss. This theory shows, I  believe, the importance of repetition for the maintenance of rationality, which is dependent on its relation to reality. The object of the search is an object or event in history in the external world that attests to the fact of its existence; in other words, it was neither invented nor dreamed. The danger for those who have suffered massive losses is the lack of confirmation. Fairy tales start with “once upon a time”, but early on we know that there never was such a time. The worst scenario occurs when individuals experience their own life as if it were invented. This leads time and again to the need to confirm and externalise it by means of enactments. When I  think about my own life, I  remember the great relief derived from the confirmation that this or that had really happened. However, it took many years before I – like all survivors – could speak of my experiences. Upon my first visit to Andernach where I  was born, the Rhine and the vineyards on the other side of the river were very important to me. They confirmed my childhood from which nothing else remained. Naturally, the question poses itself of how the two aspirations work together for those individuals who cannot look back. How does striving to suppress the inner world – including those representations that confirm the loss work with –­the need to acknowledge the losses as a precondition for the life of the psyche? It appears as if negative hallucination could successfully establish the destruction of everything that could be reminiscent of the losses and to regard the substitute as the return of the desired satisfaction. This is how it appears, but it is likely that we are describing the result of an “enabling fantasy” according to Gottlieb’s study of multiple personality (Gottlieb, 1997), pp.  912–­ 913. These fantasies illustrate Winnicott’s belief that there is no trauma without omnipotence (Winnicott, 1960, p. 586). It relies on a self-­deception: if the individual is not psychotic and therefore the distinction

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between inside and outside is not totally collapsed, there remains an awareness of the loss suffered. The search for scenes embodying wishful thinking continues through life in dreams and fantasies without necessarily endangering the distinction between inside and outside. This perspective appears to conform to human nature without evoking an innate repetition compulsion. Instead it stresses the need to externalise the inner world. The danger persists for everyone to assume that their fantasies portray the world as it is. In the perspective that I prefer, the repetition is motivated by the need to confirm reality and to be assured that the inner world is not invented. To the contrary, the properties of external reality are of utmost importance for the confirmation as well as the experience that what is found exists without being identical with the wished-­for image. I think that this view has recently been neglected – the explanation for the close relationship between mankind and the physical reality of the external world on which we all depend. One of my patients alerted me to the threat inherent in a reality that he experienced as coming too close to the fulfillment of his wish. It was a presence that appeared to lack the differentiation between inside and outside and was therefore unbearable. The patient was a good-­looking young man who distanced himself markedly from his origins. He wanted to marry an heiress; it was his conscious goal which he seemed to have achieved when he formed a serious relationship with a rich young lady. When he spoke about money during one of his sessions, he referred to the small salary he was getting and his worry about the future. I said that this will undoubtedly change when he marries the woman he was courting. Now it became clear that despite both of us knowing that this was his intention, not only did it appear to him as strange that this could actually happen, it was unbearable. He said that this was terrible and broke off the relationship that very day. I am not clear whether I saw him again or whether this was our last session. The panic at seeing his wish fulfilled and that he had done everything in his power to that end was too much for him because it threatened the weak border between inside and outside.

Cooperating with conflicting aims I think that some questions regarding the understanding of trauma can be answered in a new way: If we consider that victims of extreme catastrophes need defence mechanisms in order to survive and that amongst those a very careful attitude toward the past has priority, we realise that this endeavour is in direct conflict with the unconscious need to attest to veracity of this history.

The defence that makes survival possible in that it enables the individual to have a posttraumatic adaptation that appears to be realistic, yet this conformity to the new environment also feeds an irrational sense of omnipotence. Thus, the apparent realism is conditional and depends on a constricted sphere of activity. One could say that Mrs. Lot develops a stiff neck and that she fails to differentiate between surviving and life: instead of doing many things, it is mostly undoing that preoccupies her. I believe that the attempt to undo caused the murder of the Israeli athletes on German soil during the Olympics in 1973. From this perspective it was so important for Germany to appear unmilitaristic that the officials acted in an unrealistic way that prevented them from recognising the danger, with the results that once more Jews were killed on German soil. I tend not to think of such events as being caused by the biologically determined repetition compulsion but rather by the attempt to undo by promoting its opposite, in this case, unarmed officials were responsible for the area reserved for the teams. This is reminiscent of trauma prevention as described by Krystal: “Most of the clinical syndromes that would commonly be considered of traumatic origin (e.g., neuroses) are not aftereffects of psychic trauma but consequences of autoplastic changes developed in the process of trauma prevention” (Kystal, 1985, p. 151, with a reference to a previous publication Krystal, 1978). In my own strategy for survival it was of foremost importance not to be German. Mrs. Lot lives with a stiff neck and thinks that her life was full of valuable experiences, but she confuses the recipe for surviving with the recipe for a full life. If she is fortunate, she sleeps well. This is not guaranteed, but if she can put the real world out of consciousness at night, she will be at work to depict the experiences she does not want to face. She is dimly conscious of the fact that this mechanism is important for the demarcation of her internal world from external reality and to find confirmation for real experiences. The success of this strategy depends clearly on the extent of the losses, on each personality, and the level of development that relates to the earliest experiences. Once more I want to emphasise that I cannot accept that the experiences are repeated because they happened. For me these are stories that are told that correspond to the angry assessment: you have the devil in you. What I am defending is that there is no basic difference between those who were traumatised and the rest of humanity. Everyone has to reconcile the inner world with external reality, to reinstate the difference between the two realms, and to understand that external reality penetrates our senses during the day whereas at night the two are brought into closer contact. However, the personality of traumatised individuals is distinguished in that both sides

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of their sense of reality are in conflict: one side must forget the losses while the other is forced to acknowledge them.

Summary 2009 What can your senses bring you at night? What do you dream about in order to bring the catastrophe to your senses? At the beginning of the presentation, I  mentioned that I would also take up the issue of the German relationship to the catastrophe which up to now I have mostly discussed in relationship to those who were persecuted. In 2009 I believed firmly that the Germans were entitled to the same blind spots as I. Only you have an additional problem: how can you “figure” (darstellen) the catastrophe that you did not experience personally, since for you it is history or stories? Is it difficult to imagine what you should assume personally? Here I  would exclude from the discussion those who say it does not concern them. It relates to each German but what is this “it”? I take my distance from the tendency prevalent amongst certain groups who identify automatically with those they consider victims. All reactions that are automatic are suspect because they do not stem from a personal judgement. This is why I  was enraged when I came across a Hiroshima-­Nagsaki Platz in Cologne; this is a square named in honour of the victims of the Allied Forces. It is an automatic reaction that lacks the consideration that the Allies had to save their own soldiers as much as possible from a war they did not start. I am sure that there is no Auschwitz-­Platz. But to return to positive thinking, I  believe that you can learn from this horrible past, especially about the possibility of a trait that might still be present in the German character. But basically there is no answer except to cling to your humanity, not get caught up in absolutes, and to stop before espousing any ideal that does not accept life as the greatest good but instead would glorify the sacrifice of a life as a means for attaining a greater good.

Addendum 2017 Unfortunately, this optimistic picture cannot be maintained in the light of the regrettable developments around the world and specifically in this country. With my inability to prevent a regression in my thoughts about Germany, typically at first expressed in the vague way that obscured its specificity, it is evident again that major events can restructure our memories of the past. In addition it shows us that even in this restructuring the emotions determine the quality of memories by tending them to be vague, timeless, and painful

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experiences – leading to the question of how I got from the election of Trump to my firm resolve never to return to Germany – thus completely forgetting the very recent unprecedented and humiliating experiences with a series of inconsiderate colleagues. A very esteemed German colleague with whom I  shared my disappointment in the lack of hospitality of those people whose behaviour I described earlier supported my observations. My interpretation is that the chosen victims are the Syrians for whose misery Germany has no responsibility and who actually give them a chance to show greater humanity than our government that has been so rejecting lately. This reaction has the earmark of undoing their previous concern for the genocide in their history. I  sensed it of course in their commemorating the massacre of the Japanese, but now I was feeling it directed against me as part of a nation of perpetrators. Now I  fear that our American political situation will serve many Germans to trivialise the historic genocide against the Jews and exonerate themselves as they did after the war when their own country was in ruins. As I review my past attitude toward Germany, it is clear that I  declined all official invitations, such an all-­expense-­paid trip extended to the former Jews of Andernach. I did, however, accept gratefully the various invitations by the mayor, including his attending one of my presentations to the local analytic group where he handed me a medal inscribed as “medal of honour of the city of Andernach”. When the agent examining my passport saw that I  was born in Germany, he said, “Welcome to your homeland”; I replied that it was homeland no more after Auschwitz. He recognised the message without a sign of regret. I knew all the time that the Germans did not have much credit to draw upon and this was clear when I forgot again that I  was invited in Andernach to a large auditorium to give an account of my life in May 2016. The announcement for it was in the newspaper which sent a reporter and a photographer. But because of the shabby treatment by my official hosts in Frankfurt, I  left saying that I  shall never return to Germany. And so it goes: one might say with the French “On retourne toujours à son premier amour” and paraphrase it back as “You always return to the object of your first hate”, or else in conclusion as I indicated in the title, “The Vagaries of Memory”.

References Blévis, J.-­J. (2004). Remains to be transmitted. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 73, 751–­770.

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Blum, D. America, fascism and the failure of imagination [Author]. Botella, C.,  & Botella, S. (1992). Névrose traumatique et cohérence psychique. Revue française de psychosomatique, 2, 25–­35. Braunschweig, D.,  & Fain, M. (1981). Bloc-­notes et lanternes magiques. Revue Française Psychanalyse, 45, 1221–­1241. Freud, S. (1900). Die Traumdeutung. In Gesammelte Werke (pp. 1–­643). Frankfurt: S. Fischer. Freud, S. (1915). Thoughts for the times on war and death. In Standard Edition (Vol. 14, pp.  273–­302). London: Hogarth Press. Gottlieb, R. M. (1997). Does the mind fall apart in multiple personality disorder? Some proposals based on a psychoanalytic case. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 45, 907–­932. Green, A. (1998). The primordial mind and the work of the negative. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 79, 649–­665.

Krystal, H. (1985). Trauma and the stimulus barrier. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 5(1), 131–­161. Margalit, A. (2004). The ethics of memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Oliner, M. M. (2011). Drehen Sie sich nicht um, Frau Lot. In P. Diederichs, J. Frommer, & F. Wellendort (Eds.), Äussere und innere Realität. Stuttgart: Klett-­Cotta. Oliner, M. M. (2013). “Non-­represented” mental states. In H. Levine, G. Reed,  & D. Scarfone (Eds.), Unrepresented states and the construction of meaning (pp. 152–­171). London: Karnac Books. Oliner, M. M. (2016a). Kriege entstehen aus Furcht – der Rest ist Geschichte. In R. Müller-­Gerwig & M. Vogel (Eds.), Subjektivität und Verstehen (pp. 167–­188). Giessen: Psychosozial-­Verlag. Oliner, M. M. (2016b). A l’oringine de la guerre: La peur. Revue Française de Psychanalyse, 80, 107–­122. Winnicott, D. (1960). The theory of the parent-­infant relationship. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 41, 585–­595.

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7 A moment in time Vera Muller-­Paisner

One moment in time, one moment in history, can create a lifetime struggle with religious identity. Traumas of war obscure important truths.

Introduction It has been many years since the 1989 fall of the Communist Party when many Poles, who were raised and educated as Christians, began to discover their Jewish roots. Since Church and State were intertwined in Poland, the school curricula had included prayer so that students in attendance prayed as Christians. This was not always the case. The 1921 Polish census had allowed Jews to claim being Jewish and/­or Polish as a nationality. Prior to World War II, Jewish life in Poland flourished as the second largest Jewish population in the world after American Jewry. About ten per cent of prewar Polish citizens identified themselves as Jews either by faith or by having declared Yiddish as their mother tongue. After the Holocaust and World War II, in a predominantly anti-­Semitic, Catholic country with a scarce minority of Jews left, many survivors concealed their Jewish identity and declared themselves to be, above all, Poles. Painful past events such as the massacre of about 1,600 Jewish men, women, and children by neighbors in the small Polish town of Jedwabne in the summer of 1941 generated traumatic memory. The screams of tortured Jewish victims who were burnt alive could not be assimilated into a normal narrative. The memory of that story and many others formed collective memories of persecution. Consequently many chose only Polish as their nationality. Their children, members of this group, were raised as Poles, not even knowing about their Jewish roots. After the war the whole question of Poland’s diversity (or lack thereof) seemed a moot point as most

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“minorities” were gone. Most Jews either perished in the Holocaust, left in the 1968 purge of Jews, or went further underground to keep their Jewish identity secret, making it easier to continue promoting the Catholic narrative “Nowhere else is the union of Church and nation as strong as in Poland” (Porter, 2001, p. 289). The monolithic union of church and state put enormous pressure on families. The stress of secrets was woven in family relationships and intertwined in family dynamics. Children were learning about the saints in school and were expected to celebrate Polish traditions. Common celebrations such as honoring saints or buying a Christmas tree were anxiety-­provoking for parents who were Jews yet felt compelled to follow a Catholic Polish tradition. They deceived employers, friends, and their children about having Jewish roots. Historical, national, and geographic alterations can amplify familial patterns in a way that can influence and change the interpretation of reality (Erikson, 1959). Family dynamics respond to both internal and external crises. Family life is shaped by knowing the geographic boundaries of a country as well as its religious identity and social “boundaries”. Subsequently, when suddenly one day new rules are imposed that re-­define identity, family internal coherence and stability change. A  family that has been considered as “insiders” seemingly overnight can then be considered and treated as “outsiders”. The country was invaded, the government changed into a dictatorship, and Jewish families were put at great risk. No one could go to school, have a job, a profession, a business, or own a home. Decisions to protect the family needed to be made quickly. Parents

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became less concerned about future generations because they had an immediate need to save their family in the urgency of the moment. Each family formed a strategy and scrambled to use the resources available to it. Some Jews decided to stay in Poland and hide their Jewish identity. Others decided to flee either together or separately, making plans to meet in the future. Regardless of their plans, children often remained the uninformed and helpless legatees of their parents’ decisions. It has been over seventy years, yet many individuals are still actively challenged to make meaning out of what happened to their families. They continue to interpret and re-­interpret the realities of their historical roots to accept the patterns of their parents and integrate their personal identities with their Jewish roots. For many, family patterns that adapted to the reality of a dangerous moment show signs of being outdated and no longer useful after survival. There is a disjunction between the realities and mindsets of the 1930s and seven decades later. Nevertheless, patterns often remain imbedded in a family interpretation of reality to safeguard the future. Discovery has different forms and emerges at different ages and times with varying degrees of acceptance: “On discovering the secret: It made me feel legitimate” (“A”, 65 years old). “My mother told me before she died. I was angry and felt helpless . . . (But) I changed and felt more self-­assured” (“J”, 57 years old). “When I escaped (as a child), it was the nuns who protected me . . . they saved me” (“L”, 76  years old). “I  need to be Christian for protection” (Schneiderman & Budziszewska, 2012). Other dilemmas include believing in the “Trinity” and not knowing how to incorporate or reconcile Jewish heritage with Christian beliefs. Disclosure does not always lead towards integration. Another challenge is how to integrate current personal identity with Jewish roots. At times it starts out as a fragmented or inauthentic double life.

Case report One such family story and pattern started with the birth of a son to a Jewish couple sometime in March  1943. The couple made a decision to try to save their son by giving him to a Catholic couple they knew. They made contact and implored the Christian couple to take their son. When he was only about eight days old his mother brought the baby boy to her Catholic neighbors and, standing under their window, begged them again to take him saying: “You are devout Catholics. You believe in Jesus, who was a Jew. So try and save this Jewish baby for the Jew in whom you believe, and one day he will grow up to be a priest” (Ronit Kertsner, personal communication, July  2017). Parents did the unthinkable and engaged in the seemingly irrational behavior of

giving away their newborn son to strangers for safety. In like manner, the couple who accepted the baby made a momentary decision that would put their entire family at risk for hiding a Jew. The child was raised as a good Polish Catholic by a family named Waszkinel. After the war the family lived in Paslek, a small town in Eastern Poland (New York Times, 1999). The boy, Romuald Waszkinel, had a good life with parents who loved him and identified with and was supported by a majority Catholic religious group, which grounded him in a belief system, providing additional support and well-­being (Ysseldyk, Matheson,  & Anisman, 2010). His parents were shocked when at the age of seventeen he told them that he planned to become a priest. Both father and mother adamantly opposed his decision. They were horrified at the possibility of Romuald’s mother’s prophecy coming true. Ironically, it seemed that it was the same prophecy that had bound them to take the baby boy. Their vehemence was so strong that the young man wondered whether they questioned his ability to make a good priest or perhaps there was something he did not know, something that had been hidden from him all these years. He had always noticed that when looking in the mirror throughout the years he did not seem to resemble anyone in his family. Finally, he gathered the courage to ask his mother, Emilia, whether he was Jewish. This would be significant, if true, and would bring enormous conflict for many reasons, not least of which was his own fear because he loved Jesus, and the church had taught him that the Jews had murdered Jesus. He was identified with Jesus, not with his “killers”. The road to religious identification begins as a rule when a child “finds himself” a member of his parents’ church. After being forced through experience to renounce his own omnipotence, the child attempts to share the omnipotence he ascribes to his parents. The longing for omnipotence is then transferred to religion, which allows the ego to participate in something even more unattainable (Fenichel, 1945). This participation solidifies when the individual joins a larger social group with similar beliefs and values. Personal identity is characterized by the social likeness of groups and is rooted in one’s perception of sameness and continuity in time as well as recognition by other (Erikson, 1959). Romuald was solidly identified with the Catholic community and his presumed Catholic heritage. Subsequently, he was relieved when his mother told him that he was Catholic, part of the majority familiar to him. She kept faithful to the family secret to maintain the “false” reality, as is often the case. The fear of living in Communist times may have further strengthened her sense of the need to keep the family pattern. After all, the religious identification of being a Catholic was

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part of being in the “in group”, a positive religious and national identification in Poland despite communist rule. The Christian community is like a family in that each member is united in Christ, the Father, and therefore, united with each other as brothers (Freud, 1921). That belief ruled out the truth of his underlying Jewish identity. Romuald eventually was able to live his dream when he enrolled in seminary. Even though his father had tried to discourage him, he came to visit him at the seminary. During the visit, his father wept. A few weeks later, his father died of a heart attack. Romuald felt intense grief and doubt. Nevertheless, he was ordained in 1966. He moved to Lublin and began studying at the Catholic University. When at home, Father Romuald Waszkinel often read aloud to Emilia his Polish mother, because she was illiterate. He noticed that she often had tears in her eyes when he read news to her about Jewish issues. One day, he asked her again whether he was Jewish. She avoided the question and answered him indirectly neither confirming nor refuting his birth identity. He was shaken but no longer pursued the topic with her. While this left him gripped by doubt, he maintained allegiance to her word. However, about twelve years later, in 1978, his mother was hospitalized for suspected cancer. The priest took the opportunity to ask her again. Emilia finally confessed his true story, her adopted son’s life narrative. Romuald had been born in 1943, exact birthdate unknown, to a wonderful Jewish couple in the town of Stare Swieciany (then Poland, but now known as Svencionys in Lithuania). There was an older brother and his father Jakub Weksler was a well-­known tailor. Emilia recounted how Romuald’s Jewish biological mother Batia had made contact with Emilia and begged her to take her infant in order to save him. Emilia then told him the words that his mother used that convinced her husband and her to take a Jewish baby which could seal all of their fates: “You are a devout Catholic. You believe in Jesus, who was a Jew. So try and save this Jewish baby for the Jew in whom you believe, and one day he will become a priest”. When Romuald heard his true story, he was thirty-­ five years old. In the space of a few minutes his solid, homogenous identity instantly shattered and split in two and changed to the reality of a split or dual identity: Romuald-­Jakub Weksler-­Waszkinel would be his new and full identity. It was eerie to hear how he had somehow fulfilled a prophecy from a mother whom he had never met (New York Times, 1999). From a psychoanalytic perspective, however, the role of unconscious communication offers an avenue of potential understanding of this phenomenon. With his Jewish heritage hidden from him, Romuald-­ Jakub Weksler-­Waszkinel was raised as a Catholic and

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found his place in society as a leader of the Catholic Church. His identity was intended to be fixed as a part of the majority culture, the privileged, unpersecuted, “insider” culture with no relation to the “outsiders”, ethnic and minority groups that make up the unconscious evil identity. As such, they became repositories for the disowned facets of the large group’s unwanted mental contents (Volkan, 1988). Romuald was challenged therefore to forge a new identity that would integrate two religions, Catholic and Jewish: “good and evil” shaped by the social and political circumstances of a particular moment in time (Muller-­Paisner, 2002). Identities, as we now know, are experienced as if they are solid in their existence rather than as the constructs that they actually are (Kohut, 1971). For example, the beliefs about the self and the world can be derived from psychological or social identity, political ideology, personality traits, and gender stereotypes. People may have varied beliefs about sexual roles and may understand themselves differently based on their various personality traits and their emotions as well as the influence of prevailing social processes. However, religious identity differs from these constructs in that these beliefs are intangibles whose existence cannot be proved yet are shared amongst its group members. Group membership shapes a world view and is considered “sacred” by a community of members that share and hold the same strong conviction. These core beliefs are grounded in rituals, symbols, and rites as well as historical and cultural continuity. They offer interpretation and meaning to one’s experience and can be a positive guide in uncertain times reducing existential anxiety with the ideology of an afterlife, a higher being, and everlasting group membership (Ysseldyk et al., 2010). Romuald had an additional identity as a professor at the Catholic University in Lublin, with responsibilities in the delivery of Mass as part of his duties. As a Catholic priest with newly discovered Jewish roots, his identity would cause conflict with the social and emotional needs of his parishioners. His decision to actively struggle with religious identity was his choice, but he could not expect the support of the Catholic Church and his parishioners. He no longer shared membership in the same group. Religious identity demands that one religion is the “truth”. Romuald felt driven to explore another world view, along with any information that he could gather about his Jewish family. He experienced anti-­Semitism in Poland personally for the first time. He had a difficult time feeling hated as a result of his new Jewish identity. His perception of social sameness no longer existed; he lost the sense of temporal continuity that he had been living with based on the myth that he was born Catholic. He felt unrecognized by others. Discrimination on the basis of religious identity may have greater ramifications than threats to one’s

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identities (Ysseldyk et al., 2010). Religiosity satisfies the need for belonging, life purpose, meaning, and of being in a “holding environment” in an unpredictable world. The stability of religious identification as a Jew was no longer a reality in Poland, and the challenge for a Catholic priest pursuing his secret Jewish roots was especially complex. Romuald learnt crucial family history in 1992, three years after the fall of Communism. He learnt that his father’s brother, Svi Weksler, had escaped to Russia and survived Soviet camps. He had spoken to Michael Schudrich, the Rabbi of Poland, asking for help to visit his new found family in Israel. It was to be a temporary visit to meet with the family that he would have known and been part of in a different time. He felt compelled to try out and validate his new sense of Jewish identity. Rabbi Schudrich was able to help him get a visa and a temporary stay in a kibbutz. The idea was to stay in the kibbutz and interview with a Catholic Church in the hopes of a position and a small stipend. On his arrival in Israel he was met by Svi, his father’s brother. It was an overwhelming meeting. He had searched his entire life for someone who looked like him, and now, in his uncle, he finally found an image of himself. He felt a profound sense of self-­identity and belonging. Father Weksler-­Waszkinel learnt that his parents had been Zionists and had not been able to escape Poland alive. His mother’s family, however, was part of the first family founders of Israel. They were as passionate about their beliefs as he was. Although he had surrendered his Catholic leadership role in Poland under circumstances that did not allow him to continue his priesthood, he would not abandon his love for Jesus, to whom he had prayed for most of his life. He would need to face his struggle with dual religious and personal identity. His arrangements and Jewish studies at the kibbutz were supportive and pleasant. Romuald spent time going to class learning Hebrew and attending synagogue every day. Praying in a foreign tongue and a foreign way was very difficult. Not understanding the prayers and not being the spiritual leader helping with others’ emotional needs further destabilized his fragile identity. He was no longer in a position of knowing, leading, and helping. He was once again a student, this time learning to pray in a very different way, in a foreign tongue, as a Jew. Even though he had not been offered a position, he found himself wanting to go to Catholic Church on Sundays. He desperately needed a psychological anchor. It contained a remnant of the identity that he knew and the only way he knew how to be. He naturally thought that attending Church once weekly should be tolerated. Although the Rabbi of the kibbutz understood his struggle, he told him that he could not support his going to church at all if he were trying to learn how to be a Jew. Apparently, the Rabbi needed to tell him that that is not

what Jews do! However, since he understood Romuald’s identity confusion and conflict, he told him he could pray in his room if he found that helpful. Public praying to Jesus and crossing himself was not acceptable. Indeed, he continued to pray to Jesus in his room privately. Needless to say, dual religious identity under these circumstances did not provide the intellectual and emotional sustenance that religious group affiliation might usually provide. Instead of fortifying his personal sense of self and faith, it furthered chaos and internal conflict. Father Weksler-­Waszkinel’s pain and struggle added pressure and stress to his life both in his external and intra-­psychic realities.

Discussion Father Wecksler-­Waszkinel’s external struggles were expressed in his desire to maintain a relationship with the Church so as not to abandon Jesus, whom he felt had “saved his life”. Ironically, it fulfilled his Jewish mother’s last wishes for him were he to survive. As such, it had enormous psychological power, indelibly linking mother and son. However, part of him felt guilty about being a Jew, because it was Jews who had killed the Savior. It was as though he were living out aspects of the 2,000-­year-­old historical conflict between the Church and the Jews through his projective identification. I understand this defense as wishing to rid oneself of a “bad” part of the self that is in danger of attack by other aspects of the self and must be held by another person. He felt so conflicted about being given time and space in the kibbutz to learn about and accept Judaism that he needed to fantasize that it was being forced upon him by the Rabbi and he needed to rebel by insisting on going to Church. His boundaries between self and others seemed blurred and on an intra-­psychic level he fantasized feelings of being “at one” (Schafer, 1968) with Jesus into whom he projected an aspect of himself. Projective identification and projection serve as two poles of a continuum of types of fantasies of expulsion (Ogden, 1979). The former is a defense and distances the unwanted part of the self, projecting it onto another, in this case the kibbutz Rabbi. As a result, he became a container for Romuald’s rebellion against adhering completely to Jewish studies in order to remain faithful to the part of him that identified with the Savior. Externalizing his seemingly irreconcilable conflict, he wanted to be accepted for being both Jewish and faithful to Jesus. The political and social context in Israel would support a healing expansion of his Jewish identity, which was the majority religion, free of Poland’s victimization where Jews were linked to an externalized “bad” image. Father Romuald was now called Jakub by friends and family in Israel. He had found his mother’s family, who embraced him and with whom he spent time. He was

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able to live and work in Jerusalem in the archives of the Yad Vashem, the world Holocaust Center. It gave him the opportunity to read the testimonies of survivors and the stories of complicity, including many such stories involving the Catholic Church. This clouded the teachings of his youth, but he was able to separate human frailties from his love of Jesus. At least on a conscious level. The Law of Return, Israel’s legislation passed in 1950, gave Jews anywhere in the world the right to live in Israel and to gain citizenship. The only stipulation was that it was not applicable if the person converted. Father Romuald had not converted by choice. He simply did not know that he had been born a Jew. He was presented with the opportunity to be considered a Jew with all rights including a pension if he signed a document which included the renunciation of Catholicism as his religion (Ronit Kertsner, personal communication, July 2017). However, he was not able to denounce Christ. He considered himself Jewish but would not abandon Jesus, an ironic link to his Jewish mother. This could also perhaps be understood as an “acting out” or a lacuna existing alongside high-­level functioning in a two-­fold psychic structure. There is a helpless, woebegone image alongside a competent self, which may be debasing of the other (Rosenman & Handelsman, 1990).

Summary One moment in time greatly complicated life cycle events for Father Romuald. Historical, national, and geographic alterations changed long-­held family patterns and the interpretation of reality for this man who was determined to feel legitimate in two religions simultaneously. It would take time for the possible redirection of his ego and libidinal investment as well as his psychic organization before being able to move toward integration (Muller-­Paisner, 2012). When a significant life crisis occurs, the experience may offer occasion for identity’s reorganization. Historical, national, and geographical alterations can change family patterns in a way that can influence the interpretation of reality. The profound impact may change regulating the sense of self, the relationship to others, and

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the entire life cycle. One such family story of a Jewish couple in Poland during the Holocaust making a painful decision to save their newborn son by giving him to a Catholic neighbor is explored. The boy’s adopted parents kept his Jewish roots a secret and faced their own conflict over his uncertainty with his decision to become a priest. His behavior and struggles over the discovery of his true identity are studied and analyzed. Accounts of his personal crisis demonstrate the enormous difficulties that can be created for a family in one moment in time.

References Cohen, R. (1999, October  10). For a priest and for Poland, a tangled identity. The New York Times. Retrieved from http:/­ www.nytimes.com. Erikson, E. H. (1959). Ego development and historical change. Identity and the Life Cycle, 1, 18–­49. Fenichel, O. (1945). Early mental development: The archaic ego. The Analytic Theory of Neurosis, 4, 33–­54. Freud, S. (1921). Group psychology and the analysis of the ego. S.E., 18(5), 93–­100. London: Hogarth. Kohut, H. (1971). The analysis of the self: A systematic approach to psychoanalytic treatment of Narcissistic personality disorder. New York: International Universities Press. Muller-­Paisner, V. (2002). Poland: Crises in Christian-­Jewish identity. Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 4, 13–­30. Muller-­Paisner, V. (2012). The broken chain: Legacies of trauma and war. In M. G. Fromm (Ed.), Lost in transmission (pp. 21–­ 30). London: Karnac Books. Ogden, T. H. (1979). On projective identification. International Journal of Psycho-­Analysis, 60, 357–­373. Porter, B. (2001). The Catholic nation: Religion, identity and the narratives of Polish history. The Slavic and East European Journal, 45, 289–­299. Rosenman, S. & Handelsman, I. (1990). Identity as legacy of the Holocaust: Encountering a survivor’s narrative. The Journal of Psychohistory, 18, 35–­64. Schafer, R. (1968). Aspects of internalization. New York: University Press. Schneiderman, G., & Budziszewska, M. (2012). Sixty-­five years after WWII: A family secret. Retrieved from http:/­www.psychiatrictimes.com. Volkan, V. D. (1988). The need to have enemies and allies: From clinical practice to international relationships. Dunmore, PA: Jason Aronson. Ysseldyk, R., Matheson, K., & Anisman, H. (2010). Religiosity as identity: Toward an understanding of religion from a social identity perspective. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14, 60–­71.

8 Aging: coping with re-­traumatization Sophia Richman

In the late 1970s, a few years before his death, my father was hospitalised and he wrote me a letter. It was one of the few times, perhaps the only time, that he reached out to me. But the letter, written in a shaky hand, barely legible, never actually reached me because it was never sent. It was handed to me by my mother after my father returned home from the hospital. Mother was his emissary and usually acted as the go-­between for my distant father and me. This is a copy of the letter: Mail it immediately Leon Richman c/­o LaGuardia Hospital Forest Hills, N.Y. Dr. Sophia Richman 119 W. 245 Street New York City, N.Y. My Dear Sophie: Since a couple of days I am cut off and [sic] see any possibility to get in touch with you about my situation. I would appreciate your getting in touch with me and explaining this state of affairs. Forgive my handwriting. It is in bed that I am writing. Answer please without delay. Love Your Father Leon Richman This letter reflects not only the formality of my father’s attempt to communicate with me, but more importantly, it reveals his sense of isolation and confusion and

his hope that somehow I can rescue him. In the hospital setting, he feels alone, helpless and threatened. Despite his sense of urgency, the attempt to connect with me is doomed to failure – the address he so carefully writes in the letterhead is totally wrong. What is clear to me when I  finally do read his letter is that he has been retraumatised by this situation of finding himself alone and confused. It is likely that the hospitalisation triggered a state which he had experienced thirty-­five years earlier when he was imprisoned and struggling to survive in a chaotic world. My father was a Holocaust survivor who had managed to stay alive in a concentration camp for fourteen months until his escape. Subsequently he was hidden in a cramped attic space for another two years by my mother who was passing as a Catholic with me, her blond, blue-­eyed toddler who looked like a Polish baby – not a Jewish child marked for death. When the war ended, we had survived as a family, an unusual situation for Polish Jews during the Second World War. Since I was born during the Shoah, I did not know the man who was my father before he was subjected to catastrophic trauma. To me, he was always a distant figure with a paranoid frame of mind, formal in manner, and socially awkward. I share this letter which my father wrote to me from his hospital bed because it illustrates what I believe often happens to survivors facing life-­threatening illness and mortality in their later years. For many, the vulnerable state of being hospitalised is a trigger to horrific memories. As they face death once again, they revisit the sense of helplessness and terror of earlier years, but this time they no longer have the strength or the hope of youth that once kept them alive despite all odds.

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The end of life is a challenging stage for us all. Existential issues such as confronting our mortality, facing a sense of isolation and searching for meaning in our existence become more salient in the later years as we feel more vulnerable and closer to death. Mortality is always an issue, but much harder to avoid thinking about when it is facing us up close. We watch contemporaries die and are reminded of our own waning strength and power as our body deteriorates and our identity shifts from adult to “senior citizen”. We endure many losses and become more dependent on others. All of these changes test our courage and our capacity to cope. But for those who were severely traumatised earlier in their lives, who faced death and profound losses, aging can take the form of reliving a nightmare with no end. After the Holocaust, most survivors coped with the tragedy they had lived through by focusing all of their energy on adapting to a new way of life: earning a living, learning to live in a new culture, mastering a new language and, in many cases, creating a new family. But the horrors they had experienced continued to haunt them in nightmares or flashbacks. For most, the bad memories, the longing and nostalgia for the lost world did not disappear; they co-­existed with their current reality. Survivors live a double life, existing in two worlds at the same time (Alford, 2009; Herman, 1992; Laub, 2005; Richman, 2018). I  see this as a process of altered consciousness which results in the creation of a dual self. It is an adaptive, healthy type of dissociation which alters an unbearable reality by compartmentalising experience, thereby allowing the traumatised individual to function well in the present despite a horrific past. But aging brings out our vulnerabilities. My father is long gone and I  am now approaching the age that he was when he was hospitalised and desperately trying to get in touch with me. His generation is no longer with us, and we the child survivors are the last witnesses. We are now the senior citizens who face our mortality, who struggle with illnesses, who watch our numbers dwindle, and who try to integrate a fragmented history into a narrative that can help us feel complete. As memory begins to fail us, we feel an intense need to keep our childhood memories alive; they are precious and an integral part of who we are. They are the legacy we leave behind to future generations. Many of us have given our testimonies to various Holocaust Archives so that it will not be forgotten. When I was interviewed by the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale in 1990 and later by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in 1998, I  left out an important piece of my history, not because of a conscious decision to exclude it, or on account of failing memory, but because I  did not yet fully know the complicated effects of that history on my life. I was unaware that, deep within my cells, diseases were brewing that would erupt in later years. In 2004

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I learnt that the strange and varied symptoms that had taken me to the Mayo Clinic for a diagnosis were autoimmune in nature. It would take many more years to realise that the systemic autoimmune condition which affected so many aspects of my life had its genesis in early childhood trauma. We are well aware that childhood trauma shapes us and has a lasting effect on our psyche, but generally we are not as knowledgeable about the impact that early stressors and adversities have on our biology. While the psychological effects are usually evident at the time of trauma, or shortly thereafter, the physiological effects are often not apparent until many years later. Scientific research in recent years has revealed that psychosocial stress in the early years of life has a lingering influence on physical health and is damaging not only on a psychological level but on a neurobiological level as well. Catastrophic events can alter our body chemistry and result in elevated rates of morbidity and mortality from chronic diseases of aging (Baumeister, Akhtar, Ciufolini, Pariante,  & Mondelli, 2016; Danese  & Baldwin, 2017; De Bellis & Zisk, 2014; Dube et al., 2009; Miller, Chen, & Parker, 2011). When trauma occurs early in life, it influences immune system development, causing chronic activation of the inflammatory response as well as overall aberrant activity of the immune system throughout the life span. Amongst people exposed to major psychological stressors in early life, there is a heightened vulnerability to vascular disease, autoimmune disorders, and premature mortality from chronic diseases of aging. Adult illnesses such as heart disease, cancer and autoimmune disease – all of which I have been diagnosed within the past thirteen years – are increasingly identified as the potential legacy of a traumatic childhood. As these diseases have appeared in my adult life, I have been surprised to learn that not only psychologists, but many physicians as well, tend to be unaware of the relationship between early trauma and adult onset diseases. Notable exceptions include Ira Brenner, M.D., who makes reference to this relationship in his award-­ winning paper about aging child Holocaust survivors (Brenner, 2017), and Bessel van der Kolk, another psychiatrist who has written extensively about how trauma reshapes both body and brain (van der Kolk, 2014). For many years I had struggled with countless strange symptoms and no diagnosis; I  knew something was very wrong with my body and while my physicians concurred, they were similarly perplexed and failed to see the big picture. I  took my medical research to the internet and I kept a detailed diary of my symptoms for many years. The diary served as witness to the relentless assaults on my body as well as a reminder of my desperate attempts to cope with this overwhelming situation. How does childhood stress affect the risk for later diseases? And how does it incubate there, giving rise

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to diseases several decades later? Such questions have preoccupied investigators since the 1990s. Despite the voluminous amount of current research on this subject, we do not yet thoroughly understand the mechanisms by which childhood trauma “gets under the skin” at the molecular level and eventually results in disease. Models that attempt to explain this process are still hypotheses in need of verification. We do know that one of the main factors driving this process forward is an inflammatory process. In autoimmune disease, however, the immune system attacks its own body. Antibodies which ordinarily fight foreign invaders such as viruses and bacteria turn on the body itself, creating inflammation and in that process destroy healthy tissue and organs. Various diseases which appear to be discrete can be linked by the inflammatory process. For instance, I was surprised to learn that the coronary artery disease, which I most recently have been diagnosed with, is autoimmune in nature and directly related to rheumatoid arthritis, another disease that I  suffer from. In autoimmune heart disease, the immune system mistakenly attacks and destroys heart tissue, causing symptoms similar to those typically resulting from classic cardiovascular risk factors such as lifestyle behaviour. Rheumatoid arthritis doubles the risk of coronary artery disease due to chronic inflammation – the shared link which accelerates atherosclerosis. “Clinical evidence confirms the presence of biological markers consistent with a broad range of inflammatory disorders, including both cardiovascular and autoimmune diseases” (Boscarino, 2004, p. 141). In much of the research on the effects of early trauma on adult illnesses, the trauma variable studied has been the maltreatment of children such as abuse or neglect.1 However, war trauma, and, more specifically, Holocaust trauma, has also been researched in the last decade. A  number of scientists (Bercovich, Keinan-­Boker, Shaul,  & Shasha, 2014; Keinan-­Boker, Vin-­Raviv, Liphshitz, Linn,  & Barchana, 2009; Keinan-­ Boker, Shasha-­Lavsky, Eilat-­Zanani, Edri-­Shur,  & Shasha, 2015; Miller, Chen, & Parker, 2011) have examined the long-­term effects of war trauma on child Holocaust survivors. In a cross-­sectional study based on highly validated data, it was established that living under constant threat of death and exposure to starvation had long-­term deleterious physiological effects, particularly on those survivors born during the Second World War – Jewish children born between 1940 and 1945. On the basis of a number of investigations, those of us born during those years are considered the highest risk group for chronic morbidity and premature mortality “From this unique cohort, we can learn lessons about adaptation to extreme hardships in early life, resilience during life, and cancer susceptibility later in life” (Hursting & Forman, 2009, p. 1437). We not only have a higher risk for cancer occurrence later in life (Keinan-­Boker, Vin-­ Raviv, Liphshitz, Linn,  & Barchana, 2009), but other

conditions such as hypertension, dyslipidemia, diabetes and cardiovascular morbidity (Bercovich et  al., 2014, Keinan-­Boker, Shasha-­Lavsky, Eilat-­Zanani, Edri-­Shur, & Shasha, 2015). Recent research efforts have gone beyond the identification of negative effects of early trauma on a single generation by examining potential intergenerational effects of extreme stressors (Yehuda et  al., 2016). Neuroscientists have recently studied the intergenerational sequelae of exposure to Holocaust trauma through epigenetic inheritance, and concluded that severe psychophysiological trauma can indeed have intergenerational effect. As in other studies comparing age of trauma exposure, Yehuda found that the younger the survivors were during the Second World War, the greater the intergenerational effect (Yehuda et al., 2007). As a child survivor born in early 1941, I  find these statistics about the effects of Holocaust trauma chilling and incredibly ironic. My parents’ frequently uttered words “You were too young to remember” are now juxtaposed with the words of scientists who tell us that it is the youngest survivors, those of us born between 1940 and 1945, who face the greatest risk for morbidity in adulthood. We may not remember much about the trauma we endured, but the truth is that our bodies did not forget. Yiyun Li, a novelist who once studied immunology, describes the workings of the immune system in this imaginative way: “Its job is to detect and attack nonself; it has memories, some as long lasting as life; its memories can go awry selectively, or, worse, indiscriminately, leading the system to mistaken self as foreign, as something to eliminate” (Li, 2017, p. 14). The discovery of the complex relationship between my childhood trauma and the various medical symptoms, which had baffled my physicians for so many years, was profound. Its consequences were both positive and negative. I  was retraumatised by the realisation that the losses of the past were even greater than I had ever imagined, and that I now faced a future with a heightened risk for premature death. At the same time, having a narrative and a deeper understanding of what had been happening to me felt essential and liberating. The way that I coped with this challenge was typical for me. I immersed myself in various creative and intellectual activities. It not only distracted me from dwelling in dark places, but it also empowered me by facilitating a shift from a passive, helpless state to an active one in which I  could produce something of value that would live on after me. Irvin Yalom (1980), the existential psychiatrist, has written extensively about our encounters with mortality and other universal existential concerns. He refers to these urgent life-­altering events as boundary experiences. According to him, facing the end of life has the power to create a massive shift in the way that we live – a shift from an everyday mode to a more authentic mode of

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being in the world. The anticipation of death potentially moves us from trivial preoccupations to what really matters to us. There is an awareness that existence cannot be postponed, and, for many, a desire to live life fully during the time that remains becomes a priority. Writing about his own experience of aging, Yalom concludes that what he finds most central is being creative. “To create something new, something that rings with novelty or beauty and harmony is a powerful antidote to a sense of meaninglessness” (p. 435). I too have found that creative engagement is reparative and an antidote to despair. The healing potential of the creative process has been the focus of my intellectual interest since adolescence, but even prior to that, I have come to believe that it was an unconscious driving force in my life. Creative self-­expression was especially meaningful in childhood because it was one of the few and most effective ways I had of coping during traumatic times and beyond. The hiding years happened to coincide with a developmental period when the child learns to speak. Just as I was learning to talk, I was entrusted with the formidable secret of my father’s presence in the attic. We lived a precarious existence: one wrong word would give us all away and my parents knew that certain death would follow. I complied with their desperate injunction to lie. Just as I was developing language at around two years of age, I was also learning that words could be dangerous, and that what came out of my mouth had to be carefully controlled. Ever since I  can remember, speaking was somewhat blocked and inhibited. Words seemed not to come when I  wanted to express myself; I  was more comfortable listening than talking. It was not a verbal issue since I  could write well, and by the time I  was eleven years old, I  was fluent in three languages. So the problem seemed to be limited to speech uttered out loud, especially in the presence of relative strangers. After many years of struggling to understand my speaking inhibition, I came to realize that it had its roots in those early years when speaking out loud meant exposing myself and my family to grave danger; it was safer to remain silent in the presence of others. Fortunately, there were other means of self-­ expression. I loved to draw and paint, and later I found writing gratifying. When asked “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I most often answered – “a writer and an illustrator”. My childhood enthusiasm for writing and painting has remained despite the fact that I did not choose them as a career. Gradually I brought these passions back into my life. Aging can provide certain advantages. It can be a time of dealing with unfinished business. Retirement is an opportunity for developing talents which had been ignored because of life’s practical demands and embarking on a review of one’s life can provide a chance to

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come to terms with one’s past. As I aged, these creative activities became even more significant in my life. One of the most meaningful experiences I ever embarked on was to write a memoir in my late fifties (Richman, 2002). In reviewing my life story and examining the impact of childhood trauma on my adult choices, I learnt a great deal about who I am and where I came from. My fragmented history was put into a context and by creating a coherent narrative I was able to organize the fragments of my experiences and memories into an integrated whole. Curiously, self-­analysis through writing provided more insight than years of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy had done. But to be fair, both experiences had their place; the years in analysis had prepared me for carrying on the process on my own. My father had also turned to memoir writing as a way of processing his own trauma and bearing witness to the horrors he had lived through during the war years. While hidden in our attic after his daring escape, he had gathered together bits of memory about daily life in the concentration camp. He conceptualised his memoir as a document that recorded the horrors he had witnessed every day for over a year as an inmate at Janowska. But the manuscript he had completed in hiding would take many years before it was translated into English and published (Richman, 1975). It waited until his retirement and a receptive environment for the memories of survivors. As the first generations of survivors began to die out, society was shifting from a silence about the Holocaust to a desire to document this ugly period of history for posterity. The last living witnesses were encouraged to give their testimony. Memoirs began to spring up at an increasing pace, and Holocaust archives were established to record oral testimonies. The powerful drive towards self-­expression in the later years is illustrated by Louis Begley, a child survivor from Poland, who had waited many years to tell his wartime story. Begley, who came onto the literary scene around the time of his retirement from a lucrative and successful law practice, published his first award-­ winning novel at the age of fifty-­seven and followed it with a series of novels and a number of non-­fiction works within the next few years. For Begley, who had been an English literature major in college, retirement provided an opportunity to develop a writing talent that lay dormant while he practiced law for forty-­five years. Most of Begley’s novels contain autobiographical elements, but his first one – Wartime Lies (1991) – was actually more memoir than novel. It dealt with his boyhood in Poland during the Second World War and described how he survived under a false identity by passing as a Christian. This first book was a huge success and won numerous prestigious awards. I personally find it quite compelling and appreciate his deep understanding of the long-­term psychological impact of a childhood in hiding. He addresses the burden of having to lie in order

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to survive and the implications of living under a false identity during an impressionable time of life. I resonate not only with his story, which is so similar to my own, but also with the parallels regarding the time of life we chose to write our story and the important function that it served for us. Both of us in midlife felt the need to turn to writing as a way to make sense of and come to terms with childhood trauma. Begley described his first novel as an attempt to take care of unfinished business before moving forward into novels that address current life issues that have meaning for him (Atlas, 2002). Memoir writing is particularly valuable as a form of life review which can be enlisted in the search for meaning. The process of writing can facilitate the integration of experience, establish continuity over the life span and assist the difficult process of coming to terms with what cannot be changed.2 As valuable as autobiographical narrative is, it is only one of many forms of self-­expression that empower the traumatized individual and facilitates mending. My second book – Mended by the Muse: Creative Transformation of Trauma (Richman, 2014) – addresses this theme of emotional healing through creative expression of various types. How does art help master trauma? What is the therapeutic action in the creation of art? Gilbert Rose (1987), who has written extensively on the subject of art and trauma, proposed that “both creative and clinical processes follow the fundamental psychic principle of attempting to master passively experienced trauma by active repetition” (p. 44). Creative work externalises inner processes and connects the person more intimately to the outside world. What begins as the task of mastering one’s personal past for the creative artist becomes a process of externalising and transcending it. Rose’s conceptualisation is consistent with my thinking on the subject. In the aftermath of trauma, artistic work helps the survivor to come to terms with the internal chaos generated by the experience. I see the process of creation as a purposeful (although not always conscious) symbolic reenactment of traumatic experiences that facilitates the working through of overpowering affects. By externalising what is experienced internally as overwhelming and fragmenting, and by fashioning it into a creative product, the artist becomes witness to his/­her own trauma, and invites others to be witnesses to his/­her suffering. For the many survivors who have written memoirs, painted their memories, or expressed their sorrow in music or through dance, art serves the witnessing function on multiple levels. The need for witness is universal and ubiquitous; we come to know ourselves through the recognition of others (Stern, 2010). But for the trauma survivor, whose experience has been chaotic and fragmenting, the witnessing function is especially vital; it provides opportunities for repair through connection and integration. The ability

to step outside of oneself and see the product that one has created through the eyes of another (that is, the witness) allows a person to shift perspective and achieve some distance from overwhelming feelings. Over the many years that I have been painting, it is curious that I  never thought to use visual art to work through emotional challenges or to process traumatic events in my life. In contrast to writing, which always served that function for me, painting was purely an aesthetic experience, soothing and engrossing. When I paint, I am in a conflict-­free zone, totally focused on the present moment, and rarely concerned with the expression of my internal life – that is until now. Several months ago, I began a new painting, dramatically different from any artwork I  had done before. It was emotional, bold, infused with personal meaning; it related to my past history and it was done with the future in mind. This painting which I titled “A Memorial to My Family” (Figure 8.1) represents a deeply felt, emotional journey into the lost world of relatives who had perished at the hands of the Nazis during the Second World War. I  knew about them from my grieving parents, but I  never met them; they were the aunts, uncles and cousins who were murdered between 1939 and 1945 in Poland. They are not the total death count of my family of origin, which, according to my mother’s written account, was thirty-­five members of our extended family, but these are the immediate family members – my parents’ siblings and their families. These past couple of years, as I moved into my late seventies, in poor health, aware that the time before me was quickly shrinking, I  found myself looking at old family albums which had survived the war years in the home of gentile friends where they had been left for safekeeping and retrieved after the war. My parents spoke of those lost relatives in hushed and anguished tones, and my mother regularly lit yahrzeit candles in their memory, but I had never mourned these lost relatives, and suddenly I had a strong desire to memorialise them so that they would not be forgotten. My idea was to create a collage-­like painting, an oil on canvas featuring an assemblage of images inspired by those old family photographs. Collage is a style I have never used before, but it seemed fitting to capture the fragmentation of my family and to bring them together one last time in a family portrait. Previous research I had done on the art of visual artists grappling with issues of trauma suggests a strong preference for collage as the technique of choice (Richman, 2014). It is noteworthy that collage involves the active piecing together of separate entities arranged and rearranged into a whole, and thus seems particularly well suited to express emotional fragmentation and a wish for integration; it captures both the disintegration as well as the active reintegration of parts into a whole. I created a composition based on the individual photos, which varied in size and shape,

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FIGURE 8.1  A Memorial to My Family.

some photographed as a family unit, others alone but all united by a common fate – the tragedy of their premature death. Surrounding them is a raging fire, a symbol of the Holocaust. This time, the challenge was not aesthetic, it was not about beauty, but about capturing the essence of each family member and establishing a connection with him or her. As I traced their features on the canvas, I found myself developing a relationship with each one. I recognized my father’s face in the faces of his older brother Zygmunt and even in some of his children as they posed for the family portrait in the late 1930s. Within the next five years or so, Zygmunt and his oldest son would perish at Janowska, the camp where my father escaped from, a month after the death of his brother. The others were buried in a mass grave in the cemetery of the shtetl that had been their home for generations. I recognised the facial features of my mother’s sisters and brothers whose round faces reminded me of my own and that of

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my daughter. The thread tying our generations together was apparent in our physiognomy. Reuniting these lost family members in this concrete, visible way made it easier to locate my own place amongst my ancestors. It allowed me a greater sense of continuity, which the Holocaust had robbed me of. The process of painting this piece of memorial art was deeply engaging; I  felt alive and inspired. Physical discomfort and the wearing demands of everyday life receded to the background as I focused on the challenge of bringing my family back to life. Through emotional engagement and creative action, passively experienced trauma can be mastered and ultimately mended. Creative self-­expression provides an opportunity to mourn, to memorialize, to find meaning and to regain some sense of continuity and connection. If we are fortunate, it also fulfils our need for generativity and desire for immortality as we enter our twilight years.

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Notes 1 The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study, begun in the late 1990s, was a large-­scale project that assessed maltreatment retrospectively in 17,337 adults; it established a relationship between childhood stress and chronic diseases decades later. 2 J. Lipton, personal communication, 7/­24/­17.

References Alford, F. (2009). After the Holocaust: The book of Job, Primo Levi, and the path to affliction. New York: Cambridge University Press. Atlas, J. (2002). The art of fiction No 172. Interview with Louis Begley in The Paris Review (162). Baumeister, D., Akhtar, R., Ciufolini, S., Pariante, C. M.,  & Mondelli, V. (2016). Childhood trauma and adulthood inflammation: A meta-­analysis of peripheral C-­reactive protein, interleukin-­6 and tumour necrosis factor. Molecular Psychiatry, 21(5), 642–­649. Begley, L. (1991). Wartime lies. New York: Ballantine Books. Bercovich, E., Keinan-­Boker, L., Shaul, M.,  & Shasha, S. M. (2014). Long-­term health effects in adults born during the Holocaust. Israel Medical Association Journal, 16(4I), 203–­207. Boscarino, J. (2004). Posttraumatic stress disorder and physical illness: Results from clinical and epidemiologic studies. Annals of the New York Academy of Science, 1032, 141–­153. Brenner, I. (2017, July). The last witnesses: Learning about life and death from aging survivors. Paper presented at the IPA in Buenos Aires. Danese, A., & Baldwin, J. (2017). Hidden wounds? Inflammatory links between childhood trauma and psychopathology. Annual Review of Psychology, 68, 517–­544. De Bellis, M., & Zisk, A. (2014). The biological effects of childhood trauma. Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 23(2), 185–­222. Dube, S., Fairweather, D., Pearson, W. S., Felitti, V. J., Anda, R. F.,  & Croft, J. B. (2009). Cumulative childhood stress and autoimmune diseases in adults. Psychosomatic Medicine, 71, 243–­250. Herman, J. (1992). Trauma and recovery. New York: Basic Books. Hursting, S.,  & Forman, M. (2009). Cancer risk from extreme stressors: Lessons from European Jewish survivors of World

War II. Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 101(21), 1436–­ 1437. Keinan-­Boker, L., Shasha-­Lavsky, H., Eilat-­Zanani, S., Edri-­Shur, A.,  & Shasha, S. M. (2015). Chronic health conditions in Jewish Holocaust survivors born during World War II. Israel Medical Association Journal, 17(4), 206–­212. Keinan-­Boker, L., Vin-­Raviv, N., Liphshitz, I., Linn, S., & Barchana, M. (2009). Cancer incidence in Israeli Jewish survivors of World War II. Journal of the National Cancer Institute, 101(21), 1489–­1500. Laub, D. (2005). Traumatic shutdown of narrative and symbolization: A  death instinct derivative? Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 41, 307–­326. Li, Y. (2017). Dear friend, from my life I write to you in your life. New York: Random House. Miller, G. E., Chen, E.,  & Parker, K. J. (2011). Psychological stress in childhood and susceptibility to the chronic diseases of aging: Moving toward a model of behavioral and biological mechanisms. Psychological Bulletin: American Psychological Association, 137, 959–­997. Richman, L. (1975). WHY? Extermination camp Lwow (Lemberg) 134 Janowska street Poland. New York: Vantage Press. Richman, S. (2002). A wolf in the attic: The legacy of a hidden child of the Holocaust. New York: Routledge. Richman, S. (2014). Mended by the muse: Creative transformations of trauma. New York: Routledge. Richman, S. (2018). The pathologizing tilt: Undertones of the death instinct in relational trauma theory. In L. Aron, S. Grand,  & J. Slochower (Eds.), Decentering relational theory: A comparative critique. London & New York: Routledge. Rose, G. (1987). Trauma and mastery in life and art. Madison, CT: International Universities Press. Stern, D. (2010). Partners in thought: Working with unformulated experience, dissociation, and enactment. New York: Routledge. Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain mind, and body in the healing of trauma. New York: Penguin Books. Yalom, I. (1980). Existential psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books. Yehuda, R., Daskalakis, N. P., Bader, H. N., Klengel, T., Holsboer, F., & Binder, E. B. (2016). Holocaust exposure induced intergenerational effects on FKBP5 methylation. Biological Psychiatry, 80(5), 372–­380. Yehuda, R., Teicher, M. H., Seckl, J. R., Grossman, R. A., Morris, A., & Bierer, L. M. (2007). Parental PTSD as a vulnerability factor for low cortisol trait in offspring of Holocaust survivors. Archives of General Psychiatry, 64(9), 1040–­1048.

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9 Mourning Anna Ornstein

In order to make further comments on the mourning process in Holocaust survivors, I will use my mother’s, my father-­in law’s, and my personal experiences as “windows” into the subjective experience of mourning following multiple and traumatic losses. In my two earlier publications on the subject (Ornstein, 2010, 2016), I  focused on the difference between mourning as this occurs in response to the death of a single individual under ordinary, civilized conditions, and mourning as this would have to be conceptualised when mourning is delayed following the loss of one’s whole family and community under traumatic conditions. In these publications, I described creativity as a transformative agent. Memorials, poems, music, memoirs, paintings, and sculptures that deal with the subject of mourning not only bring back the past but when read and/­or viewed, the past is actively mourned. Survivors of communal disasters visit these sites and seek out these texts because of their power to elicit the dreaded but also deeply desired pain of grief. Much as it is dreaded, experiencing grief is also desired because it is only then that the numbness that isolates the bereaved from his/­her surroundings can be overcome. In this chapter, I  am suggesting that the metapsychological conceptualisation of mourning does not distinguish amongst the varieties of losses one can suffer; to understand the subjective experience of mourning, we depend on personal experiences and on close observations of the bereaved. Experientially, mourning is not only affected by the quality of the relationship – loving, hating, protective, or abusive – but also by the context of the losses, such as war, genocide, natural disaster, or when death occurs in one’s own bed surrounded by loved ones. Mourning is also affected by the age of the deceased and when in the life-­cycle of the bereaved the

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loss had occurred. In relation to the age of the deceased, Joan Didion (2005) describes the difference in her reaction to the anticipated death of her elderly parents and the death of her husband and only child. Following the death of her elderly parents she felt sad and had regrets “for times gone by and things unsaid”. But the grief she felt on the unexpected loss of her husband was different: “grief is not what we expect it to be . . . [it] comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weakens the knees and blind the eyes and obliterates the dailiness of life . . . [it] interferes with the ability to think and to eat” (pp. 26–­27). The personal experience of mourning was the topic of a panel of the American Psychoanalytic Association in 2013. Two of the panelists, L. Wurmser and O. Kernberg, had recently lost their spouses and I spoke about my losses during the Holocaust.1 Each presenter felt that sharing his/­her personal feelings could be helpful to others who are experiencing painful losses. Importantly, the panelists’ different theoretical orientations did not negate the similarities regarding their subjective experiences. I  found myself particularly in agreement with Wurmser’s description of the manner in which he found that Jewish rituals, specifically, sitting shiva,2 was helpful to him in the mourning process. A  few years later, after the death of my husband, Paul, at the shiva services when the conversation focused on Paul, I  felt a great desire to include stories about my brothers and my father. I wanted to share with my friends that Paul knew my brothers who perished in Forced Labor Battalions, and that Paul had also met my father who was murdered in Auschwitz – as if these facts would give me permission to include them in the conversation. As time passes, in my current grief, I  am re-­experiencing the grief I felt over the years regarding my family, with

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greater intensity. I believe that having had a chance to attend the funeral of a loved one who died after a long and rewarding life and having the support of my family and my friends enabled me to experience the rage and sorrow more keenly about my brothers’ and my father’s traumatic and premature deaths. While appreciating the highly individual nature of mourning, regarding the Holocaust, we can also recognize certain generalisable features. I  believe that mourning and the ability to start a new life after the war depended on the survivors’ pre-­Holocaust psychic organisation, the extent of their personal suffering, and the ability to summon the necessary defences to adapt to the inhuman conditions that existed in most concentration and work camps. Equally important was whether or not, after liberation, the survivors found an emotional environment that was supportive of their efforts to resume their lives at the point in their life-­cycle where it was traumatically interrupted. In addition, the context in which their losses occurred had a major influence on the survivors’ world-­view. Whether man-­made or caused by natural forces (earth-­quakes, floods, tornadoes), major disasters profoundly “sensitise” survivors to human suffering. Survivors of genocides seem to be particularly sensitive to human rights violations,3 a sensitivity that appears to be transmitted to the second and third generations.

War, genocide, and the search for meaning In 1943, in the middle of World War II, Viktor Frankl, a Viennese psychiatrist in an unnamed concentration camp, was asked to “volunteer” to care for typhus patients. He knew that by working in that setting he would die in a short time, but he took the assignment, thinking that “if I  had to die there might be at least some sense in my death. I thought that it would doubtless have more purpose to try and help my comrades as a doctor than to vegetate and finally lose my life as an unproductive laborer that I was then” (p. 48). Frankl was fortunate to be given this option. In attending to the typhus patients,4 he did exercise his freedom of choice in a place where that had to be considered a privilege. I  believe that making this decision gave meaning not only to his possible death but it gave meaning to his life as well. Viktor Frankl went on to write a book about his camp experiences with the title Man’s Search for Meaning (Frankl, 1946). The book was published in 1946, only one year after the end of the war. By 1997 when Frankl died, the book had sold over ten million copies and became one of the ten most influential books in the United States.

Why? What is the book’s message that explains this extraordinary success? The subtitle of the book may give us a clue: From Death Camp to Existentialism. The search for meaning amongst death and destruction appears to have been responsible for the popularity that existentialism enjoyed in World War II and during the post-­war years; the works of Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir enjoyed extraordinary popularity. With death and destruction all around us, there appeared a great urgency to find meaning in everyday life; young people in particular were searching as the brutality of the war, the industrialised nature of the genocide, and the extraordinary number of casualties threatened a whole generation with cynicism and nihilism. The experience of nihilism after World War II was similar to what people experienced in Europe during World War I. In his 1915 paper on Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, Freud gave expression to this nihilism as a form of “disillusionment” which the war had evoked. He also commented on the “altered attitude toward death which this – like every other war – forces upon us” (p. 275). Did the massive nature of the destruction and the “simultaneous death of millions of people” (p. 290) in the two world wars and the many subsequent genocides – Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia, and Sudan – affect the universal and “biologically wired” need to deny one’s own death? Hardly. In the same article, Freud maintained that “It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death, and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are still present as spectators. . . . In the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality” (p. 289). The connection between the denial of one’s own death and the search for meaning and immortality was the subject of Ernst Becker’s influential book Denial of Death, published in 1973. The basic premise of the book is that human civilisation is ultimately an elaborate, symbolic defense against the knowledge of our own mortality; on the level of the individual, every human being has an “immortality project” which is a symbolic belief-­system that is felt to be superior to one’s individual physical existence. I  believe this is what Frankl had in mind when he welcomed the opportunity to care for the typhus-­infected patients in the concentration camp; as a physician, he gave meaning to his life by living up to his values and ideals (Kohut,1966).

Immortality projects, values, and ideals Since values and ideals vary from culture to culture, they also create conflicts with one another, potentially leading to wars and genocides; what one culture values most highly may threaten the existence of another.

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For example, a suicide bomber who is considered as a terrorist in one culture is highly regarded as a soldier for the preservation of a religion in another. Subjectively, a suicide bomber may experience the same sense of satisfaction and sense of fulfillment as a physician administering a life-­saving medication to a severely ill patient – or to ease the suffering of the dying by offering him a sip of water. Pursuing one’s “immortality project” gives one the feeling that life has meaning, a purpose that is significant in the grand scheme of things. The content of one’s “immortality project” varies from individual to individual: one may strive for immortality and find meaning in life by engaging in scientific, humanitarian, political, artistic endeavours, or by becoming a fighter in the service of an ideology. Amongst the many possibilities, the most common immortality project is to have and to raise children. This may well have been one of the factors that explains the high birthrate amongst Holocaust survivors (Helmreich, 1992). Besides transmitting one’s genes, parents have conscious and unconscious hopes and expectations of their children, dreams they themselves may not have been able to actualize. The content of these hopes and dreams are profoundly affected by the values and ideals that are embedded in the culture in which the individual had spent his/­her formative years. Most Holocaust survivors arriving in the United States were between seventeen and thirty-­nine years old, many without an education or a trade worked in factories as unskilled labourers. As they struggled with their emotional pain and challenges in building a new life, they retained the standards, principles, and values by which the fundamental features of their personalities were formed (Helmreich, 1992). I believe that these psychological building blocks that were established prior to their war experiences constituted the foundation of their post-­Holocaust recovery. Similar to previous Jewish immigrants and in keeping with centuries-­old “Jewish values”, the survivors of the Holocaust placed great importance on their children’s education: The values of perseverance and ambitiousness and optimism that typified so many survivors were clearly ingrained in them before the war began. What is interesting is how much these remained part of their worldview even after it ended. . . . The horrors they witnessed and experienced often left deep scars but beneath the scars the capacity to give, to take pleasure in the joy of others, to derive happiness from watching loved ones grow refused to die. (Helmreich, 1992, pp. 119–­121) With uncanny sensitivity, J. Berger (2001) poignantly describes the meaning that creating a new family had

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for his parents and for him as a young child: “Sometimes we laughed, sometimes we bickered but we were together. It was evident in their glimmering eyes that my orphaned parents relished the sight of our togetherness as a family as if there were no sweeter gift imaginable. And I reveled in their delight” (p. 12).

Life-­cycle, identity, and the mourning process The death of a child (children) means the loss of the most important source of securing one’s immortality, of being robbed of a crucial source of living a meaningful life. This may well be the reason why the loss of a child creates the most intense grief, one from which it is the most difficult to recover; children represent not only the child’s own but the parents’ future as well. I believe this is what Erikson (1980) had in mind when he spoke of generativity as a constituent of the adult self: “Generativity is concerned with new beings as well as new products and new ideas which, as a link between the generations, is indispensable for the renewal of adult generation’s own life as it is for that of the next generation (p. 213). Irrespective of securing a sense of immortality in their parents’ lives, children have a special place in the mental lives of their parents because of the nature of the parent-­child tie, a connection that is essentially a narcissistic one. In the course of development with phase-­appropriate caretaker responsiveness, infantile narcissism becomes transformed into a sense of pride and is an essential aspect of one’s self-­esteem ( Kohut, 1971). The narcissistic tie between parents and children means that both parties perform narcissistic (selfobject)5 functions for the other: while the developmental significance of the parents’ validating, empathic responses to the developing child can readily be appreciated, the narcissistic functions that children serve for the enhancement of the parents’ selves are more difficult to recognise (Ornstein & Ornstein, 1985; Ornstein, 2006). Regardless, whether the child’s development is optimal or poses hurdles along the way, children, by mastering the various developmental tasks, affirm their parents in their parenting ability and are major contributors to the enhancement of their self-­esteem. The narcissistic quality of the parent-­child relationship is most clearly seen when a child becomes symptomatic: having an emotionally troubled child creates intense shame and guilt in most parents. When I now describe the lives of two survivors who lost their children in the Shoah and were too old to create new families, I wish to highlight the importance to create meaning in life at a time when hopelessness and depression appear to be the more likely outcomes.

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On 8 May  1945, the nearly five-­year-­old war in Europe came to an end. This was the day that my forty-­ seven-­year-­old mother and I, eighteen years old at that time, along with about 100 Hungarian-­Jewish women, were liberated in a concentration camp located in the Czech Republic. We were liberated by the Russian Army; they did not offer us help to return to Hungary, nor did they offer help with the sick and the dying. We arrived in Budapest several months later mostly on foot, where the cruel news was waiting for us: my two brothers, ages twenty and twenty-­two, died in Forced Labor Battalions and my father, along with the rest of the extended family, was murdered in Auschwitz. Lajos Ornstein was forty-­nine years old when he was liberated by the American Army in one of the subcamps of Mauthausen in Upper Austria. His Hungarian-­Jewish Labor Battalion arrived at the camp in May 1945 only a few weeks before liberation; the several thousand Hungarian Jewish forced laborers marched for close to a year, about 1,000 kilometres to reach their destination. They marched through forests, along riverbeds in rain and snow in tattered clothes and inadequate shoes with little food, sleeping in forests on wet grounds. While on the march, none of the men was aware of the fact that their families had been deported and killed. Three of Lajos’ children, ages fourteen, twelve, and six, and his forty-­two-­year-­old wife were killed in Auschwitz; his eighteen-­year-­old daughter died in a bombing raid in Budapest. Only one of his children, twenty-­one-­year-­old Paul, survived. Considering the importance that children have in their parents’ lives and that their loss creates the most profound grief, the letter my mother wrote to her sister in the summer of 1945 shortly after she and I returned from the concentration camp provides insight into the depth of her grief and her efforts to re-­orient herself to a fundamentally altered future:6 “What I was not prepared for was that my sons were not waiting for me here. In the most difficult hours, this was the thought with which I consoled myself: I will discuss all this with my sons . . . such thoughts and hopes indicate some kind of flexibility I  have but not the strength . . . I find everything to be very difficult, to find an apartment, to find a job . . . (but she quickly reminds herself of her good fortune): Among the Jews from the provinces in my age group there are less than 1% survivors. In the camp, people were jealous of us: a mother with her daughter! At that time, I thought, this is what I want: to be a mother to all these orphans . . . I did not realize that I will be the one who would need this the most . . . I did not know that I would feel this excruciating pain for my sons; the longing, the void I feel. Ideology (Communism, Zionism) does not help with these kinds of feelings. But I am being ungrateful: I have Anna and now we also have Paul (Anna’s future husband) who is a big support to us and here is my sister and my brother-­in law; their tenderness and love cannot be adequately described”.

As my mother began to describe the void, the excruciating pain she felt, almost immediately she put her unbearable grief into the context of the Holocaust; she was amongst the very few (less than one per cent) in her age group who survived and she has a daughter, a future son-­in-­law, she also found two sisters and two brothers alive who surrounded her with affection; she felt profound gratitude for all the tenderness and attention. I believe that experiencing grief in this manner was not unique to my mother; in the minds of the survivors, the losses had to be relativised; they had to be put into the context of the magnitude of the Holocaust. One had to mourn what was lost but at the same time one also had to be grateful for what had remained. In reading my mother’s letters years later, I learnt that she decided already in camp that if she survived, she wanted to take care of orphans. This was a conscious decision with an unconscious motive: she needed to renew life at the point in her life-­cycle where it was tragically interrupted. Remarkably, my mother was also aware of the fact that taking care of orphans could fill the void she was experiencing with the loss of her sons: the children needed mothering, and caring for orphaned children might restore not only her self-­image but could also provide meaning and purpose in her life. In a letter two years later, my mother reflected on the universal need to give meaning to one’s existence. Surrounded with cynicism and nihilism in the post-­war years, she wrote: “I think, we miss strong ideals, something to strive for . . . I think I had grown older but I don’t feel it because I am surrounded by our little ones and I am ‘mothering’ again.” My mother found a job as a director of a Jewish orphanage where the children called her “Ima” (mother). The orphanage, in the suburb of Budapest, housed in a spacious villa surrounded by a beautiful garden, had the ambience of a home rather than an institution. The children, about twenty-­five to thirty boys and girls less than ten years old, survived the war hidden by Gentile friends of their parents who were deported and did not return. Because of the protracted siege of Budapest, the children arrived with lice in their hair and scabies over their emaciated bodies. With the help of a devoted staff – a teacher, a cook, and a gardener – the children quickly recovered physically. We were all involved in an effort to provide them with experiences that were potentially emotionally restorative. Every member of the staff was involved with the bedtime routine; there were bedtime stories and soothing lullabies. A few years later, when my mother joined us in America and she took care of her own grandchildren, she would listen to conversations with our colleagues and write to her sister: “The company of the young people and their conversations bring new ideas  .  .  .  it seems like all these help to ‘conserve’ my own intellectual capacities”. After visiting her sister in Israel, she was in awe of the

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mothers who lost children in the many Israeli wars and commented: “It is always easier for those who can feel their own inner value”. Mother also wrote about dreaming about my father: “In the beginning, I was totally preoccupied with my boys, now, that time had passed, I am talking to William in my dreams. When I awake, I feel as if I want to re-­establish something from the past but I am not successful. I go back to sleep, when I wake up again, I am feeling better. Actually, I look forward to my day’s activities with joy”. Dreaming about her husband and feeling better on awakening indicates a sense of closure regarding his death. My father was sixty-­one years old when we arrived in Auschwitz; he was protecting his ninety-­six-­year-­old mother from the surging crowd on the platform where I lost sight of them. Once we learnt about the selections, we could not hope for my father’s survival. The dream made my mother feel good; it was an opportunity to be with him. I have very few dreams about my father and my brothers. However, whenever I  do dream about them, I  too feel good and wish I could have them visit with me in my dreams more often. After his physical recovery, Paul’s father was welcome into our home and he delighted in the idea of being a grandfather. However, this was not the time at which his life was interrupted and this was not where he needed to resume it. A life-­long Zionist, he immigrated to Israel where he found families from his hometown with children who were comparable in age to his own lost children. In one of these families, the mother and her four children survived while the father perished. Soon after the family’s arrival in the new country, important decisions had to be made regarding the children, two of them having contracted tuberculosis while in a work camp in Austria. Paul’s father helped the overburdened mother to make these decisions and he was very helpful in many other matters in the family’s everyday life. Some years later, he married the children’s mother but by then the children had regarded him as their father. With time, he participated in the life-­cycle events of other families from his hometown, a father and then a grandfather to many children who never knew their grandfathers. The process of mourning I witnessed in my mother and in my father-­in-­law indicates that for these two adults, parenting constituted an important aspect of their identities as it does for most parents. At the time in their life-­cycle when these two survivors lost their children, their identities and the purpose of their lives were tied to their children and to their children’s future. Unconscious of their motivations, both appeared determined to re-­experience themselves as competent parents capable of re-­investing in their “new children” who needed their parenting as much they needed these children’s love in return. Experientially, losing a narcissistically invested other, whether a spouse or one’s child (children)

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means to lose a part of one’s self. Adaptive mourning of these losses includes a new vision of the future with the promise that the rest of one’s life can be lived in relative contentment. Traditionally, we have conceptualised mourning as having a double task: while (1) internalisation of the lost object assures an ongoing internal relationship with the lost “other”, simultaneously, this process (2) facilitates the task of giving up the deceased in reality (decathexis). I  am suggesting that the mourning process – certainly in cases where the self of the bereaved had suffered the loss of a narcissistically invested other (a selfobject) – includes a third function: it includes the ability to have a vision of an altered but, potentially, meaningful future. These are not sequential processes; new objects are not invested after the old ones have been given up as Freud had postulated in Mourning and Melancholia (1917). Rather, investing in new projects and new relationships invigorate a depleted self and constitute an intrinsic aspect of an adaptive mourning process. Pathological mourning, on the other hand, creates a chronic sense of numbness in which one is neither fully alive nor fully dead. Neimeyer (2002), viewing mourning from a constructivist perspective, said something similar when he maintained that grieving entails the attempt to reaffirm or reconstruct a world of meaning that has been challenged by loss. The question could be raised as to whether or not the orphans and half-­orphans were “replacement children” used by the adults to rehabilitate their own damaged selves. Were these children expected to fulfil the adults’ hopes and expectations in order to be loved and valued? Since I  did not have a chance to have follow-­up interviews with the children, I do not know how they were affected by my mother’s and father-­in-­law’s parenting. Generally, the literature of the “second generation” in cases where one or both parents lost children in the Holocaust had offered clinical examples of the destructive impact that the survivor parents’ psychopathology had on their children’s emotional and cognitive development (Kestenberg, 1982; Kogan, 2003). The children in these families were considered “replacement children” who were loved and narcissistically valued “only on the condition that they fulfil the destiny of the child who was lost” (Kogan, 2003, p. 727). Everyday observation would indicate that the phenomenon of “replacement children” is more likely an exception than the rule in survivor families. The idea of “replacement children” – with its dire consequences for the new children – found its way into clinical situations not only where the parents lost children in the Shoah but also in families where the children were considered “replacement children” for the parents’ murdered siblings. The following clinical example is a case in point.

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The reconstruction of memories and the mourning process Mrs. Halpern7 (“Mrs. H.”) was referred to me because her duodenal ulcer failed to heal in response to a diet regimen and her doctor thought that her Holocaust past was responsible for this. This survivor-­patient’s treatment also demonstrates the importance that the reconstruction of memories has in the mourning process. In the absence of material possessions (especially photographs), memory fragments become “anchor points” around which many Holocaust survivors attempt to reconstruct memories and assemble their lives’ narratives. Having survived several concentration camps, Mrs. H. married another survivor after the war. The couple had two teenage sons. The older was about to enter college, which the doctor considered a major source of Mrs. H.’s anxiety as this was about the age when she was separated from her family. In recounting her history to me, Mrs. H. found herself trying to remember the colour of the dress her mother wore when she last saw her. She now felt “silly” for hanging on to such an insignificant detail. I said that I could see that she was trying to have a clearer image of her mother because this may help her remember more about her family and the day they were together the last time. She was glad I did not think this was silly and she had good reason trying to remember the details. When my patient succeeded to remember the dress her mother wore, many other details of that last day emerged. She recalled where her father was sitting and what her little brothers were doing that day. She again asked me if this was “sick” or “stupid”, but remembering these details made her feel good. Pausing for a minute, she asked if forgetting how they died would help her ulcer to heal. I  said that it is unlikely that she would ever forget how they died but now she also wanted to remember how they lived and what they looked like. As if confessing, she said that since she does not have any pictures of them, she was afraid that if she lost the memory of their faces, then she really would not have anything. After her sons were born, she had been thinking more of her family than before. When she told her doctor that she found herself searching her sons’ faces to find resemblance to her little brothers, the doctor thought that this meant that her sons were “replacement children” and that she would need psychiatric help. It was then that Mrs. H. was referred to me. When I  told my patient that her wish to find resemblance between her sons and her lost brothers made good sense to me because that way part of them would have survived, she began to cry. Her cry sounded more like a cry of relief than that of anguish. She asked me again why she felt good when talking about these things. I said that being able to feel the profound sadness

of their premature and cruel deaths made her feel good because these feelings signalled the end of numbness, the end of an inner void. There was a smile coming through her tears as she mused: “I can just see how my father would have enjoyed our sons, how he would play with them. I remember him playing with my brothers”. The pain of the loss of her entire family was now mixed with joy of the pictures she managed to re-­assemble in her mind about her father playing with his two young sons. From here, more memories followed, each of them bittersweet, a mixture of joy and profound sorrow. This was a relatively brief treatment. At the time we parted, we both thought that she felt better because she was able to “fill in the gaps” in her memory that helped her establish a sense of continuity between the way she experienced herself within the family of origin and the life she was living with her family now. Having made contact with her memories set the process of mourning into motion. Remembering the details of her last day with her family served as an emotional bridge between herself in the past and her present life. In psychoanalysis, the presence of contradictory affects are associated with the changes that take place in the course of treatment: a new sense of vitality alternating with old fears and concerns. Theoretically, we explain this phenomenon by an increase in self-­cohesion which had become gradually more able to contain a variety of affects, pleasurable as well as painful ones. In treatment, these affects may be subtle; however, in the process of mourning, the co-­existence of contradictory affects may be powerfully experienced; profound joy seems to invite intense sorrow mixed with rage. I  experienced these mixed emotions at the weddings of our children as I did again and again at various joyful family occasions. The joy we feel for having lived to witness these occasions powerfully reinforces the pain of grief over the magnitude of our losses. Reflecting on his survivor-­parents, Berger writes: “You might think it strange to say, but when my parents got together with their friends, they laughed and joked with a gusto I  rarely share with friends. . . . I point these out because the refugees and survivors are always portrayed as gloomy and bitter. They were that way at times. But they also lived lives that were quite full, life of frivolity as well as mourning” (Berger, 2001, pp. 17–­18).

Summary This chapter places emphasis on the highly individual nature of mourning that is affected by a variety of factors: the age of the deceased, the context in which the death occurred, and the nature of the attachment between the deceased and the bereaved. Accepting the idea that human beings – consciously and unconsciously – are in search of meaning and purpose in their

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lives, the chapter examines the lives of two survivors (my mother and my father-­in-­law) after the Holocaust; both lost children at the time in their lives when they were no longer able to create new families. The loss of a child (children) carries special significance because, for most parents, caring for and raising children constitutes the most important source of living a meaningful life. Supported by my mother’s letters to her sisters after the war, I proposed that “adaptive mourning” includes the ability to imagine a future in which life can be lived with a sense of satisfaction, fulfillment, and joy after such devastating losses. The anticipation of a future that has meaning and purpose is intrinsic to the process of adaptive mourning. Experientially, on the level of the individual mourner, this can be recognized by the co-­ existence of seemingly contradictory affective states: joy mixed with a deep sense of sorrow, indicative of a relatively cohesive self that is capable of accommodating a variety of complex emotions.

Notes 1 With the addition of a paper by M. Oliner, the panel presentations were published in Grief and Its Transcendence. Ed. A. Tutter & L Wurmser, 2016. 2 The first seven days of mourning during which visitors are expected to respond only to what the bereaved verbalizes; they do not console, lest they interfere with expression of painful emotions (Slochover, 1993). Traditionally, these conversations are focused on the deceased. 3 Tom Lantos, the only survivor who became a United States Congressman, was the co-­chair of the International Human Rights Commission. He championed the causes of the vulnerables and the disenfranchised, ranging from the Bahai in Iran and dissidents in China to children exploited in sweatshops. 4 People were asked to “volunteer” to attend to these isolated patients who were left to die. Volunteering meant to give them some water and be present as they died. The job was expected to lead to the volunteers’ own deaths within a few weeks. 5 Kohut coined the word selfobject, indicating that the verbal and non-­verbal behavior of an “other” (the object) always impacts the state of the self. The self can only be conceptualized in relation to its selfobject environment.

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6 Recognizing the importance of these letters, my mother’s sister saved them with the instruction that, after her death, they ought to be given to me. 7 I reported this case in greater detail Reconstruction and the establishment of psychic continuity. In: Reconstruction of trauma: Its significance in clinical practice. Workshop Series of the Am. Psychoanalytic Assn. Monograph 2. Ed. A. Rothstein. International University Press, 1986.

References Berger, J. (2001). Displaced persons: Growing up American after the Holocaust. New York: Scribner. Didion, J. (2005). The year of magical thinking. New York: A. Knopf. Erikson, E. (1980). On the generational cycle: An address. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 61, 213–­223. Frankl, V. (1946). Ein Psycholog erlebt das Konzentrationslager, published in German, Translated into English and published by Beacon Press in 1959. Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and Melancholia. S.E., 14, 243–­258. Helmreich, W. B. (1992). Against all odds: Holocaust survivors and the successful lives they made in America. New York: Simon and Schuster. Kestenberg, J. S.,  & Kestenberg, M. (1982). The experience of survivor parents. In M. S. Bergman  & M. E. Jucovy (Eds.), Generations of the Holocaust. New York: Basic Books. Kogan, I. (2003). On being a dead, beloved child. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 72(3), 727–­766. Kohut, H. (1966). Forms and transformation of Narcissism. JAPA, 13, 243–­272, also in Ornstein, P. H. (Ed.) (2011). Search for the self. London: Karnac Books, 1, 427–­460. Kohut, H. (1971). The analysis of the self. New York: International University Press. Neimeyer, R. (2002). Lessons of loss. Memphis, TN: Mercury. Ornstein, A. (2006). Caretakers and the sources of their dysfunctions: Therapeutic implications. The Annual of Psychoanalysis, 36, 130–­144. Ornstein, A. (2010). The missing tombstone: Reflections on mourning and creativity JAPA, 58, 631–­648. Ornstein, A. (2016). The function of memorial spaces. In A. Tutter & L. Wurmser (Eds.), Grief and transcendence; memory, identity, creativity (pp. 81–­88). London: Routledge. Ornstein, A., & Ornstein, P. (1985). Parenting as a function of the adult self: A  psychoanalytic developmental perspective. In J. Anthony & G. Pollock (Eds.), Parental influences in health and disease. Boston, MA: Little Brown & Co. Slochower, J. (1993). Mourning and the holding function of Shiva. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 29, 352–­367.

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Section III Transmission of trauma

10 Second generation identity Eva Fogelman

Historical perspective In the late 1960s, Henry Krystal, a psychoanalyst and Auschwitz survivor, organised several conferences for doctors, social-­service providers, and German government officials on the after-­effects of “massive psychic trauma” on survivors of Nazi concentration camps and the Hiroshima nuclear disaster. While organising the conference at Wayne State University, Krystal learnt of Canadian psychiatrists Vivian Rakoff and John Sigal who had reported that twenty-­five percent of the families seeking psychological help for their children at the Montreal Jewish General Hospital were Holocaust survivors. This percentage was disproportionate to their numbers. The adolescents Rakoff and Sigal treated came to them with severe phobias, chronic depression, anger, and unsuccessful suicide attempts. Rakoff wrote: “It would be easier to believe that they, rather than their parents, had suffered the corrupting, searing hell.  .  .  . With the accumulation of knowledge and the unfolding of the concentration camp experience through the damaged generations, one may fairly ask if indeed there were any survivors” (1966). An Israeli psychiatrist, Hillel Klein, who had been conducting research on Holocaust survivor families on a kibbutz, disputed Rakoff and Sigal’s findings. He maintained that survivors spent more quality time with their children than other parents and that their children had a rich fantasy life that enhanced security and provided relief from anxiety (1968).

Krystal concluded that the intense and unique family dynamics centred on the children of survivors “related to the subject of object-­loss [of beloved relatives and] . . . the yearning (hope) that the lost people would be restored magically. The most common expectation is that such love objects would return in the form of children . . . [who would] represent the new versions of parents, close relatives or offspring lost in the Holocaust” (in Krystal and Petty 1968, p. 325). After the Wayne State University conferences Krystal and others approached the American Psychoanalytic Association to organise a study group on the psychological effects of the Holocaust on the offspring of survivors. They met tremendous resistance, so they met ad hoc to continue to explore the transmission of historical trauma during the American Psychoanalytic Association and International Psychoanalytic Association meetings. Among the participants of the Discussion Group on “Children and Social Catastrophe: Sequelae in Survivors and the Children of Survivors” were Henry Krystal, Hillel Klein, Judith Kestenberg, Peter Blos, Yehuda Nir, Vivian Rakoff, John Sigal, Elmer Luchterhand, Paul Chodoff, Janis Schossberger, and Sam Kaplan. New York psychoanalyst Judith Kestenberg sent a questionnaire to 320 analysts around the world to ask about their treatment of children of survivors. Reporting in 1972, she concluded: “A vast majority of those questioned revealed an amazing indifference to the problem. . . . Some were startled by the questions because it never occurred to them to link their patients’ dynamics to the history of their parents’ persecution” (1972, pp. 311–­325).

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Study groups and groups In 1974, the committed psychoanalysts finally persuaded the American Psychoanalytic Association to sponsor the Group for the Psychoanalytic Study of the Effect of the Holocaust on the Second Generation, which held its first session in December 1975. Kestenberg was joined by psychoanalysts Martin Bergmann and Milton Jucovy, amongst others, in developing new psychoanalytic approaches to treating second generation patients. The Group for the Psychoanalytic Study of the Effect of the Holocaust on the Second Generation also met monthly in New York for approximately fifteen years and culminated in the edited volume Generations of the Holocaust, 1982. Although the book is ascribed to Martin S. Bergmann and Milton E. Jucovy as editors, Judith S. Kestenberg was a lead editor and is acknowledged so in the German edition. She was reluctant to have her name listed because she was concerned that her patients would recognise themselves in the book even though they would be disguised. I joined this discussion group in December  1976. After listening to dozens of Holocaust survivor children in the privacy of my office for a year, I wanted to share ideas with colleagues who understood the importance of combining the historical with the personal. Meetings of The Group for the Psychoanalytic Study of the Effect of the Holocaust on the Second Generation usually began with participants introducing themselves and their interest in the study group. Many were Jewish and shared a Holocaust-­related history, which enabled them to empathise as well as to realise the limitations of psychoanalytic concepts to describe the consequences of massive psychic trauma on “second generation” members. Some were reluctant to share their connection to the Holocaust and many were oblivious to psychological dynamics in the lives of Holocaust survivors, let alone in the lives of their offspring. Most of those mental health professionals whose patients informed them that they were children of survivors were unclear about the therapeutic implications of this information. Psychoanalysts often interpreted children of survivors as emotionally impaired or colluded in a silence about the subject to protect themselves from hearing graphic death narratives. Misdiagnosis was common. For example, some second generation patients who expressed mistrust of the outside world were diagnosed with paranoid personality, when in fact, what they were expressing was a world view that was transmitted to them by their survivor parents. One prominent psychologist doing work in this area, Chester Feuerstein, had been part of the American liberating army. He witnessed first-­hand the unbelievable effects of the Nazi’s murderous actions. In the early 1970s, despite considerable opposition, he worked to establish the Holocaust as a legitimate area in clinical psychology

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that affects mental health, as he would later do with the Vietnam War. Later, he fought with the Executive Board of the New York Clinical Psychologists to establish Holocaust memorial awards for the best work in this area. The Awareness Groups for Children of Holocaust Survivors that Bella Savran and I initiated in 1976 at Boston University were independent of the efforts of the psychoanalysts referred to earlier. We were influenced by the consciousness-­raising groups of the women’s movement. In the United States, many different clusters had been forming groups based on collective identity. In 1975, I happened to read the transcript of a conversation amongst children of Holocaust survivors published in Response: A Contemporary Jewish Review (1975). They discussed how growing up with survivor parents influenced their world view, values, behaviour, and feelings. That publication gave Bella and me the idea to start a short-­term awareness group for children of Holocaust survivors at Boston University. Fogelman and Savran posted flyers on bulletin boards around campus and at local kosher food stores and the bookstore. Elie Wiesel had started teaching a course on the Holocaust at Boston University and advertised the group in his class. We subsequently published articles about the dynamics of these groups, including the leaders’ reactions (1979, 1980). Transcripts and interviews of a few of the early groups (one which Mona Fishbane co-­led with me) were used for one of the earliest doctoral dissertations on the second generation (1979). Another group which I co-­led with psychiatrist Henry Grunebaum became the subject of the documentary film Breaking the Silence: The Generation After the Holocaust (PBS, 1984). In 1976, Time published a paragraph on the research of Israeli psychiatrist Shamai Davidson entitled “Second Generation Effects of the Nazi Holocaust”. This article helped journalist and daughter of Holocaust survivors Helen Epstein persuade her editors at the New York Times Magazine to give her an assignment on this topic. On June  19, 1977, Helen Epstein’s cover story Heirs to the Holocaust, and her subsequent landmark book, Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors (1979) gave children of survivors the language to understand themselves. Epstein’s interviewees articulated what many others felt but could not put into words. That resulted in children of Holocaust survivors becoming an identifiable group in American society. The second generation (in lower case letters) became the Second Generation (upper case) or as they refer to themselves colloquially today as “the 2Gs”. Our Boston awareness groups (Fogelman  & Savran, 1979, 1980) described in Epstein’s article, spearheaded similar groups in a few other cities. I  was invited by Hillel Klein to start such a group at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1978, when I  lectured in Israel,

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mental health professionals told me that I  was bringing an American phenomenon to Israel, that children of survivors in Israel were not psychologically affected by their parents’ trauma. They argued that children of survivors felt integrated into Israeli society and did not feel alienated, different, or isolated from their peers as in the United States. It took another decade until the phenomenon was recognised by Israeli mental health professionals and the 2Gs themselves. In the United States, Gerald Green’s Holocaust television mini-­series in 1978 and the inauguration of the United States Holocaust Commission, then the Holocaust Museum focused much media attention on survivor families, who became a highly visible part of the American cultural landscape – unlike in other parts of the world. The detrimental effect of all this attention was that 2Gs were being put under a psychological microscope. One of the themes that emerged from our awareness groups was that children of survivors were mourning murdered family members whom they never knew. Mourning the loss of an entire people cannot be done in isolation. It requires a community. Towards that effort Bella Savran, Moshe Waldoks, and I  approached Rabbi Irving (“Yitz”) Greenberg, director of The National Jewish Center for Leadership and Learning (CLAL, which included a Holocaust Jewish Resource Center), to host a conference on children of Holocaust survivors.

First international conference This idea came to fruition in November 1979 at the First International Conference on Children of Holocaust Survivors. Six hundred children of survivors gathered in New York City with a smattering of survivors. It was an explosive conference, in which mental health professionals speaking about their research became the unexpected targets of audience rage. The torrent of anger was, I believe, in lieu of the collective mourning process that usually takes place when survivors and their children get together. This intense anger was really about what was done to innocent people by their persecutors. Some felt that the professionals were speaking of them as specimens to be experimented on, the way some survivors were guinea pigs for medical “researchers” in concentration camps. Since the actual persecutors were not present, the rage was directed at the “messengers”. Theologian and historian Michael Berenbaum helped address this rage by leading participants in chanting the Kaddish (prayer for the dead) for those who were killed in the Shoah. Following the conference, more mental health professionals established self-­help kinship groups and second generation therapy groups but encountered resistance when they asked Jewish organisations to provide funds.

Some children of survivors resisted the idea of groups and of trying to understand the psychological impact of their parents’ trauma on them. Some felt stigmatised by mental health professionals and wary of being compared to America’s many other victimised groups. Children of survivors sometimes heard, “You’re just like children of alcoholics”. Such an interpretation undermined the Holocaust survivor parent who would not be emotionally compromised were it not for being persecuted as a Jew. Other offspring of survivors sought more life-­ affirming, active ways to identify with their family’s traumatic history. When the World Gathering of Holocaust Survivors met in Israel in 1981, one day was devoted to a meeting of 1,000 children of survivors where the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, with Menachem Rosensaft as its Founding Chairman, was formed. Its mission was to continue Holocaust commemorations and education, to help other oppressed groups, to fight genocide, and to provide social support to those in need. It established chapters throughout the United States and organised regular conferences in Israel and the United States.

Research and clinical findings On the research front, more than 150 psychology doctoral dissertations and 500 research articles have been written until 2017 about the transmission of historical trauma. The literature includes findings that highlight resilience amongst members of this group and findings on the psychopathology and vulnerability in this population. Early researchers focused on the psycho-­historical themes in the lives of children of survivors that differentiated them from their peers. Robert Prince’s doctoral dissertation in 1975 was followed by research asking whether children of survivors were more clinically depressed or anxious than comparative groups. Did they have the capacity to separate from their survivor parents and function as independent adults? How had communication about the atrocities and losses in the family affected the well-­being of these children? How was their identity and self-­esteem influenced by having parents who were persecuted as Jews? Since the early 1990s researchers have focused on the biological transmission of Post-­Traumatic Stress Disorder diagnosis in the second generation. Do children of survivors have normal cortisol levels? Are children of survivors exhibiting PTSD? More recently, epigenetic enquiries concentrate on trauma-­induced genetic changes in Holocaust survivors, and how and whether altered genes are transmitted to the next generation.

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Since there are too many findings to review, I  will highlight ones I  found to be key. In research conducted by Gloria Leon and others at the University of Minnesota using the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, the conclusion reached was that being a child of Holocaust survivors is not a personality syndrome (1981). Children of survivors were shown as not more depressed, or more anxious, than a comparative cohort group. They do not exhibit a greater tendency towards schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or borderline narcissistic personalities. These findings were also corroborated by Zahava Solomon from Tel-­Aviv University who conducted a series of controlled studies with thousands of subjects in Israel using other psychological instruments. A major subject of enquiry has been regarding the developmental stage of separation and individuation. Clinicians have suggested that 2Gs cannot separate from their parents and thereby cannot become independent human beings who assume adult responsibilities. The dozens of studies with control groups have yielded mixed results, but Erica Wanderman suggests that children of survivors have the capacity to separate from their parents, but take longer to go through this phase of development. Furthermore, daughters of survivors are less separated and individuated than daughters of American-­Jewish-­born parents. However, these results are not significant when measured by more projective measures like the Rorschach, which tap the unconscious (1979). Another interesting enquiry is the difference between sons and daughters of survivors. In Israeli society, sons of survivors have been shown to attempt to undo their parents’ victimisation by being extroverted, assertive, dominant, aggressive, and competitive. They display courage, take risks, seek excitement, and look for novelty. They also tend to be less neurotic, more independent, and more suspicious. In sum, they present a relatively consistent personality structure with low inhibition as its main feature. And sons of survivors tend to volunteer for front-­line combat (Kav-­Vanaki, Nadler, & Gershoni, 1983). Generally, daughters of survivors have a more emotional approach to life, with their behaviour directed by feelings of melancholy and depression rather than by objective rationality. But I would note that these symptoms are within the normal range and are not considered clinical depressions. This may be because Holocaust survivor mothers tend to talk more than the survivor fathers, and thus, the father serves as a role model of instrumental coping, while the daughters identify more with the mothers’ internalisation of past victimisation. This finding, by the way, is in sync with general findings that women tend to be more emotional and men tend to be more task-­oriented.

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The “2 Gs” I learnt that such commonalities must be understood in the context of each child of the survivor’s unique family history. On the surface, the 2Gs are no different from any other group of people their age. They are lawyers, doctors, parents, teachers, journalists, actors, artists, secretaries – people from every walk of life. They are straight, gay, lesbian. They seem as well adjusted as any of our peers. Many have a tendency to be over-­achievers. Some are classical musicians of the highest order – such as Emmanuel Ax; others are heavy metal head bangers. They have a presence in Hollywood with Ivan Reitman, have made it into the halls of the United States Congress with Sam Gajdenson and Ron Wyden, and into the board rooms of major corporations. They are in the ranks of Jewish national and international leadership. Wolf Blitzer on CNN is a son of Holocaust survivors. What seems to have differentiated children of survivors from their peers in America is that the 2Gs grew up feeling different. They did not have grandparents or extended families for celebrations, and holidays became mournful remembrances. In addition, their immigrant parents needed the child to be their spokesperson to the bureaucracies and to the outside world in general. These distinctions may have also affected their self-­esteem. The values and world views that some children of survivors were subjected to also contributed to a sense of isolation. Observing the world as a hostile place, learning not to trust anyone outside the immediate family, choosing an occupation that can be transferred anywhere, being prepared for a catastrophe, and keeping a low profile as a Jew are but a few of these attitudes. Another psychological dynamic we examined is the extent to which communication about the persecution had an impact on the psychological well-­being of the offspring of survivors. In most families, the children were exposed to their parents’ suffering and losses by eavesdropping on conversations with other survivors, or hearing bits and pieces of their ordeals. It is when parents or a close relative spoke incessantly or were totally silent that more extreme reactions ensued. Hearing too many gruesome details at a young age caused tremendous uncontrollable rage, and not knowing anything about the family history resulted in a lack of an intimate relationship with parents and to some extent with others. One group member, Solomon, shared a bedroom with his uncle who had lost his wife and two children when they were sent to the gas chambers. Every night when Solomon went to sleep, his uncle would repeat the story of how his wife and two daughters were directed “to the left” by Mengele. It did not take long for Solomon to act out his aggression by misbehaving in school and starting fires at home.

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Solomon was sent to live in group homes – he was one of the few Jews in such a place. This clearly exacerbated his alienation and isolation. But he was very intelligent and went on to become a college professor specialising in European Jewish history between the wars. He channelled his anger into a constructive intellectual pursuit, and educates others about the continuity of the Jewish people and the Jewish life that existed before the war. Another child of survivors, David, came from an Orthodox Jewish background. He would hear about atrocities from his mother when he came home from school and she served him milk and cookies. As a young man, he would take his anger out on Jewish women he dated by rejecting them, one after another. After several years of marriage to a Muslim woman, and many other relationships with non-­Jewish women, he finally married a non-­Jew who converted to Judaism after they had a child. The Jewish identity of the survivor generation was diverse: from Hasidim to converts to other religions, and from Bundists to Zionists. The second generation reflects that diversity and reactions to it. A small percentage of children of survivors – as authors Helen Fremont (199) and Louise Kehoe (1995) have described – did not know that they were born to Jewish survivor parents until their adulthood. Ingrid Tauber’s doctoral dissertation explains how the social milieu of growing up with many children of survivors, with a few or with no others, formed one’s self-­esteem and identity as a second generation member (1980). Most children of survivors knew that their parents were persecuted as Jews. Even when the details of their lives before, during, and after the Holocaust were vague, they heard bits and pieces about their parents’ traumatic years as they eavesdropped on adult conversations. But children of survivors were often reluctant to ask too many questions for fear that a survivor might break down if his or her wounds were brought to the surface. To most 2Gs, “break down” means crying uncontrollably. The quality and quantity of how the past is communicated to a child has other effects. Very minimal information can lead to excessive fantasies and shame about how a parent survived, sometimes resulting in low self-­esteem and poor self-­image. The quality of family communication cannot be psychologically measured and was different in each Holocaust survivor home. In some families there was a haunting theme of secrets which kept a child of survivors in the dark about what “really” happened. Another variable is the mood of the individual home. Some homes were permeated with a sense of loss and mourning. Dozens of memorial candles were lit along with holiday candles – mitigating the joy of

holidays. Festive meals were reminders of all those who were not there to celebrate. Survivors tended to name their children after relatives who were murdered in the Holocaust – and some children mourned the person for whom she or he is named. I have observed that a child of survivors does not necessarily know that he or she is coming into therapy to mourn his or her unknown relatives or is unable to verbalise the connection to losses during the Holocaust. One who came to see me held a napkin on his lap. When I asked him about who was in his mother’s and father’s families before the war, he opened his napkin and said, “This is the reason I am here”. He then read the names of a list of relatives who were murdered on both his mother’s and father’s sides of the family. He came for treatment because every time he contemplated having children of his own, he fell into a deep depression, and did not know why. After a number of sessions, he became aware of his fear of losing a child the way his parents lost a son during the Holocaust. He was then able to mourn his dead brother, and went on to have four children of his own.

Mourning The way 2Gs mourn may take different forms. Some may repress any family losses; others may channel their feelings into helping others. Israeli psychologist Dina Wardi contends that in every family of survivors there is one who is designated as the “memorial candle” (1992). These are the stages of mourning as I delineate them: 1) The “shock” of finding out that parents were persecuted as Jews and that many in their family were murdered (Fogelman, 1998). 2) Then there is a period of “denial”, the second phase: not dwelling on the suffering and losses. Many 2Gs knew that their parents survived “the war” and lost many close relatives, but the details were vague. These people are not revisionists. They do not say, “It didn’t happen”, but, rather, they never attend a memorial service, read a book, interview a survivor, visit a Holocaust museum or memorial, or read an oral history. They avoid Holocaust-­related films, and they complain that there is too much focus on the Holocaust. 3) A different level of awareness sets in when a barrier to confronting the past is removed. This third phase of mourning is the “confrontation”. Denial may be disrupted when a parent falls ill or dies, and the family worries that it will soon be too late to get the stories about their families. Others have denial broken by reading a book or seeing a movie, by experiencing an anti-­Semitic incident or some

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other experience of fear. Often a more direct dialogue begins with the parents or with other relatives to seek details of the parents’ survival and their life before the war. Confrontation continues with going on “roots” trips, reading books, and searching for documents. Too often, the confrontation stage begins after a parent dies, and then getting details of their lives becomes problematic. Many 2Gs were enlisted to help their parents fill out forms for German reparations, and that got the story-­telling ball rolling. Another avenue to confrontation came from the third generation, the 3Gs, the survivor’s grandchildren, who would ask a question about the family, and their parents did not know the answer. Another trigger to confrontation could be seeing or experiencing an external event that triggers fears of annihilation, such as the days before the Six-­Day War in Israel, or 9/­11 in New York. 4) After learning the details of the humiliation, persecution, and losses, a flood of feelings is evoked in 2Gs. The “feeling stage” is the fourth stage of mourning, in which 2Gs wish they could undo the pain and suffering of their parents. Feelings of grief, sadness, depression, anger, rage, revenge, helplessness, and survivor guilt can be overwhelming. That guilt has the potential to turn into a dysfunctional state of being – making some 2Gs feel like they have to deprive themselves of joy and need to suffer in the present.   During the feeling stage of mourning, the individual may experience survivor guilt, a desire to undo the pain and suffering of the parents, anger, rage, a desire to take revenge, loss and sadness, identification with victimhood. At times overly identifying with victimisation or heroism can result in transposition – living in the present as if it is the past, for example, putting oneself in a dangerous situation (Kestenberg, 1982).   As a result, some 2Gs put themselves into situations in which they are forced to survive or compete with their parents’ heroism, or they live in the present but are transposed into the past world of their parents. Kestenberg explains transposition as “the organization of the self in relation to time and space. Transposition must not be confused with a dual personality. This dual existence of living in the present and in the past arises under extreme stress and danger of death otherwise it is dormant” (1989, p. 70).   This time tunnel, at times a replacement of mourning, can be subtle and misunderstood if one does not connect it to the parent’s traumatic past. For example, Aart, a journalist in Israel, was writing for a Dutch newspaper. He was planning to live in Israel permanently but could not see himself taking Israeli citizenship. It frightened him to think that if another Holocaust were to occur, he would be stuck and unable to escape. He

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had German and Dutch passports and felt he belonged nowhere. When Aart revealed his father’s story, it was clear his father survived because he had false passports that allowed him to travel incognito out of Holland when the rest of the family was deported to Westerbork (a way station to Auschwitz).   When Aart began to understand that connection, Aart was eventually able to get Israeli citizenship, and have a feeling of belonging rather than feeling like a refugee. This concept of transposition – living in the present and past at the same time – is often at the heart of psychological problems amongst 2Gs who are “stuck” in the feeling stage. There are those who are immersed in feeling the pain and suffering of the Jews. They interpret the Jewish people as the ultimate sufferers and they turn themselves into victims in their current lives. Some of these 2Gs walk around in a state of self-­induced paranoia or believe that the Jews are under constant siege from anti-­Semites and Muslim countries: “Everyone is out to get us Jews”. Some feel guilty because they did not suffer like their parents. Others are full of rage, a mechanism to keep fear away. 5) Finally, feelings need to be channelled into constructive, life-­affirming behaviours. This “search for meaning” is the final stage of mourning that connects us with the life that was destroyed, and heals those who have gotten stuck in the emotional state of the mourning process. Such endeavours include raising consciousness about man’s inhumanity through Holocaust education, human rights work, creative projects, helping other oppressed groups, raising Jewish families, and connecting to the culture and Jewish knowledge that was destroyed. Negative feelings are transformed into constructive life-­affirming ways to identify with the dead and remember them before and beyond their suffering. When the feelings are “good”, when feelings emerge with awareness of the losses, they can be channelled in various ways one of which is to affirm continuity of aspects of the Jewish culture that was destroyed – as Zalmen Mlotek does with the National Yiddish Theatre-­Folksbiene in the United States. It is interesting to note that the search is best accomplished through group efforts. One cannot be an active Jew in isolation. To fight oppression and racism, to raise Holocaust consciousness, and to help others requires a collective effort. The Holocaust Awareness Movement can arguably be called one of the most influential consciousness-­raising efforts in history – for good and evil. When the search for meaning in the lives of survivors and 2Gs began, the memory of the Holocaust no longer remained a private nightmare of the survivors. The memories shifted from individual memory to collective memory.

10 CHAPTER

S e cond ge ne rat ion ide nt ity     

Conclusion Psychoanalyst George Pollock explains that the creative process enables an individual to integrate the mourning process. And, indeed, amongst the children of survivors there is a flourishing second generation genre of literature and film which Alan Berger analyses in Children of Job: American Second Generation Witnesses to the Holocaust (1997). In 2017, the number of films, plays, performative, and visual works produced internationally has dramatically increased. This process occurs within an artistic, social, and cultural context that has been very different for 2Gs in their far-­flung places of residence: Australia and New Zealand (Deb Filler, one woman shows); formerly Soviet-­occupied and western Europe; and North and South America. I believe that Judaism and Jewish identity clearly cannot be based on the Holocaust and a history of persecution. Judaism is a life-­affirming religion and needs to be transmitted as a great joy and not as a burden. The Holocaust is not Judaism. The late historian Josef Hayim Yerushalmi wrote that the modern effort to reconstruct the Jewish past began at a time when there was a break in the continuity of Jewish living, and also a decay of Jewish group memory. He argued that, for the first time, history – and not sacred text – became the arbiter of Judaism. As 2G Leon Wieseltier wrote when the Holocaust museum in Washington was built: “Traditions decay or disappear if they are not remembered, but they do not flourish in the hands of those who live in the past. And memory, too, may cloud or clog one’s view of one’s time. In collective memory there will always be a mystical quality, since it consists in the unaccountable capacity to remember – not to know, but to remember – things that happened to others. What is missing in memory is the eros of Jewish life in Europe before the end”. The late Rabbi Harold Schulweis, with whom I  founded the Jewish Foundation for Christian Rescuers, understood that “Memory contains an ambiguous energy: It can liberate or enslave, heal or destroy, the use of memory carries with it a responsibility to the future”. The significance of the second generation of Holocaust survivors is much more than psychological symptoms. As a group they have been role models for other historically traumatised groups to mourn collectively and to engage in life-­affirming endeavours.

References Berger, A. L. (1997). Children of Job: American Second G ­ enration Witnesses to the Holocaust. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.

Epstein, H. (1979). Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with sons and daughters of survivors. New York: Putnam. Fishbane, M. (1979). Children of survivors of the Nazi Holocaust: A  psychological inquiry, Doctoral Dissertation, University of Massachusetts. Dissertation Abstracts International, 40 (1-­B). Fogelman, E., & Savran, B. (1979). Therapeutic groups for children of Holocaust. International Journal of Group Psychotherapy, 29, 211–­235. Fogelman, E., & Savran, B. (1980). Brief group therapy with offspring of Holocaust survivors: Leader’s reactions. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 50(1), 96–­108. Fogelman, E.,  & Savran, B. (1998). Group belonging and mourning as factors in resilience in the second generation of Holocaust survivors. Psychoanalytic Review, 85(4), ­538–­549. Fremont, H. (1999). After long silence: A memoir. New York: Delacorte Press. Kav-­Vanaki, S., Nadler, A., & Gershoni, H. (1983). Sharing past trauma: A comparison of communication behaviours in two groups of Holocaust survivors. International Journal of Psychiatry, 29(1), 49–­59. Kehoe, L. (1995). In this dark house. New York: Penguin Random House. Kestenberg, J. (1972). Psychoanalytic contributions to the problem of children of survivors from Nazi persecution. Israel Annals of Psychiatry and Related Disciplines, 10, 311–­325. Kestenberg, J. (1982). A  metapsychological assessment based on an analysis of a survivor’s child. In M. Bergmann & M. Jucovy (Eds.), Generations of the Holocaust (p.  157). New York: Basic Books. Kestenberg, J. (1989). Transposition revisited: Clinical, therapeutic, and developmental considerations. In P. Marcus  & A. Rosenberg (Eds.), Healing their wounds: Psychotherapy with Holocaust survivors and their families (pp. 67–­82). New York: Praeger. Klein, H. (1968). Problems in the psychotherapeutic treatment of Israeli survivors of the Holocaust. In H. Krystal (Ed.), Massive psychic trauma (pp.  233–­248). New York: International Universities Press. Krystal, H.,  & Petty, T. A. (1968). Rehabilitation in trauma following illness, physical injury, and massive personality damage. In H. Krystal (Ed.), Massive psychic trauma (p. 325), New York: International Universities Press. Leon, G. et  al. (1981). Survivors of the Holocaust and their ­children. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 41, ­503–­516. Rakoff, V. (1966). Long term effects of the concentration camp experience. Viewpoints, 1, 17–­21. Rosensaft, M. Z. (2015). God, faith & identity: Reflections of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. New Hampshire: Jewish Lights. Tauber, I. (1980). Second generation effects of the Nazi Holocaust: A psychosocial study of a nonclinical sample in North America. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, California School of Professional Psychology, Berkeley, California. Wanderman, E. (1979). Separation problems, depressive experiences and conception of parents in children of concentration camp survivors, Unpublished doctoral dissertation, New York University. Wardi, D. (1992). Memorial candles: Children of the Holocaust. New York: Tavistock/­Routledge.

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11 Fifty years as a “2G” author Helen Epstein

Fifty years have passed since I began researching Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with Sons and Daughters of Survivors (1979). I  am over seventy now, older than my mother was when she died, and a grandmother. Over the past five decades, a large body of interdisciplinary research on the aftermath of the Holocaust has coalesced, including the study of a once novel idea – intergenerational transmission of trauma. Hundreds of books, films, music, visual art, and performance pieces have been made by and about descendants of survivors. Holocaust studies, Holocaust centres and many other resources now exist for the general public as well as the survivor community. And yet, people newly aware of being affected by the Shoah – sometimes newly aware of their Jewish ancestry – still seek out therapy, and readers all over the world still write me about my now-­40-­year-­old first book. “Hello Helen (if I may call you that),” reads a recent email. “Today, I  realized that I  never thanked you. I read your book just after it was published and it was like an explosion in my head and heart. It was the first time I read about the commonalities of experiences in other ‘survivor’ households. However, it also helped me understand that each family’s experience is also as different as it is similar. I could go on about how it changed my life, but I simply wanted to take this opportunity to say ‘thank you’ ” (2017). Providing words for so many people’s experience is an author’s dream and deeply gratifying. But it has taken me many years to be able to internalise this gratitude and to understand the far-­reaching ramifications of the Shoah on myself. People often ask me what factors I think allowed me to write Children of the Holocaust when other writers in North America, Europe, and Israel were thinking about

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similar things at the same time. I  believe I  was in the right place at the right time, and that personality and culture converged. I was born in in Prague but grew up in New York City in the 1950s, attended a high school for gifted girls during the civil rights era, studied in Israel just after the Six-­Day War, wrote an eyewitness account of the Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia that was published in the Jerusalem Post (1968), and eventually became a freelance journalist, including for the New York Times. Another key factor was a habit of dissociation that it has also taken many years to comprehend. Starting early in my life I  learnt to evade upset by detaching words from feeling. Some “2Gs” (the Second Generation) have told or written me that they could not block out the painful things they heard at home. I could and did do that. I could listen and detach and somehow not allow myself to feel the reality of what I heard. As I  wrote in my non-­fiction trilogy Children of the Holocaust, Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for her Mother’s History (1997) and The Long Half-­Lives of Love and Trauma (2018), my parents were secular Czech Jews and concentration camp survivors. They were both strong, smart, intuitive, middle-­class people. My father, Kurt Epstein, was an Olympic athlete who had been a reserve lieutenant in the Czechoslovak Army. The Terezin Ghetto had been his garrison. He was deported to it as a prisoner in December 1941, then to Auschwitz, and then to a work camp in Poland. My mother, Franci Rabinek, was a Prague fashion designer and businesswoman. She was deported to Terezin, Auschwitz, and a work camp in Germany. She saved her life during a selection by lying and telling Dr. Mengele that she was an electrician.

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In 1945, both my parents returned to Prague, where they had met briefly years earlier, when my mother was thirteen and my father her twenty-­nine-­year-­old swim coach. In 1946, when they ran into one another on a Prague street, they were both unattached: Franci was a twenty-­six-­year-­old widow and Kurt was a forty-­one-­ year-­old bachelor. They moved in together twenty-­four hours later – fast, even by camp survivor standards. They married as soon as they could obtain papers in December 1946. I was born in November 1947 and would have grown up in Wenceslas Square had it not been for a Communist putsch in February 1948. In 1945, with the help of relatives in New York, Kurt had applied for an American visa. In August, when I was eight months old, we flew out of Czechoslovakia with that visa and the proverbial three suitcases. The Epsteins became part of New York’s Czech community that included Jewish and non-­Jewish survivors of the Nazi Occupation, pre-­war emigres, and post-­war anti-­Communist refugees. They and their community were multi-­cultural, and politically and socially liberal. My Czech (non-­Jewish) nanny had hidden a Jewish child in Prague while her husband was a political prisoner in Buchenwald. Other Czechs we knew had aided the Resistance. They spoke a mix of Czech and German, and I was often unsure which language frequently used terms such as Transport, Kapo, Appel, and Koncentrak belonged to. I grew up familiar with the names Terezin, Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, Belsen, Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, Yalta – World War II standards, as well as the name Heydrich. He was the despised commander of the Nazi-­occupied Czech Protectorate, despised, assassinated by the Resistance. Hitler retaliated by razing the town of Lidice to the ground. So the trope of parental “silence” about the war was not my experience; it was part of daily conversation. However, near silence about the war was what I experienced outside my home on New York’s Upper West Side in American Jewish culture of the 1950s. At my 50th sixth-­grade reunion, almost everyone remembered the Auschwitz tattoo on my mother’s forearm and being told by their parents not to stare at it. Tattoos were associated with prisoners and sailors back then. My mother’s tattoo reminded me of the brands burned into the hides of cattle on TV westerns. At three I reportedly began to ask about it. Franci told me that she had been forcibly tattooed in Koncentrak and my grandparents, uncles, and cousin had been killed because they were Jews. When my own son was three and also asked, I  instructed my mother politely but firmly to keep it short. In retrospect, I think she told me too much too soon. Though my former classmates knew my parents had been, as people said then, “in the camps”, those who

read Children of the Holocaust in 1979 were surprised to discover that my mother sometimes threatened to commit suicide, and that my father was given to sudden rages. Most were unaware that I had no grandparents or other close family. That dichotomy between what was common knowledge “inside” and “outside” our home continued through my high school years. One reason for that was that we spoke another language at home. While the ramifications of the war in the Epstein household pervaded everything, they were rarely expressed in or translated into English. Another reason was our domestic culture. I  was raised as an immigrant child with different standards and rules than American children. My Czech parents and their friends behaved in ways that Americans did not. The differences included expectations around food, friendship, sexuality, civil rights, justice, loyalty to family and friends, the importance of earning one’s own living no matter where life would take me, and a toleration of eccentricity bordering on the insane. Early on, I came to think of Koncentrak as an excuse and a blank check for aberrant behaviour. Another reason for the “disconnect” in knowledge between my private world and the outside culture was that my parents did not socialise with Americans. They did not attend PTA or any other kind of meetings or even synagogue services. Once a year, on Yom Kippur, they attended a refugee Yizker service in honour of their parents. They were allergic to official organisations though my father was for a short time Treasurer of the Association of Czechoslovak Sportsmen in Exile in the Western World. I was unaware of “2Gs” who participated in youth groups attached to organisations in New York such as the Bergen Belsen Association (founded in 1962) or the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization (founded in 1963). I  was unaware of my contemporaries Toby Mostysser, David Szonyi, and Lucy Steinitz who would publish an anthology of essays about the second generation (1975) or know when in the 1970s Art Spiegelman began interviewing his father and drawing for what would become a graphic novel called Maus (1986). My impression is that most second-­generation artists and writers (Eva Hoffman and Anne Karpf in the United Kingdom; the late Nava Semel and Savyon Liebrecht in Israel; Lev Raphael, Sonia Pilcer, Melvin Bukiet, and Thane Rosenbaum in the United States; and Henryk Broder and Aliana Brodman in Germany) developed their work about the legacy of the Shoah in relative isolation. When I turned sixteen and was at a loss for summer plans, Margot Koerbel, a friend of my mother’s, arranged for me to work in a kibbutz. She lived in Jerusalem, had saved my mother’s life in Terezin, and said she would serve as my surrogate mother. My parents were not Zionists, but they loved and trusted Margot, and were deeply invested in raising an independent daughter.

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So I flew off to Israel alone in 1964, learnt rudimentary Hebrew, and some rudiments of the Jewish calendar, history, socialism, and Zionism. I fell in love with everything and everyone, and determined to live in Israel. While I noticed the scorn for survivors that was rampant at that time and that journalist Tom Segev would later write about in The Seventh Million (1993), Israel provided me with what I  considered a remedial Jewish identity and education. I  decided to study at Hebrew University. In 1967, I  was one of the mitnadvim from all over the world who planned to work for weeks in the places of soldiers who had been mobilised for the Six Day War. Instead, the war ended quickly and hundreds of us wound up earning undergraduate degrees in Israel. The majority were children of Holocaust survivors. We were bi-­or tri-­lingual, bi-­or tri-­cultural. Our families had been decimated and displaced to other European countries, North or South America, Asia, Australia, or Africa. I was not yet a journalist but I was curious and not shy about asking questions. I  thought of us as “a peer group without a sign.” It was the beginning of my decade-­long research into what became known as the Second Generation (“2G”). In 1971 I began writing a novel I titled We Who Came After the War, but no publisher was interested and my (Jewish) agent suggested that I write about being single in New York City. I  did not. I  wrote about the Second Generation for small Jewish magazines such as Midstream, Present Tense, and the National Jewish Monthly (1970, 1974, 1976). I  had, by then, begun freelancing for the Sunday New York Times and pitched my 2G idea to my editors. They were sceptical. How did I  know a “second generation” existed? Did they have an organisation? A  letterhead? Could experts vouch for their importance? Finally, because Time Magazine ran a short item on what I  had been proposing, I  got the assignment in the fall of 1976. I did not notice anything odd about how I  maintained my composure when I  was interviewing other 2Gs about painful and upsetting things. It was like listening to my mother. And I was being professional. I did not allow feeling to get in the way of work. I did find it strange that, waiting for my article to be published by the New York Times Magazine (1977), I  became uncharacteristically paranoid. I  worried that someone would destroy or steal the article, or that I had made the whole thing up, that no one would believe what I had written, and that by writing it I was betraying shameful family secrets. Kurt had died at the age of seventy-­one two years earlier. He was an old-­fashioned man who mourned his murdered parents and brothers until the end of his life. He also kept his private life private. Like psychiatrist Vivian Rakoff, who abandoned his research into Canadian 2Gs after some survivors accused him of “giving Hitler a posthumous victory”

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and inflicting further pain, I  too might have stopped pursuing my subject if my father had been alive. In June of 1977, after the two million readers of the New York Times Magazine saw “Heirs of the Holocaust” on the cover, the article was syndicated around the world. Detaching emotionally was the only way to cope with the emotional onslaught it unleashed. I was questioned by almost everyone I knew, received hundreds of long, intimate letters, and was invited to speak at dozens of libraries, universities, synagogues, and churches. I  was an NYU journalism professor in 1977. Anyone could walk into my office hours unannounced, and a few 2Gs did. Some told me I  had changed their lives. One guy proposed marriage. Some said they could not relate to what I had written. Some were jealous – as though I were a sibling who had gotten more than my share of attention. Some were angry at me for, as they saw it, focusing on damage, not triumph, and on “airing dirty laundry in public.” I had been prepared for that by Vivian Rakoff but thought, then and now, that I  had written about trauma and resilience. That summer of 1977, I was offered a book contract. At that time, there was little public discussion of the “Holocaust.” The television mini-­series by that name had not yet aired. The U.S. Holocaust Museum would open its doors more than fifteen years later. There was no internet and no therapy groups for the Second Generation except for the ones founded by Eva Fogelman and Bella Savran in Boston two years earlier that I did not yet know about. That fall, I joined a newly formed 2G group in Manhattan modelled on the Vietnam War Veteran groups pioneered by psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton and facilitated by Dr. Florence Pincus. Its members came from very different backgrounds but bonded in hilarity while sharing our 2G childhoods. Unlike my one-­on-­one interviews for the Times, in which I encouraged others to express themselves while I kept quiet, here I was expected and encouraged to speak. Some of the eleven participants were concerned and/­or angry that I planned to write a book and were worried about my respect for confidentiality. Others wanted to be in the book and were hurt that I did not select them to be profiled. I knew that my being a journalist set me apart from the group but had little understanding of how much my being a reporter as well as a participant was affecting them and me. I was conscious of being both there, and not there, but had no idea that I also was withholding an important childhood experience. Members raised subjects that I had not pursued in my interviews, such as sexuality, differences in social class, and comparative damage to survivors under Nazism. Two had parents who fled Hitler in the late 1930s. The issue of a “hierarchy of suffering during the war” surfaced and was uneasily addressed since no one wished to pursue such differences in the throes of bonding. At

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least two people described being beaten by their parents. I do not remember whether I spoke up and said I was hit too. One member accused me of glossing over the issues of survivor rage turned on their children. Rosalie Gerut, now a cantor and rabbinical student, joined a Boston group after reading Children of the Holocaust and later wrote the music for Eva Fogelman’s documentary Breaking the Silence. While finding the group experience a relief, she felt that its members and most of the greater Jewish community were uncomfortable discussing survivor violence and physical as well as sexual abuse. In the 1990s, she spearheaded One by One, a now twenty-­five-­year-­old intensive dialogue group for children of survivors and children of Nazis, where such subjects are taken up. I left my NYC group in 1978 to write Children of the Holocaust in Toronto, where I  had interviewed several 2Gs for the. Writing it felt like driving through a snowstorm: I  could neither see ahead nor behind the sentence I was working on. Despite the New York Times article and all those letters I had subsequently received, I doubted that my subject was real. I am not sure I could have finished it without the near-­daily companionship of my Toronto interviewee and later close friend, artist Rochelle Rubinstein. Much later, I  would understand that my doubting and sense of “driving through a snowstorm” was my way of describing dissociation, and that I had been employing that defence since childhood. After Children of the Holocaust was published in April of 1979, I was suddenly being interviewed by dozens of reporters. I  was usually composed, almost affectless, and remember feeling uncomfortable only once, sitting for a national television network with my mother. The interviewer was formidable psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim. Whenever he asked a question, I deferred to Franci. I had, until then, been her confidante and ally and was trying with great difficulty to separate from her. One of the difficulties was that I had trouble allowing myself to feel anything about her but admiration and loyalty. I had been disconnecting feeling from disturbing words and actions from an early age. I was fascinated by the stories my parents and their friends told and though they were objectively terrifying, I did not perceive them as scary. I took them in with my ears but not with my heart. My brother Tommy and my friend Rochelle, like many other 2Gs, took everything they heard to heart: they refused to understand Czech, Polish, German, or Hungarian, and left the room when war talk began. But I stayed. Listening made me feel important, loving, and loved. Being “there but not there” enabled me to listen. I wonder if I  learnt this psychological trick on my own or learnt it from my mother, who, as I  wrote in Children of the Holocaust, first noticed the loss of feeling in Auschwitz after they had given her the blue number A-­4116: “She had stared at her forearm then and the

forearm became two arms, one that belonged to her and one that belonged to that other woman who looked exactly like her but had a number on her arm. From that moment, she became two people: one who acted and one who watched.” Franci had, from the start of the Nazi Occupation, refused to identify as a Jew, refused to wear her yellow star, and continued to run her salon after it was forbidden. She had a nose job after the Nazis invaded Prague to “look less Jewish” so she could sneak into the cinemas. She continued to numb out, split, dissociate, whatever one chooses to call it after the war. Sometimes, in her suicidal episodes, she threatened to kill herself and then simply ignored what she had said or did not acknowledge that anything unusual had happened. Sometimes she also denied realities that reminded her of Koncentrak, as when I  returned from summer camp ridden with lice. “There are no lice in America,” Franci declared. Only after I produced a live louse in my hand did she cut off my long hair and comb it through for nits. Needless to say, she expressed no sympathy or emotion: she just did what needed to be done. Growing up with parents who dissociated, denied, and may have suffered from alexithymia had many consequences. Without a larger family (especially grandparents) to model alternatives, I  adopted my parents’ models of behavior and communication. I was intense, decisive, prolific, and dead serious about most things. I regarded most forms of play as a waste of time and was largely unaware of fantasy. As a friend and a lover, I was loyal, protective, and a terrific listener but not verbally expressive. I  am still discovering at age seventy how unusual my expectations are around family, separation, boundaries, and loyalty especially in my relations with my two grown sons. From an early age, I  was reminded that any disappointing or painful thing that happened to me – from a bike accident to an adolescent heartbreak – was dwarfed by “the war” and learnt to have little sympathy for myself. My parents never modelled the use of words such as “disappointing” and “painful.” I  learnt to use them and other common parenting words at the age of forty from the teachers at my sons’ daycare centre. That lack of sympathy for non-­extreme setbacks affected my relationships and, later, my parenting, in many ways – some positive, some negative. On the positive side, I have always been aware of being determinedly cheerful, healthy, and counter-­phobic in part because I am a Sagittarian but also because my parents told me that, as an American child, I could not be any other way. From nursery school through university, I was acknowledged by students and teachers alike to be an intrepid leader. One former high schoolmate recently told me that I had reminded her of the Statue of Liberty because I stood tall and seemed unafraid of speaking my mind to anyone.

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I was also highly serious about everything I  did and competent in situations of emergency or danger. When my grad-­school roommate and I were mugged at knifepoint in our Manhattan apartment in the 1970s, I coolly instructed the muggers on where our valuables were and where they should put us while they made their exit (we stood facing the wall in a bathtub). I excelled at journalism where dissociation is almost a prerequisite. Reporters must often detach from feeling and the meaning of their material in order to do good work. Like other professionals, we focus on technique – in our case, accurate observation, choice of words, cadence of sentences, narrative arc – rather than processing emotional content. Even at the age of seventy, in an ER for instance, I often still detach at emotionally fraught or dangerous times and process my feelings – positive (love, excitement) as well as negative (fear, disappointment) – much, much later. As I  have talked to thousands of 2Gs all over the world, I have become aware of group and national dissociation occurring in a similarly belated way. Danger, discrimination, and shaming led many in the survivor community to deny, disavow, or minimise their victimisation in the war. Czech 2Gs have told me how difficult it was to raise children as Jews under totalitarian rule in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere behind the Iron Curtain. They “forgot” they were Jews or their parents never told them. French 2Gs and other western Europeans have made me aware of what it was like to grow up and walk to school in neighbourhoods where well-­known round-­ups and deportations took place. In Germany, of course, the past pervades the present and I found myself aware of adopting a special persona to address the many layers of psychological difficulty. Even in Israel, until very recently, survivor families downplayed their history. Survivors were, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, marginalised as “Diaspora Jews” and denigrated as “soaps” or “sheep to the slaughter.” Until I sat down and read Children of the Holocaust and absorbed it like an ordinary reader, I  did not find any of that dissociation a problem. It was when I  reflected on having stored many combustible things in an “iron box” that I  decided I  needed therapy and chose the slowest, most traditional method: classical psychoanalysis. I  began in 1979 with a Czech Jewish female analyst, quit in 1980, started with a male American analyst (who turned out to be a son of survivors) in 1981, left in 1982, returned in 2001, and finally worked with him over the telephone for eight sequential years terminating in 2009. My explanation for this checkered history also has to do with dissociation. The day before my first session, Franci took me out for lunch and said she was going to save me a lot of time. She had been an analysand

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like her mother before her. She told me that when I was a little girl she had had an affair with my Czech nanny’s husband, Ivan, and that I had known about it. She explained that Ivan (who had been in Koncentrak for six years and was an anti-­Nazi hero) validated her sense of being an attractive woman after having been reduced to a number. She said that his wife, Milena, knew about the affair, was also in love with her and with me (a kind of replacement child for the little Jewish girl she had hidden during the war and whose mother had reclaimed her in 1945). She did not say whether or not my father knew about this affair. I was overwhelmed by her revelation and that she had chosen the day before I  was to begin my psychoanalysis to spill her beans. Only in retrospect does the word “angry” come to mind. I  remembered nothing about her long sexual entanglement. Milena and Ivan were our “adopted grandparents” with whom we celebrated Christmas and Easter every year. They were an intimate part of my life from 1950 to 1965. Since I am a keeper of journals, I wrote what my mother told me in my diary at the time. I discussed it with my new analyst a bit but then forgot it until 2000 when I began working on a memoir of adolescent love that turned into an excavation of childhood trauma. After writing Children of the Holocaust, I found myself unable to put my “Second Generation stuff behind me” as many people urged. Although I wrote many pieces of arts journalism, I was not done with the content of the “iron box.” After my mother died suddenly of a brain aneurysm in 1989 (at the relatively young age of 69), I determined to write about our relationship in a memoir. I couldn’t do it. I basically chickened out and instead wrote a book about her history up to the time I was born titled Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for her Mother’s History. It was not until I had published that book and after Franci had been dead for ten years that I finally began to examine the sexual aspects of the environment in which I  was raised. I  tiptoed into it via a planned memoir of my adolescent romance with the son of blacklisted American Communists. Red Diaper babies, like children of Holocaust survivors, are a group that grew up in relative silence and/­or secrecy regarding their family history. I  originally saw the story as a kind of variation on Romeo and Juliet – the daughter of anti-­Communists falling in love with the son of Communists. I  reconnected with my teenage love and we began talking. One thing led to another and suddenly I recovered the memory of what my mother had told me about her affair – and far more than she had confessed to me. I  began to remember witnessing my mother having sex with Ivan in the bathroom of our small apartment. I also began to remember his molesting me – chasing me into corners and insisting

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on kissing me on the mouth as well as taking hundreds of photographs of me. I finally placed myself at the centre of my story, a process that brought me back into psychoanalysis for a third time. The Long Half-­Lives of Love and Trauma took me fifteen years to complete. It describes eight years of psychoanalysis that finally helped me become aware of the prevalence and power of dissociation. At seventy-­one, I still feel that the Shoah is never far from my consciousness; it colours my thoughts and feelings about the most personal to the most public events, especially since the 2016 elections in the United States and the ensuing entitlement of white supremacists and other racists. It is difficult for me to avoid linking many current events, political movements, and personalities to those who led to the Shoah. But I feel as though I have company. Once thought by many of its survivors to be a unique event, the Holocaust has been contextualised by survivors of the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides, and by African-­Americans and Native Americans who have created their own literature and art. Collective as well as individual trauma has increasingly been made visible by cultural and political changes. Best-­selling mainstream books such as Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (1992) and Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2015) attest to the widespread recognition of posttraumatic effects. As a result, in 2019, collective as well as individual trauma has been ‘normalised’ by cultural and political

changes that allow and even encourage post-­traumatic effects to be expressed.

References Epstein, H. (1968). Tears in Prague. Jerusalem Post, August  28, 1968. Epstein, H. (1970, Summer). Conversations in Prague. Midstream. Epstein, H. (1974, June). A peer group without a sign. National Jewish Monthly. Epstein, H. (1976). Children of the Holocaust searching for a past and a future. Present Tense, 3. Epstein, H. (1977, June  19). Heirs of the Holocaust. New York Times Magazine. Epstein, H. (1979). Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with sons and daughters of survivors. New York: G.P. Putnam. Epstein, H. (1997). Where she came from: A daughter’s search for her mother’s history. New York: Little, Brown. Epstein, H. (2017). Private communication. Epstein, H. (2018). The long half-­lives of love and trauma. Massachusetts: Plunkett Lake Press. Herman, J. (1992). New trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence from domestic abuse to political terror. New York: Basic Books. Mostysser, T. (1975, Spring). The weight of the past: Reminiscences of a survivor’s child. Response Magazine (reprinted in Living after the Holocaust: Reflections by the post-­war generation in America. L. Steinitz & D. M. Szonyi (Eds.). New York. Segev, T. (1993). The seventh million: The Israelis and the Holocaust. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Spiegelman, A. (1980–­1991). Maus, serialized in raw. New York: Pantheon, 1986. Van de Kolk, B. (2015). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. New York: Penguin Books.

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12 Intergenerational transmission Ilany Kogan

Introduction This chapter presents material from the second analysis of a patient, the child of two Holocaust survivors, each of whom lost a child during the war. The patient’s first analysis (Kogan, 2003) focused mainly on the relationship between herself and her mother. The second analysis revolves around the elaboration of the complex and painful father-­daughter relationship, centring on the events surrounding the death of the patient’s father. The discussion includes the exploration of the deferred action of father’s trauma passed on to the next generation, the break of the idealised paternal representation, and the unique transference and countertransference problems which arose mainly because of the patient and analyst belonging to the same traumatised large group.

My father, myself It had been stated repeatedly that, in one way or another, the children of survivors tend to be preoccupied with the suffering of their parents. To many people’s surprise, children who were often conceived in order to reaffirm life have shown signs of the past suffering of their parents. Prominent analysts such as Judith Kestenberg (1972, 1980a, 1980b, 1982); Kestenberg and Brenner (1996); Henry Krystal (1968, 1981, 1988, 2007); Henri Parens (2004, 2007); Anna Ornstein (1985); Dori Laub (1998, 2017); llse Grubrich-­Simitis (1984); Ira Brenner (2002, 2004, 2019), among others, have studied the varied and complex phenomena in the realm of the transmission of the Holocaust trauma from survivor parents to their offspring. I have explored in depth this topic in

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my book The Cry of Mute Children (Kogan, 1995). In this chapter, I will first examine the “deferred action” (Freud, 1918) of the father’s Holocaust trauma passed on to his daughter. I will then explore the “break” of the idealised representation of the survivor father and discuss some unique transference and countertransference problems. To examine my theme, I  will present material from the second analysis of Nurit, whose first analysis inspired the paper On Being a Dead Beloved Child (Kogan, 2003). Nurit is the child of two Holocaust survivors, each of whom lost a child during the war. Her first analysis focused mainly on the relationship between Nurit and her mother. Mother’s first daughter was murdered in an “aktion” at the start of the Holocaust, after which the mother was transported to Bergen-­Belsen and held there for several years. When Nurit reached eleven – the age of the daughter who had been killed – the loving relationship between her and her mother broke down completely. All through her adolescence, Nurit suffered terribly due to her mother’s outbursts of anger and her ability to ignore her, not talk to her for days, and her harsh accusations that Nurit was the cause of her unhappiness. In this first analysis, we dealt mainly with the impact of the unresolved mourning of the patient’s bereaved mother on the relationship with her daughter and on the daughter’s character structure. Nurit sought this first analysis for help with obsessive-­compulsive symptoms that had not yielded to behavioural treatment and also because of clashes between herself and her young adolescent daughter. Memories of her own adolescence were horrifying but recounted without affect, as she had learnt to hide her feelings from her mother. Even her voice had a metallic quality, as though she were enclosed within a wall. In

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this analysis, I felt I had to teach Nurit (who was fluent in several languages) a new language – the language of feelings. Nurit left her parent’s home at age eighteen. She moved back to Israel to live with her paternal grandmother, who had returned to Israel several years earlier. Nurit earned a university degree in science and married a man with a successful career who gave her constant love and support. She was proud of her successful marriage and her two children. Nurit’s parents lived abroad. Her father was a well-­ known professional man and was also a successful businessman. His philanthropic activities included improving the welfare of many Holocaust survivors and their children. He remarried at the age of ninety-­seven and spent his last years writing his memoirs.

The father of Nurit’s childhood and adolescence In the course of her previous analysis, we both, analyst and patient, partially uncovered the truth of Nurit’s internal representation of her father. Before she began analysis, Nurit had truly idealised him. He was clever and successful, and throughout her childhood had showered her with love. They had enjoyed walking and talking together and he had always been proud of her. Nurit’s oedipal attraction to her father, the love and admiration she felt for him, was in sharp contrast to her negative feelings toward her mother. In Nurit’s first analysis, we worked through her oedipal conflicts at length.

The father of Nurit’s adulthood Nurit’s return, twelve years after ending her successful first analysis, was impelled by the recent death of her father. After his death, the father passed on to his daughter three letters written sixteen years before he died that excoriated her. Nurit felt that he must have intended for her to carry guilt for being a bad daughter and a failure as a person for the rest of her life. The wealth left to her would be forever tainted by his scorn for her and the life that she had built. Angry and deeply hurt by his letters, she insisted reading to me excerpts from them in analysis. I will here present some vignettes from these sessions:

Session I Nurit (reading from father’s letter): Both my wife and I were proud of Nurit’s extraordinary abilities and her early achievements. I am sorry to say that later on in her life she squandered her abil-

ities, mostly in promoting her husband’s career, with rather limited success. We were always pleased with the way he behaved as a son, husband and father. I have to ask his understanding and forgiveness in stressing that he is made of very little academic substance and has no real vocation. Somehow, I have the feeling that over the years this has been at least one of the reasons why our family relations have not been such as my wife and I would have liked. (Shouting): It makes me so angry! I’m furious! I  don’t want to cry. I’m simply mad! This isn’t criticism. It’s just garbage! What am I going to do with it? How can he say that I  squandered my abilities on an undeserving husband? What did he want from me? I have a good life, and my husband is very successful; he’s well known in his field throughout the world. I  don’t think I  have an undeserving husband, but I truly feel that I had undeserving parents! (Short silence and continuing to read from the letter): I do not say that their [Nurit and her husband’s] behavior accelerated my wife’s death, but it added quite a bit to her suffering. I was struck by Nurit’s father’s “negation” (Freud, 1925), and, apparently, so was she. Nurit: Well, he obviously considered the idea that we did hasten her death. I think I know why he said that. Mother hid her breast cancer from him for two years. When she finally sought help, the doctor said that he had never seen such a badly neglected case of breast cancer in his entire career. She was clearly suicidal, my mother. Father didn’t know about my mother’s breast cancer, in spite of the fact that they shared the same bed and the same bathroom. This made him feel so guilty that he diluted his guilt by accusing us. Ilany: Your father felt that you were the persecutor who embittered his beloved wife’s life during her final years. You now feel that he’s your persecutor, and you’re tormented by him. Nurit confirmed my interpretation, and her further associations regarding her father’s views about her children reinforced this confirmation. Nurit: Yes, absolutely. Listen to this: (Reading): I am sorry to say that the respective mix of genes [the grandchildren] cannot be considered a success. They are dear to me, lovely personalities, but share little of our family characteristics. These characteristics are a love of learning, acting for the benefit of society, and professional and economic success.

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Nurit (shouting): Only a racist can call his grandchildren a “mix of genes.” My father held fascist beliefs. He claimed that there are superior races and inferior ones, each with specific characteristics. My children don’t belong to his elitist family, as they don’t have its characteristics. I suddenly found myself asking a bizarre question. Your children, who do they belong to? Nurit (with a grin): They belong to their father, to his family. Ilany:

A myriad of thoughts crossed my mind after this episode. How could I  have asked a mother who her children belong to? Was it possible, I  deliberated silently, that my question reflected the unconscious fantasy that had dominated the lives of Nurit’s parents as well as Nurit’s adult life: to whom did Nurit really belong? In her outbursts of anger, Nurit’s mother had often stressed that Nurit was cold and egocentric like her father; thus, she was her father’s daughter and not hers. Was it possible, I wondered to myself, that Nurit’s father felt that Nurit and her children did not belong to his family? I wondered silently what Nurit’s father’s expectations were of her. Were they only narcissistic expectations of fame and glory or economic success? Or was there something deeper hidden behind them? We would deal with the answer to this question later on in analysis.

Session II (next session) Nurit:

Ilany:

Nurit:

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I  remember my father once saying, “The Czechs were clever; they didn’t resist the Germans; that’s why Prague wasn’t damaged. The Poles were stupid, they resisted the Germans, and as a result, Warsaw was destroyed.” I asked my father what he meant by that, and he explained, “Beautiful historical buildings were destroyed. That’s a pity; people are expendable, they’re born again.” My father definitely held fascist beliefs. Are you saying that your father believed that people are expendable because they are replaceable by others, like your dead little sisters who were replaced by you? Exactly. I was actually a double replacement child. I replaced a child for each of my parents, and as such I should have been treated like a miracle, but, as an adult I disappointed them. So did my children, who, as you can see from Father’s letter, were also not wor-

thy of his appreciation. (Silence). My father’s image is like a bubble that burst.

Session III (Two-­and-­one-­half years later) Nurit had returned from a month’s long vacation at her father’s home. In this session Nurit complained mainly about the lack of confidence that she still felt in dealing with her father’s estate. She believed she was intimidated by her parents’ critical voices, which she had internalised and which today were part of her. When the session ended, Nurit said that she wished to go to the bathroom. After a few minutes, she opened the bathroom door and called me twice to come in. Taken by surprise, I went in. She looked at me severely, pointed to the small cabinet near the sink, and said harshly, “Do you know there are ants here?” I was taken aback, and feeling attacked. My immediate reaction was to ask, “Where?” Nurit pointed to three tiny ants on the cabinet. They were so small that I probably would not have noticed them had she not pointed them out to me. I was astonished and ashamed, as if caught doing sloppy cleaning. Trying to defend myself against what I experienced as a harsh accusation, I murmured something like, “It’s probably due to the heat of the last few days.” After Nurit left, it took me a while to regain my composure. I  was totally shaken by her abrasiveness. Calling me into the bathroom to scold me because of some tiny ants on the cabinet was a very strange thing to do. But I realised that my strong reaction to her remark was due to my countertransference feelings of humiliation and vulnerability, which her harsh tone had evoked. In this incident in the bathroom I had become a little girl in the presence of a critical, menacing adult, and I felt attacked by the unexpected criticism. Working through my feelings, I realised that Nurit had needed to enact a situation from her childhood to enable me to feel what she had felt as a child. But who was this critical, menacing adult? I  asked myself. Could this be the introjected Nazi aggressor, a disavowed aspect of Nurit’s father’s self-­representation with which Nurit unconsciously identified? If so, by pointing out to me the tiny ants that had to be exterminated (the Jewish people), she became the powerful Nazi aggressor whose orders I must obey. From a different perspective, I felt in the transference that I was the servant who had not done a good enough cleaning job. Whose “dirt” was this? I  asked myself. In pointing at the ants, was she pointing at filth that belonged to me, or did the filth contain her persecutory thoughts that she was trying to evacuate in the treatment (the “toilet-­breast”) (Meltzer, 1967). If these were her own persecutory thoughts, then I was the ineffective

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analyst who had not succeeded in exterminating them, and some of those thoughts were still roaming around freely.

Session IV (next session): Nurit: I wasn’t here this past month, and when I was in my father’s house, the memories returned. I  found the papers which show that my father hadn’t paid all his taxes, and he’s shoved the payment, including the fine, on to me. I found magazine clippings accusing him of fraud, although he was never found guilty and it never came to trial. Ilany: It seems to me that these thoughts are like the ants on the cabinet in the toilet, which you pointed out to me at the end of the last session. Nurit: The ants can indeed be seen as something symbolic, because treatment is needed to get rid of them. Ilany: You know, when you called me into the bathroom and pointed out the ants to me, I trembled like a little girl who was being harshly criticized by an adult. In trying to understand my feelings about this incident, I realized that I was probably identifying with you, and that I  was experiencing what you had experienced when you were criticized by the harsh voices of your father and mother during your childhood. Nurit: That wasn’t my intention, but I can see that you try to understand me. I called you into the bathroom to tell you that you have to seek out where these ants are coming from; it’s important to treat their place of origin. Ilany: And you probably felt that I haven’t been effective in treating their place of origin. Nurit: You know, you told me today that in the bathroom you felt like a little girl scolded by an adult, like myself when I was young. I find that touching. In my opinion, to understand, to get inside the head of another person, that’s the ultimate love. My father never tried to understand me; he wasn’t able to do that.

Recent session Nurit: You know, I found a place at home where I can keep my father’s letters. Ilany: Where were your father’s letters before you found this place? Nurit: I always took them with me when I went out of the house or on my trips abroad. I did not want any of the members of my family to find them, as they could also be hurt, like I was.

Ilany: I  understand that you wanted to protect your family members from being hurt. But is it possible that by taking these letters with you, you were not ready to separate from your father’s persecutory words? Nurit: You may be right about that, but I was not aware of that. I  believe that if now, three-­and-­a-­half years after his death, somebody of my family members found the letters, they will not be so hurt. And after we have so much discussed the impact that Father’s letters had upon me, I think I can live with that. You know, Father’s attitude to me may have also been the result of what he went through. He never spoke much about the family that he lost. It was a well-­known fact that he had lost a wife and a child, but he never expressed feelings of pain or guilt. Only recently, rereading his last letter, I became aware of how guilty he felt about the family that he lost. I want to read it to you again:   As I approach the end of my life, I regret that earlier I did not show enough appreciation to persons who deserved it, my first wife Masha and our daughter Fania, who both perished on September 15, 1943, in the Holocaust. After more than half a century I still cherish them and mourn their memory. I think about them every day of my life and will remember them until the day I die.   It seems to me that he never overcame the loss of his first wife and child. Outwardly, he enjoyed his worldly success, but inwardly he was stuck in his mourning all those years. I  believe that part of the bitterness he expressed in his letters stemmed from his traumatic losses, which I couldn’t repair. I’m also aware that he loved me in his own way. He begins his last letter by saying that he owes his last good years to me. (Silence) You know, the things I discovered during these years in treatment caused me a lot of pain. The bursting of the bubble of my father’s image and his love for me hurts a lot. Ilany: Then you probably feel that I  caused you pain by facilitating the discovery of these things. Is it possible that sometimes you were angry with me, but were afraid to say so because, like your father, I  could retaliate and sever connections with you? Nurit: That could be. I’m often in touch with my pain here, and that’s not easy, but I know that the goal is to heal my wounds. My nature is to always discover the truth. I think that if I had read those letters without being here with you . . . I don’t even want to think what could have happened. With my mother, when I  couldn’t deal with the past, I  developed serious symptoms that impaired my life. Now my relationship with

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my mother is clear; the difficulties are behind me. The fact that I was able to work through the relationship with her is our success. I  believe that this is the only way to heal the wounds my father inflicted on me. Every time I leave here, I feel better. I feel that I succeed in elaborating upon something; we’re putting things in order. And I’m very glad that I have the opportunity to do that.

Discussion In this discussion, I will first examine two sources of my patient’s traumatisation: a) The deferred action of the traumatic Holocaust past passed on to the daughter, and b) The “break” of the idealised paternal representation. I will then discuss the unique transference and countertransference problems which arose mainly because of the patient and analyst belonging to the same traumatised large group.

a) The deferred action of the traumatic Holocaust past passed on to the next generation A brilliant, highly successful scientist and businessman, Father wrote a series of coldly constructed rants over a period of sixteen years, saving them up to be delivered upon his death. All of the letters expressed grievances against Nurit for not loving or respecting him enough and scorn for her and her family. Nurit was stunned by his cruelty, and so was I  that he would plan such an utterly annihilating ambush for his daughter. How can we understand this cruel and hateful deed? I want to suggest that the traumatised, aged father, under the sway of repetition compulsion (Freud, 1920), may have enacted his own personal Holocaust for his daughter, leaving her, like himself, with conflicts that could never be spoken or worked through after death. Father wrote the first letter close to the death of his wife who died of breast cancer. As mentioned earlier, Nurit’s mother hid her illness from her husband for two years before she disclosed her secret to him. When she finally sought help, the doctor said that he had never seen such a badly neglected case of breast cancer in his entire career. Nurit claimed that her mother was clearly suicidal. Father did not know about her mother’s breast cancer, despite the fact that they shared the same bed and the same bathroom. This made him feel terribly guilty. Nurit’s father has never succeeded in assimilating the trauma of the loss of his family and incorporating it fully into a meaningful context as we can see from

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his unresolved mourning expressed in his third letter. I  believe that the death of Nurit’s mother revived in retrospect Father’s Holocaust trauma, endowing it with pathogenic force (Freud, 1918; Laplanche, 1967). As a result, he probably felt compelled to enact his traumatic history and pass it on to his daughter by writing the aforementioned letters. Father’s letters caused Nurit to be haunted by him, just as he had been haunted by the family that he had abandoned and lost in the Holocaust. In this way the traumatic experience of the father was actualised in the life of the daughter. The deferred action of trauma, which in this case took the form of the revival in retrospect of the Holocaust trauma, was transmitted to the next generation.

b) The “break” of the paternal representation In both analyses, the “break” of the paternal representation is depicted as the downfall of an idolised figure. Terribly painful in the first therapy was the dashing of a romantic fantasy that had sustained the patient through the difficult times with her mother: her father loved her and witnessed her suffering but dared not intervene lest her mother decompensate further. Even more painful was the “break” of the father’s image in the second analysis, where the idealised father of Nurit’s childhood, the greatly admired, generous, and loving father became a bitter and persecutory figure, as she experienced him after his death. By enacting his own trauma upon his daughter, the father became the victim of his past as well as the persecutor of his daughter. In spite of his vast achievements, I believe that Nurit’s father never succeeded in healing the wounds of his past. He thus assigned Nurit the fantasy role of restoring his narcissism through her personal achievements. Only her success could make up for the traumatic losses, disappointments, shame, and guilt that were part of his past. But, in fact, Nurit’s life was a success, both in terms of her career, her marriage, and her husband’s career. The question, then, is why didn’t this work? The answer to this question may be that Nurit was unwilling to give up her independent self (Freyberg, 1980). Nurit’s parents apparently could not accept her growth and separation and related to her as an extension of themselves. At the age of eighteen, Nurit immigrated to Israel, where she studied, married, bore children, and lived her own life. Her leaving home was probably experienced by her parents as an act of betrayal towards the family. The father’s letters expressed his rage and disappointment that Nurit had dared to develop an autonomous set of values that differed from his own. As she failed in her role to heal his wounds and make him happy, a hostile bond was created between father and daughter,

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with each experiencing the other as a persecutor. Nurit observed that although her father had spent his entire life helping people who had suffered at the hands of the Nazis, at times he adopted a fascist morality. In his old age, Nurit’s father experienced her as a harsh external superego (a persecutor) who judged his moral standards and lack of empathy for others (Kestenberg, 1982). I believe that the patient experienced herself both as a “replacement child” (Blum, 1983) who had the task to repair her parents’ grief, as well as a Nazi responsible for the earlier deaths of her siblings. As she internalised both roles and at the same time rebelled against them, she was trapped in a situation in which love and hatred become inextricably fused. The “break” of Nurit’s idealised paternal representation lessened her father’s parental authority. Her superego was no longer able to internalise her father as a protective agent on her behalf, a fact which caused her great disappointment. The disillusionment and rage of father and daughter were mutual. I would further suggest that the father might have perceived the daughter’s survival after his death as a betrayal (the way he probably had perceived his own survival after his family’s death). The letters may have served as an expression of the father’s unconscious wish to kill his daughter so that she would not continue to live after his death, and thus they would remain united forever. In analysis, Nurit realised that her father’s derogatory, critical attitude toward her was due, in part, not only to his narcissistic and unempathic personality, but also to his traumatic losses and advanced age. She understood that she had been assigned the impossible mission of healing the wounds of his past, an unrealisable task. Nurit also realised that her father’s advanced age had increased his feelings of helplessness, exacerbating his great need for flattery and narcissistic gratification. This kind of understanding facilitated Nurit’s ability to forgive to a certain extent her father as well as herself, thus achieving a better integration of the parental representation and of herself (Akhtar, 2002).

Unique transference and countertransference problems In the transference, I  was aware that the split father representation had been projected onto me. I was often the idealised figure from whom Nurit needed love and appreciation. At the same time, I  was the persecutory father, who caused her pain and suffering. Nurit did not trust our relationship sufficiently to allow her to express her anger toward me. As in the relationship with her father, she protected me from her anger because of her fear that I would reject and abandon her. Nurit’s enactment helped me to also become aware of the special countertransference problems which arose

in this analysis and which had an impact on my understanding of her dynamics and on my interpretive technique. By elaborating upon the feelings evoked by her enactment, I realised that my empathy with Nurit’s victimised aspect (the helpless, little girl persecuted by two terrifying adults) impaired my ability to elaborate upon the Nazi introject, the aggressive aspect of her parents’ self-­representation with which she also identified. As in Nurit’s first analysis, I  disregarded this aspect because both she and I  belong to the same traumatised large group – the offspring of Holocaust survivors (Blum, 1985; Volkan, Ast, & Greer, 2002) – and it was easier to empathise with my patient’s traumatisation than elaborate upon her aggression. Another reason why I  ignored the Nazi introject (expressed through her order to exterminate the tiny ants, the Jewish people) was to avoid becoming the Nazi perpetrator and inflict further shame and humiliation upon my patient (Oliner, 1996). Instead, I chose to interpret Nurit’s enactment in the transference as her desire to make me feel how she had experienced herself as a child, criticised by her menacing parents. I related to her aggressive aspect by pointing out to her that she had turned me into an ineffective, unworthy analyst who was incapable of helping her rid herself of her tormenting thoughts. An additional countertransference problem stemmed from the fact that we shared a common traumatic historical experience related to the “break” of the idealised paternal representation in a Holocaust survivor’s daughter. Several years ago I explored the “break” of the paternal representation in the offspring of infamous, high-­ranking Nazi perpetrators (Kogan, 2010). While familiar with the psychoanalytic literature on this subject, which states that the confrontation with old age and death may have also led to changes in the superego, thus damaging the normal function of the superego’s guardianship (Bergmann, 1982; Grubrich-­Simitis, 1984, Kogan, 2014), I  found myself reluctant to explore the superego lacunae of a survivor father. I believe this was because, in our collective Jewish unconscious, Nurit’s father represented all of our survivor fathers. Thus, despite his international fame, great philanthropy, and vast efforts to improve the lives of thousands of Holocaust survivors, the father’s manipulative, cruel, and reprehensible behaviour and his psychic numbness evoked in me feelings of shame and narcissistic hurt, making it difficult for me to explore, write about, and publicly discuss the profile of a survivor father. Nurit’s analysis still continues as we strive hard to work through her complex and painful relationship with her father. Eventually this will help her repair, to a certain extent, her father’s split inner representation and her own split self-­representation, thus strengthening her feelings of healthy narcissism and helping her achieve better psychic integration.

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References Akhtar, S. (2002). Forgiveness, origins, dynamics, psychopathology, and technical relevance. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 71, 175–­212. Bergmann, M. V. (1982). Thoughts on super-­ego pathology of survivors and their children. In M. S. Bergmann  & M. E. Jucovy (Eds.), Generations of the Holocaust (pp.  287–­311). New York: Basic Books. Brenner, I. (2002). Forward. In V. D. Volkan, G. Ast & W. Greer, Jr., (Eds.), The Third Reich in the unconscious: Transgenerational transmission and its consequences (pp. xi–­xvii). New York: Brunner/­Routledge. Brenner, I. (2004). Psychic trauma: Dynamics, symptoms, and treatment. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Brenner, I. (Ed.) (2019). Introduction. International textbook of Holocaust studies. London: Routledge. Blum, H. (1983). Adoptive parents: Generative conflict and generational continuity. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 38, 141–­163. Blum, H. (1985). Superego formation, adolescent transformation and the adult neurosis. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 4, 887–­909. Freud, S. (1918). From the history of an infantile neurosis. Standard Edition, 17, 1–­122. Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the pleasure principle. Standard Edition, 18, 7–­64. Freud, S. (1925). Negation. Standard Edition, 19, 235–­239. Freyberg, S. (1980). Difficulties in separation-­individuation as experienced by offspring of Nazi Holocaust survivors. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 5, 87–­95. Grubrich-­Simitis, I. (1984). From concretism to metaphor. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 39, 301–­319. Kestenberg, J. S. (1972). How children remember and parents forget. International Journal of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, 1–­2, 103–­123. Kestenberg, J. S. (1980). Psychoanalyses of children of survivors of the Holocaust. Case presentation and assessment. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 28, 775–­804. Kestenberg, J. S. (1982a). A metapsychological assessment based on an analysis of a survivor’s child. In M. S. Bergmann & M. E. Jucovy (Eds.), Generations of the Holocaust (pp. 137–­158). New York: Basic Books, Kestenberg, J. S. (1982b). The experience of survivor-­parents. In M. S. Bergmann & M. E. Jucovy (Eds.), Generations of the Holocaust (pp. 46–­62). New York: Basic Books. Kestenberg, J. S. (1982c). The return of the persecutor. In S. Martin Bergmann & M. E. Jucovy (Eds.), Generations of the Holocaust (pp. 187–­176). New York: Basic Books.

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Kestenberg, J. S., & Brenner, I. (1996). The last witness. Washington, D.C: American Psychiatric Press. Krystal, H. (1968). Patterns of psychological damage. In Henry Krystal (Ed.), Massive psychic trauma. New York: International University Press. Krystal, H. (1981). The aging survivor of the Holocaust. Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, 14, 165–­189. Krystal, H. (1988). Integration and self-­ healing. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press. Krystal, H. (2007). Resilience: Accommodation and recovery. In H. Parens, H. P. Blum and S. Akhtar (Eds.) The unbroken soul tragedy. Trauma and resilience (pp. 47–­64). Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson. Kogan, I. (1995). The cry of mute children. London and New York: Free Association Books. Kogan, I. (2003). On being a dead, beloved child. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, LXXII, 727–­767. In The struggle against mourning (pp. 123–­157). New York: Jason Aronson. Kogan, I. (2007). The struggle against mourning. New York: Jason Aronson. Kogan, I. (2010). Sons of Nazi fathers. Paper presented at the EPF Conference, Vienna. Kogan, I. (2014). Transformation of personality: Deformation and reformation in confronting death. Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association, 62, 719–­740. Laplanche, J., & Pontalis, J. P. (1967). The language of psychoanalysis. Trans. D. Nicholson-­Smith. New York: Norton, 1973. Laub, D.,  & Auerhahn, N. C. (1984). Reverberations of genocide: Its expression in the conscious and unconscious of post-­Holocaust generations. In S.A. Luel & P. Marcus (Eds.), Psychoanalytic reflections of the Holocaust: Selected essays (pp. 151–­167). Denver: Ktav Publishing House. Laub, D., Auerhahn, N. C., & Hamburger, A., (Eds.) (2017). Psychoanalysis and Holocaust testimony: Unwanted memories of social trauma. New York: Routledge. Meltzer, D. (1967). The psychoanalytical process. London: Tavistock. Oliner, M. M. (1996). External reality: The elusive dimension of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 65, 267–­300. Ornstein, A. (1985). Survival and recovery. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 5, 99–­130. Parens, H. (2004). Renewal of life: Healing from the Holocaust. Rockwell, MD: Schreber. Parens, H. (2007). An autobiographical study: Healing from the Holocaust. In H. Parens, H.P. Blum  & S. Akhtar (Eds.), The unbroken soul tragedy. Trauma and resilience (pp. 85–­116). Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson. Volkan, V., Ast, G., & Greer, W. F. (2002). The Third Reich in the unconscious. New York and London: Bruner-­Routledge.

13 Trans-­generational fallout Yolanda Gampel

There are hundreds of people whose lives were nipped in the bud during the war who are living through me. My two grandmothers, both of whose names I bear, live through me. My parents, too, live through me. Yolanda Gampel (2005, p. 67)

Introduction Auschwitz and Hiroshima taught us that death and violence belong to the most intimate parts of our identity. The painful, monstrous memories are a burden, one that destroys both victims’ and uninvolved bystanders’ representational and perceptual systems. These memories become a legacy, generating violent identifications in them and in their children. And though the survivors’ children do not have personal memories of their own from the Shoah, the inner reality of loss, suffering and humiliation inflicted upon their families has been deposited in them through trans-­generational transmission. A parallel pattern may be identified in the children of the perpetrators, the Nazis’ children. They do not have personal memories of their own from the Second World War – sometimes vague shreds of memories at the most – but the inner realities of their families’ past, and the actions carried out by their relatives, have been deposited in them, too, via trans-­generational transmission. The concept of trans-­generationality may be used to account for the way memory, intergenerational transmission and in-­therapy transference may be related to phenomena which are beyond the links that exist between generations. Trans-­generational phenomena manifest in many ways; the prefix “trans”, which means “beyond” or “through”, indicates transition, change, transmission and transformation from one generation to the next.

I have chosen to use the prefix “trans”, and not “inter”, due to the special meaning it has for me in this context: “Trans-­generational time is that which registers the history of the generations in memory. It puts the individual in the face of his time, as well as in the times of his predecessors, thus allowing him or her to identify with them. But when trauma occurs due to state-­violence, previously acquired identifications may change, crack, and even break down” (Gampel, 2005, p. 68). But what of personal memory? Could the transmission of the terror of the Shoah, that unimaginable dread, not undermine the wish to live? Writer David Grossman, guest of honour in the Berlin literature festival of 2007, dedicated much of his keynote address to this phenomenon. Explaining why he had refused to answer his son’s question: “What did the Nazis do?” he said: “I  didn’t want to say it”, says Grossman. I, who grew up in the midst of silence and broken whispers that filled me with anxiety and nightmares; I, who wrote a book on a son who nearly lost his mind because of his parents’ silence; I suddenly understood my parents and their friends, who had chosen silence. . . . I felt that if I told him what happened there, even if I said it indirectly, part of his child’s purity would become contaminated; I  felt that once the mere possibility of the existence of

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such evil crystallized in his innocent consciousness, he would never be the same child anymore, indeed, he would not be a child at all anymore. The Shoah confronted the victims with an emotional experience the magnitude of which was so excessive and overwhelming that it brought about the breaking down of thought processes, leaving the survivors speechless, wordless. The only options left were evacuation and silence. In his story “Eyewitness”, Robert Antelme (1957) describes the disproportion between what he actually went through in Buchenwald and what he could tell others: “Ever since the first days, we felt it was impossible to bridge the gap between the language that was available to us and the experience that kept living in our bodies. We barely started to tell the story and we were already choking on it. What we had to say started to appear as unimaginable, even to us”.

Transmission Between silence and words there is an area through which no testimony can pass; maybe it is the area where, in extreme circumstances, morality and survival clash. “The Shoah is a sacred domain”, says Elie Wiesel (1980). “None can enter it and not realize that only those who were there can really know. No one, ever, can really know, but we must keep trying”. And yet, in spite of the survivors’ traumatic memories and painful suffering, Primo Levy (1988) adamantly maintained that there is a compulsive need to testify – and that this testimony is aimed both at the past and at the future. Borrowed from nuclear physics, the term “radiation” is a metaphor for the monstrous effects caused by socio-­ political violence. This term points at the nonperishable quality of the memory of violence, cruelty, and terror found in war and in other forms of social violence. People who went through the Shoah as children have in their everyday reality certain representations of those times, side-­by-­side with frozen and closed aspect which they have no words to express. There are only radioactive vestiges that cannot be transformed into memory (1996, 2001, 2003). These are not repressed aspects, as they are almost impossible to transform into representations; and even in those cases when such transformation is possible, a certain distance must be kept. Without some distance from it, the representation has no space in consciousness and it cannot be created. But the experience is communicable. How can one grasp and understand the “radioactive nucleus”? The radioactive nucleus is a metaphor for an endless, accelerated process in which anything may come into shape and then disappear right after it has appeared. It is a form of “virtual emptiness” which, paradoxically, contains all of the possibilities for change, which simultaneously appear and disappear.

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Discussing my work, political philosopher Marie-­ Claire Caloz-­Tshopp expressed this idea in philosophical terms; she says this is like being and nonbeing existing simultaneously, always tending towards nonbeing. The predominance of nonbeing may bring about a destructive being characterised by a simultaneous movement of appearance and dissolution whenever a certain thought tries to take shape (Caloz-­Tschopp, 2007). How do the radioactive residues penetrate consciousness, which is constantly actively trying to maintain its organisation and find areas and shapes for self-­ expression? Radioactivity can move in unexpected ways without touching anybody in specific. Radioactive identification is made of elements originating from the outside which have been phantasmatically assimilated, fixated and internalised. It may abruptly come into force in moments of extreme traumatic tension; and anyone carrying such metaphorical radioactivity in their psyche or in his/­her body, as a trace or as a nucleus of identification or in any other form, may find him/­herself locked and unable to live his/­her life. That which is gone, lacking, that which has been denied or repressed but transmitted, like death, murder or suicide related to our ancestors, is concealed and hushed. We meet people, patients, who pay the price of those transmissions originating from that negative element that is in motion. It is like phantoms that stay and return. It is a defect in the process of mourning; keeping a secret or not elaborating trauma generates a crypt, a cyst or states of freezing between unconscious and conscious. They can settle down in a person like phantoms. Trans-­generational transmission of non-­elaborated traumatic components takes place where Thanatos and negation are in excess due to flooding; the narcissism that is transmitted from the parents’ mind to the baby’s mind is not a narcissism of life but narcissism of death. Does the narcissism of death exist due to an affective or representational radical disinvestment? The investment in emptiness and in “death”, the tears shed over a lost object, threaten any possible encounter, any possible act of connecting or alliance. The work of denial is so successful that it leaves no trace that could testify that anything happened. It is a strange, vague, dim feeling, populated by emptiness: no longing, no sign of a lost object, no representations. The purpose of analysis is to re-­acquire, even if only slightly, the individual’s realistic history in the dialectic of his/­her passion – or bring about a recognition of the reality of violence – in those places where the psyche builds a defence that has to be slowly and gradually dissolved so that the individual may recognise the reality of suffering that eludes him/­ her (Puget, 1988, 2013). All the words that could not be said, all the scenes not remembered, all the tears unshed but swallowed and suspended, find their way to a place in which they are concealed as in some secret grave. This grave is located

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somewhere between the dynamic unconscious and the internalisation of the ego. It may be described as an unconscious, archetypal element inside the ego. The ego becomes Warden of the graveyard, like an unrealisable desire that is buried and cannot come into the world. The past tries to come into existence in the individual and becomes a barrier that blocks reality, held by negation and denial. This blocking of reality inside the crypt is transmitted from one generation to the next because this past cannot be elaborated (Desbois, 2007). Abraham and Törok (1978) were both psychoanalysts who grew up as teenagers in Hungary during the Shoah and later worked in France. They advance a theory of trans-­generational haunting. “What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others”. According to this theory, repressed secrets are passed from one generation to the next if they are “encrypted” as unprocessed and traumatic information. The terms monument and crypt receive special meaning trans-­generational transmission. The crypt (from Greek: kryptē, i.e., “hidden”) is an underground space located underneath the floor of a church, used for the burial or storage of sacred relics. The family secret transmitted from one generation to the next (like the Phantom theory, elements that transmit terror from one generation to the next) does not allow the work of mourning. The secret of the dread and terror experienced during the Holocaust becomes mixed with the individual’s psyche and manifests in the form of drives that generate shame, aggression, violence and sadistic attitudes towards others. This phenomenon is reminiscent of the experience of Un Heimlich, the “uncanny”, as an experience that is unacceptable to the individual. The building of the crypt occurs when, due to some life event, the individual experiences a reality that is unavailable to facts, that is to say, cannot be accepted as fact. The crypt is that place inside the individual where the lost object is engulfed and preserved, like in a tomb, but is occasionally released as a phantom in the absence of transformative capacities. The crypt is created by a defence mechanism that forbids the revelation of the catastrophic memory and turns it into a taboo. The memory is stashed in the body and/­or the psyche and generates the catastrophe by introducing the catastrophic object into the body. It is as if the individual lent his/­her body to the object he/­she had loved, having created the hidden crypt for it inside the body. The inaccessible crypt is built to accommodate the secret that is part of what used to belong to the love object, a secret now kept in an impossible, inaccessible place. The term “phantom” used by Abraham and Törok (and others) is a metaphor for something that exists in the psyche – like the inheritance of a trauma or pathological mourning – which could not be integrated in the intergenerational chain. The traumatic experience – and all its echoes – remains in the crypt as an enigmatic,

mourning psyche, behind doors closed by those families, erected to shut secrets they could not speak out. Thinking of Shoah survivors or any other survivors of catastrophes originating in state-­violence, a twofold question comes to mind: how do they transmit their traumatic experiences to their children, and how are the children influenced by that? Judith Kestenberg (1989) describes a mechanism that is beyond identification, which she calls “transposition into the past”. This term was inspired by her therapeutic work as she was listening to the anxious screams of the survivors’ children, who could not help living in the past and seemed to be compelled to hold the dead past generations inside them. There is a difference between “transposition” and “identification”; the children’s “transposition” is derived by fantasies about rescuing and restoring the lost loved ones, a compulsion to return into the past in an attempt to enter it and relive it. In their mind, second generation children go back in time, descend into the abyss of the Holocaust (Shoah), and play the part of the perished family members, not only unconsciously living the illusion that they are protecting their parents from having to confront an irreparable loss, but also going through the work of mourning in their stead. Kestenberg describes this in terms of “overlapping epochs”, a “time tunnel” in which two realities exist one next to the other, whose duality arises from the fact that they are both artificially connected to the present. Perl Wilgowicz conceptualises in her book Vampirism (1991) a typical form of “vampirical identification”, according to which certain descendants of Holocaust (Shoah) survivors, who are trapped in the previous generation’s trauma, are like vampires, “not dead, not alive, not born”, and thus become the origin of a vampirical genealogy, or “dynasty”. Faimberg’s work, Télescopage des Générations et Identifications Aliénées (1988) deals with “intergenerational compactness”. The French term télescopage refers to elements penetrating or collapsing one into the other, like the folding inward of the telescope.

Psychological radioactivity I have coined the concepts of “radioactive identification” and “radioactive transmission” (Gampel, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2005) in the process of my work on the influences of social traumas (focusing mainly on traumas related to the Holocaust). These concepts assume the existence of a clinical fact that is extremely difficult to understand and gives rise to a great deal of objection. They force upon us the awareness that we are not protected from the influence of events that took place far away from our here and now, far away in time and space. Such influences do not travel along known paths of identification; we may be passive “recipients” just as

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we may also become, quite randomly, “transmitters”. As opposed to the fracture of representation caused by the external world, inside the psyche there remain traces of the dreadful and the threatening, sometimes generating illness for generations over generations, just like the radioactive footprints of socio-­political violence. This metaphor represents the simultaneous existence of different planes, not a sequence system. Radioactivity is inscribed in the order of the existing reality, masquerading, amongst other things, as something that is inscribed as an iceberg in the development, in the psyche, and in history, stashed as a crypt inside the body, as a “vampirical identification”, a “transposition into the world of the past”, or “intergenerational compactness”. Sometimes radioactivity appears when something happens in one individual, or in one society, in which case the event defeats the historic context. The only thing that history takes from the event is its influences on the state of things – but the event as such eludes history. The experience of the Shoah does not become a link in any sequence, as other experiences may do. Something about its coherence is so awe inspiring and frightening that it stands alone in its extremeness; that is also why its experiences cannot be assessed, measured or compared to anything else. When I  started to write these words, I  immediately saw images originating from various domains: views, emotions, memories, accompanied by different conceptualisations of trans-­relational phenomena existing in and between generations. I could also see images, memories and feelings I experienced while sitting with survivors of socio-­political violence and hearing their stories, those long testimonials of patients who told me about their experiences and about the symptoms of these children whose parents live through them (Gampel (2005). How can I  formulate all those different strata of memory, oblivion and reminiscence in one coherent and understandable statement? The text I  was asked to write following my numerous years of working on and thinking about trans-­ generational transmission is multidimensional; it comprises many different and sometimes contradicting texts and instances of writing, none of which is written now for the first time. The text is a tapestry of different citations, times and spaces. I am reminded of the enigmatic artwork of Magritte, whose “This Is Not A Pipe” is the caption under a perfectly rendered painting of a pipe. In his words, “Everything seems to tend towards the idea that there is little relation between an object and that which it represents” (Magritte, 1929, pp.  32–­ 33). This paradox is very much related to the concept of rhizomatic thinking, coined by Deleuze and Guattari, which is explicated in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) (Nietzsche, 1996). It is an unusual book, a reflection, a representation of something, a thought, which explicitly and intentionally refrains from presuming to be a

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representation of the world; rather, it is a rhizome, based on the term for a botanical structure that can duplicate itself and form networks. It creates itself out of a rhizomatic context. The authors describe a world that does not ask to be explained, and only constitutes yet another fold of complexity where rhizomatic thinking, that is to say nomadic thinking, is used. The rhizome has a centre and that centre is the nomadic thinking that underlies it (Nietzsche, in Deleuze, 1965). Deleuze and Guattari also refer to the rhizome as a conjunction, an alliance – they use the rather vaguely understood French term agencement to denote the coming together into a designless grand design. The rhizome is a perpetual movement that keeps adding things in the world to one another to become, in Derrida’s words, a tissue. The Shoah as a historic concept or as a representation of memory cannot be forgotten because it has always been there. It will be what it has been; it is the memory of the future. Writing takes that which is not assembled and assembles it into one whole aesthetic (linguistic-­cultural) experience. For over forty years of work and therapy with conditions of social-­political violence, I  have wandered between plateaus and now am trying to ally, to conjoin that which is uncoordinated with that which cannot be assembled, nomadic thinking with nomadism, and thus to some extent bring together immanent and historic relations. In the 1970s, as I  began my way as a psychoanalyst, I had a young twenty-­five-­year-­old female patient named Leora (Gampel, 1982), the daughter of Holocaust survivors. She felt that their lives were full of secrets she would have liked to unravel, but at the same time she did not want to know. A few months later I started to work with Merav, a seven-­year-­old girl whose father had been a child during the Shoah and arrived in the Warsaw ghetto when he himself was also seven years of age. Through her intense distress and demand to know, I was able to confront the cruelty of the Shoah and its repercussions. As a general rule, young children are closer to their unconscious than adults; and as long as school or grown-­ups do not lock them in prefabricated answers, they maintain contact with existential questions. They have the courage to simply explore and investigate the mystery and the unknown. If we let them guide us, they can bring us closer to the knowledge that eludes us, adults, because of our fear of confronting the dark. Each and every discovery in my work that led to any change or creation was related to an encounter with a child. Merav allowed me to open my heart and go deeper in my thinking about the reality of Auschwitz and the way that reality was being transmitted onwards. Only then did Leora’s analysis come out of the dead end in which it was found. Over the years I continued to work with the Second Generation, and met them in interviews and various other settings, as well as in the framework of large-­scale

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research project conducted in Israel, France, Argentina, and elsewhere in the world. Paris. 1 May 1986. A sunny and humid day, with the air feeling dense and heavy. Stands selling May Bells are seen in every corner of the city. There is nothing to worry about here and the cafés are full. I find a seat in Café Select in Montparnasse. Sipping my coffee, I open the newspaper. Europe is agitated after the explosion in one of the reactors of the nuclear central or Chernobyl in the USSR. Experts advise not to consume dairy products or lettuce because the rains in Europe may be radioactive. Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany have already taken measures to protect their populations; but the Paris newspapers declare, on that first of May, that the toxic clouds have not crossed the French borders; and that the French have therefore no reason to worry. And yet, a friend who works at the Pasteur Institute tells me she just measured the level of radioactivity in the heels of her shoes, and that it was very high. She tells me she is quite certain that even in Israel they will have to take some precautionary measures – which was indeed the case several weeks later. That was the day when “radioactivity” became, in my mind, a metaphor for “state-­violence” (Gampel, 2005, pp.  11–­12). It was as if something completely new started in this world, in history, something that never existed before, a new form of destruction which people could inflict upon others, which completely devastated any possibility of representation. To describe this, I have used – and still do – the physical term “radioactivity” as a metaphor; radioactivity as a metaphor for the very essence of violence, in the sense that it leaves a radioactive nucleus behind it, and a radioactive capacity of transmitting the same violence from one generation to the next. This phenomenon does not only alter perception; it also alters means of identification, identity and the subject itself!

Stories of silence and speechlessness Fernheim is the name of a short story by Shmuel Yossef Agnon (1949, 1952), written in 1943, before we started to deal with testimonials about the hell that took place during that period. The author writes about Fernheim’s return home after the First World War, and describes how he felt compelled to describe what he had been through but could not manage to say anything except some “crushed, beat and chopped statement that had nothing in it” (freely translated from Hebrew). This “crushed, beat and chopped statement” is characteristic of anyone who returned from there, after the Second World War. During the time spend “there”, everything had to be concealed in the deepest folds of the psyche. The hell which Shoah survivors went

through seems to have erased the ontological bedrock of the psyche; and if words do manage to find some sort of expression, they are indeed uttered through crushed, beat and chopped statements. How can the silenced words be voiced? Can the relics of the Holocaust redeem exiled speech? In Landscape of the Death Metropolitan, Kulka, O. D. (2013) tells his story, his family’s story and the story of many others who could not speak. He does that by using statements that are neither beaten nor crushed. In a way, I feel, this book is a small miracle. In this special work, Kulka writes about his childhood in Auschwitz, and his testimonial is given after many years of thought and reflection. He was born in 1933 in the Czech Republic. In September  1942, he was deported with his mother, first to Theresienstadt, then to Auschwitz. His father was deported to Auschwitz in the same year, after having first stayed in a Czech concentration camp. After liberation, the son and his father immigrated to Israel; his mother did not survive. In Israel Kulka became a historian. Through his book he disturbs the silence and investigates the memories that have been haunting him for seventy years. The book contains, on the one hand, descriptions of extremely hard moments, such as the torture of prisoners about to be murdered – and, on the other hand, it has descriptions of his first acquaintance with Beethoven and Schiller through Freddy Hirsch. On the one hand this book bears witness to the worst that people could do to others – and on the other hand it is a statement about the human psyche’s capacity to survive. Winfried Georg Sebald was first exposed to the Holocaust when he was eighteen; the extermination of the Jews by the Germans became, ever since that time, forever central to his life and work. He was amongst the harshest critics of the general disregard and ignorance of the Shoah in the German cultural discourse; and his literary work dealt with questions such as cultural memory, exile and immigration, loss and its different manifestations, uprooting and wandering, generally presenting the Germans with scathing self-­criticism and soul searching. Sebald (2001) wrote about the Holocaust and its survivors in a special and aesthetically characteristic way, as if out of the clinic. For Sebald, the inanimate, too, has a story. His work calls the names of the dead, brings that which is forgotten closer to the tip of the tongue and reveals worlds from the depths of the past. He tells the story of language – a torn, cleft, broken language that is, quite paradoxically, saturated with words and at the same time terribly lacking them.

The trans-­generational Now that we have pointed at the dread of the Shoah that is cannot be expressed, that is unspeakable, ineffable;

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and at that which nevertheless may still be said after years of elaboration, we may relate to the transformation of the dread when it is/­was transmitted to the second generation, to the third generation and to the next generations. Second generation researchers, cinematographers and young writers travel all the way back to the camps, to Germany, to history and to life in the time of the Shoah. As psychoanalysts, we are familiar with the psychic vicissitudes of the second generation. But as time goes by we meet, more and more, the ups and downs of the third generation. Before I reach the clinical part, I wish to present here two books written by members of the second generation. Dana Arieli wrote a book called The Nazi Phantom (2014), which is a journey in the footsteps of the remains of the Third Reich. This book attempts to tell the story of a study conducted over many years through which the author searches for remaining clusters of Nazi architecture in Germany. She unravels violent aspects in the history of Nazi architecture and design since 1945, as well as the main dilemmas facing the designers of the German culture of memory after the Second World War. The Nazis’ “phantom” has been casting its shadow upon us for generations. It is but a shadow, not reality. The shadow appears whenever and wherever it pleases, during the day or at night, in architecture or in everyday life. In her book, those who are present in or absent from the big cities create traces of memory. Her study focuses on the aggressor, whereas our study underlines the aggressor’s victims – the Nazi phantom, the shadow of those lives, of that dread, which cannot be perceived, or grasped, or eliminated. The phantom expressed in the radioactive vestiges is a memory that breaks into smithereens, a memory that is transmitted from one generation to the next (like the beat, torn and chopped language which is the only language survivors can use to express themselves) and is scattered in a monstrous way in time and space. Göran Rosenberg’s Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz (2017) is the contemplation of a memory. Göran follows his father and documents his attempts to start a new life in a new world; his point of view is that of a child born into and living in that new world. The father, who survived the Łódź Ghetto, Auschwitz, the labour camps and the death wagons, was transported in 1945 to Switzerland by the Red Cross. An abyss is formed between the child’s world and the father’s world, an abyss that becomes filled by a world of shadows. Göran was able to turn this narrative into a highly personal theoretical study. The term “collective trauma” resonates in the current discourse. Speaking about the trauma allows us to bring into the discourse past or present events that are hurting people who are under fear and terror. These events are inscribed locally – in the experience of the inhabitants of this or that ­country – but also, in parallel,

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in the world’s history. These events modify parts of the world and influence those who are directly hurt – but at the same time they also hurt those who were only witnesses and were not directly affected. How are events of social violence, massive harm or terror inscribed? What representation do they receive in the psyche? In the history books? In the witnesses’ narratives and testimonials? News spread about violent events in the world and then the world identifies and knows what is happening – sometimes suddenly, sometimes slowly. Some people may feel the need to know more and therefore allow for and listen to the testimonials of those who have undergone the traumatic condition related to social political violence. Others develop a conformist mechanism that says “I have to adjust to anything that happens” (Amati, 1992). The testimonials of the nightmare of Nazism converge into a new aesthetic, that of disintegration and decay, which has demonstrated man’s tendency to uproot the symbolic structuring from within himself. The role of the symbolic is, to a certain extent, to transform hell into a metaphor and use the symbol politically, manipulatively. We may say that trauma never lies. It compels its own repetition, demands to be expressed because it has the strength to cross trans-­generational barriers and leave traces were it only in the form of symptoms that keep connecting those generations to one another. The segments of traumatic prehistory that do not allow for transformation in the elaboration of historic processes will work to maintain a link between distant generations who went through the trauma and do not know the reasons for the suffering. It is a generation-­to-­generation continuity that challenges the very essence of time (Lazar, 2017).

Trans-­generational time The work of active memory takes an important place in the culture. It has various manifestations in literature, memorial days, monuments and diverse encounters and gatherings in which different disciplines attempt to elucidate that which is barely thinkable or barely digestible. Each extermination, each such event, has its own unique characteristics. Extermination in the modern era confronts us with technical and bureaucratic innovations on the one hand, and political and thinking archaism on the other. How should modern government be managed? Are these topics still current, still relevant? They may be more relevant than ever in a time when the nuclear threat seems to be overhanging. How should we relate to our present? To our current political-­belligerent condition? How are the forking paths of the Israeli-­Palestinian relations narrated today? How will the meanings and

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explanations given to those stories today change in the future? Is the topic only memory, remembrance and oblivion? Do the questions we ask about memory and the past serve to conceal the dark side of the present? We know that such an aspect exists in our time; do we have the courage to actually look into the dark? Do we have the courage to think about our time, this present period of time, and capture in the dark the spot of light that is coming towards us and eternally getting further and further away from us in time? We may feel that we are attending an occurrence that should neither be missed nor ignored; but in fact we are walking on a tightrope, as our response could come too soon or too late, not yet or not anymore. The now, the investigation of the present, is needed in order to be able to live in it, and that means taking action. In Hanna Arendt’s words, doing is that which makes the human subject human, and the experience of thinking is one of a common strength. She also referred to fissures that appear between the past and the present, which help us define temporality and understand what are different times. The present and the future are not only a repetition, but a transformation of an already experienced experience, which becomes something new, something that is renewed daily in a socio-­cultural context and in a State, and that which includes political, economic and ideological situations. These naturally create language, customs and values. We relate to the economic difficulties that generate anxieties – the fear of losing one’s work place and becoming nonexistent, homeless, or the feeling of daily insecurity due to violence (thefts, attacks on elderly people, violence amongst youth, drugs) in a certain context that naturally alters interpersonal relations. A mass-­immigration movement brings about new experiences and social organisations based on racist ideologies, as well as new techniques and technologies (fertilisation, organ transplants) that alter biology and give a totally different meaning to life and death.

Conclusion How can these processes be joined into a perception of consciousness? How can we conceptualise the connections between interpersonal processes and the structuring of collective narratives such as myths, mythology and history? It is an infinite trans-­generational memory that is constantly transforming, in which each story keeps changing all the time. It is hard to fully grasp this occurrence and write it as history, because then we would need to write a historic memory that changes every day, in accordance with the place or time from which we look at it. Groups in a state of continuous suffering show an accelerated trans-­generational transmission of contents, concepts, values and beliefs related to trans-­subjective constructs. This is particularly true for

Israel, where intergenerational and trans-­generational processes are highly significant and carry the memory of a collective death sentence decided and partly executed by a modern nation, Germany. This is a destruction of the human basis, at its most essential level; it is an experience of absolute despair that is inscribed in parts of the population and bears heavily upon it. Israel is now in the midst of an extreme conflict with the third generation of the Occupation. The conflict is exacerbated. Both communities have their origins in trauma; they are entangled in a conqueror-­oppressed relation and the pressure upon each of them from the outside directly contributes to the strengthening of their respective traditional and communal aspects. In Israel – but not only there – a tradition is being created of extreme violence. The aggressive process of being under threat in the place you wanted to become your home will only lead to more and more mistakes, blunders and violent outbursts. In 1988, a few months after the beginning of the first Intifada, concerned Israeli and Palestinian mental health professionals came together and created “Imout” (Hebrew for “confrontation”), an Israeli-­Palestinian mental health organisation for the promotion of peace. The goal of this project, of which I was part, was to create a link that would bring forth dialogue, in spite of our political disconnection. Discussions were first held in Israel; later, in 1991, we convened in Portugal and then in France. Utilising a third party, the discussions became quite heated as extremely harsh topics were put forward. The Jewish Israelis talked about the memory of the terrors of the Shoah, the founding of the state of Israel, nationalism, the occupation, the present and the future. A psychologist from Gaza who participated in one of the working groups finally managed to speak about the emotional turmoil he was experiencing. This had been the first time he ever met Israelis who were not soldiers. Surprised, he kept repeating, time and again, “These are human beings!”, with everything that this statement entailed (Gampel, 2002, 2009). I wish to conclude with a few words about the complicated situation in our country. The background is, essentially, the terrible disaster of the Jewish people in the Shoah; all the wars we have been through are defined as existential wars. Our neighbours live under the memory of their expulsion; a third generation is now growing up under that occupation. Many questions arise about the trans-­generational transmission of impossible situations, about secrets, about the elaboration of history on each side, and about the possibility of ever reaching rapprochement, negotiation and peace. In each and every meeting held in the 1990s and in the 2000s, the great concern that came up was the outcry: “What is it that awaits the children and the grandchildren of both sides in the generations to come?” (Hass, 2000; Levy, 2009, 2010). This is why I wish to emphasise

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that trans-­generational and intergenerational transmission of conditions of destruction, war, social violence and terror are not only related to us but also to the people living next to us – and to other peoples as well.

References Abraham, N.,  & Torok, M. (1978). L’écorce et le noyau. Paris: Aober Flammarion. Agnon, S. Y. (1949, April 13). Fernheim. Ha’aretz. Agnon, S. Y. (1952). S “Fernheim” (1949) in to this day. Tel Aviv: Schocken. [Hebrew]. Trqnleted in rench dans 21 nouvelles de S.J. Agnon, traduit de l’hébreu par M.R. Leblanc, Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 1977, pp. 220–­236. Amati Sas, S. (1992). Ambiguity as the route to shame. International Journal of Psycho-­Analysis, 73, 329–­334. Antelme, R. (1957, 1966). L’espace Humaine. Paris: Gallimard. Arieli, D. (2014). The Nazi phantom: A journey following the relics of the Third Reich. Arendt, H. (1956). The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Caloz-­Tschopp, M.-­C. (2007). Dialogue personnel. Deleuze, G. (1965). Nietsche, Puf, edition 2007, Paris. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, G. (1980). Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2: Mille plateaux Collection Critique, 648 pp, 19 illustrations in-­texte. Desbois, P. (2007). Porteur de mémoires: Sur les traces de la Shoah par balles. The Holocaust by bullets: A priest’s journey to uncover the truth behind the murder of 1.5 million Jews. English translation by Catherine Spencer. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Faimberg, H. (1988). The telescoping of generations: Genealogy of certain identifications. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 24(1), 99–­118. Gampel, Y. (2001) Group psychology, society and masses: Working with the victims of social violence. In E. Spector (Ed. in Chief), On Freud’s group psychology and the analysis of the ego (pp. 129–­153). Analytical Press. Gampel, Y. (1982). A  daughter of silence. In M. Bergmann  & M. Jucovy (Eds.), Generations of the Holocaust (pg 120–­136). Basic Books. Inc. Publishers. 120–­136. Gampel, Y. (1996). The Interminable uncanniness. In L. Rangell & R. Moses-­Hrushovski (Eds.), Psychoanalysis at the political border (pp. 85–­98). Madison, CT: International Universities Press. Gampel, Y. (1998). Reflections on countertransference in psychoanalytic work with child survivors of the Shoah. The Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 26(3), 343–­368. Gampel, Y. (1999). Between the background of safety and the background of the uncanny in the context of social violence. In P. Fonagy, A. M. Cooper & R. S. Wallerstein (Eds.), Psychoanalysis on the move (pp. 59–­74). London: Routledge. Gampel, Y. (2000). Reflections on the prevalence of the uncanny in social violence. In A. Robben & O, Suarez-­Orozoo (Eds.), Cultures under siege: Collective violence and trauma in interdisciplinary perspectives. Cambridge University Press. Gampel, Y. (2001). Group psychology, society and masses: Working with the Victims of SociaL violence, In E. Spector

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(Ed. In Chief). On Freud’s Group Psychology and the analysis of the ego (pp. 129–­153). Analytical Press. Gampel, Y. (2002). Unavoidable links and violable links: Israelis and Palestinians in psychoanalytic psychotherapy training. In J. Bunzl  & B. Beit-­Hallahmi (Eds.), Psychoanalysis, identity, and ideology – Critical essays on the Israel/­Palestine case (pp. 201–­214). Kluwer Academic Publishers. Gampel, Y. (2003). Violence sociale, lien tyrannique et transmission radioactive coordonnée A. Ciccone, Psychanalyse du Lien Titanique Editionnes Dunod, Paris, 105–­126. Gampel, Y. (2005). Ces Parents qui vivent a travers moi: Les infants de guerres. Paris: Fayard. 2006 in Spanish, Ediciones Paidos Iberica, and in Hebrew, Tel-­Aviv: Keter. Gampel, Y. (2009). The Middle-­East crisis: Psychoanalytic explorations. Rivista di Psicoanalisi Applicata “Frenis Zero”. Gampel, Y. (2017). Evil in talking about evil psychoanalytic, social, and cultural perspective (pp.  1–­15). Ed. Rina Lazar. London: Routledge. Relational Perspectives Book Series. Gampel, Y., & Mazor, A. (2004). Intimacy and family links of adults who were children during the Shoah: Multi-­faceted mutations of the traumatic encapsulations. Free Associations, 546–­568. Göran, R. (2017). A brief stop on the road from Auschwitz. New York: Other Press. Hass, A. (2000). Drinking the sea at Gaza: Days and nights in a land under Siege. New York: Owl Books. Kestenberg, J. S. (1989). Transposition revisited: Clinical, therapeutic and developmental considerations. In P. Marcus & A. Rosenberg (Eds.), Healing their wounds: Psychotherapy with Holocaust survivors and their families (pp. 67–­82). New York: Praeger. Kulka, O. D. (2013). Landscapes of the metropolis of death: Reflections on memory and imagination. London: Harvard University Press. Lazar, R. (Ed.) (2017). Evil in talking about evil psychoanalytic, social, and cultural perspective (pp. 1–­15). London: Routledge. Relational Perspectives Book Series. Primo Levi (1988). Si c’est un homme traduit pAr Martine Schruoffeneger Giulio Einaudi éditeur s.p.a., Turin, 1958 et 1976. Julliard, pour la traduction française, 1987. Levy, G. (2009, August 6). From Sheikh Jarrah to Sheikh Munis. aaretz. Twilight zone – Life and death under the Israeli occupation, 1988–­2003. Tel Aviv: Babylon Printing, 2004. Levy, G. (2010). The punishment of Gaza. Tel qviv: Verso Books. Magritte, R. (1929). Les Mots et les Images. La Révolution surréaliste, 12, 32–­33. Magritte La Trahison des images (Ceci n’est pas une pipe). (1929). Painting, Oil on canvas. Nietzsche, F. W. (1996). Human, all too human: A book for free spirits. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Puget, J. (1988). Social violence and psychoanalysis in Argentina: The unthinkable and the unthought. Free Association, 13, 84–­144. Puget, J. (2013). Discontinuidades, superposición, articulación. Revista Generaciones, 2(2), 385–­399. Sebald, W. G. (2001). Austerlitz. London: Hamish Hamilton. Wiesel, E. (1980). Dialogue with Elie Wiesel. Centerpoint, 4, 25. Wilgowicz, P. (1991). Le Vampirisme, de la Dame Blanche au Golem. Lyon: Cesura Edition.

14 Family dynamics Hanni Mann-­Shalvi

Introduction This chapter focuses on the particular characteristics of transgenerational Holocaust trauma transmission to the third generation. Much had been written about the Holocaust’s influence on survivors and their offspring (Akhtar, Rogers, & Plotkin, 2002; Auerhahn & Laub, 1987, 1998; Brenner, 1988, 1999; Gampel, 2005; Kestenberg & Brenner, 1986; Kogan, 1990, 1993, 1995, 2017), but little is known about its impact on the third generation. My analytic work shows that the Holocaust continues to play a central role in the unconscious of third generation Holocaust survivors and that its characteristics differ from known second generation phenomena. After a brief review of relevant literature, I will present vignettes from two analyses and more complex, detailed material from a third. Freud originally related to the unconscious dynamic as an entirely individual structure, an area with somatic tension from the body, and repressed thoughts and affects from the mind of the individual who needs to face intense inborn conflicting drives: Eros and Thanatos (Freud, 1900, 1901, 1905, Breuer  & Freud, 1893–­1895). A later generation of psychoanalysts, including Fairbairn, Klein, Winnicott, Bion, and Bowlby, loosely grouped as the “middle school” of “British object relations”, believed that the only innate drive is the drive for relationships. Concentrating on the relational arena, they provided a detailed and complex view of how the development of the unconscious is shaped by relationships with the primary caretakers.

In a 1988 conference at Hebrew University, Jerusalem, titled “The Meaning of the Holocaust For Those Not Directly Affected: A  Psychoanalytic View”, Vamik Volkan discussed the inability of the Holocaust victims to mourn, explaining that in the normal course of mourning the representation of the lost object becomes a remembrance formation enabling the mourner to view the lost object as a memory. A  Holocaust victim cannot achieve remembrance formation and mourn because (1) extreme helplessness obliges her or him to cling to external objects; (2) Holocaust victims learn to internalise helplessness since silence could save their lives; therefore they cannot express normal mourning that is accompanied by externalised emotions; (3) to complete the mourning process would mean forgiving and forgetting, and one cannot forgive and forget the Holocaust; (4) a Holocaust survivor facing too great a loss may develop closer identification with others in the group who have undergone similar experiences, making it impossible to separate from the group and grieve on his or her own; and (5) mourning is impossible because of the perceived need to avoid acknowledging feelings such as rage and resentment against the dead that underlie the self-­reproach of the survivors (Granek, 1994). Trauma is often maintained in the mind by “presentations”, mental processes displayed to the senses without emotional processing and with no connection to the personal history (Oliner, 2000). In 2002, Volkan explained that when a shared trauma occurs to a large group under conditions where the enemy intentionally causes losses, pain, suffering, shame, humiliation, and helplessness without the victims being able to mourn these losses, specific

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unidentifiable processes may arise in the identity of the large group. “The trauma exceeds individual PTSD and creates, by transgenerational transmission, certain unconscious tasks for the group’s future generations to perform” (Volkan et al., 2002, p. 10). Because the Holocaust is engraved as one massive trauma in the mind without an associative system that characterizes normal memories, it passes from one generation to the next and continues to torture the offspring even without words and representation (Laub, 1998). This creates a massive attack on mental processes that reverberates by attacking links in relationships (Bion, 1959). In a dynamic which Haydée Faimberg (1988) termed “telescoping of generations”, parents identify with everything that is good in their children and possess their positive identity. Concomitantly, they are unable to recognise the children’s negative parts or experiences which are impossible for them to contain and process. They also may project any negative experience onto the child and attribute negative identity to the child. This situation leaves the children no room to develop their individual identity. Unconsciously, the parent/­survivor generation drains the second generation’s emotional world of its authentic identity, needs, feelings, and wishes, invading them as if they were their own. This being an unconscious process, the second generation can feel it only through an experience of emptiness, loss of direction, loss of automatic functioning, lack of purpose, absent sense of satisfaction from the other, and so on. The trauma and its consequences “invade” the psyche of second generation individuals who enacted their parents’ experiences in their own lives, causing survivors’ children to find themselves living their parents’ emotional lives in a contemporary reality (Brenner, 1999, 2005; Faimberg, 1988; Grubrich-­Simitis, 1984; Kogan, 1990, 1993, 1995, 2017; Laub, 1998; Laub & Lee, 2003; Mann-­Shalvi, 2007, 2016). Grubrich-­Simitis (1984) identified Concretism as one of the characteristics of Holocaust survivors. She explains that “survival under the conditions of extermination camps impaired the ego capacity for metaphorization and the related psychic ability to structure time in past, present, and future.  .  .  . And evoked a timeless concretism in the psychic functioning of the second generation” (ibid p.  303). She suggests that in such analyses “the aim is to overcome the concretism and to restore the metaphoric function. A process which requires passing through a specific phase in the analytic process which she termed “phase of joint acceptance of the Holocaust reality” (ibid, p. 303). The third generation is born into this emotional reality. Superficially, they may have grown up with beneficial circumstances in a sometimes overprotected and overindulgent environment created by parents as

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a compensatory reaction to their own experiences as children of Holocaust survivors. Since the emotional sequence is unconscious, the third generation cannot recognise that the second generation’s unconscious obligation to carry their parents’ unmetabolized Holocaust emotional material is transmitted to them. Thus, in the third generation, the emotional material still remains raw, unconscious, and even more remote from its origin. Yolanda Gampel (2005) described this when pointing out that the impact of the Holocaust is much like “radioactive fallout” revealed in the long run, scattered through space and time at the intersection between present and past, between presence and absence. As such, radioactive traces may pass from the first generation which experienced the Holocaust, directly to the second generation and to the third. Scharff and Scharff (1998a, 1998b, 2011,) describe the process through which objects and object relations are internalised, making it possible to apply this model as a tangible theory of personality, further supported by Fonagy’s studies on mentalization (Fonagy et al., 2002). Originating in South America and based on Pichon Riviere’s definitions, known then as “el-­Vinculo” (Losso, De Setton, & Scharff, 2017, p. xxv), Link Theory expanded our perception of the unconscious as additionally constructed from imprints of our environment, as well as from past and future generations. Accordingly, the unconscious is “a complex structure that includes the subject, the object, and their mutual interaction, through processes of communication and learning in an intersubjective frame. The Link is both conscious and unconscious, mental and interactional, and it has a central temporal dimension in that it links the generations” (Losso et al., 2017, p. xxv). Scharff and Scharff (2011) integrate link and relational theories defining the “interpersonal unconscious” as developing in the dynamic interaction with the unconscious field into which it is born. They emphasise the central role of intergenerational transmission, contending that babies are born into links and relationships of all that the previous generations have suffered and repressed, absorbing information from the prolonged encounter with the physical-­emotional heterogeneous environment that surrounds them (Scharff  & Scharff, 2011). With this integrated formulation in mind, I wish to address the unconscious emotional process I  encountered in those of my analysands who were third generation offspring of Holocaust survivors.

The therapeutic process The analytical process requires the following: (1) facing and containing the extreme devastation; (2) recognising the unconscious malignant connections between the

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generations, differentiating what belongs to whom in the enmeshed emotional worlds of three generations; (3) accepting the helplessness of the analyst and the analysand when encountering the black holes of what remains unknown; and (4) making it possible for the third generation individual to begin reclaiming his/­ her own life while developing empathic understanding towards his/­her parents and grandparents. When these offspring are assisted in finding the trauma’s significance in their parents’ lives, the compulsion to repeat can be transformed into a cognitive mode (Faimberg, 2012).

Jewish and German countertransference challenges Israeli or Jewish psychoanalysts need to pay special attention to countertransferential processes. We need to accept that we, like our patients, are influenced by the same intense emotional forces described earlier. Creating a psychic space in the analyst and analysand may be influenced by the psychoanalyst’s desire to construct her/­his own history, by the wish to develop a project for the future, or as a defence against recognizing one’s own aggressive fantasies (Volkan et al., 2002). It is vital to recognize that Jews in the Holocaust experienced the ferocity of destructive, satanic aggression. Facing such forces unleashes the death instinct, awakens conflicting unconscious primitive destructive drives, and leads to an upheaval of the former unconscious psyche’s organization (Laub & Lee, 2003). As Volkan et al explained (2002, p.  10): “the shared aggressive fantasies that accompany enmity have not banished, but have rather been covered over by an apparent reaction formation”. These can be experienced as an emotional earthquake, which rouses various defence mechanisms against fragmentation or annihilation anxieties and, as I  heard from numerous second generation Holocaust survivor patients, abusive behaviour towards them. For the analysand, the psychoanalytic process can become a source of intense psychic pain and therefore rouses resistance to it. At an unconscious level it may be experienced by the analyst as killing the victims once again, becoming an obstacle to listening and interpreting (Faimberg, 2012). German psychoanalyst Grubrich-­Simitis (1984) described how when Hitler’s regime came to an end, there was a long period of denial before psychoanalysts were able to start investigating the psychic effects of the Holocaust. Gottfried Appy, another German psychoanalyst (in Granek, 1994), describes the complicated task of German psychoanalysts working with descendants of Nazis in his paper entitled “The Meaning of Auschwitz Today: Clinical Reflections about the Depletion of a Destructive Symbol”. He states that “For the analyst, the

situation is uneasy; he needs to ‘recognize the disastrous presence of Auschwitz’ (p.  27) in the psyches of himself and his clients, he must venture into tenebrous psychotic regions at the risk of encountering impotence”. Israeli and/­or Jewish analysts may find it extremely difficult to identify the satanic or destructive forces within them, which would hold them in a state of split identification with the victims against the Nazi aggressors and, in turn, prevent our clients from recognising the devilish and aggressive parts within them.

Clinical material Mia Mia is a thirty-­year-­old married mother of one child. She described her life as “functional”. She has a good relationship with her husband and has a successful career, supportive families, and some friends. However, she experienced life as empty and dull, and complained of intense fear of her and her loved ones dying. She was anxious about her son dying in kindergarten, that she would be killed in a car accident, that her husband will be killed on the way to work, and so on. Any threatening news she came across would transform into an immediate and concrete death anxiety. The analysis was characterised by a sense of monotony, as if deadness had penetrated our psychoanalytic space and taken hold of me as well. Only in retrospect could I see how the analysis was unfolding and realise that its experience was one of a death already having occurred. Mia was a control case in my psychoanalytic training, and the feelings of dullness with no sense of process which I experienced in analysis with Mia resurfaced in my supervision. It was a parallel process which I did not understand at first. The centrality of intergenerational Holocaust trauma transmission to the third generation was discovered by chance. Curiously, in one of our meetings, my supervisor and I found ourselves delving into a lively discussion about intergenerational Holocaust trauma transmission and were feeling guilty about not staying focused on Mia’s analysis. At least consciously. The doorknob question came intuitively, then, from my supervisor. “Does Mia have any connection to the Holocaust?” I was surprised to realise that I had no idea nor had I asked. At that point in my training many personal issues were still quite raw in me, and quite possibly inhibited my curiosity about that history. At the first opportunity, I questioned Mia who knew only that her father’s family had been exterminated in the Holocaust, but no other details. In the following session she said that eventually she found one of her father’s cousins, with whom her father did not stay in

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touch, and had talked to him about this. He disclosed a reality of which she had no knowledge, including being able to list all the murdered family members by name, age, and how and where they were killed. Mia arrived for the next session, clearly very excited, describing how she had gathered her entire family and passed along that information. She added: “None of us knew them, but I knew their anxieties”. This new insight was followed by a working-­through process that allowed her anxieties to disappear. In our final meeting she said: “Now, when Iran threatens to eradicate Israel, I worry, but just like everybody else. It’s the other anxieties that plagued me throughout the day that have gone”.

Rahm Rahm, forty, suffered symptoms of OCD in his everyday life. He, too, led a carefully planned life devoid of creativity and satisfaction. Rahm experienced his environment as hostile and wanting to attack him, including his partner, parents, brothers, work colleagues, and others. His reactions to imagined attacks ranged from submission to aggression, creating that same hostility in the other which Rahm had already attributed to the other through projective identification. It was not surprising that these were Rahm’s internalisations, growing up in a very loving yet simultaneously highly abusive environment. His grandparents were Holocaust survivors who fled to Israel. His grandmother almost obsessively maintained an orderly home and deeply loved Rahm, who found refuge there from his everyday chaotic life. His grandmother had initiated eleven abortions; she was never forgiven for this by her only living child, Rahm’s mother, who constantly called her “murderer”. His grandfather was impudent, openly adulterous, and spoke rudely to Rahm’s father, but loved his grandson. He tried to influence him to be as tough and blunt as he was. Rahm’s parents’ behaviour swung from abusively violent and humiliating attacks to suffocating erotically tinged love, and, in between, they acted as though they were a normal family. I realized that across the three generations the Holocaust had imprinted a system of conflicting alternating identifications, from Nazi aggressor to victim, identifications which fluctuated within each member of the family and were internalised in their relationships without any external trigger. The analytic process, lasting nine years, was challenging for both of us. Innate murderous fantasies and sadistic sexuality towards children and other helpless people filled his unconscious world, intertwined with sadistic Holocaust scenes. These are what we needed to face and contain.

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When these fantasies of sadistic sexual abuse arose in transference, the challenge grew even greater. My role was to experience and contain the horrific range of reactions Rahm probably experienced as a child, his parents likely experienced in their childhoods, and his grandparents in the reality of the Holocaust; harsh scenarios which, though described in words, I  felt as actions, as though sadomasochistic abuse was being enacted on me via transference. Surviving the maelstrom of emotions in transference, while naming and identifying the enactments, enabled realising the complex situations he faced as a child, and understanding their intergenerational and current unconscious context. Only then could symbolisation processes start taking place in life outside our analytic space. Gradually the obsessive compulsive behaviours lessened and he was able to meet and shape his life according to his authentic self.

Daphne Daphne, thirty-­six, a beautiful young woman with almond-­shaped blue eyes and long blonde hair, complained that she was “empty” of feelings and memories. All emotions were pushed away with contempt. She said that it seemed she would never marry and be a mother. In her view, analysis was for solving problems and changing. I felt trapped in her state of sterile concreteness and sensed that if anything could indeed fresher up, it could be psychoanalysis. I made the recommendation for analysis, and quite notably, she responded with excitement. For four years she lay on the couch in three analysis sessions every week. Daphne is the older of two daughters. Her father served in the Foreign Office and her mother was a housewife. As a child they moved from country to country, repeatedly uprooting her from her environment and anything familiar to her. The following motifs appeared from the outset of analysis: the longing for home and the suffering that comes from interrupted life experience, her need for control and distinction, and her attitude towards her body. “I  don’t go to the beach because I’m not comfortable with exposed bodies”, she insisted. But instead of using the correct Hebrew word for “bodies” she used one which means corpses. Her puzzling choice of words, a parapraxis, was clarified later in the treatment. Initially she stated that “Mother said everything was always fine with me”. But it turned out that when Daphne was “not well”, her mother felt attacked and then guilty after turning this around into an attack on Daphne. Daphne worked in a dreary high-­tech job with a high salary. For ten years she had no intimate relationships. Rigidity and obsessiveness controlled her life and characterised our sessions. “The other” was perceived as a

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threat like her mother, which must be fought. Therefore, it threatened her to acknowledge the emotional connection between us. Everything was translated into emotionless terms of buying and selling services. She felt torturous futility and emptiness: “If I die, I won’t be missed by anyone . . . no one’s life will change”.

The girl within Her life story unfurled very gradually, embedded with memories, relationships, and internal conflicts. Connected space and narrative began appearing. We touched on the loneliness and sadness she felt when she left her friends behind during her frequent moves, on seeking to please her parents with academic excellence, and on adapting swiftly to different social codes in their new location at the expense of her authentic identity. She developed an effective false self to cope with those challenges. Her parents, her sister, and two friends were the only people close to her. With her father she felt a special connection: they were similar in their silences, their logical thinking, their practicality, and their disdain of the mother, yet her relationship with her mother was symbiotic. For long months both she and I  existed under the reign of terror caused by an absence of permission for individual existence. Sometimes I collaborated with the necessary experience of symbiotic “we”. The slightest sign of differentiation, such as when I did not understand something or did not react as expected, was experienced by Daphne as a threat and caused outbursts of rage. I felt bruised, helpless, as though fighting to survive, but I  also felt a connection to the little girl within, to hints of her existence. I realized that through aggression Daphne could express herself.

Guilt enters the picture Guilt was found to be of the leitmotifs organising Daphne’s world of relationships as it was with mother. For example, she explained that when her sister borrowed her clothes and returned them used, she preferred to wash them so that her sister would “feel guilty and she, Daphne, would become the victim, while teaching her sister a lesson”. Relative to the mother, the reverse was true in that the mother was the victim and Daphne felt blameworthy and guilty. Aggression, accusation, and guilt became the analytical leitmotifs recreated in the transference. In situations in which Daphne’s environment experienced her as violent, she actually felt frustrated and helpless, certain she was only expressing herself. Gradually, a potential space began to develop that enabled

thinking, tolerance of conflicts, as well as through containment, feelings of helplessness, frustration, and pain. A year into analysis Daphne expressed her desire for a tattoo to permanently inscribe upon her skin “a symbol of my loyalty to myself, and over the years I could look at it and smile”. She added: “I’m looking for a saying, a symbol . . . something like: I think, therefore I exist, a kind of rebirth that would always make me ask: Are you being true to yourself?” Significantly, she recalled seeing an article in the news describing how grandchildren tattooed their grandparents’ Holocaust numbers on their arm in order to never forget what happened. Although I  actually deal with Holocaust-­related issues in my practice, I  ignored this connection, a type of dissociation in countertransference. Perhaps not unrelated to my oversight with Mia, as described earlier. Daphne tattooed her inside right arm with the phrase: “I  am who I  am – a human”. She connected it to her need, surfacing in analysis, to remember to be true to herself. The connection to the Holocaust quickly crossed my mind, but she never said a word about it nor did I. These issues can be notoriously difficult to work through. Analysis continued in meaninglessness futility until one day . . .

A reality stranger than fiction On November 16, 2012, the meeting began with eight minutes of silence that caused Daphne deep distress. Angered by my silence, she attacked me when I asked, “What comes to your mind?” which she experienced as ridiculous: “If I  knew, I  wouldn’t be silent!” When I said, “Maybe the feelings and thoughts inside are hidden now, and it’s like seeing the results of bombardment without knowing where it came from and who is attacking”, an air raid siren sounded. We fell silent, and I  realised, shocked, that for the first time a missile from Gaza was targeting Tel Aviv! In the building where I live, every apartment includes one room that doubles as designated bomb shelter. In my case, it was my bedroom, never imagining it would actually be needed. For a fraction of a second, I hesitated but quickly came to my senses: “First we stay alive – then we handle analysis”. So, we stood up and left my office. We passed the bathroom and entered my bedroom. I raised a section that makes the bed more like a sofa, we sat down, and I turned the TV on. After tensely following the news for some ten minutes we returned to the office. The bombardments on Tel Aviv continued for some weeks, and everyday life now included becoming accustomed to the routine of sirens. I also developed an additional safe place in the building. At this point, Daphne entered into what she called her “black hole”. For some two months, she cried ceaselessly and inexplicably. We

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dealt with violence, guilt, despair, and the endless crying, but this time we had some space which allowed thinking and observation. Daphne described a dream: “I dreamt this messed-­up dream. I was at the pool with Paul. I don’t remember if I wore a bathing suit. I only remember that we smoked a cigarette and suddenly the air raid sirens went off and we didn’t know whether we should throw out the cigarette or get out of the pool. It was a Grad missile. I told Paul and he said, “You want to do forbidden things with me and so you punish yourself with the missile”. So I said, “Great, a real Joseph, you are”. I associated it to how sitting on the bed was like an overstimulating primal scene, and the missile was like an unacceptable urge, a “male phallic missile” linked to death as a punishment, an explosive missile also connected with bowel movements in the bathroom, which Daphne saw at the entrance to my bedroom. It was an arousing experience of a primal scene with a consciously dream imagery erotic transference wishes, which was brought to break through and blow up the treatment. Daphne wished to keep the process with me sterile, unproductive and lifeless  .  .  . once again there was evidence of the conflict between life and death forces. Whilst in her dream Paul made an interpretation, Daphne herself refused to consider it and felt sealed off. I listened with floating attentiveness when suddenly an image came into my mind of two scary bouncers selecting those allowed in and preventing others via a locked discotheque door. The image, so atypical for me, surprised me. Facing Daphne’s own tightly locked door, I decided to share it with her: The image that comes into my mind  .  .  . what do you call those guys standing at the entrance of a disco? Daphne: Who, the guards? Me: Ah, the selectors. Daphne, sharply and very quickly: Selection!! (“Selectzia” is the Nazi term for directing fit individuals to labor camps; the unfit were instantly shot dead.) Me: Wow!!!! Daphne, catching my surprise: Even at the most simplistic level, the connotation links “Selectzia” to the Holocaust. Me:

I surprised myself to realise I might still have had a blind spot. Why did it take a serious missile threat for me to consider her background? Was there something I  may have unconsciously sensed about her that was especially anxiety provoking? I asked: “Do you have any connection to the Holocaust?” Daphne: “My grandmother . . . I don’t remember the name of the Romanian camp . . . she jumped the train,

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but her father and his entire huge family were all killed in the Holocaust. My grandmother’s was from Tran . . . net . . . ria”. She had difficulty pronouncing the name. Even more surprised, I realised that her grandmother was from the same region as my mother! It was an uncanny experience for me. I thought about how she was experiencing difficulty pronouncing the name in exactly the same way I had. “Transnistria”, I  said, using the pronunciation that my mother taught me, realising I had also mixed something up. Daphne continued: “My grandmother  .  .  . I don’t remember the name of the camp . . . they were brought to the camp and she and her little sisters fled and jumped off the train . . . and they were caught again . . . in the forest”. Incredibly, her broken story echoed that of my mother’s life. I imagined the girls running through the forest, chased by the Nazis, caught, and returned to that terrible train. My mother had described the terrible cattle wagons, where people had no choice but to urinate and defecate on each other, die on top of each other, and how the naked corpses were tossed from the train. Daphne and I also shared a moment of terror in a cramped space during the missile alert. I learnt that my mother and Daphne’s grandmother had been in the same place, were the same age, had undergone the same things, and when Daphne noted the names of friends from that area who live in her parents’ neighbourhood to this day, I  realized that we probably have mutual acquaintances. These were very intense moments for me, focusing inside on leaving all parallel avenues open while listening closely to Daphne, and to the best of my ability not mingling what was mine with what was hers. This differentiation was necessary to maintain my analytic functioning.

Crossing the Rubicon From this point on, and only identifiable in retrospect après coup, work began on processing the slivers of intergenerational Holocaust trauma transmission which Daphne carried within her. Mental content seemed to jump to the surface in a dissociative manner which gradually became meaningful. In a deeply moving, ongoing conversation, Daphne underwent a transformative process. It commenced with several months of mute and torturous crying, day and night. We applied words to her unstructured, disowned feelings, and when I  suggested that perhaps at times there are no words to express the scope of pain and crying, Daphne protested, saying: “How can I  survive something if I  don’t know what it is?”

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Her curiosity was an absolutely necessary component of her quest for understanding. I responded: “Perhaps things greater than you are shaking you up?” A gradual associative process linking to Holocaust material began, with Daphne screaming: “But to be in something bigger than I am for several months? Next you’ll say it’s because of God and because of the Holocaust”. This caused severe emotional upheaval, weeks of endless crying, seeking words for the horror, and indescribable mourning. A voice crying out in her to be the container for the emotions of previous generations began taking shape: “Sorry, but I can’t sense this thing, and be in this state, as just one tiny person in the world. Why should I want to deal with this . . . why?” An emotional process developed in which she identified those feelings which belonged to her father, to her grandmother, to her grandfather, and angrily to herself: “Sorry, I’m not crying for her! I’m crying for myself! And I won’t cry because my father is second generation! That’s history, it has nothing to do with me! I  refuse! And it annoys me and I don’t want to talk about it! It’s as though you’re telling me, ‘Blame God for me sitting here and crying’ ”. Then her voice changed to one of astonishment: “So . . . did God make me cry?” “A  precious cry rises from your words”. I  answered, quoting her: “ ‘Sorry, I’m not crying for my grandmother and father!’ . . . I’m not willing anymore to carry inside me the Holocaust’s consequences on my grandmother and father’ ”. She was determined to stop grieving. With newfound calm in her voice, Daphne’s crying stopped and she said: “When I said that every time I forget to be loyal to myself I’d look at the tattoo, I meant in the context of myself, not in the context of me feeling sorry for my grandmother in the Holocaust. I’m trying to free myself from things related to me, not things I  don’t know about”. After pondering for a while, she added with sorrow: “And looking at my arm and remembering that ‘I am who I am’ won’t necessarily mean I’m free of the oppressive burden which my grandmother and father have passed on to me. But when this crap surfaces, what can I do?” I sighed, pained by my insufficiency at being able to release her, and perhaps myself too, from a burden that is not ours, and said: “That’s a very moving question”. To my surprise, Daphne laughed when I sighed. “Oy, that was so tough . . .” and suddenly I noticed she was no longer crying. I said: “You’re not crying anymore”. She answered: “Yes. Enough. I  don’t have the strength”. In fact she had acquired much strength. Her affect tolerance was certainly improved. About a year later Daphne completed her analysis. She now works with sick children and has plans to become a mother.

Conclusion While I think that it is too early to generalise our findings regarding the intergenerational Holocaust trauma transmission to the third generation, my experience so far has enabled me to identify four main characteristics: (1) Symptoms of intergenerational Holocaust trauma transmission in the third generation are so deeply covert that they seem unrelated to the grandparents’ Holocaust experiences. (2) Concretism, which Grubrich-­Simitis (1984) identified as characteristic of the second generation of Holocaust survivors, is also one of the characteristics of the third generation. This focal impairment of metaphorisation is probably due to whatever traumatic material not worked through in the second generation is further transmitted to the third generation, creating the same pathology. Analysis is characterised by a sense of emptiness and death, manifesting itself in a variety of ways. (3) The linkage of symptoms to the Holocaust always surfaces unexpectedly. Since the purpose of defences is to ward off annihilation anxiety and unimaginable terror (Grubrich-­Simitis, 1984), when the damaged links (Bion, 1959) are re-­established, the extreme feelings of terror, the fear of death, intense aggression, deep pain, and mourning, which are raw unmetabolized emotion, then flood the analysand. Analysts must allow themselves to be touched and sometimes changed by this experience. Only if the analyst allows her/­himself to be carried away helplessly with the analysand by such powerful emotions, then can working through processes be possible. (4) Both the analyst and the analysand must recover from the maelstrom they experienced in order for a working process to occur, leading in the final phase to focusing on the analysand’s authentic self and how it is expressed in his/­her life. There are similarities between the “second generation’s” and the “third generation’s” symptomatology. I think that the difference between them lies in the ability to link the source of their pathology to the survivors’ Holocaust experience. When children grow up with parents suffering from trauma as a result of the Holocaust, it is easier to understand that they may have been affected. However, the “third generation” grew up with parents who did not experience the Holocaust trauma. They were raised in a free country, under “normal” conditions. Such parents, in many cases, pampered their children and raised them in a climate of abundance. Moreover, in the Israeli and the Jewish culture, it is a “shared recognition”, heard especially around “Holocaust memorial day”, that the grandchildren are a living

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proof that the Nazis failed (Mann-­Shalvi, 2016). Such a proud and victorious role bestowed upon the third generation makes it even more difficult to associate their symptoms with their grandparents’ Holocaust experience.

References Akhtar, S., Rogers, N.,  & Plotkin, R. (2002). Holocaust and Hollywood: An annotated filmography. Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 4(1), 135–­144. Wiley Blackwell Publishing house. Auerhahn, N. C.,  & Laub, D. (1987). Play and playfulness in Holocaust survivors. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 42, 45–­58. Wiley Blackwell Publishing house. Auerhahn, N. C., & Laub, D. (1998). The primal scene of atrocity: The dynamic interplay between knowledge and fantasy of the Holocaust in children of survivors. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 15, 360–­377. Wiley Blackwell Publishing house. Bion, W. R. (1959). Attacks on linking. International Journal of Psycho-­Analysis, 40, 308–­315. Wiley Blackwell Publishing house. Brenner, I. (1988). Multisensory bridges in response to object loss during the Holocaust. Psychoanalytic Review, 75(4), 573–­ 587. Wiley Blackwell Publishing house. Brenner, I. (1999). Returning to the fire: Surviving the Holocaust and “Going Back”. Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Study, 1(2), 145–­162. Brenner, I. (2005). Violence or dialogue? Psychoanalytic insights on terror and terrorism. Ed. Sverre Varvin & Vamik Volkan: London: International Psychoanalytic Association, 2003. Wiley Blackwell Publishing house. Breuer, J., & Freud, S. (1893–­1895). Studies in hysteria. Standard Edition, 2, 1–­305. Faimberg, H. (1988). The telescoping of generations: Genealogy of certain identifications. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 24, 99–­117. Wiley Blackwell Publishing house. Faimberg, H. (2012). Listening to the psychic consequences of Nazism in psychoanalytic clients. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 81, 157–­169. Wiley Blackwell Publishing house. Fonagy, P., FBA, Target, M. (2002). Early intervention and the development of self-­regulation. Journal of Psychoanalytic Inquiry, A Topical Journal for Mental Health Professionals, 22(3). Wiley Blackwell Publishing house. Freud, S. (1900). The interpretation of dreams. Standard Edition, 4, 1–­338. Freud, S. (1901). The psychopathology of everyday life. Standard Edition, 6, 53–­105. Freud, S. (1905). Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria. Standard Edition, 7, 7–­122. Gampel, Y. (2005). Ces Parents Qui Vivent a Travers Moi. [The parents who live through me], (trans: T. Mishor). Jerusalem; Keter.

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Granek, M. (1994). Persistent shadows of the Holocaust: The meaning to those not directly affected. International Journal of Psycho-­Analysis, 75, 635–­639. Grubrich-­Simitis, I. (1984). From concretism to metaphor – Thoughts on some theoretical and technical aspects of the psychoanalytic work with children of Holocaust survivors. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 39, 301–­319. Kestenberg, J. S., & Brenner, I. (1986). Children who survived the Holocaust – The role of rules and routines in the development of the superego. International Journal of Psycho-­ Analysis, 67, 309–­316. Kogan, I. (1990). Vermitteltes und reales trauma in der psychoanalyse von kindern von Holocaust-­Überlebenden. Psyche-­ Zeitschrift Fur Psychoanalyse, 44(6), 533–­544. Kogan, I. (1993). Curative factors in the psychoanalyses of Holocaust survivors’ offspring before and during the Gulf War. International Journal of Psycho-­Analysis, 74, 803–­814. Kogan, I. (1995). Love and the heritage of the past. International Journal of Psycho-­Analysis, 76, 805–­824. Kogan, I. (2017). Personal statement: Main topics of research and activity research, clinical and educational work on the Holocaust. Revue Roumaine de Psychanalyse, 10(1), 141–­152. Laub, D. (1998). The Empty Circle: Children of survivors and the limits of reconstruction. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 46(2), 507–­529. Laub, D.,  & Lee, S. (2003). Thanatos and massive psychic trauma: The impact of the death instinct on knowing, remembering and forgetting. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 51(2), 433–­463. Losso, R., De Setton, L., & Scharff, E. S. (2017). The linked self in psychoanalysis: The pioneering work of enrique Pichon Rivière. London: Karnac Books. Mann-­Shalvi, H. (2007). German and Israeli Jews: Hidden emotional dynamics. In H. Parens, A. Mahfouz, S. W. Twemlow,  & E. D. Scharff (Eds.), The future of prejudice (pp. 250–­269). Lanham, MD: Littlefield Publishers Ltd. Mann-­Shalvi, H. (2016). From ultrasound to army: The unconscious trajectories of masculinity in Israel. London: Karnac Books. Oliner, M.M. (2000). The Unsolved Puzzle of Trauma. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 69(1):41-­61 Scharff, J. S. (2017). Contribution from British object relations. In D. E. Scharff & E. Palacio (Eds.), Family and couple psychoanalysis – A global perspective. Form the committee on Family and Couple Psychoanalysis of the International Psychoanalytical Association. A library of couple and family psychoanalysis. London: Karnac Books. Scharff, J. S., & Scharff, D. E. (1998a). Object relations individual therapy. London: Karnac Books. Scharff, D. E.,  & Scharff, J. S. (1998b). Object relations family therapy. London: Karnac Books. Scharff, D. E.,  & Scharff, J. S. (2011). The interpersonal unconscious. Lanham, BO, New York, Toronto, Plymouth, UK: Jason Aronson. Volkan, V., Est, G.,  & Greer, W. F. J. (2002). The third Reich in the unconscious. London and New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group P, 10.

15 Third generation Rivka Bekerman-­Greenberg

Introduction I do not remember how old I was, about eight years old, perhaps younger, when my mother told me about the last time she saw her mother. It was in the Lodz ghetto in Poland that my mother, a young girl then, found out that her mother was taken away. She ran as fast as she could to the train station and witnessed her mother being shoved onto the train. When her mother noticed her, she motioned with her hand, “Go away. Go away”. This story as well as stories about the family children who perished in the Holocaust continued to haunt me throughout my youth. It was only years later that I was able to understand my strong identification with my mother. Her need to share her experiences with me and my wish to replace her mother all contributed to my conflicts with loss and separation, which shaped me as a person and psychoanalyst. As I  began to read about children of Holocaust survivors, I realised that I was part of what in the late twentieth century became known as “the second generation,” or “2G”. Cumulative psychological and psychoanalytic studies have established the impact of the Holocaust trauma on the survivors and their children. The list of contributors to this research is extensive, including the work of Krystal (1968), Bergman and Jucovy (1982), Laub (1998), Klein (1973), Danieli (1998), Epstein (1979), Kogan (1995), Brenner (2014), Kestenberg (1982), Gampel (2005), and Grunberg (2006). In the 1990s I  participated in the Posttraumatic Stress Disorder programme at Mount Sinai Hospital, which provided psychoanalytically oriented group therapy for Holocaust survivors and their offspring (Yehuda, 1999). Officially, the Holocaust ended more

than seventy years ago, and the first generation of Holocaust survivors is dwindling. As the existence of the first and second generation survivors has narrowed, scholarly attention in the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis has turned to the third generation, and I began to wonder about the kind of burden the third generation carries. Since I had a need to express myself freely through intellectual study, I  chose the genre of drama. I  wrote a play called “Eavesdropping on Dreams” (Bekerman-­Greenberg, 2013), which focused on the psychological dynamics of three generations in a family of a Holocaust survivor. It was an attempt to convey my own personal journey of growing up with parents who were survivors of the camps. Writing the play enabled me to develop the capacity to put the inconceivable experience into words, and integrate it with other parts of myself, including my clinical work. The play was produced in New York City in 2012, and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2013. Recent psychoanalytic case studies explore the unconscious transmission of the Holocaust trauma to the third generation through the use of transference and countertransference (Talby-­Abarbanel, 2011; Feldman, 2016). As I  began my own individual work with the grandchildren of survivors, I thought that they too could benefit from group work. Thus in 2012, I started a psychoanalytically oriented therapy group for the third generation. Since my group therapy experience with the second generation has taught me that group work was not sufficient for dealing with specific individual developmental conflicts, I  saw the group experience not as a replacement, but as a supplement to individual treatment. The women who joined my group all stated that the concept of the transmission of the trauma of

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the Holocaust resonated with them and that they were eager to explore it further.

Description of the group The group met for nine months on a weekly basis and consisted of nine professional women ranging in age from twenty-­five to forty. Ruthie is a twenty-­five-­ year-­old woman on leave from a graduate programme in social work. Daria is a thirty-­year-­old woman who was a singer and decided to pursue social work in order to become a therapist. Danielle, age twenty-­nine, is a dancer and choreographer who wrote a play about her grandparents’ flight throughout Eastern Europe during World War II. Tara, age twenty-­eight, is an actress. Fay is a forty-­year-­old writer and an organisational consultant who wrote a memoir about her grandfather in the camps. Tova, age thirty-­two, is a lawyer who works in a social-­justice-­oriented nonprofit organisation. Julia is a thirty-­year-­old administrator in a law firm. Helen is a public relations executive. Tania is a thirty-­two-­year-­old freelance writer of medical research. Most of the women grew up close to their grandparents, which suggested that they experienced the transmission of trauma both from their grandparents and from their parents. However, there was one woman who was estranged from her entire family including her grandmother. Several of the women were artists, who, not surprisingly, expressed themselves through their art. Some group members worked in non-­profit organisations associated with social justice, while others were involved in the helping profession. Both career choices seem to be representative of the third generation in society at large. The group members knew that I was a daughter of Holocaust survivors, and collectively felt that since I  was familiar with the “Holocaust culture” I would be more likely to understand them (Kestenberg, 1996; Gampel, 2005; Brenner, 2014). Because the primary goal was to explore the transmission of trauma rather than group dynamics, I  decided to take a more active role as a group leader, specifically avoiding silence in order to foster containment and holding. From the first session, the young women developed a strong bond with one another, which set a tone of empathy and containment that lasted throughout most of the nine-­month period that the group met. This dynamic stood in contrast to the Fight-­Flight-­Freeze defence, which has been documented in previous group therapy work with first and second generation Holocaust survivors and is a dynamic that I observed in the Mount Sinai Project (Garwood, 1996). In turn, I acknowledged my maternal feelings toward these competent young women, who were all “my daughters”. Their struggles were familiar to me, and I was eager to help them overcome those struggles in order to thrive.

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By the time these women joined the group, they were familiar with the therapeutic process. Interestingly, the group members who had already been in individual treatment stated that the Holocaust never entered their treatments and that they never discussed these issues with anyone outside of their families. This silence generated a strong need to relate to other people with similar experiences. It made me reflect on my own parents who were only able to socialise with other survivors because “others would never understand them”.

Dreams and scenic memories Interestingly, the topic of dreams was introduced in the very first session, and this set the stage for the exploration of the profound manifestation of the transmission of trauma through dreams. Danielle: I have a recurrent dream about my grandparents in the Holocaust. Dreams are very significant in our family. Dreams saved my parents’ life: one night my grandmother had a dream that a relative from a past life warned her to run away from the Germans, and so they followed the dream and managed to escape. In fact, my father (second generation) still screams at night because of nightmares, and his screams wake me up. Each woman in the group had a unique story to tell, a story that shaped the very core of her identity; served as a symbol, a powerful metaphor, and/­or a “scenic memory”; and formed the unique individual meaning of the family trauma (Grunberg, 2006). Ruthie shared with us her first memory of asking her grandmother about the number on her arm. Ruthie: My grandmother told me that bad people put it on her, and I suddenly knew that something horrible had happened to my grandmother. Tova told a story about her grandfather who lost his first wife and two small children in the camps, but later put his life in danger to save the lives of several children. Most group members were exposed to the Holocaust from an early age. In Daria’s house the Holocaust would come up as a topic of conversation every Friday night when the family had Shabbat dinner with the maternal grandparents. One story left a strong impression on her: during the death march Daria’s grandfather lost his strength and will to live, but a German soldier noticed his red hair and fair complexion and decided to carry him on his bike. Originally, Daria heard the story as a tale about the goodness of humanity, but later she recalled the story as an instance of hidden cruelty because she realized that her grandfather hung onto

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the bike in a painful position. The group served as a container for each woman’s story; we would refer and return to the stories on several occasions throughout the group process.

Silence and secrets The impact of the survivors’ silence on their children is documented in numerous studies and continues to haunt the grandchildren (Brenner, 2014; Bergman  & Jucovy, 1982; Gampel, 2005; Kestenberg, 1982; Kogan, 1995). However, in the third generation there is a wider range in the degree of knowledge about what the first generation went through. In the group there was one young woman who knew nothing and there were several who knew a lot because decades after the Holocaust took place many survivors were able to share their stories either orally or through written memoirs. However, most members knew isolated facts or stories, which contained many gaps filled by their own fantasies (Laub, 1998). They also relied on collective stories to fill the absent knowledge in an attempt to get closer to the missing facts. Furthermore, for most of them the affect was dissociated from the content of the story. Several group members expressed how their urge to hear about their grandparents’ experiences during the Holocaust was tempered by a fear of broaching the subject. Many of the women were afraid that breaking the silence about the Holocaust would be too destabilizing for their grandparents. I said to the group, “In order to avoid pain people tend to repress painful or traumatic memories or thoughts, but whatever is repressed or not remembered tends to get repeated over and over again”. This interpretation resonated with the group, and other examples of repetition came up. Later in the group process, the compulsion to repeat transmitted traumatic experiences became something the women could watch for in their lives. Most of the granddaughters were aware of family secrets. Tova’s grandmother wrote a memoir in which she revealed a secret for the first time. Gaining knowledge of this secret impacted Tova so much that she fought with her father against publishing the book. Fay sensed for years that her parents did not reveal the truth about her grandmother’s depression resulting in suicide. Only many years later when she began writing a book about her grandfather did she find out that her grandmother’s severe depression stemmed from excessive guilt about not being able to save her twin nephews after their mother was sent to Auschwitz. The themes of silence and secrets occupied the group for several months, and there was a yearning to break the silence. I said that the survivors’ silence and secrets placed an emotional burden on both their children and grandchildren. The secrets that remained covered

through the three generations prevented both the second and the third generations from metabolising what happened, and integrating the past with the present in order to move on and heal. A process of grieving began in the group; members grieved for lost relatives who were hovering over three generations as ghosts. The group yearned to find some part of what had been lost. Yearning was further translated to knowing and not knowing, knowing very little, and being aware of and at the same time not knowing secrets. The group members expressed that their feelings of loss had been augmented because the survivors had reached old age and were dwindling. Helen told the group that she lost two of her grandparents in the past two years. Five group members spoke about grandparents who were sick and frail, and three of these grandparents died during the duration of the group, which turned the group into a container of grief and loss. The women well aware of the fact that I  shared their losses. The collective emotions culminated with Helen’s comment: “How can one grieve for a Holocaust?”, and this reminded me of a line in a poem of Bialik (1903), the national Israeli poet: “Satan has not yet invented a revenge for a little boy’s blood”. I said to the group that this can be a lifelong process, but that the wounds of our people will remain open.

Identification with the victim All the women felt that the Holocaust, specifically their grandparents’ experiences, played a significant role in the formation of their individual identities. Fay asked herself and others: “What if I were in my grandparents’ place? Would I have survived? Would I have wanted to live?” The responses ranged from Ruthie’s statement: “Definitely not. I am sure of it. I would not have wanted to live” to Daria’s reflection: “I think I would have wanted to live. Definitely . . . actually I may have survived . . . yes, I would”. Anxiety was prevalent in the group, and the members shared with each other some of their catastrophic thoughts, fantasies, and dreams. Daria, for instance, had pervasive dreams and nightmares about houses burning and people getting murdered. Daria lives in two coexisting zones (Brenner, 2014; Gampel, 2005). One is the world of inner safety (Sandler, 1960), and the other is a world of the uncanny past, what Freud called “unheimlich”, a world of threat and hostility ( Freud, 1920). For several of the women, the identification with the grandparents seemed to be pathological. Jucovy and Bergman call this kind of pathological identification “primitive identification” (Bergman  & Jucovy, 1982)

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and Kogan refers to it as a “deep hole” (Kogan, 1995). One more specific example of a pathological identification is the preoccupation with death: Daria came across as a very lively and exuberant young woman, which was something I  noted as a possible manic defence to cover up another side of her. She suffered from chronic anxiety and insomnia. The anxiety was manifested in her compulsive thoughts about death and a pervasive expectation that catastrophe was always in sight, for example, on the subway (“A bomb may blow up”) and at my front door (“Something terrible could happen to me”). According to Brenner, these are problems in “abstract and metaphorical thinking”. For survivors and their offspring the reality of a given experience is so overwhelming that it confirms in a child’s mind that one’s worst fears and wishes could indeed come true. As a defensive solution the child may then hyper-­cathect elements of this reality as a defence against fantasy and in so doing might become unduly preoccupied with certain details, structures, or functioning of the external world. (Brenner, 2014) Such catastrophic fantasies can also be connected to Bion’s concept of a “nameless dread” or an infantile catastrophe. Bion refers to the infant’s worst terror as a result of the mother’s inability to translate his inchoate tension into a meaningful experience (Bion, 1962). When the grandparents lost their loved ones, they had to escape emotionally and erase the pain of their losses in order to survive and go on with their lives. However, while being in a dissociated state of mourning, the grandparents were unable to protect their children from their own existential dread of death, which was transmitted to the second generation. Daria reported this dream and set of associations: I am in a concentration camp trapped under bodies and struggling to crawl out.  .  .  . This may sound crazy, but sometimes I feel I am dead alive. I am so haunted by this feeling, obsessed with it. For me feeling dead alive got exacerbated by 9/­11. I think about the victims all the time. I think about the last moments of their lives. They were trapped knowing that they were going to die, yet they must have continued with their regular functions. They had to eat and go to the bathroom. The question of what that was like does not leave me. I am obsessed with it. Of course I can see how this relates to my grandparents in the camps, but I can’t stop thinking about it. This sounds like a good example of Kestenberg’s idea of a survivor child living in a “time tunnel” or a “parallel

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time” to the grandparents’ relatives who died during the Holocaust. Kestenberg argues that the “time tunnel” is a result of a “transposition to the world of the past rather than an identification with the parent through which the child descends to the world of the dead in order to protect his/­her parents from the hopeless loss and does the mourning work for them”. Kestenberg prefers this concept to identification because it conveys multiple identifications not only with the victimised grandparents but also with the perpetrators (Kestenberg, 1996). Daria in her dream becomes like a vampire, who is neither dead nor alive, but “dead alive” in order to spare her grandparents from their desperate grief (Gampel, 2005). Associations to death led Fay to recount her grandfather’s story about how he found himself lying next to dead corpses, wishing that he were one of them, wishing himself dead. This story carried echoes for several women in the group, who heard similar stories from their grandparents, who would share with them that sometimes they envied the family members who had died and bemoaned their fate to stay alive in order to suffer. The most extreme example of pathological identification was demonstrated by twenty-­five-­year-­old Ruthie, a student at an Ivy League school, who was suffering from anxiety and depression to the point that she needed to quit school in order to attend a day treatment programme. Ruthie told the group that her father was flooded by his mother’s Holocaust experiences; her own father (Ruthie’s great-­grandfather) was hanged by the Nazis in front of the family’s eyes in the town square, and as a result he took on a life of suffering and misery, leading him to be depressed all his life. Ruthie, who is very close to her father, repeated his identification and also lived a life of suffering and misery (Bergman  & Jucovy, 1982). Like her father, Ruthie carries the grief of her grandmother and father, unconsciously trying to rescue them from their suffering. I  shared with the group Yolanda Gampel’s notion that the Holocaust, which was a calculated form of brutality, has come to symbolise for future generations what she calls “the prototype of evil”. This inconceivable evil created an “emotional radioactivity” which is bound to affect future generations (Gampel, 2005). Ruthie had a strong emotional reaction to this interpretation; she expressed feeling as if she was put on this earth to suffer. Ruthie is stuck in her grandparents’ past and is closed off to the present because there is a convergence of past and present (Faimberg, 1988). Faimberg links present symptoms with the idea that there are always at least three generations in the consulting room: grandparents, parents, and patient. A “telescoping [of] generations” occurs when the patient experiences an unconscious identification with the massive trauma suffered by the grandparents. Although the trauma has been split

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off from conscious memory, Ruthie has been unable to live a healthy life (Gampel, 2005; Brenner, 2014). Ruthie repeatedly stated that her presence in the group provided her opportunities for healing and working through her suffering. Julia also held onto an expectation of catastrophe, an expectation that she shared with her mother and grandmother. Julia told the group that her grandmother was a seventeen-­year-­old only child when the Nazis invaded her village in the Carpathian Mountains and killed her entire family. She managed to escape and spent the rest of the war fleeing and hiding. However, Julia experienced her grandmother and mother as domineering, angry, and bitter women, and now she sees these characteristics in herself. The repetition compulsion is also at work here. Although Julia did not live through the traumas of the war, she experiences a pathological identification with the grandmother and her mother ( Freud, 1920). She took on the role of the victim, repeating the pathological identification over and over again in her intimate relationships and with coworkers. In more extreme cases, the transmission of trauma can lead to dissociation. Tara: I could not own my feelings and felt that I  had many selves. This is why I have become an actress. I  can hide my true feelings, and express them through the characters I play. Paradoxically my real, true feelings can come out only when I am acting. This is who I am, but at the same time, since I know almost nothing about my past, I am confused about who I am, and keep asking myself: Who am I? All the women in the group felt that survivor’s guilt was repeated and transmitted through the three generations. For Ruthie, guilt was the reason she could not enjoy life. Tova felt guilty for everything, including the burdens of the world, such as the plight of American Indians, who, unlike Holocaust survivors, do not have too many people fight for their cause.

Identification with the aggressor With some of the granddaughters, as with some of the children of survivors, identification has taken the form of identification with the Nazi perpetrator. Anna Freud saw this as (Freud, 1936) a defence mechanism associated with an inability to tolerate the guilt that led an abused subject to take on the attributes of the aggressor and become abusive toward others. Ferenczi did not see this process as a defence, but rather as an identification out of anxiety. He found evidence that children who are terrified by out-­of-­control adults will go into an autohypnotic, dissociative state and unconsciously identify with the aggressor (Ferenczi, 1949).

Tova described both her grandfather and father as tyrants, and she experienced difficulties with her father throughout her life. She told the group that since her grandfather had another family before the Holocaust, she is actually alive “thanks to Hitler”. For Tova this thought takes on a distorted meaning to suggest that since Hitler is the reason she came into the world, it means that right from birth she was damaged goods. Tara shared with the group her ongoing struggle with depression. Her parents are divorced and she has not been on speaking terms with either one of them for years. As a result she is alienated from her grandmother, who is a Holocaust survivor. She expressed a strong wish to get to know her in order to understand the breakup of her family. Tara grew up with a very critical and verbally abusive mother, who was born right after the war to a Holocaust survivor who was unable to function as a mother. Tara understood that her mother, who was unable to express anger toward her own mother, displaced it onto her. While sobbing, she went on to tell the group that her mother and grandmother were never able to speak about the grandmother’s Holocaust experience, which has remained unknown. At this stage the group focused on conflicts around aggression and the difficulties of expressing anger and rage. Tova struggled with feelings of rage toward her dismissive, passive aggressive father. In the group she began to understand that her father must have felt this way toward his narcissistic mother who survived the camps and needed to be the centre of attention at the expense of her children. In turn, her father displaced his own passive aggressive rage toward his own children, the third generation. One example of his sadism was his insistence on teaching Tova to ride a bike without training wheels, but she fell to the ground, hurt herself physically, and felt humiliated. This incident became a metaphor for Tova, who thought that her father must have been treated similarly by his parents, abandoned “without training wheels”. Similarly, Tova felt unprotected by her parents when her older brother bullied her and her parents failed to intervene. At this point there was a shift in the group from the grandparents to their parents’ shortcomings. Tova’s story resonated with Daria, whose parents were not able to handle aggression between the siblings, and left them fending for themselves. Daria shared with the group that since she was the oldest child in her family, she tortured her younger brother, but as a result felt profound guilt, which she continues to carry, being convinced that she destroyed his life. Only in the group did Daria realise that she had put the responsibility on herself in order to protect her mother from the guilt, and that unconsciously she experiences identification with the aggressor.

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While examples of identifications with the victim and the aggressor as demonstrated by Daria, Tanya, and Julia were described separately, both identifications coexisted and were displayed at different phases of the group process (Kestenberg, 1982).

Patterns of love: attachment and separation The endearing stories about the grandparents’ love, expressed through imitations of their foreign accents and “funny” manners of speech, provided both opportunities for comic relief and conveyed the womens’ strong attachments to their grandparents. Several of the granddaughters saw their grandparents as loving too much and smothering them with both their love and constant worrying. I brought up the fact that after liberation many survivors created families right away in DP camps. Many of the survivors viewed their children and grandchildren as miracles that symbolised a victory over extinction and provided them with the strength to go on living. The importance of family is one of the most profound values transmitted over the generations; however, this placed a burden on the survivors’ children who were expected to compensate for their parents’ suffering. Following my words Tara, who was estranged from both her parents and her grandmother, became very angry with me and stated that neither she nor her mother felt like miracles. Her rage was palpable and it seemed like transference of anger toward me for not understanding her. My comments could have also triggered unconscious excessive guilt, which she could not tolerate. Tara dropped out of the group without saying goodbye. In a following discussion the group expressed anger about her leaving so abruptly and decided not to approach her, but let her take responsibility for her actions. I said that in her case the group expressed anger as a way of dealing with losing her, but the decision was sustained. It was an enactment that resembled the pattern of love Tara experienced in her own family, and the entire group colluded in treating her harshly. I was perplexed by this enactment. This was the only example of fight and flight in the group. While at times the women viewed the grandparents as larger-­than-­life heroic figures, they also complained that treating the grandparents as legendary caused them to trivialise their own life struggles. Furthermore, a couple of women felt that their parents colluded in glorifying their own parents, at their expense, and demanded that they, the granddaughters, live up to their grandparents’ needs and expectations to excel and be poster children rather than live their own lives. Daria shared with the group that out of devotion to the grandparents her entire family went on a trip to the

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camps when she was twelve and her younger brothers were nine and six years old. The family reasoned that this trip ought to be done while the grandparents were still young, but it was clear that Daria and her siblings were much too young to contain such an experience. While telling the story, Daria stated that she was unable to feel anything, and that these dissociated feelings were generalised to other parts of her life. Daria, who is a singer, shared a poignant story: I am giving a concert, a rock concert, and of course my grandparents want to be there to cheer for me, even though what do they know about rock music. And I think to myself: they came all the way from New Jersey to my performance, and all I am doing is a rock concert? Here I am singing rock, and I am carrying the Holocaust in my pocket.

Separation-­individuation and other developmental issues The prevalence of conflicts around separation-­ individuation – a normal phase of development (Mahler, Pine, & Bergman, 2000), which was pointed out in studies of children of survivors (Bergman  & Jucovy, 1982; Kestenberg, 1982), remains a major struggle for the third generation. While Tara did not speak to her parents for years, many of the women in the group expressed an inability to separate. At the same time this group was not devoid of humour, and just as with guilt, the group members were very acquainted with deeply ingrained “Jewish” conflicts caused by thousands of years of pogroms, which were exacerbated by the massive loss of family members during the Holocaust. The women were well aware of the repetition of the struggles to separate from one generation to the next, and they shared the feelings of enmeshment within their families, which involved both their struggles to leave their parents as well as the parents’ struggles to let go. Since the separation-­individuation process lies at the heart of intimacy and love, when this process came up in the group, the topic of romantic relationships emerged. None of these women was married or involved in a healthy relationship. These difficulties may suggest that Oedipal conflicts are exacerbated by the transmission of the Holocaust trauma. Furthermore, in many families of Holocaust survivors there is an immense pressure to date Jewish men and to produce great-­grandchildren. The pressure has in turn created resentment since it interferes with their need to develop their own autonomy. Danielle and Tova expressed despair about their inability to find partners, while Fay recognized that her involvement with a married man was connected to her

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grandparents’ secrets. And Daria brought up her propensity to involve her parents in her relationships with men. Some of the women experienced pressure to produce grandchildren before the death of their grandparents. Daria, who tended to be dramatic, said emphatically, “I feel that if I don’t give them grandchildren, I will die. It would kill me”. In this session Daria had just begun to scratch the surface of her preoedipal and Oedipal conflicts and her feelings of enmeshment with her parents and how all this is affecting her relationships with men. Just like Ruthie, she, too, is an example of the transmission of her grandparents’ Holocaust trauma superimposed on her Oedipal struggles. In a later session she talked about her fear of loving deeply – to love deeply would trigger the threat of loss.

Legacy and responsibility The process of termination was accompanied with feelings of loss and the group became aware of the parallel process of a larger loss and mourning. The collective mourning allowed for healing to take place. The group experience allowed for the first and second generations’ transmitted feelings of fear, anxiety, and survivor’s guilt to emerge in the containing setting of the group. The group members gained more access to their feelings of living in the past, which allowed them to move away from dissociative defences and become better integrated with the present. Ruthie considered getting a tattoo of the number the Nazis tattooed on her grandmother’s arm. Ultimately, she decided this was too morbid and chose to get a tattoo of the Star of David, which symbolized both the Jewish faith and her transformation. Other voices were heard stressing the importance of separating from their grandparents and parents and rather than live as their extensions, live on their own right. Tova expressed the need to break the repetition of silence and spoke about her wish to teach her future children about their history as Jews and survivors of the Holocaust in a healthy way. While they all felt that the Holocaust should not be glorified, fetishised, or commercialised, collectively they felt a strong responsibility to genuinely remember and commemorate the tragedy. As Judith Kestenberg observes, one often sees a blend of unusual ego strengths and ego weaknesses, due to being born in the shadow of their parents’ Holocaust trauma (Kestenberg, 1982). This ‘shadow’ manifests itself in conflicts about Jewish identity and the practice of Judaism, where on the one hand these are sources of pride in the Jewish culture, and a positive sense of belonging to a family, but on the other hand it can create demands and pressures that interfere with the grandchildren’s sense of autonomy.

Conclusions The present psychoanalytically oriented group therapy findings point to the existence of a trans-­generational transmission of the Holocaust trauma from both grandparents and parents to the third generation. While earlier psychological studies in Israel and the United States (Bar-­On, 1995) report no impact of the Holocaust on grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, later studies that relied on in-­depth clinical interviews support the existence of a transmission of trauma on grandchildren of survivors (Scharf, 2007). In the present psychoanalytically oriented therapy group, the granddaughters displayed survivor’s guilt and defence mechanisms such as living in two time zones, dissociation, identification with the victim, and identification with the aggressor. However, psychodynamically oriented group therapy helped them better integrate their grandparents’ past trauma with their present psychological life challenges. At the same time, the women conveyed a strong commitment to healing through the search for truth and through the memorialisation and commemoration of their grandparents without the glorification of the Holocaust. They also felt strongly about the education of future generations. The third generation’s passion to help others, be engaged creatively, and participate in social activism, both professionally and nonprofessionally, speaks to their investment in studying history in order to prevent another Holocaust. Bergman and Jucovy, who headed a comprehensive study of children of survivors, concluded that the severity of the transmission of trauma to children of survivors depends on their developmental challenges throughout the life cycle (Bergman & Jucovy, 1982). The variation in outcome in the present group study points to a similar conclusion; namely, that the severity of the transmission of trauma to the grandchildren of survivors was amplified by Oedipal and pre-­oedipal conflicts. An important question that emerged in this work was whether or not a developmental crisis could be separated from the transmission of trauma when, for example, an infant grows up with a “dead mother” or a scary, raging father whose lives were shattered by the horrors of the Holocaust. Furthermore, Gampel postulates that the phenomenon of the transmission is not linear and may erupt unpredictably in the future. The powerful metaphor used by Gampel to describe the impact of the Holocaust on subsequent generations is “emotional radioactivity” or radioactive spread (Gampel, 2005). Since 9/­11 we have been living in a world where the threat of violence and terrorism happens on a daily basis. Furthermore, this chapter is being written during the first three months of Donald Trump’s presidency, and we have become exposed to ongoing threats of racism, anti-­Semitism, and the loss of democracy. The uncanny

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is raising its ugly head again, and with it fears and worries rise. While toward the end of the group experience, group members expressed hope about enabling a transformation for future generations of Jews, it remains to be seen how the third generation, which is overly sensitive to the uncanny, will take on this role.1

Note 1 I would like to thank Dr. Richard Lasky for his generous and thoughtful comments.

References Bar-­On, D. (1995). Fear and hope T.: Generation of the Holocaust. Cambridge: London. Bekerman-­Greenberg, R. (2013). Breaking the silence (“Eavesdropping on Dreams”). Lancaster, PA: Eldridge Musicals and Plays Publishing. Bergman, M. S., & Jucovy, M. E. (Eds.) (1982). Generations of the Holocaust. New York: Basic Books. Bialik, H. N. (1903). On the slaughter. In A. Hadari (Ed.), (2000). Songs from Bialik: Selected poems of H.N. Bialik. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Bion, W. (1962). Learning from experience. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Brenner, I. (2014). Dark matters. London: Karnac Books. Danieli, Y. (1998). International handbook of multigenerational legacies of trauma. New York: Plenum Press. Epstein, H. (1979). Children of the Holocaust: Conversations with sons and daughters of survivors. New York: Plenum Press. Faimberg, H. (1988). The telescoping of generations: Genealogy of certain identifications. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 24, 99–­117. Feldman, M. J. (2016). Travel fever: Transgenerational trauma and witnessing in analyst and analysand. In A. Harris, M. Kalb,  & S. Klebanoff (Eds.), Ghosts in the consulting room (pp. 52–­76). London: Routledge. Ferenczi, S. (1949). The confusion of tongues between the adults and the child – (the language of tenderness and of passion). The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 30, 225–­230.

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Freud, A. (1936). The ego and the mechanisms of defense. New York: International Universities Press. Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the pleasure principle. S.E., 18, 7–­64. London. Hogarth. Gampel, Y. (2005). These parents who live through me: Children of war. Paris: Fayard. Garwood, A. (1996). The Holocaust and the power of powerlessness: Survivor guilt an unhealed wound. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 13(2), 243–­258. Grunberg, K. (2006). Love after Auschwitz: The second generation in Germany. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers. Kestenberg, J. S. (1982). Survivor-­parents and their children. In M. S. Bergman & M. E. Jucovy (Eds.), Generations of the Holocaust (p. 100). New York: Basic Books. Kestenberg, J., & Brenner, I. (1996). The last witness: The child survivor of the Holocaust. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press. Klein, H. (1973). Children of the Holocaust mourning and bereavement. In M. S. Bergman & M. E. Jucovy (Eds.), Generations of the Holocaust (p. 100). New York: Basic Books. Kogan, I. (1995). The cry of mute children: A psychoanalytic perspective of the second generation of the Holocaust. London: Free Association Books. Krystal, H. (1968). Massive psychic trauma. New York: International Universities Press. Laub, D. (1998). The empty circle: Children of survivors and the limits of reconstruction. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 51, 433–­463. Mahler, M., Pine, F.,  & Bergman, A. (2000). The psychological birth of the human infant. New York: Basic Books. Sandler, J. (1960). The background of safety. International Journal of Psycho-­Analysis, 41, 352–­356. Scharf, M. (2007). Long-­term effects of trauma: Psychological functioning of the second and third generation of Holocaust survivors. Development and Psychopathology, 19, 603–­622. Talby-­Abarbanel, M. (2011). Secretly attached, secretly separate: Are, dreams, and transference-­countertransference in the analysis of a third generation Holocaust Survivor. In A. Druck, C. Ellman, N. Freedman,  & A. Thaler (Eds.), A new Freudian synthesis: Clinical process in the next generation (CIPS Confederation of Independent Psychoanalytic Societies) boundaries of psychoanalysis (pp. 219–­239). London: Karnac Books. Wardi, D. (1992). Memorial candles: Children of the Holocaust. New York: Routledge. Yehuda, R. (1999). Parental PTSD as a risk factor for PTSD. In R. Yehuda (Ed.), Risk factors for posttraumatic stress disorder (pp. 93–­123). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press.

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Section IV From the dark side

16 Problems in German remembrance Werner Bohleber

Introduction In his recent book Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II, British historian Keith Lowe insists categorically that to regard postwar history as a history of reconstruction is extremely euphemistic. In no sense of the word did 1945 see the onset of an era in which “Europe rose like a phoenix from the ashes of destruction” (2012, p. XIV). The German version of this narrative referred to this period as the Stunde Null or “Zero Hour”, implying (in the German sense of the phrase) starting over again from scratch with a clean slate. But Lowe and other historians demonstrate that the history of Europe in the first postwar years was a period in which chaos and devastation had made large parts of the continent highly unstable, with renewed aggression threatening to break out at the slightest provocation. Lowe summarizes as follows:

What is implied in all the descriptions of this time, but never overtly stated, is that behind the physical devastation is something far worse. The “skeletons” of houses and framed pictures sticking out of the rubble of Warsaw are highly symbolic: hidden beneath the ruins, both literally and metaphorically, there was a separate human and moral disaster. . . . Whatever approach one takes, it is impossible to convey more than the merest glimpse of what such a catastrophe actually means. (2012, p. 11ff)

Hans Erich Nossack (1948) has this to say about the Hamburg firestorm: This one (house, WB), being torn from the midst of the living, this we could mourn for and at the same time tremble for the lives of others. But now, when there was nothing there? Not the corpse of a city, not something dead that said to us: Yesterday, when I  was still alive, I  was your home. No, here was no cause to mourn. In no way did the surroundings recall what we had lost. They had nothing to do with it. It was something else, it was strangeness itself, the essentially not possible. (1948/­1981, p. 68, translated for this edition) Both authors describe how, in the immediate aftermath of the war, the survivors gradually realised that the appalling crimes of the Nazis and the experience of “total war” inflicted on the human world was an external and internal devastation of hitherto unexampled dimensions. This gradual awareness resembles the effects of traumatic experiences, after which it takes time for the people involved to attain a reasonably accurate idea of what they have gone through. Historian Klaus Naumann (2001) speaks of the “profound marks” inflicted on German society by the extreme violence in the years before and the destructiveness of total war. Reichel, Schmid, and Steinbach (2009) contend that in the engagement with the aftermath of National Socialism, the historian’s job is to “investigate contradictions and instances of resistance that can help explain how

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difficult it was to induce German society and German politicians to face up to the past” (2009, p. 8). They go on to speak of a “second history” of Nazism that held perpetrators and survivors alike in an iron grip. With its focus on the unprecedented crimes against humanity and all the dread and horror they inspired, this second history posed entirely new challenges to memory, commemoration, and remembrance. The authors insist that this second history did not simply happen. It was made. At a societal level, collective memory developed into a political view of history in which the interpretation of Nazism in debates and discussions was formulated in political terms, sometimes manipulated, then later adjusted and enhanced. Other scholars insist that conventional history is simply not equipped to describe what the people living at the time were confronted with. The Holocaust and the Second World War not only challenge us to try to understand how such things could come about but also force us to face up to the horrors of those years and the sufferings of victims and witnesses. Historian Jörn Rüsen contends that, in the face of the Holocaust concepts of meaningful interpretation disintegrate when they relate existentially to the deep structure of human subjectivity in which identity has its roots . . . his disruption is hard to bear. But it must become part of our historical culture if that culture and its commemorative recourse to the experience of the past is not to fall short of the unprecedented threshold of enormity objectively represented by the Holocaust. (2001, p. 214, translated for this edition) The concepts employed by Rüsen refer to the conflict between commemoration and memory that is invariably a latent element in any engagement with the Holocaust as an historical fact. Saul Friedländer (1997) and others have pointed out how paradoxical it is that today Auschwitz is much more central to our historical awareness than it was in earlier decades. This view of the delayed impact of the Holocaust resembles the psychoanalytic understanding of trauma, especially in its quest for meaning after the event and its historicisation. Accordingly, a number of historians have advocated the incorporation of the trauma concept into the theory of history. But as they readily concede, this poses the question of how the authentic collective experience of a trauma can be adequately described so that the horror of that experience and the shocking, brutal, meaningless nature of the trauma do not have (new) meaning thrust upon them by subjection to historical categories in which the traumatic character of the event is doomed to disappear.

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Looking at the situation of Germany’s postwar population, we see that it had created narratives for itself from a victim’s viewpoint, focusing on leitmotifs like family losses, the homelessness caused by air raids, displacement, and war captivity (Confino, 2005, p.  49). The past was “recoded” (Frei, 1996) with the majority of Germans as a “community of victims”. This emphasis on their hardships served as a defence against facing up to the actual events, reflecting upon them, assuming responsibility, and admitting guilt. Much has been written about the defensive function of such hardship mentalities in what was very largely a society of perpetrators, but it does not explain everything. The scholarly range of such investigations needs to be extended, and we must not lose sight of the actual subjects who exercised violence and those who suffered it, as individual and public memory frequently differ. This remarkable discrepancy, these “split memories”, are one of the subjacent problems of the German postwar period (Naumann, 2001). Second, it is essential to remind ourselves that traumatic experiences undergone by large sectors of the population left a lasting imprint on the subjective experience and the memories of individuals, with repercussions on their thinking, feelings, recollections, and political attitudes. In the postwar period there was no scholarly or societal discourse on trauma and its impact upon both the individual and the collective. Refusal to reflect adequately upon what had happened was associated with mass traumatisation as a result of the war itself, the air raids, exile, and displacement (similar arguments have been advanced by historians like Confino [2005] and Moeller [2005] and the social scientist Brumlik [2001]). Defensive and avoidance strategies operated in conjunction with remembrance processes that were overtaxed and hence distorted by trauma. Today, we know that such trauma results in “tunnel vision” and militate against objective, realistic perception of individual circumstances and the immediate past. In addition, traumatic experiences long resist being recounted in narrative form, with feeling and empathy very greatly restricted. For decades, the fact that traumatic experiences served as a shield to fend off guilt interfered with the realisation that victim and perpetrator experiences frequently coincided in one and the same individual, in soldiers at the front, and also in civilians. The fact that this duality was not appropriately perceived for a long time has to do with the psychic stalemate situation created by the victim-­perpetrator ambiguity “which not only thwarted engagement with the individual damage and the possible injuries ensuing from the psychic situation of perpetrators and/­or victims, but due to massive defensive needs, which generally restrict the capacity for psychic processing” (Kattermann, 2015, p.  1047, translated for

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this edition). Kattermann speaks of a “psychic texture” that “left its mark on postwar Germany and frequently nipped in the bud any reflection on the way victim and perpetrator experience might be concatenated” (ibid., p. 1047).

The culture of commemoration from the 1950s to the present The 1950s The remarkable blockage of collective German memory in the postwar era may seem hard to understand from a present-­day vantage. It was largely a product of the defence against guilt and its expression to oneself and others, rooted in the traumatic experiences undergone by large sectors of the population and exercising a significant impact on collective memory. Germany in 1945 was a physical and emotional wasteland and getting back to normal was the overriding concern. The central German desire was to salvage or restore a positive individual and collective self-­image. Accordingly, remembrance of the past was selective. After 1945, and above all in the 1950s, “communicative silence” (Lübbe, 1983) prevailed over the subject of the Nazi regime and its crimes. There was blanket disavowal of Nazism as such, but the actual events of the past were kept under wraps. In addition to the need to ward off the guilt and shame of tacitly colluding with a criminal system, many were also fascinated and thrilled by it. But now the whole structure had collapsed, plans for the future were suddenly devoid of meaning. The main response was to harp on the losses one had suffered oneself. At an official political level, the crimes committed against the Jews “in the name of the German people” were acknowledged, but the criminals themselves remained largely faceless. Against resistance from many of his fellow party members, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer ensured that compensation be paid to the state of Israel. But at the heart of the ongoing political and societal debates were the consequences of the war for the Germans themselves. By contrast, there was little interest in the question of how Hitler had come to power and why the Germans had willingly cooperated in his preparations for war and the persecution of the Jews. By the mid-­1950s, the “accepted version in public awareness was that Hitler and a small number of ‘major war criminals’ were alone responsible for the atrocities of the ‘Third Reich,’ whereas the Germans had been ‘led astray’ politically and were themselves the ultimate ‘victims’ of the war and its consequences” (Frei, 1996, p. 405, translated for this edition). Public campaigns calling for the release of sentenced war criminals, quicker reintegration of former Nazi

functionaries, and generous amnesty legislation all showed that there was little inclination to acknowledge the fundamentally unlawful nature of the Nazi regime and its war of annihilation. In this widespread identification with the war criminals, Norbert Frei (1996, p. 399) sees an indirect admission of the total identification of a whole society with National Socialism. According to Frei, the “almost limitless will to amnesty” was the front side of the unconscious recognition of, and simultaneous defence against, the theory of collective guilt. While no reference to such a theory was made by the Allies per se, the Germans were convinced that this was how they actually felt, thus affording themselves another welcome opportunity to feel unfairly treated. Amnesty for the war criminals was tantamount to a latter-­day acquittal from all suspicion of active collusion plus a claim to victim status all rolled into one. The genuine victims were almost entirely relegated to oblivion. This prevailing mentality to obscure the past was compounded with strategies of denial, belittlement, and active deception. The reconstruction of Germany and pride in the so-­called economic miracle made it easier to avert one’s gaze. Germans, east and west, made the transition from the racially defined “community of the people” in the Third Reich to the community of victims of a war which they claimed not to be responsible for and to a community of survivors emerging from the ruins, ready to preserve and rebuild what remained of the “good” Germany (Moeller, 2005, p.  164). A  new unity was found in the “community of victims”, while the victims of the Germans, above all the Jews, were studiously left out, enabling them to uphold and normalise a positive self-­image as a community of victims. In 1959, Adorno had this same idea in mind when he suggested that the collective narcissism in the human psyche was immeasurably exalted by National Socialism. This collective narcissism and the “identification with the whole” of the individuals was grievously damaged by the collapse of the Hitler regime, but not destroyed as it continued to exist. From the viewpoint of social psychology, it would also be expected that this damaged group narcissism is lying in wait to be repaired and grasps at everything in consciousness that might immediately bring the past into harmony with narcissistic wishes – but then it also, if possible, remolds reality as if this injury could be made not to have happened. (1986, p. 122) In his analysis of the debates taking place in the German Federal Parliament on Nazi history and the Holocaust, Helmut Dubiel writes of the years after 1949 (the establishment of the Bundestag):

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The compulsive appeals to “German honor”, which had been “sullied” but not destroyed by the Nazis, the defiant assertion of Germany’s integrity as a cultural nation, and the obsessive quest for political traditions worth resuscitating all suggest that beneath it all there was an inkling of the irretrievable destruction of those traditional identity components from which the Germans, individually and collectively, could have derived self-­respect. (1999, p. 74, translated for this edition) While there were other forces at work that were determined to oppose these efforts to shuffle off the history of Nazism and to keep the awareness of a criminal past alive, the democratic roots of the Federal Republic did not run deep. Democracy was a structure that the Allies had ordained, but it was not yet an internalised model. The involvement of the Federal Republic in the Cold War and its political perception as being in the forefront of the fight against Communism made it easy for the Germans to espouse anti-­totalitarianism as a political ideology. By conflating National Socialism and Communism as “totalitarian rule”, the big fight against Communism then relegated their Nazi past to the back burner (Dubiel, 1999, p. 75).

The 1960s The new decade ushered in some decisive changes. In a societal “return of the repressed” Germany’s war crimes repeatedly emerged in the public eye. Scandals ensued – many of them triggered by trivial occurrences – because the crimes of former Nazi officials who had been reinstated after the war suddenly came to light. Newspapers and the media gave extensive coverage to criminal proceedings against perpetrators from the past. But the real breakthrough came with the Einsatzgruppen trial in Ulm in 1958, followed by the major Auschwitz trial of twenty concentration camp guards in Frankfurt (1963–­1965) and the Düsseldorf Treblinka trial of 1964/­1965. These were the first genuine forays “into the heart of the matter: the annihilation of the Jews and the war of destruction in the East” (Wehler, 2008, p. 21). Here, too, press coverage was extensive. Confrontation with the past was additionally reinforced by the reports on the Eichmann trial 1961 in Jerusalem and the Bundestag debates on the abolition of the statute of limitations for murder in 1960 and 1965. Abolition of this statute was necessary to enable courts to continue with the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. The debates on these issues cast new light on the conflict between the criminal nature of the Nazi state and the quest for a sustainable, identity-­ forming ideology that the Federal Republic as a democratic entity could convincingly espouse. This ideology was called for with increasing insistence by conservative

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politicians who saw the stability of democracy threatened by the unremitting references to Nazi atrocities. In 1964, Federal Chancellor Ludwig Erhard declared in the Bundestag: The Germans have found their way back to healthy self-­assurance based largely, but not solely, on the immense reconstruction achievements since the war. The great burden the past imposed on us is no longer coupled with the negation of the fatherland. The political maturity of the German people is reflected precisely in this awareness of national dignity. (cited by Dubiel, 1999, p. 96) Collective narcissism was almost hallowed by the reference to the successful reconstruction of Germany and offset against the burden of the past. Erhard uses the past tense to refer to that burden as if coping with it could be safely regarded as over and done with. A slow but profound change came about in both the public and the political arenas. Thinking individuals were mindful of Germany’s responsibility for the crimes of the past and the necessity of unearthing and investigating those crimes. This change was fuelled in the second half of the decade by a thorough and fundamental liberalisation of German society, resulting in new legislation. The all-­pervasive modernisation process dismantled the authoritarian structures still present from the 1950s. By encouraging the democratisation process, it facilitated coming to terms with the Nazi past. The year 1967 saw the publication of The Inability to Mourn by Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, which elicited an unusually broad response from the German public, as it addressed a problem that was generally felt to be “in the air”. The Mitscherlichs drew upon psychoanalysis to conceptualise the urgent issue hamstringing German society. They interpreted the prevailing political and societal sterility, and Germany’s pervasive psychosocial immobility, as having to do with denial of the Nazi past. This denial functioned as a tool for self-­preservation and a defence against anxiety, guilt, and shame. The Mitscherlichs reminded the Germans of their enthusiastic and narcissistic adulation of the Fuehrer, whose death robbed the nation of the representation of the collective ego-­ideal and deflated its self-­esteem. The threat of a “melancholy impoverishment of the self” was fended off by massive derealisation of the Nazi past. The Mitscherlichs diagnosed this as one of the psychological “emergency reactions” (p. 24) setting in immediately after the traumatic end of the war and the demise of the Nazi regime. They saw this ongoing derealisation as a major problem because it meant that “no adequate work of mourning was done by the German people for the masses of fellow men slain through their doing” (1975, p. 24). Mourning would have been

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necessary for discarding the old ideas, the excessive collective narcissism, the delusional inflation of self-­ awareness, and the narcissistic ideology of being the master race. It would pave the way for the painful work of memorialisation. Such “extended introspection” would have brought about a confrontation making it possible to “recognize ourselves  .  .  . on those appalling occasions when one hundred, five hundred, or one thousand bodies lay in front of us, bodies of people we had killed. This would imply a compassionate and poignant acknowledgement of the victims long after the time of horror” (ibid., p. 67). The Mitscherlichs’ concern was to analyse “the psychic history of the Germans as a collective” after the end of Nazism (Freimüller, 2007) without however concretising the Holocaust in historical terms. Despite this limitation, the book provided an important context for the work of memorialisation, a context encapsulated only very much later in the term “negative memory” when the Holocaust had been investigated and made conscious in all its horrific dimensions. In 2002, the historian Reinhard Koselleck wrote: “My contention is that there is only one thing we Germans can do. We must include the perpetrators and their deeds in the work of memory and not merely recall the victims as such and alone. That would distinguish us from other nations” (Koselleck, 2002, p. 27, translated for this edition). The 1968 student protest movement reinforced and radicalised the growing criticism of this refusal to come to grips with the past. It openly accused the generation of the fathers of their involvement with Nazism. The question: “What did you do in the Nazi period?” often produced paltry answers or was met with obstinate silence. But now at least the real victims of the Nazi regime became the focus of attention, that is, the persecution and marginalisation of the Jews. However, engagement with these issues came to a halt before inquiries could be made into addressing the active role the parent generation had played in the extermination process. Elisabeth Domansky (1993) points out that the 1968 generation and in its wake large sectors of German society had indeed taken a decisive step towards confrontation with the past and recognition of the fact that a majority of the population had known the truth. But the next step, that is, asking concrete questions about active involvement in the persecution of the Jews and their mass extermination, was too much to stomach and remained more or less taboo. Thus, the attacks on the parent generation never progressed beyond more or less general indictments. Many members of the 1968 generation turned away from their parents as Nazis and fellow-­travellers by identifying with the Jews and other victims. In so doing, they “attempted to extricate themselves from that very part of German history that had just been reclaimed” (Domansky, 1993, p. 190). Ulrich

Herbert refers to this quest for distance from inherited history as a “second repression” (Herbert, 2014, p. 855). In 1969 a coalition of Social Democrats and liberals came to power with Willy Brandt as Chancellor. Twenty-­ five years after the end of the war, he was the first to ensure that the German Bundestag would be the scene of an official ceremony commemorating the day the war ended. While he could still not go so far as to refer to it as a day of liberation, he addressed himself to the memory of all victims and thus evaded arguments about “which victims should be memorialized above all, the German victims or the victims of the Germans”. Brandt spoke of the past in a new tonality and also insisted on the responsibility of subsequent generations: “A people must be prepared to look at its history with an impassive eye. Only those who recall the past can see the present for what it is and have an accurate idea of what may come tomorrow. This applies especially to the younger generation . . . no one is free of the history they have inherited” (cited in Dubiel, 1999, p. 133). With his genuflection before the Warsaw Ghetto memorial in 1970, Brandt acknowledged the crimes the Germans had committed against the Poles and the Jews. But the German public was anything but unanimous in its assessment of this political gesture. According to a survey by the German weekly Der Spiegel (14 December  1970, 27) forty-­ eight per cent of the Germans thought it exaggerated, and only forty-­one per cent found it appropriate.

The 1970s and the 1980s It took the TV broadcast of the American Holocaust series to fully and finally anchor the Nazi genocide of the Jews in German public awareness. It made a lasting impression. The Germans were appalled as the individual accounts shattered their refusal to empathise and their defences against acknowledgement of the victims’ suffering. They were now ready to face up to the unimaginably dreadful crimes that had taken place. A  painful learning process set in in German society, but this in itself again triggered counter-­responses. Commemoration and defence existed side by side. In the 1980s, societal and political controversies over the Nazi period increased by leaps and bounds. One reason was the wave of protests against Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s attempt to more or less phase out Nazi history by means of “historicisation” (explicitly relegating it to the past) and to put an end to “fruitless brooding” about historical and moral guilt. The joint visit by Chancellor Kohl and President Ronald Reagan to the military cemetery in Bitburg on 5 May  1985 was planned as a symbolic gesture of reconciliation. But, when it was learnt that members of the Waffen-­SS were buried there and there was no sure way of ascertaining whether they might have been involved in the extermination

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campaigns against the Jews, the symbolic gesture backfired. Many things that had been effectively repressed resurfaced with a vengeance. Massive protests ensued, amidst a new, wide-­ranging controversy on how best to deal with Germany’s Nazi past (cf. on this Hartmann, 1986). The speech by federal president Richard von Weizsäcker in the German Bundestag on 8  May 1985 commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the total surrender that ended the war displayed an entirely different attitude toward the Nazi past. On behalf of the German people he avowed the nation’s responsibility for the monstrous crimes committed in their name. With his insistence that 8 May was not a day of defeat but a day of liberation (“It liberated all of us from the inhumanity and tyranny of the National Socialist regime” [1985, p. 2]), von Weizsäcker coined a new and henceforth central tenet in the commemoration culture of the Federal Republic. He called upon his fellow Germans to accept the past and the “grave legacy” the preceding generation had left them. “All of us, whether guilty or not, whether old or young, must accept the past. We are all affected by its consequences and are liable for it”, he asserted. As federal president, von Weizsäcker set new standards for the Germans’ understanding of history and their culture of commemoration. Sparing our own feelings and expecting others to do the same was the wrong course. “We need and we have the strength to look truth straight in the eye – without embellishment and without distortion” (1985, p.  1). In detail he enumerated all the groups of victims persecuted by the Nazi regime and almost obliterated by the war, with special reference to the six million Jews slaughtered in German concentration camps. Commemoration of these crimes, he insisted, was the only way to regain the moral sovereignty without which the political sovereignty achieved since the war would be entirely without substance. Critical remembrance of the past and of Nazi atrocities would not explode the collective identity of the Federal Republic. Rather it must be part and parcel of its normative foundations. This process, von Weizsäcker said in conclusion, was by no means over. The year 1986 was the year of the so-­called historians’ dispute, which sparked off unusually extensive public discussion. The central question here was whether or not one could compare the Nazi genocide with Stalinist war crimes. Revisionist historians played down the singularity of the Nazi atrocities. Their aim in this was to relieve the Germans’ collective memory of guilty feelings and to restore national pride. But, ultimately, the highly emotional debate underlined the unique nature of the Holocaust (on this, see Maier, 1988). The fact that the debate finally took this turn was largely due to Jürgen Habermas. He insisted, as did Weizsäcker, that unconditional and unrestricted commemoration of the past with all its downsides, conflicts, and guilt was the

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only way to achieve genuine moral sovereignty. After the fragmentation of identity by the Holocaust, the only course left to the Germans was a reflective approach to their history. These events and the public engagement with them were a sign that a major change had taken place. Denial was replaced by the conviction that only public remembrance of the Holocaust and a “no-­holds-­barred” memorialisation of crime and guilt could restore moral sovereignty and stabilise a reflexive democratic identity.

From the 1990s to the present Since the 1990s, historians have investigated the genocide of the European Jews much more thoroughly than before, assisted by the Internet and by the opening of the archives in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In 1996, the Federal Republic was the scene of an extraordinarily intensive discussion of Daniel Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Historians levelled weighty criticisms at his assertions on the subject of eliminatory anti-­Semitism, but Goldhagen undeniably succeeded in holding up to German eyes the brutality of the executions of Eastern European Jews in all their horrific detail. In 1995 and thereafter, the Wehrmacht exhibition organised by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research triggered vehement debates and controversies, including massive attacks on the exhibition-­makers. The exhibition exploded the integrity myth surrounding the Wehrmacht and documented its involvement in the planning and implementation of a war of annihilation against the Jews, the Russian prisoners of war, and the civilian population in Eastern Europe. At the same time, a ten-­year public debate was raging over erecting a monument in Berlin to commemorate the European Jews murdered by the Nazis. A  citizens’ initiative had proposed the idea of such a monument and did its best to get the plan realised. It had long been Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s policy not to emphasise individual groups of victims but to jointly honour the dead on both sides. Increasing public pressure made it impossible to continue with this policy because the Holocaust had been a crime against humanity committed by Nazi Germany, so the German population was partly responsible for this. The significance of this monument project increased in importance due to the reestablishment of Berlin as the capital of a united Germany, raising the level of discourse to the fundamental identity of the reunited republic. One controversy was what a monument for the Holocaust victims erected in the country of the perpetrators should look like. A  purely victim-­centred perspective would draw a veil over the perpetrators and would thus be just another defensive operation. Another issue was

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whether there should be a central monument for all victims of the Nazis’ reign of terror or whether there should be separate monuments for different groups of victims. Public debate on these issues was highly emotional. Finally, the view of the Holocaust as an unparalleled crime against humanity imposed itself. Discussion of the project also became a flash point for the precarious balance between the lasting burden of history and the longing for “normality”. On 25 June 1999, the German Bundestag resolved to put up a monument in Berlin to commemorate Europe’s murdered Jews, and in 2005 the monument, situated near Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag building, was finally inaugurated. The decades between 1960 and 2000 saw a “progressive restoration of remembrance” (König, 2008) in which, despite considerable resistance, the criminal attempt to exterminate the European Jews gradually took centrestage in the political and societal arenas. The Germans relinquished the role of the victim and faced up to their responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi regime. This change in collective awareness was probably a reason why, in the late 1990s, memories of the war, exile, displacement, and the air raids resurfaced. Another reason was that these people, now between the ages of sixty and seventy were children and adolescents in the Nazi era and the war. We know today that split-­off traumatic memories resurface in middle and old age, so the time had come for their suffering to find expression in the form of narratives. In 2002 Günter Grass published his novella Crabwalk about the sinking of the warship Wilhelm Gustloff by a Russian torpedo boat in the Baltic in January 1945. The ship was full of East Prussian refugees, and 9,000 people drowned; 2002 also saw the publication of Jörg Friedrich’s book The Fire, a description of the Allies’ saturation bombing tactics. Both books awakened many memories in their readers and triggered vehement public debates in Germany. Expensively produced documentaries on German television about the displacement of countless Germans from their homes left viewers drained and appalled. The year 2005 saw the first major war children’s congress in Frankfurt. Hans-­Ulrich Wehler (2008) speaks of a “new undercurrent” and a “psychic sea change” in the German public. The deep marks left on German society by instances of extreme violence found new expression. Individual traumas were now addressed and discussed as a typical generation-­specific experience, placing this suffering in a larger context. This recognition did nothing to heal the traumas, but in many cases it made them easier to bear. The subject of these discussions was not only recollected personal experiences but also the way they should be talked about. One central bone of contention of these reports was whether it was made explicitly clear throughout that the outbreak of war and the extermination of the Jews were entirely the responsibility of Nazi German period. The answer to this

question made a crucial difference. In Friedrich’s book, the author’s stance was ambivalent. His vocabulary in describing the Allied assailants used terms which usually referred to the Holocaust, like “mass killing” and “hurricane of destruction”. He compares the German bomb shelters to “crematoria”, the victims of air raids as “slaughter victims”, and the bomber commandos themselves as Einsatzgruppen, the term used to refer to the mass killing squads of the SS operating at the Eastern front of the war. These implicit comparisons with the Holocaust aroused suspicions in the public that an attempt was being made to relativise the enormities of Germany’s war crimes. Aufrechnung – the settling of scores by drawing up “balance sheets” – was a topic that ran through the entire debate on German suffering as a result of war, displacement, and strategic bombing. The critical response to Friedrich’s book indicated an insistence on preserving the historically correct proportions of events. At the same time, the tendency to lose sight of the overall picture, bewail one’s own sufferings, and play down the depredations of Nazi terror had not died out altogether. In fact, this attitude can still be encountered today. Over the decades, the engagement with the Nazi past and the crimes of the Holocaust took place in successive “shock waves” (Seibt, cited in Berg, 2003, p. 9). This recurrent “return of the repressed” set in motion a painful process in which in public debate over historical truth asserted itself over rejection, defence, and denial. As in an upward spiral, the historical revelations accumulated and the work of commemoration grew with them, while instinctive defence and the averted gaze became less common. In the course of this increasingly self-­critical engagement with the history of Nazism, a culture of public commemoration took shape that was prepared to reflect upon the long process of collective memory formation. The historian Peter Reichel notes that it took time “before the most incomprehensible and painful core of the whole story could be publicly remembered and it became possible to face up to the resulting obligation for lasting commemoration” (Reichel et al., 2009, p. 18). Another historian, Nicolas Berg, speaks of the “overpowering nature of real events”, which produced a lasting effect “that seen in the long term became the genuine source of slow and retrospective enlightenment about the event itself” (2003, p. 10). In the fifth volume of his German social history, Hans-­Ulrich Wehler summarizes this process of enlightenment and learning as follows: Looking back on the first 40  years of the Federal Republic, it is difficult to avoid the impression that the decisive feature of its political culture has been determined by an initially tormentingly slow, undoubtedly painful, but ultimately resilient

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learning process that consisted of facing up to the rift that had torn German civilization in the recent past. Given the enormity of the evil that came to light, this is an astonishing achievement that to this day clearly distinguishes the Federal Republic from other defeated nations of the Second World War like Italy and Japan.  .  .  . Accordingly, the quality of German political culture will continue to depend largely on whether this salutary self-­criticism can be sustained. (2008, p. 291, translated for this edition)

A society of perpetrators: transgenerational identification processes in postwar Germany On a scholarly and a societal level, there has been increasing realisation over the past few decades that it takes time to come to terms with major traumatic disasters and to accept responsibility and guilt. It is not something that can happen within the course of one generation. Psychoanalysis has contributed much to this realisation. We are now seventy years on from the end of the Second World War, so we have a number of generations to look back upon. The members of the first generation were those who had experienced the Nazi regime and were involved in it. The second generation witnessed the war as children or were born just after it was over. The third generation are their descendants and the grandchildren of the first generation. In German society, memories of the criminal history of Nazism set in motion a specific transgenerational dynamic that gave the term “generation” a very special meaning as a category of memory (Jureit  & Wildt, 2005; Weigel, 2006; Bude, 1998). Generations are complex memory communities displaying specific ways of coming to terms with the present as they experience it. The strategy employed by the first generation, whose involvement in the Nazi regime was either active or complicit and/­or largely enthusiastic, was to create a “usable past” (Moeller, 1996) doing their best to deny their own connections with the Nazi regime, especially as perpetrators. As described earlier this necessitated a division into acceptable and unacceptable memories reinforced by the traumatic effects of extreme violence, hardships of warfare, air raids, and the dangers of escape. Emotional numbing, the derealisation of the past, and the repression or dissociation of one’s own deeds are the direct consequences of such traumatisation(s) having an adverse effect on the ability to engage reflectively with the past. Here the moral problem of guilt avoidance enhanced pathological memory processes that are

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traumatic in their origins. After the event, the members of the generation of perpetrators created an awareness of themselves as victims derived from two sources: (a) from defence against guilt and (b) from traumatic experiences. The second generation grew up in the shadow of the willful self-­deception of parents who thought of, and referred to, themselves as victims. Silence about their involvement and gaps in family biographies produced a nebulous and sometimes distorted feeling of reality in their children. The family was a scene obscured by a mysterious or murky past. In this connection, the blatant gaps in sequential fact and remembrance were unsettling in the extreme. In their investigations, Dan Bar On (1996), Nadine Hauer (1994), and Gabriele Rosenthal (1997) have described how untold stories can have an extremely strong transgenerational effect. The taboo placed on the question of parent involvement in the Nazi era impaired the children’s ability to inquire and obtain information. Stephan Wackwitz puts it like this: “My parents’ earlier lives lay concealed at the bottom of the sea or under the rubble of destroyed cities. But that was not the only reason why, in my childhood, the country I was growing up in had something ghostly about it” (p. 28, translated for this edition). Inside the family itself, the offspring of the perpetrator generation sensed a kind of unspoken ban preventing them from taking an active interest in such questions, a consequence of identification with the parents’ attitudes, as well as an attachment based on childhood loyalty. The following is a brief outline of some of these identifications:

The child as self-­object; negative identification(s) Many parents forced loyalty upon their children, amidst their own refusal to reflect upon what they had done thus preventing any genuine engagement with their Nazi ideals. Instead, their children were pressed into service as a way of justifying their world view and assuring themselves of its validity. Dissidence and independent-­ mindedness on the part of the children were shouted down, discredited in the name of stubbornly championed Nazi ideals, and categorised accordingly. In this way, fathers (and mothers) projected those parts of themselves onto the children that they were unable to justify and with which they had no intention of engaging. Powerless to fend off these attacks, the children were unable to distinguish amongst secrecy, deception, and betrayal. So as not to endanger their relationship with the parents, the children espoused a “protective attitude vis-­à-­vis the histories of the preceding generation” (Faimberg, 1987, p. 136).

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Counter-­identifications Alongside the parental representations implanted in the minds of the children via projective identification we also come across so-­called counter-­identifications. Turning their backs on their compromised fathers, the children identified instead with the victims of this generation of paternal perpetrators. Many committed themselves to political and academic projects whose declared aim it was to investigate and reconstruct the history and role of the victims. Frequently, however, this counter-­ identification took place at the ego-­ideal and superego level and did not penetrate to the deeper and earlier strata of personality structure. The old unconscious infantile identifications with the parents remained intact. For the members of the 1968 generation in particular, their indictment of the parent generation was reserved for the public arena and frequently ended at the front door. Probing any further was too painful, too closely associated with catastrophic anxieties. Psychoanalytic therapy for members of this generation has revealed that their unconscious emotional attachment to the parental representations of their infancy often outlived all subsequent engagement with the parents’ involvement with the Nazis.

Splitting the father image In the treatment of patients belonging to the second generation, the early attachment to an idealised father image was often the rock on which all attempts at getting to the bottom of the father’s (criminal) biography threatened to crack. The patients protected their relationship to the father by splitting the image of him they carried within them. One part (either genuinely experienced or merely longed for) was the idealised father of early childhood, the other the compromised or criminal father they wanted nothing to do with. In many cases, this infantile and now unconscious attachment to a beloved authority demanding allegiance at all costs made separation from the parents appallingly difficult. Although in their ego identifications and their conscious perspectives on life they were now far removed from the world of the fathers, they were unable to come to terms with the split image they had of them. The positive attachment remained in the unconscious, but it created a conflict of loyalty that prompted the children to respect rather than upend the parents’ taboos. In members of the second generation, such identifications frequently compounded the quest for the truth and the inquiry into covert and warded off history. The ego was repeatedly exposed to the danger of unconsciously turning into an accomplice of the parents

perpetuating the “conspiracy of silence”. It was fully acceptable, indeed laudable, to talk about the Holocaust, as long as what the parents had actually done and the extent to which they were involved remained out of bounds. The profound breach that the Nazi past had produced between the generations was a painful thorn in the side of many members of the second generation which motivated them. Especially in their middle and later years, some did find it possible – often in a very painful process – to recognise and work through the psychic constellations involved and thus to break out of the emotional clinch with their parents and achieve an independent view of things. This process was in its turn facilitated by critical reflection in society on the crimes of the Nazis, and the taboos, myths, and legends they lived by. There was mutual interpenetration between an individual dynamic and a supra-­individual or societal dynamic. Since the 1990s, questions addressed to living members of the parent generation and research into their guilty involvement have produced many commemorative documents and many literary versions of family history. In many cases, however, elucidation and reconstruction remained fragmentary, either because it was impossible to break the parents’ silence or because the children had waited too long to embark on their enlightenment campaigns. The parents had died and the family secrets went to the grave with them, leaving many with unresolvable doubts about whether and to what extent their parents were involved in Nazism and its crimes. Other members of the same generation were unable either to recognise or to challenge the silence, lies, and self-­ deception of the parent generation because loyalty and the desire to preserve a positive parent image had created an unconscious straitjacket from which they could not extricate themselves.

Communicative, cultural, and family memory The members of the third and fourth generations no longer have any direct contact with the Nazi period, so their concern with it is much less existential. Also, there are very few witnesses of the era still alive, so first-­hand accounts are no longer forthcoming. Accordingly, the so-­called secondary experiences of Nazi war crimes now have pride of place in investigations on how they figure in the memory and what processes play a role in coming to terms with them. Many recent studies on this issue have found it helpful to distinguish between communicative and cultural memory, first proposed by Jan Assmann (1992).

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Communicative memory is recollection exercised by living communicators of experience. It encompasses some eighty years, that is, the three to four generations living at the same time and forming a community of shared experience, memory, and narrative communication by way of personal exchange. One can also refer to it as “three-­generation memory” that moves on as the timeframe changes. It is a communicative network and, as such, a social construct built on, and welded together by, interpersonal contact and linguistic exchange (Aleida Assmann, 2006). Cultural memory, by contrast, is a collective symbolic construction. It is based on media like texts, pictures, memorials, anniversaries, and rites that are themselves subject to change as a result of debates taking place in society. In the transition from communicative to cultural/­ collective memory, family memory plays an important role. Its relationship to collective/­cultural memory is complex. Children’s individual memories are shaped and influenced not only by collectively communicated cognitive knowledge but also by the family memory in which experiential knowledge is directly imparted from one generation to the next. But family memory is also a filter that intercepts certain aspects of collective memory and manipulates or discards them. In these communication processes, emotional loyalty attachments play a decisive part (Bar-On & Gilad, 1992; Brendler, 1997; Brendler, 1995; Hardtmann, 1997; Rosenthal, 1997; Welzer et al., 2002). As Welzer et al. (2002) described it: “The greater the knowledge about war crimes, persecution, and extermination, the more urgently family loyalty obligations demand stories featuring the crimes of ‘the Nazis’ or ‘the Germans’ alongside the moral integrity of parents or grandparents” (p. 53, translated for this edition). Emotional loyalty to, and idealisation of, family members is invariably a stumbling block in connection with the recognition of unpalatable facts and heinous deeds. Psychoanalytic therapy for members of the second generation has made this abundantly clear. We know how strong loyalty obligations can be when it comes to ensuring that one’s own family is not shown in an unfavourable light. The family member is protected vis-­à-­vis the outside world, although individual and possibly covert doubts may have arisen about the manipulation of biographical data. Accordingly, caution is necessary when embarking on a generalising interpretation of the findings produced by such investigations into family memory due to sampling bias and intergenerational factors. But regardless of such caveats, these investigations indicate the importance of reflection on emotional loyalties in parent-­child communication about the Nazi period and the necessity of taking due account of such reflection in the pedagogical approach to the Nazi era employed in schools and drawn upon for public edification.

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Conclusion Confrontation with the Holocaust is a profound shock to human subjectivity. Reinhard Koselleck (2002) emphasises that for the Germans there is only one option available for true commemoration. The perpetrators and their deeds must be included in the equation, as commemorating the victims alone is not the right course. “We can only commemorate the victims that we have produced, technically and by extermination, if we have sufficient self-­assurance to remember our own dead, the perpetrators amongst our relatives, amongst our forebears, in our own nation. This is part of the difficulty inherent in the negative nature of our memories.” He continues: “What is it then that we remember? I believe the simplest answer is that we must think the unthinkable, learn to speak of the unspeakable, and attempt to imagine the unimaginable. Even as we call for this, we realize how quickly we arrive at the limits of what is possible” (2002, p. 29, translated for this edition). Psychoanalysis is in a position to shed more light on the paradigmatic state of affairs Koselleck refers to. Listening to the stories of Holocaust survivors means opening oneself up with one’s imagination and one’s feelings to the details of what they have been through and ingesting those details, because otherwise we will not be able to enter into affective contact with the subjective experience of these trauma victims. But vicarious experience can only ever be an approximation. Robert Lifton speaks here of “being a survivor by proxy” (Caruth, 2014, p. 18). In the listener’s response and the relationship to the trauma victim there is at least an inkling of what is incomprehensible and unassimilated in traumatic experience. The therapist’s job is to give space to this unassimilated content, this “unknown known” (Geoffrey Hartman, 1996) and thus make at least partial understanding possible. If we use this knowledge from trauma research to illuminate the processes involved in “secondary remembrance” or in “learning from unacceptable history”, then it should be clear that such recollective recourse will not only be concerned with communicating knowledge but with opening one’s own emotional perception to the horror of these crimes and the sufferings of the victims and not resisting the attendant effect. Here, both in individual and societal discourse, we encounter specific defensive reactions. In psychoanalytic terms, these are reactions that we all display when we are exposed to extreme traumatic content. They happen because we instinctively recoil from the violence, the horror, the pain, and the fear of traumatic events so as to avoid feeling these things ourselves and exposing ourselves to them in the imagination. The incisive power of these memories and the sheer horror of what has happened to these victims threaten to overwhelm the psyche of the listener and to deal a crippling blow to his/­her psychic balance.

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The images and scenes we are confronted with are haunting in the extreme, which heightens the danger of experiencing what researchers call a “secondary trauma”. To prevent that from happening, we consciously or pre-­ consciously avert our gaze from the horrors related to us, phasing them out, thrusting them aside, or “cutting them down to size” so as to make the situation bearable. Put succinctly, exposure to dreadful narratives of this kind threatens to trigger on the one hand a quasi-­ traumatic paralysis of the psyche together with an emotional blockade, and on the other total defence and an attitude of indifference. We know from therapeutic experience, however, that we must engage very actively with these responses. If we accept them as part of our selves instead of condemning them, we can overcome them, find a way of dealing with this seemingly aporetic situation, and succeed in opening ourselves up to the traumatic experiences of others. What does all this mean for subsequent generations and what they can learn about the Nazi atrocities and the Holocaust? Now that the generation of contemporary witnesses has more or less died out, we are increasingly confronted with questions like these. Knowledge of the Holocaust and National Socialism has definitely left the realms of communicative memory to take up its place in cultural memory. There is nothing individually biographical for us to fall back on. For a true appreciation of the enormity of these events, the imagination of a younger generation of learners will need to square up to the horrific details of the Holocaust trauma without being so overwhelmed by them as to either recoil as if stunned or to keep these memories at arm’s length. Either response will fall short of a threshold that we need to cross if we are to grasp the unprecedented inhumanity of the crimes committed. These psychological realities repeatedly confront pedagogical engagement with the Holocaust with the dual problem of maintaining the sensitivity of the individual while at the same time avoiding or offsetting too great a strain on the senses so that the exchange does not get bogged down in defensive positions. The essential thing is to keep the psychic space of the individual open to the survivor’s testimony so that the affects generated by that testimony can remain conscious, thus creating the ground for reflection on the whole issue and an exchange with others. Helmut König (2008) reminds us that the remembrance of the Holocaust must not mutate into a commemorative religion. Spaces must be reserved for concrete narratives and reports from the appalling years when the Nazis were in power. In this, he takes his bearings from Hannah Arendt, who insisted that the prerequisite for any reconciliation with reality is a species of narrative that is uncompromising in expressing the harshness of real experience in as trenchant and coherent a way as it can. The events must be genuinely

assimilated into our consciousness and accepted for what they are. “The best we can achieve is to know and stand up to the fact that it was thus and no different and then to wait and see what will come of it” (Arendt, 1959, p.  30 cited in König p.  652). Saul Friedländer refers to another aspect of confrontation with these horrors, the initial shocking response in which “disbelief at the first confrontation with the Shoah surfaces from the depths of our own immediate understanding of the world and leaves its mark on our perception of what is ‘normal’ and what is ‘unbelievable,’ a response that takes place before knowledge hurriedly supervenes to suppress it” (2007, p. 25f, translated for this edition). He emphasises how important it is to preserve this “primary feeling of disbelief”.

Negative memory and German identity after the Holocaust In Germany, family history and perpetrator history in the narrower sense of the term can only be written in the first person plural. They are histories of “we-­ness”, and as “negative memory” (Koselleck, 2002) they remain a part of our collective remembrance. Before the Holocaust, the human mind would have been unequal to the task of imagining such deeds. Now those deeds are history, and we have the obligation to try and imagine the horrors inflicted on the victims and the suffering they went through. Unflinching confrontation with the enormity of the crimes committed and the ruthlessness of the extermination campaign against the Jews will explode any positive self-­image of the German nation (should it have established itself in the first place) and encourage a reluctance or even an outright refusal to identify with it. Herfried Münkler (2009) has described the function performed by German myth in shoring up national identity. Without exception, all national myths imbued with political significance in Germany have been thoroughly discredited by Nazism and its crimes. They have been replaced by engagement with the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes and their commemoration. For Münkler, this work of memory has the same function as the great narratives from which national identity is forged, except that they are all in a negative key. This, he says, gives Germany a special status, because no other country has embarked on such a feat of memory and made the tokens of its own moral disgrace so visible. This, however, cannot be a source of pride. On the contrary, the historical facts continue to generate a kind of negative identity. Today, negative commemoration of Nazism is an integral part of Germany’s culture as a state. It is a norm firmly established in the heart of German society. One result is that confrontation with a history of disgrace produces a conflict with the collective we-­identity of

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the individual. Here there can be no simple solutions. Remembrance of the perpetrators and their deeds and the involvement of parents and grandparents cannot be put in cold storage. There is no way back to what Norbert Elias has called the “emotional fervor” invested earlier in the idea of the nation. The consequent ambivalence with regard to national feeling is something we have to live with. From psychoanalysis we know how hard it is to accept ambivalence and how our feelings constantly prompt us to see things the way we would like them to be. Group discussions with young people about the presence of the Nazi past in their historical awareness indicate that they experience Nazi history as something that in an ill-­defined way is a part of them. As Germans they cannot escape this historical context. At the same time they display a desire for greater distance, a desire aimed ultimately at regarding the frequently individualized personifications of Nazi history in the shape of “freak villains” like Hitler or Goebbels as something separate from the collective they feel themselves to be part of (Kölbl & Fröhlich, 2015). Such responses are by no means restricted to young people. They show how strongly we want to be guided in our collective identity by positive notions of national identity. This has long been a major issue for political and social scientists. The positions are anything but unanimous, but one thing appears to be generally accepted: Without a definitive notion of where we belong/­do not belong, there is no way in which participation can be given a widely established foundation, nor can varieties of political/­societal solidarity be formally institutionalised. Jürgen Habermas calls for a post-­nationalistic species of political culture constantly redefining itself through its critical engagement with the past. He proposes a species of “patriotism” based on identification with the constitution and replacing the national identity representations that are no longer viable. He urges his fellow Germans to free themselves of diffuse notions of the nation state and to discard those “pre-­political” crutches that go by the name of nationality and collective destiny. “With that monstrous breach of continuity [Auschwitz] the Germans forfeited all possibility of basing their political identity on anything but the universalist principles of state citizenship, in the light of which national traditions can no longer be appropriated without demur but only in a spirit of criticism and self-­criticism” (1990, p.  219f, translated for this edition). Prompted not least by the awareness of the destructive power of abused national feeling in the Nazi period, Habermas steers well clear of the emotionalism generated by feelings of community, positing instead an ideal image of collective self-­identification with the principle of reason (Hacke, 2008).

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Other sociologists have investigated phenomena of collective identity within present-­day society. Most of them acknowledge the necessity of collective identity as an organising factor in social and political life. The controversial issue that remains is what forms of collective identity will assert themselves. Münkler and Hacke speak here of the necessity of a “normalization process”. This process “is merely the expression of the fact that like any other political entity, the Federal Republic is dependent on its ability to develop a positive historical identity that can gradually emerge from the shadow of the Nazi past” (2009, p.  29, translated for this edition). There is general consensus that the Holocaust is a seminal event for the Federal Republic. The reunification of Germany in 1989 marked the definitive end of the postwar period. The situation today is subject to a change dynamic generated by globalisation. European exposure to this phenomenon has led to a crisis that has seriously dented notions of European unity and is exacerbated by the immense streams of refugees and migrants over the last few years. In the populations of Europe, this development and the uncertainties and anxieties bound up with it have once again activated the emotional dimension of national identity. Currently there is massive acclaim for the idea of safeguarding cultural homogeneity and ethno-­cultural nationality, fuelled by hopes of regaining national sovereignty, which acts as an antidote to feeling at the mercy of global changes. In Germany, the intake and integration of refugees is also reminiscent of the Nazi period and the postwar era with their streams of refugees. Inscribing the right to asylum into the Basic Law of the Federal Republic was one of the consequences of that time. The question of how many refugees Germany can deal with reignites debate on the Federal Republic’s collective identity, to which there are widely differing opinions. German society has to live with the historical responsibility for the Holocaust, but the negative memory of it is also bound up with an obligation to uphold positive values such as the affirmation of human rights and the condemnation of such violations which can lead to genocide. Allegiance to the inviolability and the uncompromising validity of human rights is enshrined in Article 1 of the Basic Law. At the Stockholm International Forum of the Holocaust in 2000, German state minister of culture and media Michael Naumann thus declared that “The right answers for politics and society (must) grow from the memory of the Holocaust”. However, these answers are less likely to “grow” of their own accord than to be socially and politically negotiated, implemented in situations as they occur, and overcome the resistance they will encounter.

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Münkler, H., & Hacke, J. (Hg.) (2009). Wege in die neue Bundesrepublik. Politische Mythen und kollektive Selbstbilder nach 1989. Frankfurt and New York: Campus. Naumann, K. (Ed.) (2001). Nachkrieg in Deutschland. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition. Nossack, H. E. (1948/­1981). Der Untergang. Hamburg 1943. Hamburg: Ernst Kabel Verlag. English: The End. Hamburg 1943. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004. Reichel, P., Schmid, H.,  & Steinbach, P. (2009). Der Nationalsozialismus – Die zweite Geschichte. Überwindung – Deutung – Erinnerung. München: C.H. Beck. Rosenthal, G. (Ed.) (1997). Der Holocaust im Leben von drei Generationen: Familien von Überlebenden der Shoah und von Nazi-­ Tätern. Gießen: Psychosozial-­Verlag.

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Rüsen, J. (2001). Zerbrechende Zeit. Über den Sinn der Geschichte. Köln: Böhlau. Von Weizsäcker, R. (1985). The speech by president Richard von Weizsäcker. Retrieved from www.bundespresident.de. Wackwitz, S. (2003). Ein unsichtbares Land: Familienroman. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Wehler, H. U. (2008). Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte. Fünfter Band. Bundesrepublik und DDR 1949–­1990. München: C.H. Beck. Weigel, S. (2006). Genea-­Logik. Generation, Tradition und Evolution zwischen Kultur-­und Naturwissenschaften. München: Wilhelm Fink. Welzer, H., Moller, S.,  & Tschuggnall, K. (2002). Opa war kein Nazi’: Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer.

17 Transmitted unatoned guilt Friedrich-­Wilhelm Eickhoff Translated from German by Rod Koeltgen and Peter Hoffer

On intergenerational transmission I would like to begin my chapter by recalling that in 1912/­1913 Sigmund Freud gave a provisional response to the question, “How much can we attribute to psychical continuity in the sequence of generations and what are the ways and means employed by one generation in order to hand on its mental states to the next one?” as follows: “Everyone possesses in his unconscious mental activity an apparatus which enables him to interpret other people’s reactions, that is, to undo the distortions which other people have imposed on the expression of their feelings” (Freud, 1912/­1913, p.  158–­159). Freud’s thoughts on the subject of reconstruction beyond the prehistory of the individual and complementary to it (Berenstein, 1987) are very complex and multilayered. Even when he compared his late study of Moses, “Moses and Monotheism”, with a dancer “balancing on the tip of one toe” (Freud, 1939a, p. 58), he acknowledged that the “audacity cannot be avoided” to assume “the residual phenomena of the work of analysis which call for a psychoanalytic derivation” as proof of the postulate “of an inheritance of memory-­traces of the experience of our ancestors, independently of direct communication and of the influence of education by the setting of an example” – the continuation of “the archaic heritage of human beings” which “comprise not only dispositions but also subject matter, memory-­traces of the experience of earlier generations” (Freud, 1939a, p. 99). Freud did not consider making taboos out of the inheritance of acquired characteristics to be the last word, and

he deplored attempts on the part of the “present attitude of biological science” (Freud, 1939a) to compromise his position. In actuality, his thesis regarding a phylogenetic factor is supported by current research, which has discovered complex epigenetic hereditary processes that are aligned with DNA. In the little-­known painting by Wilhelm von Kaulbach titled “Battle of the Huns”, Freud observed the continuation of the unfinished battle, which “had raged in the deepest strata” “in a higher region” (Freud, 1923b, p. 39), as analogous to the battle of dead warriors in the sky over the battlefield, who burden their descendants with what has been kept silent. The “inheritance of memory-­traces of the experience of our ancestors” has, from the vantage point of the history of our times, acquired a highly noteworthy expansion through the concept of “transposition”. It was conceived by Judith Kestenberg in order to grasp an important aspect of the psychology of children of Holocaust survivors who descend into the “time-­tunnel” of their parents’ unknown past in order to restore their lost objects, an activity roughly comparable with the journey that spiritualists make into the past of the deceased (Kestenberg, 1989, p.  184). Ilse Grubrich-­Simitis has called attention to the fact that transposition is based on a categorical uncertainty regarding historical reality, which, from a technical standpoint, necessitates an exploration of (parental) historical reality. This also holds true, incidentally, for psychoanalytic work with the generation of descendants of perpetrators of the Holocaust, despite deep-­seated differences. In them there occurs a transposition based on the model of the “borrowing of an

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unconscious sense of guilt” (Freud, 1923b, pp.  50–­51), such that effects of one generation which find no, or only one, secret expression (anger, revenge, grief, guilt, and shame) live on, ghostlike, as “time shards” (palimpsests) in the succeeding generation (Eickhoff, 1986, 1987).

On the first phase of the treatment While I  was still a candidate in the Hamburg Psychoanalytic Institute, I  was asked by a colleague of mine to take over the treatment of a twenty-­three-­year-­old patient born in Austria in 1943, which had been conducted for approximately one year on the couch. Her complaint had to do with a so-­called consciousness problem, never described by her other than with the words “I  don’t know what I  am”, which had started at the age of thirteen after she received a scalding on her back that left behind scars that she could not see. My colleague informed me that he had surmised that she was beset by “micropsychotic seizures”, which concealed an unverbalised relationship with her father, close to incest, behind the cornucopia of painful affects about which she complained. He also warned me about her tendency to intellectualise. My subjective diagnosis had to do with my very positive impression of her great ability to articulate and the existence of archaic features that interested me. She spoke in an anxiously troubled manner and was extremely unsure of herself. Her demeanour gave the impression of suffering, and, despite her acne, there was a nuance of exoticness that was somewhat attractive. Her mother, whom she mentioned immediately, had died of an unknown cause (presumably an endocarditis lenta) around the time of her first birthday. She grew up in changing circumstances amongst mother substitutes, two grandmothers, an aunt, and a fiancée of her father, who seemed to care for her behind the scenes in place of her mother. In her sixth year the father moved with her and two older siblings to the Federal Republic and got married there. She entrusted her stepmother, who was able to calm her sister (who, bewildered, kept asking “Why is it raining?”), with the complaint that she was afraid of death – imitating her sister in the process. Unlike her sister, she remained disconsolate, and her stepmother arranged an appointment with a psychiatrist, who prescribed medication that allayed the anxiety. Her father’s second marriage also produced stepsiblings. This marriage ended in divorce, however, when her father – evidently, as it later turned out – had to return to Austria on account of his being indicted for taking part in the November pogrom of 1938 after first hiding out in Munich. He left the children behind in furnished rooms, where the landlady had social workers come in, of whom the patient had very good

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memories. Situated in a dormitory, she very happily attended school for four years until her graduation, and she very determinedly resisted her father’s expectation that she return to Austria. She had begun to study philosophy in Tübingen and found herself in Hamburg in the ninth semester of study. She had chosen Hamburg as a “serious city”, on account of its anonymity, while fleeing from her girlfriend’s friend, with whom she had become intimate without liking him. She declined an offer of a Fulbright scholarship in linguistics in Massachusetts, wrecked by success (Freud, 1916d), not by being rejected. While she was standing under a shower, she was seized by panic, in which the old anxiety, the “sense of guilt, which results in being wrecked by success” (Freud, 1916d, p.  328), assumed by Freud, returned with the image of her turning into a skeleton. A friend of hers called an emergency physician, who had her admitted to a psychiatric clinic. After her discharge, a psychology student, an acquaintance of a school friend of hers, was able to arrange an appointment for her with an established psychoanalyst. The psychoanalyst was, for her, “the first human being in Hamburg”. From her schooldays she recalled having inadvertently glanced at a paperback containing a text by Sigmund Freud, who immediately struck her as a saviour. She spontaneously welcomed my offer of only twice-­weekly face-­to-­face therapy, which I customarily make in consideration of patients who have not undergone analysis four times a week. She cried, thankful for having again come into contact with someone, albeit angry at having once more to recount everything about which I  should have been enlightened by my colleague. Her father’s back and forth between Austria and the Federal Republic remained uncommented upon, but aroused the suspicion in me that there must be a family secret protecting the father, concealing his flight from prosecution. My spontaneous remark depicting her complaint “I don’t know what I am” was that she should have said “It’s not me at all”. In retrospect, it seems like a presentiment of the theme of “borrowing”, which I  did not actually have in mind at the time, even though a childhood fantasy of the patient’s which I  soon learnt about to the effect that she had killed someone and was about to be executed would have remained completely incomprehensible absent an intergenerational connection. When, in retrospect, I  think about the first years, the diagnosis of a dissociative identity disorder seems very apt to me. The conundrum “I  don’t know what I am” appeared in many variations. She imagined herself in fantasy as consisting of parts of corpses, as if a soul murder had taken place, and she brought many people into her reflections and researches. For example, in response to her stepsister, who is supposed to have said what she was by pointing to her hair, she

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retorted, “You aren’t your hair, you know”. She compared herself to Alice in Wonderland, whom her ego was able to accommodate to many different situations. Alice, who moved “under skies”, moved her to tears. She dedicated a diary to her dead mother, who also moved “under skies”, and she swore that she would be good. The third Auschwitz trial took place in Frankfurt around the time the treatment began, and the patient had learnt from her grandmother that her father had occupied a high rank in the SS. She found that analysts had to work like detectives, as if looking for murderers. But I still would not have found anything in a thousand sessions, had it not been for an astonishing occurrence in the 108th session. She revealed herself in a very remarkable fashion in Israel, where she travelled shortly after the beginning of our work together and fell in love with an Israeli, who validated her unconditionally. The fact that her self-­incriminating defamation was easily dismissed externally relieved her but may have stimulated her to find unremittingly shame-­ laden embarrassing disclosures in herself having to do with dirt. And, she also conjured up others who compared her with a “wormy apple”. Shame also took the form of a show, when in a dream she adorned herself with her stepmother’s pubic hair. What was very striking was the ease with which she, by way of a primary identification (see later), was able to substitute herself for other persons with whom she had just been in contact. She also identified, in her words, as a mystic does, with inanimate objects, for instance with a leaf, or with a part of a city which she felt no longer existed in her feelings when she departed from it by commuter train. It was something that seemed strange to her. Derealising, she imagined the eyes of others as being soulless, as mere eyeballs that did not look at her. At the beginning of every session she seemed, unnoticed, to have taken a photograph of me, every detail of which she was subsequently able to recall while lying on the couch. Behind the changing, often chaotic transference distortions, the basic figure, always perplexing, contained much that unerringly hit the mark. As students are wont to do, she tolerated sexuality for the sake of making contact, but she was convinced that an orgasm would drain the life out of her, as if – according to my later interpretation – her father’s dreaded death penalty were being carried out. Since she had studied in Tübingen, it was easy for her to follow me when after two years of treatment, I moved to Tübingen, where a chair in psychoanalysis was in the process of being founded. Here it was also possible to return to the earlier three-­hours-­per-­week analysis on the couch. At the time, her philosophical dissertation on the concept of history in Levy-­Strauß was nearing completion. Touchingly, her revered social worker received a copy: “Dedicated to my co-­author”.

In search of supervision In January  1971, on the occasion of Wolfgang Loch’s appointment to Full Professor of Psychoanalysis, Alexander Mitscherlich visited the University of Tübingen and gave a lecture to an overflowing crowd on Two Types of Cruelty, namely Pleasure in Cruelty and Work in Cruelty (Mitscherlich, 1983). After The Inability to Mourn, written in conjunction with Margarete Mitscherlich, it is another extremely impressive application of psychoanalysis to problems beyond the couch. As is customary, guests of the Department of Psychoanalysis were invited to a seminar on technique, as was Alexander Mitscherlich, and I, as a co-­worker in the department at the time, was given the opportunity to present a case for discussion. I  gladly took advantage of this opportunity and was mindful of the difficulty in psychoanalytic work with this patient in particular, whose history I viewed as being burdened by her father’s indirectly traumatising legacy. I was able to present a current, I think, very characteristic, session, which made clear that the patient compulsively attempted to reveal painful, shameful things about herself and to discover them in others. In presenting the case, I had up to now deliberately withheld the father’s story, which was as intrusive as it was difficult to decipher, because I  assumed it would produce turmoil in the discussion, and so I  continued to hold back. But I  found that a technical seminar with Alexander Mitscherlich, whose critical view of contemporary history I admired, would be the proper occasion for a presentation. So, I expressly combined it with the question of whether the patient’s suffering had to do with an illness of shame rooted in conflicts of seeing and being seen, or whether the exaggerated shame was related to what the father would have had reason to be ashamed of. Alexander Mitscherlich did not dismiss the question, but rather in his remarks concentrated on the patient’s self-­assurance in speaking with the analyst, whereby he unquestionably accurately grasped a central aspect, insofar as the patient, according to her own words, dared only to experience much because she was able to talk about it later in the analysis. In addition, he detected reparative aspects in the material of the session, presumably in connection with strained associations to the Inability to Mourn-­which is related to A German Way of Loving [Ger: Unfähigkeit zu Trauern-­womit zusammenhängt: eine deutsche Art zu lieben]. The patient had, naturally, noticed Alexander Mitscherlich’s presence in Tübingen. His untimely death in 1982 prevented my contacting him about the later Congress theme.1 The interesting minutes of the seminar also affirm Margarete Mitscherlich’s references to the great discrepancy between regressively altered and more mature ego functions and to a disturbance of symbolisation. Before I later became aware of the connection of guilt, I  evidently thought about something

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like “borrowed shame”, without becoming conversant with the concept of borrowing, and without suspecting that, many years later, I would conceive of an important aspect of the case history under the viewpoint of “borrowed guilt”, but also without reflecting that real guilt, in contrast to guilt feelings, cannot be analysed but can only be atoned for. A few months after my presentation in the seminar with Alexander Mitscherlich, an American five years her junior who was studying Slavic languages and culture in Germany appeared. When he learnt about her analytic treatment, he was able to enter into a relationship with my patient and understood her habit of touching him at night (get “close”) in order to fall asleep. He became her husband, about whom she remarked that she arrived in the present with him as if in a Noah’s ark. Included in this present was a very successful professional activity, namely the training of educators, to whom she applied a form of pedagogy modelled after that of Anna Freud and Peter Blos. During the IPA Congress in New York in 1979, Judith Kestenberg told me about the interest in case studies of the children of perpetrators and encouraged me to participate in the work that involved the Group for the Study of the Effect of the Holocaust on the Second Generation, founded in 1974. I very much regret not having made the effort to travel to New York, and, except for the seminar with Alexander Mitscherlich, I  kept my experience to myself until Wolfgang Loch, as a member of the Executive Committee, asked me point-­blank in the preliminaries to the Hamburg Congress whether I could imagine myself presenting in Hamburg. After I  said yes, hesitantly, it was not long before the extremely prestigious invitation of the Program Committee and Janine Chasseguet-­Smirgel reached me in January 1984. Along with David Rosenfeld from Buenos Aires and Hillel Klein2 from Jerusalem, I was asked to be one of the presenters on the panel “Identification and Its Vicissitudes in Connection with the Nazi-­Phenomenon”. After taking time to think it over, I  accepted the invitation with some trepidation. During the Central European Working Conference in Maastricht in the spring of 1984 (Personal communication, Laible), I was able to arrange for supervision with Piet Jacob van der Leeuw in order to muster up courage for my breathtaking plan. When I mentioned my countertransference of petrification as a response to the depersonalising attacks that were in store for me (see later!), he drew my attention to Freud’s essay Medusa’s Head (1940), which explicates the particular type of fright that turns one into stone. It was a very helpful tip. Piet Jacob van der Leeuw also invited me to an unforgettable seminar, in which Eddy de Wind, who had just barely avoided the Auschwitz extermination camp, spoke on the topic Generations of the Holocaust – How Many? [Ger. Generationen des Holocaust – wie viele?], and, without citing the connection to Freud’s term phylogenetic, he left no doubt that twenty-­first-­century man

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is influenced by its manifold derivatives, be they Jewish, or determined by a Japanese prison camp or by membership in the SS. He underscored the indirect traumatisation by means of non-­verbal transmission of traumata from one generation to another. It was also possible, in the stimulating atmosphere of the Maastricht Conference, to work out a preliminary “Diagnostic Profile”, along the lines of Anna Freud’s, which proved very useful in organising the difficult material in my case study. It cannot be overlooked that, with the exception of Alexander Mitscherlich, I  received my supervision assistance from outside the Federal Republic. This, to a certain extent, also holds true for my presentation at the Hamburg Congress, which seemed, relatively speaking, to be extraterritorial. In retrospect I  must see this as an indication of my distrust, however reasoned, in an exclusively German public, which I viewed as being impelled by interests along the lines of the “Politics of the Past”, described by Norbert Frei in 1966 (Frei, 1996), which seek to spare the perpetrators of Nazism and mask their real guilt. Wolfgang Loch, to whom I owed great appreciation for initiating the invitation, but to whom I first gave the definitive text to read, commented, with his characteristic precision, that borrowing of guilt was existentially necessary for preserving and restoring the father’s ideal function (Loch, 1986). Regarding the Program Committee’s deliberations as to the appropriateness of the main theme, replacing the title Mourning, Forgiveness and Reconciliation with Identification and its Vicissitudes seemed well-­founded to me. Reconciliation presupposes an acknowledgment of guilt, which was always missing in individual perpetrators, despite collective historical responsibility. Kurt Eissler, Judith Kestenberg, Eva Laible, and Eddy de Wind read the first version of my manuscript with the greatest understanding. Kurt Eissler refrained from making a detailed commentary on what he approvingly called a Freudian study. The final form of my paper followed an extended closed meeting for the in-­depth examination of process notes of 1,747 sessions. A  deep impression was made at the opening of the Congress by Janine Chasseguet-­Smirgel’s reminder of Mephisto’s words about the destruction of memory, spoken at the interment of Faust, who was guilty of murder: “It is the same as if it never lived” (Goethe 1808). It was Goethe’s disconcerting foreshadowing of an element of Nazism.

On the effect of the congress presentation on supervision and the period that followed The intertwining of the father’s life history and the history of the time was revealed only with extraordinary

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hesitancy. There was an all-­encompassing defence, characterised by omission, against his historically significant external reality. I did not learn any earlier than the 1,128th session that the father, who was not mentioned at all in the first interview, was very close to an extremely high profile representative of eliminatory anti-­Semitism (Goldhagen, 1996) and had actually helped him escape in 1950. And, it is certainly in the shadow of this man that, under his spell, my patient’s father’s life disintegrated after the war. A  comment that she made about his belonging to the SS struck me at first more with surprise than with horror. At the time, I was convinced that I could not develop a working alliance that would have permitted me to explore the significance of certain of her associations, and I  was accustomed to rely upon a style of speaking which, borrowing from Grinberg (Grinberg, 1968), one could call evacuative. At first, from a technical standpoint, I followed Kohut’s recommendation (Kohut, 1971) to facilitate the restoration of the self by mirroring her archaic self-­object representations. However, the basic elements of the therapeutic frame were solid, in that there was never any doubt in the patient’s mind about acknowledging the legitimacy of the arrangement in terms of privacy and the equally reasonable private arrangement regarding fees. In the “Calendar of Feelings” (Proust, 1964, Sodom and Gomorrah 1) the unfortunate confluence of dates, namely the day of the mother’s death coinciding with the father’s birthday (December  18), one day after the patient’s birthday on December  17, intensified her “Anniversary Reactions” (Haesler, 1984), and may have contributed to the screen-­fantasy of having killed somebody, for which she was about to be executed, and being aroused by this image. It had already been formulated with Eva Laible in Maastricht, and with the aid of Anna Freud’s “Diagnostic Profile”, that it had to do with the sexualisation of a punishment for her Oedipal triumph. The father had facetiously introduced his daughter to an acquaintance of his with the words, “That’s not my daughter; that’s my little woman”. This seductive component was expressed in the transference by a transitory delusion of love (Eickhoff, 1987), and she was temporarily convinced that I  had gotten a divorce. In her own latency period the father was physically present, but, with one foot in prison, he was inaccessible as a person. All knowledge of the details concerning his ensuing pre-­trial detention in Austria was kept from the family surroundings, although “mountains of silence” made them curious. Letters saying “We’re thinking of you” were sent to him. For a while he seemed to have contemplated killing himself and the entire family; in the transference, this memory was preceded by a fear of being killed by me. In her fantasy, the patient had made a murder weapon out of a piece of paper that I was shuffling around. In actuality, since the patient had inaccurately quoted a passage from Paul Celan’s Niemandsrose

[No One’s Rose] – something unusual for her – I  was looking it up: “No one kneads us again out of earth and clay. No one conjures up our dust. No one”. The patient knew many of Celan’s poems word for word, the reading of which made her ice-­cold inside. Her conviction, often held against me, was “I can’t be cured. My body consists only of parts of corpses” rather similar to Celan’s formulation. Her older sister, who also felt things deeply, knew “when daddy made another suicide attempt”. This insightfully depressive side also belonged to the father’s side of the family. The burning scar or “branding” (see earlier!) that she had suffered in the temporal context of her father’s impending arrest and the dissolution of his second marriage prompted him to make a reparative gesture uncharacteristic of him (“you may wish for something for yourself”). An underlying connection, along the lines of Judith Kestenberg’s “time tunnel”, between the “burning scar” and those who burned to death while the father was fighting partisans in Italy, is quite conceivable. The fact that this fighting coincided with the time at which the mother was pregnant with the patient is reminiscent of Joan Raffael-­Leff’s “procreative container” of the pregnant mother (Raphael-­Leff, 1993), which, as a “generative crucible”, becomes the dynamic container of a transgenerational ethos. This “most important identification”, which, along with the “father with his own personal history” (Freud, 1923), constitutes the ego-­ideal, also acquires pathogenic significance in this context. The manner of borrowing at first appeared to me to be connected only with shame, in view of her insistent exhibition of painful, shame-­laden utterances, until I recognised a connection, which spanned generations, between the deep guilt feeling of my patient, whose very striking childlike fantasy had to do with an imminent execution, and the external reality of her father who had been threatened with prosecution. Crucial help was found in a footnote to Freud’s essay “The Ego and the Id” (Freud, 1923, p. 50) in the form of his intuition of the intergenerational adoption of a guilt feeling as the “sole remaining trace of the abandoned love relationship not at all easy to recognize as such”, unmistakably similar to “what happens in melancholia”. He wrote, “One has a special opportunity for influencing [the unconscious sense of guilt, my addition] when this unconscious sense of guilt is a ‘borrowed one’ – when it is the product of an identification with some other person who was once the object of an erotic cathexis.” The patient’s father had denied all guilt feelings, but transposed this denial and placed its burden on his daughter, who borrowed it. Her dissociative complaint “I  don’t know what I am” could be read as her taking over her father’s determination to divest himself of guilt and identity. The patient’s symptom could be understood as a “palimpsest” of the paternal pathology. And, in fact,

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very many of her utterances that denied reality can be interpreted as having been borrowed from her father’s struggle with reality. The paternal transference began to materialise with a dream in which the father “denazified” his family. The task that fell to me, the other way around, was to assume the “nazification” as a container, and to anticipate a conviction. As if I  were her father, the patient screamed at me in a dream that I would be convicted if the courts were functioning properly. However, she was far from discovering that it was her father who was represented in these utterances and from recognising the “as if” nature of the transference. She always found new opportunities for merciless accusations of me, whether in the form of seising upon, that is to say, inventing, hairsplitting inconsistencies or presumed omissions in my interpretations, or trying to convict me of total incompetence. She stepped up her annihilating attacks in such a way as to engender in me the countertransference fantasy – which was ordinarily unfamiliar to me in any context – that “I must be made of stone in order to withstand it”. She even spoke about a “disintegrating apparatus” that she sensed in herself. In retrospect, this interaction seems to me to be an enactment, in which on the one hand the patient, turning passive into active, wanted to make me feel what she had suffered under the forceful traumatisation at the hands of her father, while on the other hand, the dissociative defence against the traumatic events implicitly led to a transference onto me, as analyst, of the accusation that had been made against the father. Ilse Grubrich-­Simitis (Grubrich-­Simitis, 2008) has considered reality-­testing in place of interpretation to be indispensable in one phase of the work with survivors of the Shoah. This technical maxim also holds true, despite, incidentally, deep-­seated differences, for psychoanalytic work with descendants of the perpetrators of the Holocaust. I did not get a serious chance for reality-­testing, the testing of external reality, until the patient persuaded me in a way that, at first, I wrongly suspected it to be a parameter to investigate and reflect on family history and the history of the times. The patient knew her father as an incorrigible old Nazi, who collected documents in her grandmother’s apartment that supported his deranged self-­image as a war hero, but was never surprised at receiving information from newspapers and archives about his documentable prehistory. Very late in the game, however, he was depicted by a photograph in the press and in the document archive of the Austrian resistance as a historic person and as one who was visibly guilty. It was the sad outline of this second image of her father that the patient, knowing and not knowing, was prepared to perceive from her puberty on. Finding it portrayed by historians and political scientists enabled a process systematically to unfold

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that freed her, painfully, from an unconscious feeling of guilt inherited from her father, but against which a stubborn resistance developed – even though she had gained access to all the available sources – through the great difficulty she had in imagining the extent of his real guilt. This difficulty ensued despite the sentence of life imprisonment by a military tribunal, never carried out. He died in 1979 during the appeals process, commemorated by political adherents and a large portion of her family with persistent declarations of loyalty to the SS, from which my patient, along with her husband, clearly distanced themselves. Both of them knew that he had made both a murderous strike on the night of the pogrom of 1938 look like a rescue operation and the bloody reprisals taken against civilians in the partisan struggle in Northern Italy look like the glorious conquest of a village. An extradition, under international law, to the country in which legally binding execution could have been carried out had been demanded by a highly placed authority. My patient considered her biological mother, who moved “under skies”, to be attainable, in a magical fashion. In the transference she hoped for her return, that of an “illusionary parent” (Jacobson, 1965), by means of a particular way of crying out in despair (“distress cry”). As I understand it, it is supposed to have the effect of a reintegration into the corporal sphere of the caregiving object, to be at one with it (Rainer Krause, 1983). From the affective quality of this transference, I consider the genetic root of the intensive manner of her clinging to me and to psychoanalysis, working against the negative father transference, as possibly the expression of a positive element of the complex father transference. The initial dream, in which the moon approached the dreamer with a human face, is relevant here. A dimension, which could be seen as megalomaniacal, of the internalised mother-­daughter relation, projected in the transference, was expressed in the touching certainty “I am God’s daughter”, as a response to the dehumanising, reifying conundrum, “I  don’t know what I  am”. This expression occurred at a time when the patient, with the greatest matter-­of-­factedness, believed that she was the only person I was treating. I might mention in parentheses that the dead mother, when viewed against the backdrop of the history of the times, could acquire the significance of also being a victim of the Nazis. It should be recalled that Freud saw primary identification as “the most important of the individual”, and as connected with the parents “in his own personal history” (Freud, 1923, p. 31; Eickhoff, 2011, pp. 63–­66). The point in time at which the patient became pregnant worked like a caesura in the long-­drawn-­out process of working through the theme of “unconscious borrowed sense of guilt” and the historical reality of the publicly prosecuted father. In a dream,

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she was able to embrace her father behind bars. He would be more deserving of love behind bars than he would be with the transposition of his guilt onto the next generation. The unconscious unburdening of a borrowed feeling of guilt had a conscious correlation with ameliorating the accusations of a powerful superior in her workplace. Pregnancy was an extraordinary source of relief for her, and she accepted her daughter “with no bodily constraints” as she passionately breast-­fed her for two years. The daughter had a talent for upsetting her more seriously than any other person had, and would put up a fight with a “Don’t say that!” when the mother unconsciously assaulted her individuality by terrorising her. She developed a benign form of depersonalisation when, after being struck on the shoulder by a painful blow, she said, “I  don’t have a shoulder”. But mother and daughter were, for the most part, a happy pair. It seemed as though the deprivation that she suffered in her own childhood after her mother’s death could be compensated for. The analysis was able to be interrupted until the daughter left home for her schooling and the analyst was once again accessible. I ascribe great self-­curative significance to the patient’s “restitutive” identification with figures of world literature and with cultural values, which serve as links to a personally unexperienced and pretraumatic past, which counteract the threat of loss of contact with the world. She is supported by her husband, who is learning Hebrew. She is profoundly interested in the history of Jewry and of Israel. She fosters Christian-­Jewish contacts and has developed a special sensitivity for secondary and tertiary activities related to the question of historicising or not being able to historicise the Third Reich and the everyday history connected with it. She also has something like a perfect pitch for detecting anti-­Semitism. She looks back with amazement at her fascination, as a student, with the terrorism era in the Federal Republic, during which she was able to say, “Baader Meinhof is my generation, after all”. Leaving this fascination aside, she early on admired Simon Wiesenthal and Gideon Hausner, the chief prosecutor in the trial against Adolf Eichmann. Primo Levi did not agree with Eichmann’s execution, but rather expressed a Biblical curse in a poem: “May you live without sleep for five million nights” (Anissimov, 1997). Simon Wiesenthal never tired of calling to account everyone who had played a part in the planned “final solution of the Jewish question”. Execution of the father’s sentence would have greatly unburdened the patient, since conviction of the fathers cannot be relegated to the biological children themselves. Conflicting demands of loyalty inevitably led to superego conflicts in my patient that are nearly unbearable and insoluble.

Discussion From the perspective of the panel dedicated to the topic, “Identification and its Vicissitudes in the Context of the Nazi Phenomenon”, the following observations can be made: 1

2

3

Primary identification with the lost mother, independent of the history of the times, who returned in the transference. The coexistence of contradictory secondary identifications characterised, in part, by intrasystemic ego and superego conflicts lead to a multiple personality in which the formation of an ego-­ideal determined by themes of terror threatens to maintain a transgenerational influence based on superego identifications with Nazi aspects of the father. Guilt that is borrowed from him is incorporated in a melancholic identification. A  regressive concretisation in the form of a transient delusion forms part of the context of the father transference. A restitutive, self-­curative identification with figures of world literature and with cultural values, which belong to a personally unexperienced pretraumatic past, counteracts the threat of losing contact with the world (Eickhoff, 1986).

A second look at this summary reveals that there is also sound clinical evidence of the underlying dynamics of “multiple personality”. After all, Freud had assumed that “the secret of the cases of what is described as ‘multiple personality’ [is that] the different identifications seize hold of consciousness in turn” (Freud, 1923, p. 31). My thesis of “borrowed guilt” played no role whatsoever in Mortimer Ostow’s discussion of the panel’s contribution to the Nazi phenomenon. His unambiguous focus was the psychodynamics of apocalyptic movements and of anti-­Semitism. He very respectfully took cognizance of apocalyptic trends that were present in my case material as well. From a diagnostic standpoint, he took the position that an identification of my patient’s with the apocalyptic mood of Nazi society served to overcome a recurrent psychosis that he assumed to be present (Ostow, 1986). I  had followed the intuition of Freud’s that was expressed in his astonishing footnote (Freud, 1923, p. 50), as a consequence of which the takeover of guilt feeling is comparable to a melancholia and should be understood as a remnant of a given-­up love relation to the (Nazi) father. Both interpretations proceed from a psychotic element, be it a recurrent psychosis or a melancholia, in which ego and object remain in mutual imprisonment. Freud had conceived of that which puts an end to the melancholia – that is, enables an unbinding – as melancholic work, in which “each single struggle of ambivalence” loosens “the fixation of

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the libido on the object by disparaging it, denigrating it and even, as it were, killing it” (Freud, 1917e, p.  257). Obviously, this melancholic work is made extremely difficult by the fear of losing the object. My patient knew about the lecture and helped me, since, in light of her having a daughter, she was very troubled by the transposition of the Nazi theme. She learnt from the irritating echo in the press and also critically read the published text later on. I  assumed she would be dismayed by some inaccuracies and would have difficulty with containment in the four walls of my office. Still, the Congress’s effect of providing supervision was the surprising result. Something had happened, which one can call, as per Bion, “catastrophic change”. In order to correct the questionable extension of borrowing onto real guilt, which belongs to external reality, but threatens to penetrate the psychic reality of the succeeding generation, I  concentrated a few years later, in the International Review of Psychoanalysis (Eickhoff, 1989), on the analyzable borrowing of the unconscious sense of guilt. I understood, after the fact, that the patient’s consciousness problem of “not knowing what she is” as a palimpsest of the father’s denial of guilt and shame. The working through of many aspects of the “borrowed unconscious sense of guilt” had shown itself to be very fruitful, if not sufficient to the point of being definitive. The National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis (NPAP) found my publication interesting and invited me to present it for discussion at a scientific conference in New York with the theme Superego, Moral and Corrupt: A Polemic. It was extraordinarily valuable to me, especially since Janine Chasseguet-­Smirgel, Judith Kestenberg, Martin Bergmann, and other extremely attentive participants presented their own contributions. What made a particular impression on me was the linkage of denied guilt with shame: it is the discovery of denied guilt that elicits shame. The reflection on my diagnosis of multiple personality, which up to now had not been taken seriously in other quarters and was shared with Ira Brenner, was exceptionally enriching later on. In his book, Dark Matters. Exploring the Realm of Psychic Devastation (Brenner, 2014), I found a comprehensive consideration of dissociated mental realms, abnormal states of consciousness, in conjunction with the rehabilitation of the psychoanalytic concept of trauma by paying attention to the devastation of the Second World War and the horrors of the Holocaust. In dissociative identity disorder, he deals with a multitude of separate personifications of the self and makes it clear that, in multiple personality disorder, it can come to a “splitting of the ego” (Freud, 1923, p. 31), and the ego “comes apart, by submitting to encroachments on its own unity” (Freud, 1924, p.  151). There is clearly no doubt that, under certain circumstances, the treatment of patients with multiple

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personality disorder can last for decades. The “borrowing of unconscious sense of guilt” appeared in a new light when considering dissociation and the hypnoid states, phenomena that were assumed by Joseph Breuer, then dismissed, and now retrieved from oblivion. In his book, Ira Brenner answers the technical question, “interpretation or containment”, with a clear plea for therapeutic engagement and the modification of what is unbearable, projected into the analyst, “by being able to repose there long enough” – which is consistent with Bion’s ideas (Bion, 1959, p. 312).

Conclusion When I  undertook the writing of an “update” to my case report, this modification of what is unbearable “by being allowed to repose there long enough” occurred to me in retrospect to be especially worthy of consideration. At the beginning of the analysis, my patient had taken something like a photograph of me, on which, while lying on the couch, she was able to investigate what was unerringly accurate, but also what was distorted by the transference. As a result of her relentless reviews, every preceding session was scrutinised for mistakes, omissions, and inconsistencies on my part, with the frequently positive result that I  was actually deserving of condemnation. If I did not allow what was unbearable to stay with me long enough, along Bion’s lines, and instead prematurely focused on the transference, it would become clear what difficulties would be imposed upon her in seeing me as if I were her father. In Hermann Nunberg’s (Nunberg, 1951) way of thinking, it would be the basis of a viable transference. My patient is surprised at her obsessiveness, as she refers to it, in concentrating entirely on the real person of the analyst. At best, she is astonished that she did not what was hidden behind her father’s mountain of silence. She knows, and she does not know, that he was complicit in the murder of Jews and the Holocaust, and she vacillates between recognising historical, external reality – reality-­ testing – and fighting against it. But she responds to the transposition of the trauma by repeatedly, dissociatively, registering or auto-­suggestively summoning mental states in herself that she borrowed from her father. In 1998, Dori Laub noted, “I am not aware, although there might exist, a single case-­report of a successful analysis of a child of a Nazi” (quoted in Brenner, 2004, p.  160). But Brenner continues: he offers a challenge to us to further our dialogue on these issues. I  hope that my case study, in particular, serves this dialogue, and I do not rule out a good end of the analysis. There is a special place reserved in my patient’s implicit-­ procedural memory (Haynal, 2001, p. 69) for the experience of her analysis. There is a counterpart to this high estimation in my countertransference, inasmuch as my

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container function, which was subject to extreme strain, was firmly grounded in the psychoanalytic tradition. Freud’s remarks about the significance of an “archaic heritage” with memory traces of the experience of earlier generations”, which extend from the Interpretation of Dreams (Freud, 1900, p.  548) up to the late Moses study (Freud, 1939, p.  99), along with his idea of “an unconscious borrowed sense of guilt” (Freud, 1923, p.  50), were an indispensable aid to my interpretative work. The necessary testing of historical reality in place of interpretation, following Ilse Grubrich-­Simitis’s suggestion in 2008, resulted in an effort that was shared by both partners in the psychoanalytic situation. An example of this was the understanding over whether reading Primo Levi’s biography (Anissimov, 1997) and his book “If This Is a Man” (Levi, 1959) in Levi’s precise and level-­headed description of the world of the Holocaust would also indirectly sharpen her image of her father as a historical figure. In line with reality-­testing, reading the book, The Meaning of the Holocaust for Those Not Directly Affected by It [Ger.: Die Bedeutung des Holocaust für nicht direkt Betroffene] (Moses & Eickhoff, 1992), edited by Rafael Moses and me, had, in the final analysis, a liberating effect. My patient experienced as a personal gift the following sentence, which was formulated by me in the context of the discussion by Alexander and Margarete Mischerlich over “The Inability to Mourn”: “What seems astonishing in retrospect is the omission of the question whether or not the Germans’ mourning should have been over the conscience that was lost in the Third Reich” (Moses & Eickhoff, 1992, p. 286). This was because it seemed to be an indirect key to understanding the mindset of the perpetrators, but also to understanding her own sensitivity (“I don’t know what I  am”, when I  have no conscience), to the aspect of borrowing from a consciousness of her father’s, which was altered by the absence of a conscience. This reality-­ testing was supported directly by a professional historian’s neutral description of her father’s personality in his role as a proponent of Nazism. Primo Levi bore witness “so that no one would ever dare to deny the existence of the camps, that ‘it’, the Unnameable, took place” (quoted in Assimov).

Notes 1 The fact that Alexander Mischerlich left my question about borrowed guilt unanswered may be accounted for by a circumstance that Wolfgang Hegener referred to at a conference of the Berlin Center for the Study of Literature and Culture on “The inability to mourn. Ambivalence and actuality 50 years later [Ger: Die Unfähigkeit zu Trauern. Ambivalenz und Aktualität 50 Jahre danach]. He shows that the Mitscherlichs misunderstood anti-­Semitism, which they refer to in their book only from a letter by the historian Theodor Mommsen on the “immeasurable baseness of anti-­Semitism” as an illness

of prejudice, and that they do not say a word about the victims of the Shoah (Hegener 2017). At the time of my case presentation in 1971, I was a long way from discovering this lacuna in Alexander Mitscherlich’s work. 2 Since Hillel Klein was seriously ill before the Congress, his paper, “Identification processes and denial in the shadow of Nazism”, which had an analysis of the vicissitudes of individual and group identification processes during and after the Holocaust as its content, was delivered by Ilany Kogan. Hillel Klein and Ilany Kogan understood denial as a defence mechanism occasioned by confrontation with massive traumatisation and in the period of re-­adaptation to and re-­integration into life. Hillel Klein died in Jerusalem in December 1985.

References Anissimov, M. (1997). Primo Levi: Tragedy of an optimist. New York: Overlook Press. Berenstein, I. (1987). Analysis terminable and interminable – 50 years on. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 68, 21–­35. Bion, W. R. (1959). Attacks on linking. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 40, 308–­315. Brenner, I. (2004). Psychic trauma: Dynamics, symptoms, and treatment. Lanham, BO, New York, Toronto, Oxford: Jason Aronson. Brenner, I. (2014). Dark matters: Exploring the realm of psychic devastation. London: Karnac Books. Carroll, L (1865). The adventures of Alice in Wonderland. London: Penguin Classics. Celan, P. (1972). Paul Celan: Selected poems (p.  70). Trans. Michael Hamburger and Christopher Middleton. London: Penguin Books. Eickhoff, F.-­W. (1986). Identification and its vicissitudes in the Nazi phenomenon. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 67, 33–­44. Eickhoff, F.-­W. (1987). A short annotation to Sigmund Freud’s Observation on Transference-­Love. International Review of Psychoanalysis, 14, 103–­109. Eickhoff, F.-­W. (1989). On the borrowed unconscious sense of guilt and the Palimpsest character of a symptom. Afterthoughts of the Hamburg Congress of the IPA. International Review of Psychoanalysis, 16, 323–­329. Eickhoff, F.-­W. (2011). Ein Plädoyer für das umstrittene Konzept der primären Identifizierung. Psyche, 65, 63–­83. Frei, N. (1996). Vergangenheitspolitik. Die Anfänge der Bundesrepublik und die NS-­Vergangenheit. Muenchen:Verlag C.H. Beck. Freud, S. (1900). The interpretation of dreams. S.E., 4–­5. Freud, S. (1912–­13). Totem and taboo. S.E., 13. Freud, S. (1916). Some character types met with in psycho-­ analytic work. S.E., 14, 311–­333. Freud, S. (1917). Mourning and Melancholia. S.E., 14, 243–­258. Freud, S. (1923). The ego and the id. S.E., 19, 12–­59. Freud, S. (1924). Neurosis and psychosis. S.E., 19, 149–­153. Freud, S. (1939). Moses and Monotheism. S.E., 23, 7–­137. Freud, S. (1940). Medusa’s head. S.E., 18, 273f. Goethe, J. W. (1808). Faust Part II. Trans. A.S. Kline. Poetry in Translation, 2003. Goldhagen, D. J. (1996). Hitler´s willing executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. Little, Brown and Company. Grinberg, L. (1968). On acting out and its role in the psycho-­ analytic process. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 49, 171–­178. Grubrich-­Simitis, I. (1979). Extremtraumatisierung als kumulatives trauma. Psyche, 33, 991–­1023.

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Grubrich-­Simitis, I. (2008). Realitätsprüfung an Stelle von Deutung. Eine Phase in der psychoanalytischen Arbeit mit Nachkommen von Holocaust-­Überlenden. Psyche, 62, 1091–­1121. Haesler, L. (1984). Zur Psychodynamik der anniversary reactions. Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse, 17, 211–­266. Haynal, A. (2001). Deutungs-­Kunst und Neubeginn: Der Analytiker bei seiner Arbeit. Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse, 43, 69–­79. Jacobson, E. (1965). The return of the lost parent. In M. Schur (Ed.), Drives, affects, behavior (Vol. 2, pp.  193–­211). New York: International University Press. Kestenberg, J. (1989). Neue Gedanken zur Transposition. Klinische, therapeutische und entwicklungspsychologische Betrachtungen. Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse, 24, 163–­189. Kohut, H. (1971). The analysis of the self. New York: International Universities Press. Krause, R. (1983). Zur Onto-­ und Phylo-­genese des Affektsystems und ihrer Beziehungen zu psychischen Störungen. Psyche, 37, 1016–­1043.

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Laible, E. (1984). personal communication. Levi, P. (1959). If this is a man. Trans. Stuart Woolf. London: The Orion Press. Loch, W. (1986). Personal communication. Mitscherlich, A. (1983). Zwei Arten der Grausamkeit. In Gesammelte SchriftenBand V. Sozialpsychologie 3 (pp.  322–­342). Frankfurt/­M. (Suhrkamp). Moses, R. & Eickhoff, F.-­W. (Hrsg). (1992): Die Bedeutung des Holocaust fur nicht direckt Betroffene1992. Jahrbuch der Psychoanalys, Beiheft 14. Stittgart: frommann-­holzboog. Nunberg, H. (1951). Transference and reality. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 32, 1–­9. Ostow, M. (1986). The psychodynamics of apocalyptic: Discussion of papers on identification and the Nazi-­phenomenon. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 67, 277–­285. Proust, M. (1964). In search of lost time. London: Allen Lane. Raphael-­Leff, J. (1993). Pregnancy: The inside story. London: Sheldon Press.

18 On evil Kathryn Ann Baselice and J. Anderson Thomson

Introduction The evidence of human atrocities is all around us. We cover our ears, close our eyes, and invoke a one-­word explanation for all manners of human suffering: evil. No better example can be found than in our response to one of the most horrific acts man has enacted upon fellow man, The Holocaust. It is only now in the second decade of the twenty-­first century that the number of Jewish people in the world has returned to the pre-­ Holocaust level. And yet, despite decades of scholarly work, the Holocaust still gets reduced to this simplistic response: Evil. Perhaps, the horror, pain, and grief remain, preventing many from asking the question, “Why”? Because of this, we are no closer to preventing holocausts from occurring, a fact that is emphasised in the many genocides since. Dare we move beyond the label of “evil” to try to understand the Holocaust? Does it defy comprehension? Are its perpetrators, Adolf Hitler and his followers, exceptions to human nature, monsters the likes of whom never before existed? Or, as we shall argue, is the Holocaust a mirror to aspects of basic human nature we wish to minimise or deny? Murder, no matter the scale, is ancient and part of our evolutionary history. Just as we have evolved capacities for love and cooperation, we have evolved capacities to kill. We have strong aversions to killing humans, and we can kill other humans with relish. It lies dormant in all of us, especially the males of our species. Equally important, we have an evolved capacity for self-­deception, which we use to minimise or even deny our innate capacity for bloodshed. When that capacity joins forces with potent ideologies, charismatic leaders, and modern weapons, holocausts result.

We are not fallen angels, but risen apes. We are the descendants of hominids forged through millennia of happy genetic mistakes. Little by little, we evolved and adapted. With this in mind, we start our exploration into our own murderous natures, and the Holocaust that resulted, with Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution.

Evolutionary psychology Evolutionary theory was born in 1837 after a five-­year circumnavigation voyage taken by the young Charles Darwin (1809–­1882) on H.M.S. Beagle. Through his observations, Darwin discovered that, in the struggle for existence, beneficial variations would be naturally selected, and they would confer increased reproduction.1 Ironically, the misuse of Darwin’s ideas by the Nazis in the form of social Darwinism, eugenics and the superiority of certain races impaired our ability to see the key role of evolution in shaping one of the most horrific acts the modern world has known. It is vital to understand the role of evolution in human nature, particularly its violent side. The fibres that make up our basic human nature first began to take shape as the ancestors of modern humans arrived on the scene, approximately five to seven million years ago and culminated in our species, Homo sapiens, approximately 300,000 years ago.2 Due to the daily threats of starvation and predation, early humans found that cooperative group living provided better protection and access to resources than solitary living. The social and physical environment that shaped the human race can be viewed as a life-­long camping trip with extended

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family and relatives, with limited resources and an unending concern for safety (Cosmides & Tooby, 1992, 2013). The behaviours, cognition and emotions that helped our ancestors survive and reproduce often fail to fit in our ever-­changing modern world. Evolutionary psychology traces the roots of our modern behaviours back to their evolutionary origins, and seeks to establish how those behaviours may have benefited our ancestors and thus retained through many generations. Further, it helps us to establish the triggers and social situations where these behaviours may be enacted, a first step in finding ways to divert or stop them in the future. Evolutionary psychology does not provide one simple explanation for why “evil” acts are committed, but does offer some important clues. When we consider the Holocaust, each individual who participated in the mass murder of millions could have been influenced by one or many evolutionary adaptations. We shall first describe the evolution of violent behaviour amongst men, the ground-­work for the large-­scale violence one witnesses in genocide. Next, we analyse four basic adaptive strategies and describe how they may have influenced the behaviours of those who participated in the Holocaust: 1) Male-­bonded coalitionary violence, 2) in-­group/­out-­ group bias, 3) obedience to authority and 4) psychopathy. We then consider how our understanding of these forces shape how we think about “evil” in the modern world. We then conclude with the necessity to dispense with the term “evil”.

The evolution of violence Fighting ability evolved in our bodies and brains because male-­male competition is central to mammals, primates, the great apes and us. There is a much greater chance males will die without offspring than women, and strong selection pressure existed for men to be violent with other men to win a chance at reproductive success. Like other such animals, we had to rapidly apply force to in order to disable or kill a rival (Sell, Hone, & Pound, 2012). The legacy of that evolution remains in anatomical, physiological and psychological traits crucial to the success of competition. The evidence is literally in our bones. All great apes utilise a bipedal posture for threat displays and fighting, freeing the arms to strike and grapple with an opponent; upright posture permits an increase in the force and power of the forearm strikes. Bipedalism facilitates striking downward, which can impart more than 200 per cent more energy than striking upward. Selection for improved fighting performance likely played a role in the evolution of habitual bipedalism in hominins, including us. We walk upright because we fought (Carrier, 2011), and that shaped the anatomy of the human hand, which differs from other great

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apes. The human fist provides buttressing as the second metacarpo-­phalangeal joint creates a four-­fold increased stiffness, and force transfer through the thumb joint more than doubles the ability of proximal phalanges to transmit punching force. Thus, the human hand provides a performance advantage when striking with a fist, a reflection of sexual selection to improve our ability to bash an opponent (Morgan  & Carrier, 2013; Horns, Jung, & Carrier, 2015). When humans fight hand-­to-­hand, the face is the primary target. The bones that suffer the highest rates of fracture are the parts of the skull that exhibit the greatest increase in robustness during the evolution of hominins, with the most sex differences in both australopithecenes and humans. Male facial bones have increased robustness of the orbit and masticatory system, as the enlarged jaw may represent evolved protective buttressing of the face to survive fist strikes (Carrier & Morgan, 2015). Our brains are also equipped for violence with complex neural circuitry. There is a hierarchy of circuits that involve deep brain structures, mid brain and our cortex. We have a Rage circuit, a Seeking circuit, a Predation circuit, a Fear system closely linked to the Rage circuit and an Inter-­male aggression or Dominance system. They utilise the amygdala, the periaqueductal gray matter, the hypothalamus and the ventral striatum, overseen by the orbital frontal and dorsolateral prefrontal cortexes. The temporal parietal junction discerns intention of others. Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex calculates the utility of any violent response (Pinker, 2011). With our own bodies as evidence of our violent past, we turn now to perhaps our most difficult task: attempting to understand the evolutionary factors that may have contributed to man’s creation of the Holocaust.

Male-­bonded coalitionary violence On the night of November 9, 1938, a wave of violence spread throughout Germany and targeted its Jewish citizens. The pretext for the attacks was the assassination of Ernst Von Rath, a German diplomat in Paris, shot by a Polish Jew named Herschel Grynzpan. Fueled by paranoid fears of an international Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world, German men banded together, determined to retaliate against the perceived strike against them. Over several days, tens of thousands of Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps, while thousands of synagogues and Jewish businesses were burned to ash during Kristallnacht, or “The Night of Broken Glass”. The male-­bonded coalitionary violence and warfare that looms large in the horrors of the Holocaust seems to be at least as old as our species and likely older. We see a

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continuous record of warfare in human history and in the time before recorded history (Keely, 1996; Wrangham, 1999). In War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, Keely (1996) compiled extensive archaeological evidence for prehistoric violence and current data from small-­scale societies to estimate that 90 to 95 per cent of societies engage in warfare, with the great majority engaging in military activities at least once per year (Keely, 1996, pp. 27–­32). Because of its frequency, primitive warfare was much more deadly than civilised warfare. Keeley estimates that tribal warfare is on average twenty times more deadly than twentieth-­century warfare, whether calculated as a percentage of total deaths due to war or as average deaths per year from war as a percentage of the total population. Most adult males in primitive and pre-­historic societies engaged in warfare and “saw combat repeatedly in a lifetime” (Keely, 1996, p. 174). During the brief 300 thousand years of Homo sapiens’ history, about 95 per cent of which was spent as hunter-­ gatherers, men needed to be ruthlessly violent. Lethal raids are the essence of primitive war; 20 to 40 per cent of male deaths in the few remaining hunter-­gatherer societies are at the hands of other men in lethal raids. The equivalent death rate, if the world’s population were still hunter-­gatherers, would be well over a billion war deaths in the twentieth century (Keely, 1996).3 In lethal raids, a party of allied men collectively seeks a vulnerable neighbour, assesses the probability of success and conducts a surprise attack. This complex behaviour arose in our ape ancestors prior to the chimp/­ human split. Male-­bonded coalitionary violence dates back to our common ancestor and bloodies all hominid species. Men evolved brain mechanisms to assess and seek out opportunities to impose deadly violence in specific contexts that led to some adaptive advantage (Wrangham & Peterson, 1996; Wrangham, 1999; Buss & Duntley, 2000; Buss, 2005). Why would violence, and particularly lethal raiding and coalitionary violence, be adaptive in evolutionary terms? Lethal raiding permits men to successfully attract or secure reproductive-­age females, weaken neighbours, inspire fear, protect themselves from incursion, expand their safe borders and incur very little risk when they attack in overpowering numbers (Wrangham, 1999). Buss and colleagues suggest a number of benefits including co-­opting the resources of others, defending oneself and one’s kin, inflicting costs on male rivals, negotiating status and power hierarchies and deterring rivals from future aggression (Buss & Shakelford, 1997; Buss, 2005). Buss also notes that if you eliminate a rival, you eliminate his future descendants who would compete with your future descendants in an ancestral world of scarce resources. The murdering of one’s competitor paved a long, ever-­widening future road of reproductive success for one’s offspring and subsequent generations to come.

Importantly, male-­bonded coalitionary violence has been observed in our closest animal relatives. In 1974, in Jane Goodall’s preserve in Africa, one of the field workers watched as a group of eight male chimpanzees came together. With coordination, stealth and surprise, they moved through a neighbouring community and sought out a lone male chimpanzee to kill him. Over the course of the next few weeks, they watched the same group repeatedly attack the neighbouring community until they had destroyed all the males. Since then, this violent raiding has been observed repeatedly in chimpanzees (Wrangham & Peterson, 1996), a phenomenon that requires a level of considerable cognitive sophistication. In male chimpanzees, all such murderous violence reportedly occurs in bonded coalitions. It is the only documented evidence of male coalitionary killing in more than ten million animal species. This is the strongest evidence that this behaviour existed in the common ancestor of chimpanzees and man. Its retention through innumerable generations is a testament to the pervasive and important role it plays in the species that it serves.

In-­group/­out-­group biases Central to understanding the divisive role of ethnicity, religion or politics is our inability to appreciate groups as collections of distinct individuals. We tend to discount variation within groups and conceptualise both in-­groups and especially out-­groups as more homogeneous than they really are. Religion historically has served as one of the crucial tags that instantly distinguishes a group, dividing the world into us and them (Boyer, 2001), our “death-­deserving” enemies. Once formed, in-­group versus out-­group tendencies can be exacerbated by actual conflicts of interest between groups (Triandis, 1990, p.  96), such as vying for scarce resources (e.g. jobs, land, etc.), and hostility rises between groups as social identity processes are exacerbated (Hogg & Abrams, 1988 Hewstone, Rubin, & Willis, 2002). It suggests an adaptation for between-­ group conflict, as “in one country after another, other ethnic groups are described in unflattering or disparaging terms” (Horowitz, 1985, p.  7). The result of these processes is discrimination in favour of the in-­group, with beliefs in its superiority and the inferiority of the out-­group. Religious or political leaders can prey upon this ethnocentricity to ensure loyalty to the faith and in-­group patriotism. Hitler easily drew upon the deep well of centuries-­old Christian anti-­Semitism to promise his eager followers a world without Jews (Confino, 2014). The hard economic times of the Weimar Republic after World War I  was another factor contributing to the readiness to scapegoat the Jews. After being blamed for

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losing the war from the so-­called stab in the back, he also held the Jews responsible for liberalism, modernity, communism and capitalism.

Obedience because I was one of the many horses pulling the wagon and couldn’t escape left or right because of the will of the driver.4 –­ Adolf Eichmann, on participation in the Holocaust, stated in his prison memoirs One cannot escape a discussion of “evil” without hearing the name Adolf Eichmann. His name became synonymous with the phrase “banality of evil” thanks to Hannah Arendt’s 1963 controversial book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1994). As Steven Pinker points out in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, despite Eichmann’s underlying anti-­Semitism, Arendt’s calling into question the myth of pure evil led many social psychologists to demonstrate the more or less banal motives behind “evil” acts, such as obedience to authority. This tendency increases under the influence of a charismatic, autocratic leader. The Nazi party made few gains in the middle to late 1920s because of the momentary stability of the Weimar Republic, but the gains for Hitler set the stage for its explosive rise to power. Between 1925 and 1928, the party transformed into a “Fuhrer party”, centering around one man, Adolf Hitler. In late 1927 Rudolf Hess wrote of the “Fuhrer principle”, “absolute authority directed downwards and absolute duty directed upwards” (Ulrich, 2016, p. 207). Stanley Milgram’s (1974) famous experiments demonstrate that any ordinary human is willing to torture another human simply at the command of an authority figure. While a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the research designs and the impact that they had on social psychology is beyond the scope of this chapter, there has been great debate about the implications of these experiments, particularly to our understanding of Nazi behaviour in World War II (Miller, 1986, 2004, Blass, 1999). We are all more deferential to authority than we care to believe, and this motivator could have played a significant role in the genocidal behaviours of the Nazis. Studies similar to Milgram’s were found to replicate his results (Miller, 1986, 2004; Meeus & Raaijmakers, 1995; Burger, 2009) and showed no systematic change over time (Blass, 1999), even at perceived personal risk to one’s self (Martin, Lobb, Chapman, & Spillane, 1976). Obedience to authority has strong evolutionary roots. The evidence for this is seen in its pervasive distribution across human and non-­human animals (Van Vugt, 2006). Researchers view present-­day hunter-­ gatherer societies, like the Hazda and Kalahari G/­Wi

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(Woodburn, 1982; Boehm, 1999), as a reasonable modern window into our evolutionary past.5 They have found that even societies without defined leader roles typically had figures central to the group who guided them (Boehm, 1999). Gender and age commonly form a basis for authority rankings and influence decision-­ making (Fiske, 1992; Woodburn, 1982). The leader and follower phenomenon is seen in other species as well. Baboons, a close primate relative, echo the behaviour of the Hazda, with a majority of the group following dominant females or the harem-­holding male (Dunbar, 1983). Follow-­the-­leader behaviour is seen in a number of others species, including barnacle geese (Kurvers et al., 2009), bees, pigeons (Nagy, Ákos, Biro, & Vicsek, 2010), white-­faced capuchin monkeys (Leca, Gunst, Thierry,  & Petit, 2003), gorillas (Boehm, 1999) and other primates (Van Vugt, 2006; Van Vugt, Johnson, Kaiser, & O’Gorman, 2008). In the same way that our leader ancestors would have had to maintain group cohesion and peace, leaders amongst chimpanzees have been seen to keep the peace amongst the troop by intervening when conflict arises (Boehm, 1999). Van Vugt (2006) notes that while an evolutionary explanation of a leader’s role is fairly intuitive (access to more mates, prestige and resources), the explanation of why people follow a leader is less clear. While we may assume that being on top of the social hierarchy in a leadership role means keeping all of the advantages for oneself, followers also gain advantages for their loyalty. While leaders may enjoy more land, more material goods and less labour than their subordinates, they are expected to provide care and protection to those who are under them (Fiske, 1992). As summed up by Kenrick and Griskevicius (2013), “The underlings bestow loyalty and special privileges on the higher-­ups, but in turn they expect leaders to provide resources, money, protection and direction” (p. 65). Leaders provided direction towards common group goals, such as maintenance of the peace amongst the group, organised hunting parties for large game and coordinated defence against out-­ group rivals (Van Vugt, 2006). Followers would have benefits from this group organisation, while members of groups who crumbled with too many leaders and too few followers would not have been as fortunate. Turning back to Milgram’s results, one of the arguments against obedience and its role in the Holocaust was the fact that not all individuals who participated in the genocide seemed conflicted or distressed about following orders as they had been in Milgram’s experimental design (Miller, 1986, 2004). As Staub notes, “Often people [simply] obey because, starting with shared motives, they join leaders; they identify with them and adopt their views and wishes” (p. 43). Leaders can and do bestow benefits on the people who follow them, but they are not given out equally. The best and most loyal followers achieve a level of social status

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and benefits not obtainable to those who merely went along. For instance, when Hitler and some of his followers were tried, convicted and imprisoned in 1924 for the beer hall putsch, they enjoyed status and privileges in Landsberg prison (Ulrich, 2016). In contrast, dissenters are punished, which is an evolutionarily costly price. An ability to identify with the leader, to adopt his or her wishes and make them one’s own, would have benefited our follower ancestors greatly. And humans are selective about which leaders whose ideologies they are more prone to adopt. As Nesse and Lloyd (1992) point out, “If this is correct, people should identify most with those who are wealthy, powerful, opinionated, and punitive, a prediction that seems likely to be correct”. One needs only consider the 2016 United States presidential election and the 2017 United States political climate to see an example of a wealthy and opinionated leader who blatantly lies, yet is able to recruit the loyalty and redirect the ideals of many. Identification with a leader implies the fervent adoption of that leader’s ideology. As pointed out by Haslam and Reicher (2012), “At root, the fundamental point is that tyranny does not flourish because perpetrators are helpless and ignorant of their actions. It flourishes because they actively identify with those who promote vicious acts as virtuous”. It is also relevant here to invoke Trivers’ concept of self-­deception (1976, 2011). The best way to deceive others into thinking that one is a loyal follower and believes wholeheartedly in an ideology would be if one were deceiving oneself as well. The follower may conform and adopt that ideology, even if it were not one he initially accepted. When confronted with challenges where strong leadership would have benefited those who were led, followers’ views of leaders improve. The “rally effect” occurs in times of crises when people put aside political and individual differences; support for leaders increases, at least for a short while after the inciting event (Stoll, 1987; Hetherington & Nelson, 2003, Stapley, 2012; Van Vugt, Johnson, Kaiser, & O’Gorman, 2008). We want our leaders to make things better and to bestow as much benefit on us as we can convince them to provide. Adopting ideologies, increasing good will, and rallying for the leader would encourage leaders to do their best for the group and would gain us the maximum benefit in the process. The spectacles like the 1936 Nuremberg rally capitalise on these tendencies in us all, making us vulnerable to manipulation by certain character types, especially those who are described as “evil”.

Psychopathy The word “psychopath” is used interchangeably with the word “evil” in popular culture.6 The term and its clinical manifestations were discussed extensively in

Hervey Cleckley’s 1941 book The Mask of Sanity. Cleckley described psychopathy as a constellation of symptoms including superficial charm and good “intelligence”, unreliability, insincerity, lack of remorse, inadequately motivated antisocial behaviour, general poverty of major affective reactions and unresponsiveness in general personal relationships, amongst others (Cleckley, 1982). Today, psychopathy is a construct similar to the one Cleckley described, and the manifestations he eloquently laid out have been echoed by the current and extensive literature on psychopathy. The behavioural manifestations include impulsivity and poor behaviour control, frequent boredom with constant need for excitement, cruelty to animals as a child, lying and truancy, as well as adult antisocial behaviour such as stealing and frequent fighting (Hare, 1993). It most closely resembles and is likely a subtype of Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD). It is described in the DSM-­5 as the repetitive disregard for the rights of others, manifest in behaviours such as deceitfulness, aggression, failure to follow social norms, recklessness towards others’ safety, irresponsibility and lack of remorse (DSM-­5;7 Glenn, Johnson,  & Raine, 2013). ASPD is seen in approximately 3 per cent of men and 1 per cent of women, which represent about 47 per cent of men and 21 per cent of women in incarcerated samples8 (Glenn, Johnson, & Raine, 2013). Current theoretical considerations of psychopathy further break down the construct into primary and secondary psychopathy. A person with primary psychopathy displays the superficial charm, callousness and grandiosity as defined by Cleckley, and employs instrumental aggression to exploit others in an emotionless and deliberate manner. A  person with secondary psychopathy, by contrast, experiences considerable emotional distress by way of anxiety, depression and anger. His or her violence, which may be impulsive, largely stems from these emotions rather than the cold and calculated actions of the predatory primary psychopath (Lalumière, Mishra,  & Harris, 2008; Drislane et  al., 2014). Extreme sadism may also be noted in both, which may partly derive from separate origins, that is, underlying genetic influences in the former, in addition to early life experience 9 (Lalumière, Mishra, & Harris, 2008). In this chapter we consider the primary psychopath, from now on labelled as merely “psychopath”. Psychopaths make up approximately 1 per cent of the population10 (Neumann & Hare, 2008; Glenn, Kurzban, & Raine, 2011; Pinker, 2011), and it is likely they actively participated in the atrocities of World War II, finding sanctioning under Nazi rule. As pointed out by Steven Pinker: Though no society can stock its militias and armies exclusively with psychopaths, such men are bound to be disproportionately attracted to these

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adventures, with their prospect of plunder and rape  .  .  . genocides and civil wars often involve a division of labor between the ideologues or warlords who run them and the shock troops, including some number of psychopaths, who are happy to carry them out. (Pinker, 2011, p. 511) A prominent and likely example is Reinhard Heydrich (1904–­1942), who led the Gestapo and the SS killing squads (the Einsatzgruppen), who helped to coordinate Kristallnacht and who was instrumental in the Nazi invasion of Poland. Most importantly, he led the Wannsee Conference, the meeting that initiated the Final Solution (Gerwarth, 2011). Even Adolf Hitler, whose name is synonymous with the word “evil”, called Heydrich the “man with the iron heart”.11 His behaviour, his callousness and the utterly cold-­hearted way he conducted himself are consistent with psychopathy. Unfortunately, the tools for evaluating psychopathic personality traits were limited at the time of the Nuremburg Trials, but we may deduce they were overrepresented amongst the Nazis. Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist (PCL), in its revised form, the PCL-­R, now considered the gold standard, was still decades away (Hare, 1993; Hare & Neumann, 2008). From an evolutionary perspective, certain factors have allowed psychopathy to exist and persist over the course of human history. The psychopath’s superficial charm could have drawn in peers and lulled those in contact with him into a false sense of security, while their callousness and deceitfulness could have aided in taking advantage of unsuspecting mates and victims without giving themselves away. The aggression and disregard for social norms would have enabled the psychopath to easily break the rules and harm others. While the evolution of psychopathy makes intuitive sense, game theory, which is often used as a model for human behaviour, shows that cooperation pays off more times than not (Axelrod, 1984). In fact, humans have a propensity to actively punish those who “free-­ ride” or cheat, even if it is at a cost to themselves (Fehr & Gachter, 2002). However, psychopaths have two advantages: Their numbers are low, and humans are fallible – they can forget. In fact, when including these factors in simulations using game theory, cheating behaviour is found to be more beneficial than cooperation at times (Harpending  & Sobus, 1987). In fact, a stable equilibrium of 2 per cent was found for cheaters compared to cooperators in at least one simulation (Colman & Wilson, 1997). This corresponds, roughly, to the proposed prevalence of psychopathy in the general population. One of the best ways to judge whether a trait is adaptive or not is whether it leads to reproductive success. Psychopathy has been shown to facilitate reproductive encounters, particularly for male psychopaths,

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who benefit the most from maximising the number of their sexual partners.12 This includes being charming and engaging in short-­term mating strategies, strategies that lend themselves best to deception. These allow for minimal time spent with a given partner, and thus less chance for that partner to acquire the data to expose the psychopath’s lies. Predictions about human cheating behaviour reflective of psychopathy indicate that a male psychopath will be skilled at gaining mating opportunities by convincing females of his resources and the likelihood of his willingness to invest in her and her offspring (Harpending  & Sobus, 1987). These displays appear to work, as psychopathy scores are correlated with perceived attractiveness for men, but not for women (Visser, Pozzebon, Bogaert, & Ashton, 2010). Psychopathy is also associated with higher numbers of sexual partners and affairs for men (Visser et al., 2010).

Comprehend, condemn, and never condone “The enormity of the Holocaust seems to render any effort to explain it controversial. The very act of attempting to reduce the Holocaust to more manageable intellectual dimensions may be viewed as presumptuous, as an ill-­fated venture to comprehend that which is ultimately unknowable” (Miller, 1986, p. 180). Before we move on to a larger discussion of evil, it is important to understand the purpose of the argument that was previously laid out. Human behaviour is complex. Certainly the behaviours displayed during the Holocaust are equally complex. In this chapter, we have attempted to use an evolutionary lens to show how four human traits that developed over the course of evolutionary history may have contributed to the behaviours demonstrated by Nazis and bystanders against the victims of the Holocaust in the early part of the twentieth century. We emphasise contribute as human behaviour is made of many factors. However, the complexity of such behaviours necessitates that a discussion about its origins begin with a fraction of its building blocks. Some who write about the Holocaust believe it is immoral to attempt to explain such behaviours (Pinker, 2011). The prominent journalist, political commentator and filmmaker, Claude Lanzmann, went so far as to call any attempts to explain the actions of Adolf Hitler as an “obscenity” (Rosenbaum, 1998). There is also experimental evidence that concludes that even those who try to explain “evil” or bad behaviour analytically condone such behaviour (Miller, 2004). Therefore, some might perceive the authors of this chapter as making excuses for the atrocities committed by the Nazis and their collaborators. However, we offer neither approval nor forgiveness, as, ultimately, we are beings with choices and free will. We have adaptations

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towards pro-­social and cooperative behaviour, and adaptations to understand and weigh the possibility of social sanctions on our actions. Even the most callous, unempathic psychopath knows intellectually what is “right” and “wrong” in the eyes of society, even if he or she cannot feel it on an emotional level. Indeed, the Nazis made great efforts, when possible, to hide the enormity of their crimes in the death camps. Therefore, the blood of millions of Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, Slavs and other “undesirables” is on the hands of all of those who pulled the triggers, dropped the Zyklon B, performed medical experimentation and all of the other crimes too many to number. Blood also saturates the hands of those who sat behind the desks and gave the orders, veiled by bureaucracy. It is on those who were “just following orders”. This chapter and others that seek the roots of genocide are hardly making an apology for the barbaric behaviour. It is an effort to begin to explain the evolutionary adaptations that lead one person to harm many others, the countercurrent to the pro-­social adaptations that are equally present in us all.

Why we cling to “evil” We as a species cling to this construct of “evil”. Doubtless, even readers who find enlightenment while considering our evolutionary perspective may still say, “Yes, but true evil exists”. Why do we cling so hard to this concept of “evil”? Joshua Duntley and David Buss (2004) present a theory to answer this question. They note that acts are considered evil when they impose heavy “fitness costs” on the victim, his or her relatives and his or her social networks. The murder of a large group, genocide, is the ultimate infliction of fitness costs, and, by definition, the most evil of actions. By employing a cognitive evaluation mechanism, an individual is better able to initiate anti-­threat behaviours that will allow him or her to avoid such fitness costs. Therefore, even our evaluation of someone as “evil” is an adaptation.13 Once our cognitive mechanism of “evil” is initiated, others may use it to justify perpetrating mass harm against those who we evaluate as evil (Duntley & Buss, 2004). It is ironic that those we now label as the embodiments of pure evil used that same concept to fuel hatred towards Jewish people during the Holocaust. The Nazi propaganda that spread throughout Germany depicted the Jews as THE source of evil. This may have contributed to bystanders of the Holocaust looking the other way as the Jews were beaten, tortured, murdered and hauled away to work and death camps. Why else might we cling to the concept of evil in society? It protects us from our own innate “evilness”. Most people have engaged in phantasies of murder (Buss, 2005). Many people experience pleasure while

watching violent plays and media and reading violent books (Pinker, 2011). We all have the capacity to engage in what is known as The Moralisation Gap. This, according to Pinker (2011), is a form of self-­serving bias, in which we emphasise the degree of depravity and deliberate intent of the perpetrator when violence is committed against us while minimising our own retaliatory and anti-­social behaviour against said perpetrator as being necessary and moral given the circumstances. Like other forms of self-­serving biases, it requires our innate ability to self-­deceive, an evolutionary adaptation in its own right (Pinker, 2011; Trivers, 2011). Invoking the concept of “pure evil” as an innate driver of our enemies’ behaviour both helps us condone our own retaliatory behaviour and helps shield us from self-­reflection that will force us to confront our own violent instincts. It protects us from the realisations that little separates us from the Nazis and other “evil”-­doers throughout history.

Moving beyond evil But when we hold up the concept of evil to examine it, it is no explanation at all. For a scientist this is, of course, wholly inadequate. What the Nazis (and others like them) did was unimaginably terrible. But that doesn’t mean we should simply shut down the inquiry into how people are capable of behaving in such ways or use a non-­explanation, such as saying people are simply evil. –­ Simon Baron-­Cohen, The Science of Evil, pg. 6 One may ask, “What is the harm in using the term “evil”? These acts are so horrific that they deserve a powerful word to describe those who commit them. However, to label acts and those who commit them as evil is to end the important conversation that the acts necessitate. Why do people do such harm to so many others, and how can we prevent it? This chapter is not the first time evil was introduced as an outdated concept and attempts were made to extend our understanding of human behaviour beyond it. Hannah Arendt introduced the idea of the “banality of evil”. In recent years we have Simon’s Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream, Baron-­Cohen’s The Science of Evil, Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature, Buss’s The Murderer Next Door, Staub’s The Roots of Evil and Daly and Wilson’s Homicide, amongst others. That we felt a need to open our concluding paragraphs with a defensive note that our commentary was not meant as condoning Nazi behaviour shows that we as a society, and as a species, have yet to move beyond the concept of “true evil”. To abandon that concept means to temporarily set aside our justified anger and disgust in an effort to understand vile human behaviour

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in the name of science. Until we, scientists and lay public alike, no longer use the term “evil” to describe human behaviour, we cannot truly say we understand it. That is the litmus test, and we fail it every day. Thousands of years of scientific enquiry have led us to conclude that the Earth is not flat, is not located at the centre of the universe, and is not 4,000 years old. We discovered that atoms are made of even smaller particles than protons, neutrons and electrons. We now know human illness is not caused by humours nor is it cured by leeches or prayer. In this tradition, we must turn to the concept of evil. It is time we look into a mirror and recognise our baser instincts in an effort to quarantine them. Only when we understand the worst of human behaviour can we identify ways to stop it before it happens. We owe it to the hundreds of millions of victims over the course of human history to prevent countless more to come. We must take a hard look at our reflection in the mirror and recognise that this idea of evil is just a deception we use to avoid the truth. We are all capable of “evil”. “The Holocaust is not only history, but warning” (Black Earth, Timothy Snyder, 2015). “Never again” means nothing unless we acknowledge it can happen again. Our evolved capacity for murder, even mass murder, coupled with charismatic leaders, ideological hate and modern technology can culminate in new Holocausts. We must escape the collective self-­deception that humanity is better than it is, and that such atrocities are a relic of our past. We must remain forever vigilant, knowledgeable, as well as honest and humble before the unassailable facts of history and our evolved human nature.

Notes 1 An excellent narrative of Darwin’s intellectual journey to his great discovery is Frank Sulloway. (2009, June). Why Darwin rejected intelligent design. Journal of Biosciences, 34(2), 173–­183. 2 We stumble at the prospect of comprehending large timescales and fall when we attempt to grasp the eons of evolution, even human evolution. Our brains are designed to grasp the timescales of our own life times: Seconds, minutes, hours, days and years. (Dawkins, 1998). It is hard to truly comprehend, but here is one thought experiment: Imagine that each hour is 100,000  years. We will take a day as representative of 2.4  million years. At midnight our genus Homo appears in Africa. At dawn some leave Africa for the first time. By lunchtime some have reached present-­day Europe. At dinner time our most immediate ancestor, Homo heidelbergensis emerges in Africa. Some migrate to Europe and become the Neanderthals. Anatomically modern humans emerge in Africa from the remaining heidelbergensis population about 9 PM at night. Fully modern humans, our species, emerge about 11:20 PM. It is not until six minutes before midnight, 11:54 PM, that we start to settle into early agriculture communities in the

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4 5 6 7 8

9

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Near East. For all that time, from midnight until almost midnight the following evening, we lived in small, kin-­ based hunter-­gatherer bands in Africa. All seven billion people on the planet today arose from a small number of those hunter-­gatherers in Africa. That is the physical and social environment that shaped all of us. The debate about the level of violence in our ancestral past has reopened with the publication of Robert Sapolsky’s Behave (2017). He summarises and sides with the challenges to Keely, Pinker, Wrangham, Chagnon and others. Sapolsky argues that our hunter-­gatherer past, the environment that shaped us, was far less violent. We are hardly experts, but wary of our species’ tendency for self-­ deception. We lean towards the arguments by the Keely/­ Pinker experts in this debate, and that is reflected in our chapter. www.cbc.ca/­n ews/­w orld/­e ichmann-­m emoirs-­d escribe-­ nazi-­death-­machine-­1.198014 However, see Foley, (1995) www.newyorker.com/­b ooks/­p age-­t urner/­w hat-­d o-­w e-­ mean-­by-­evil dsm.psychiatryonline.org According to DSM-­5, the 12-­month prevalence of ASPD is 0.2–­3.3%, with the highest prevalence (greater than 70%) is found amongst males in substance use clinics and forensic settings. Data accessed at http://­dsm.psychiatryonline.org.proxy.its.virginia.edu/­doi/­full/­10.1176/­appi. books.9780890425596.dsm18. This may represent an example of contingent shift, or an adaptation that allows one to adopt a number of adaptive strategies based on their environment in order to maximise their reproductive fitness (see Glenn, Kurzban,  & Raine, 2011). In Robert Hare’s book Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, he notes that there are approximately two to three million individuals with psychopathy in North America, making that number slightly below 1 per cent. However, the true prevalence is hard to ascertain, and depends on the PCL-­R score cut-­off you use and whether you include people who display subclinical psychopathic traits. https://­translate.google.com/­translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=www. mdr.de/­zeitreise/­ns-­zeit/­reinhard-­heydrich-­ns-­zeit100.html& prev=search This may explain why males score higher on psychopathic inventories than women across studies (Visser, Pozzebon, Bogaert, & Ashton, 2010; Jonason, Li, Webster & Schmitt, 2009; Jonason, Li  & Buss, 2010; Ross  & Rausch, 2001; Glenn, Kurzban, & Raine, 2011). It was a more successful reproductive strategy for men than women over our evolutionary history. Duntley and Buss (2004) note that these evaluations are complex and include the degree of benefit to the perpetrator. Killing someone who is about to kill you is seen as less evil than killing a stranger for fun. This is likely why we view psychopaths as quintessentially evil. From someone not familiar with evolutionary theory of psychopathy, it would appear that psychopaths commit antisocial behaviours for the sake of being antisocial.

References Arendt, H. (1994). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. New York: Penguin Books.

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Axelrod, R. (1984). The evolution of cooperation. New York: Basic Books, Inc. Baron-­Cohen, S. (2012). Science of evil: On empathy and the origins of cruelty. New York: Basic Books. Blass, T. (1999). The Milgram paradigm after 35  years: Some things we now know about obedience to authority. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 29(5), 955–­978. Boehm, C. (1999). Hierarchy in the forest: The evolution of egalitarian behavior. London: Harvard University Press. Boyer, P. (2001). Religion explained: The evolutionary origins of religious thought. New York: Basic Books. Burger, J. M. (2009). Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today? American Psychology, 64, 1–­11. Buss, D. (2005). The murderer next door. New York: Penguin Press. Buss, D., & Duntley, J. D. (2000). “Is the mind made for murder?” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, Amherst, MA. Buss, D.,  & Shakelford, T. (1997). Human aggression in evolutionary psychological perspective. Clinical Psychology Review, 17, 605–­619. Carrier, D. (2011). The advantage of standing up to fight and the evolution of habitual Bipedalism in Hominins. PLOS One. Carrier, D., & Morgan, M. (2015). Protective buttressing of the hominin face. Biological Review, 90, 330–­346. Cleckley, H. (1982). The mask of sanity (Rev. ed.). St. Louis: Mosby. Colman, A. M., & Wilson, J. C. (1997). Antisocial personality disorder: An evolutionary game theory analysis. Legal and Criminology Psychology, 2, 23–­34. Confino, A. (2014). A world without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from persecution to genocide. New Haven: Yale University Press. Cosmides, L.,  & Tooby, J. (1992). Cognitive adaptations for social exchanges. In J. Barklow, L. Cosmides,  & J. Tooby (Eds.), The adapted mind (pp.  601–­624). New York: Oxford University Press. Cosmides, L.,  & Tooby, J. (2013). Evolutionary psychology: New perspectives on cognition and motivation. Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 201–­229. Dawkins, R. (1998). Unweaving the rainbow. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Drislane, L. E., Patrick, C. J., Sourander, A., Sillanmäki, L., Aggen, S. H., Elonheimo, H., et al. (2014). Distinct variants of extreme psychopathic individuals in society at large: Evidence from a population-­based sample. Personality Disorders: Theory, Research, and Treatment, 5(2), 154. Dunbar, R. I. M. (1983). Structure of gelada baboon reproductive units. Ethology, 63(4), 265–­282. Duntley, J. D., & Buss, D.M (2004). The plausibility of adaptations for homicide. In P. Carruthers, S. Laurence, & S. Stich (Eds.), The structure of the innate mind. New York: Oxford University Press. Fehr, E., & Gachter, S. (2002). Altruistic punishment in humans. Nature, 415, 137–­140. Fiske, A. P. (1992). The four elementary forms of sociality: Framework for a unified theory of social relations. Psychological Review, 99(4), 689. Foley, R. (1995). The adaptive legacy of human evolution: A  search for the environment of evolutionary adaptivedness, Evolutionary Anthropology, 4(6), 194–­203. Gerwarth, R. (2011). Hitler’s Hangman: The life of Heydrich. New Haven: Yale University Press. Glenn, A. L., Johnson, A. K.,  & Raine, A. (2013). Antisocial personality disorder: A  current review. Current Psychiatry Reports, 15(12), 427. Glenn, A. L., Kurzban, R., & Raine, A. (2011). Evolutionary theory and psychopathy. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 16, 371–­380.

Hare, R. D. (1993). Without conscience. New York: Guilford Press. Hare, R. D., & Neumann, C. S. (2008). Psychopathy as a clinical and empirical construct. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 4, 217–­246. Harpending, H. C., & Sobus, J. (1987). Sociopathy as an adaptation. Ethology and Sociobiology, 8, 63–­72. Haslam, A.,  & Reicher, S. D. (2012). Contesting the “Nature” of conformity: What Milgram and Zimbardo’s studies really show. PLoS Biology, 10(11), e1001426. Retrieved from https://­doi.org/­10.1371/­journal.pbio.1001426. Hetherington, M. J., & Nelson, M. (2003). Anatomy of a rally effect: George W. Bush and the war on terrorism. Political Science and Politics, 36(01), 37–­42. Hewstone, M., Rubin, M., & Willis, H. (2002). Intergroup bias, Annual Review of Psychology, 53(1), 575–­604. Hogg, M. A.,  & Abrams, D. (1988). Social identifications. New York: Routledge. Horns, J., Jung, R., & Carrier, D. (2015). In vitro strain in human metacarpal bones during striking: Testing the pugilism hypothesis of hominin hand evolution. Journal of Experimental Biology, 218, 3215–­3221. Horowitz, D. L. (1985). Ethnic groups in conflict. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Jonason, P. K., Li, N. P., & Buss, D. (2010). The costs and benefits of the Dark Triad: Implications for mate poaching and mate retention tactics, Personality and Individual Differences, 48(4), 373-­378. Jonason, P. K., Li, N. P., Webster, G. D., & Schmitt, D. P. (2009). The Dark Triad: Facilitating a short term mating strategy in men, European Journal of Personality, 23, 5–­18. Keely, L. H. (1996). War before civilization: The myth of the peaceful savage. New York: Oxford University Press. Kenrick, D. T.,  & Griskevicius, V. (2013). The rational animal: How evolution made us smarter than we think. New York: Basic Books. Kurvers, R. H., Eijkelenkamp, B., van Oers, K., van Lith, B., van Wieren, S. E., Ydenberg, R. C., & Prins, H. H. (2009). Personality differences explain leadership in barnacle geese. Animal Behaviour, 78(2), 447–­453. Lalumière, M. L., Mishra, S.,  & Harris, G. T. (2008). In cold blood: The evolution of psychopathy. In Evolutionary forensic psychology: Darwinian foundations of crime and law (pp. 139–­ 159). New York: Oxford University Press. Leca, J. B., Gunst, N., Thierry, B., & Petit, O. (2003). Distributed leadership in semifree-­ranging white-­faced capuchin monkeys. Animal Behaviour, 66(6), 1045–­1052. Martin, J., Lobb, B., Chapman, G. C.,  & Spillane, R. (1976). Obedience under conditions demanding self-­immolation. Human Relations, 29(4), 345–­356. Meeus, W. H., & Raaijmakers, Q. A. (1995). Obedience in modern society: The Utrecht studies. Journal of Social Issues, 51(3), 155–­175. Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to authority: An experimental view. New York: Harper & Row Publishers. Miller, A. G. (1986). The obedience experiments: A case study of controversy in social science. West Port: Praeger. Miller, A. G. (2004). What can the Milgram obedience experiments tell us about the Holocaust?: Generalizing from the social psychology laboratory. In A. G. Miller (Ed.), The social psychology of good and evil (pp. 193–­302). New York: Guilford Press. Morgan, M. H. & Carrier, D. R. (2013). Protective buttressing of the human fist and the evolution of hominin hands, Journal of Experimental Biology, 216, 236–­244. Nagy, M., Ákos, Z., Biro, D.,  & Vicsek, T. (2010). Hierarchical group dynamics in pigeon flocks. Nature, 464(7290), 890–­893.

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Nesse, R.,  & Lloyd, A. (1992). The evolution of psychodynamic mechanisms. In J. Barklow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby (Eds.), The adapted mind (pp. 601–­624). New York: Oxford University Press. Neumann, C. S.,  & Hare, R. D. (2008). Psychopathic traits in a large community sample: Links to violence, alcohol use, and intelligence. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 76(5), 893. Pinker, S. (2011). The better angels of our nature: Why violence has declined. New York: Penguin Books. Rosenbaum, R. (1998). Explaining Hitler: The search for the origins of his evil. New York: Random House. Ross, S. R. & Rausch, M. K. (2001). Psychopathic attributes and achievement dispositions in a college sample, Personality and Individual Differences, 30, 471–­480. Sapolsly, R. (2017). Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst. New York. Penguin Press. Sell, A., Hone, L. S. E., & Pound, N. (2012). The importance of pysical strength to human males. Human Nature, 23, 30–­44. Snyder, T. (2015). Black earth: The Holocaust as history and warning. New York: Tim Duggan Books. Stapley, C. S. (2012). The domestic rally effect and terrorism. Global Security Studies, 3(4). Staub, E. (1989). The roots of evil: The origins of genocide and other group violence. London: Cambridge University Press. Stoll, R. J. (1987). The sound of the guns: Is there a congressional rally effect after US military action? American Politics Quarterly, 15(2), 223–­237.

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Section V Creativity

19 Film1 Andrea Sabbadini

Mostly silence Mostly silence (with some notable exceptions) from survivors who feel guilty about having survived, irrationally ashamed of what had been done to them, frightened to be disbelieved, certain to be misunderstood. Mostly silence for some twenty years after the end of the so-­called Final Solution of the so-­called Jewish Question from filmmakers (and historians, writers, artists, psychoanalysts), all too stunned to know how to think critically about a collective trauma of such unprecedented proportions. For many the Holocaust was, and for some still is, a taboo. Losses, all losses, at first cannot be taken in and mourned. An initial, perhaps prolonged, individual as well as collective repression after such a colossal loss of trust in the humanity of humans was to be expected. But, sooner or later, what has been repressed has a tendency to return. If, as Theodor W. Adorno provocatively suggested, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (Adorno, 1955, p. 34), should their, our, silence have continued indefinitely? Should artists such as filmmakers ever attempt to enter this “sacred zone” and engage, from whichever aesthetic, moral, psychological, or political angle, with a phenomenon almost unspeakable (because beyond words), unimaginable (because beyond images), beyond any form of understandable representation? If something is so extreme to be “beyond”, do we still have a right to attempt to talk about it and to show it? Or do we have a duty to do so? We are left here with “a dilemma perennially confronting efforts to portray the Holocaust: whether a language (either verbal or

visual) can or should be created to imagine the unimaginable. Some deem the task impossible, or sacrilegious; others believe it to be as vital to the sacred mission of remembrance as the trial of war criminals” (Greenberg, 1994, p. 753). Is then silence on the Holocaust an acceptable option? Should we be allowed not to search for ways, however inadequate, to talk about, imagine, represent the attempted extermination of European Jewry by the Hitler regime? Should cinema and television, as the most popular media of our times, not play their part in helping us to understand and allowing us to remember and work through what would otherwise risk disappearing from our memories and consciences, only to remain as insipid history book chapters on Nazi Germany’s genocidal policy?

Cinema contributions to our understanding of the Holocaust In the course of the last half-­century, as Alexander Stein reminds us: Both American and European cinema have amassed a vast Holocaust film literature, encompassing a kaleidoscope of perspectives from fiction to fable, documentary to allegory, journalistic reportage to commercial release [. . .] from a broad range of vantage points and protagonists, including victims, survivors, their children, siblings, widows and widowers, Nazi perpetrators, conflicted German citizens and soldiers, politicians and jurists. (Stein, 2004, p. 756)2

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By now, Holocaust films – whether as fictional features, documentaries (also in their hybrid form of docudramas), or even animation3 – occupy an important place in the history of cinema. These movies, hundreds of them, were produced in different countries and written and directed by filmmakers with a variety of orientations, skills, and intentions. Many of these works are in black-and-white, some are in colour; some may include original archive material, or feature interviews, or may have voice-­over commentaries from a narrator; some are set on location in what remains of the original ghettos and lagers; others are fictional reconstructions of them; some focus on personal memories and accounts; others offer a wider historical perspective on those years’ events; some insist on a detached, objective analysis of facts; others stress the emotional responses that those facts evoke. While some critics regard with suspicion any film on such a sensitive subject as the Holocaust (irrespective of its author’s moral attitude, political orientation, or aesthetic merits), it cannot be ignored that millions of people around the world have become aware of, and formed their opinion about, the genocide of European Jewry not from learning about it in school or from reading about it in history books or even in best-­selling memoirs such as The Diary of Anne Frank (1947) and Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man (1947), or from visiting such places as Yad Vashem in Jerusalem or the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., but from watching some of the most popular and influential movies on the Holocaust.4

Psychoanalytic contributions to our understanding of Holocaust films5 Since the 1970s, psychoanalysis has given important contributions, most specifically about trauma, to our knowledge of various aspects of the Holocaust, central to the personal and collective experience of millions of victims, survivors, and even perpetrators. “There are two ways we can respond to trauma”, writes Lindy, “passively, in the ways that it makes us be part of it, and actively, in the ways that we attempt to make it part of our selves. As analysts, we try to help traumatised patients heal, drawing on our empathy and our own traumas to connect with them” (Lindy, 2002, p. 127). As well as exploring traumas – their causes, consequences, and transmission across generations – analysts have provided theoretical frameworks, often illustrated with relevant examples, to several other key issues. These have centred on the variety of idiosyncratic responses of ghetto dwellers and concentration camp inmates to the losses resulting from the deprivation of their familiar

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environment and from their dislocation into an irrational, sadistic, and psychotic world: losses of one’s relatives and friends, of one’s health, of one’s dignity, of one’s sense of identity, and of all hope in the future. Unconscious psychological strategies to adjust to such abnormal situations can include escape into suicidal depression and the use of the defensive mechanisms of denial, splitting, regression, and identification with the aggressors. Although these issues affect many of the characters in the movies to be discussed in this chapter, I shall not comment further on them here to avoid repeating ideas already well represented elsewhere in this International Textbook. I will instead briefly speculate on the motives which may have made some filmmakers (and other artists) choose victims and/­or survivors of the Holocaust as the subjects of their works. Of course, all artistic production is determined by a variety of pre-­Oedipal and Oedipal drives and conflicts, and involves attempts to deal with them: sublimation of repressed erotic and aggressive wishes, a narcissistic ambition to succeed in one’s career, sibling rivalry with colleagues, and a number of other factors always play a part in the creative process. Conscious reasons specific to artists representing the Holocaust may involve a genuine concern about this topic and the wish to educate, inform, shock, excite, challenge prejudice, or just record something that may otherwise get lost. Besides, in contrast to the historian’s impulse to tell it how it was, the artist’s impulse is to tell it how it could and should have been; this could be a reason why many Holocaust films focus on benevolent, heroic individuals and their acts of bravery and humanity, even if this only constituted a small part of the Holocaust experience. As to these filmmakers’ unconscious motives, an important component could be that their creative work may allow them to assuage their anxieties about such a devastating reality by offering some reassurance and redemption in regards to their own guilt, personal or collective, for being amongst those who have survived it. Many such filmmakers are themselves first or second generation survivors, but in a sense, all of us living in the twentieth and twenty-­first centuries in the Western World, whether Jewish or not, may be considered as children and grandchildren of a generation of survivors. Through a process of sublimation, films on the Holocaust could transform the persecution and murder of the Jews by the Nazis into meaningful works of art, thus helping those who have created them to feel they have played a part in repairing the enormous damage caused to humanity by this genocide and, in the process, help all of us too. One of the problems facing screenwriters and filmmakers engaged in producing movies on the Holocaust is finding the means to describe with appropriate sensitivity the physical pain caused to the camps’ inmates by the blows and the tortures, by the diseases and the

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exhaustion from forced overwork, by the thirst and the hunger and the freezing cold of Central European winters. More problematic still is how to portray the psychological violence perpetrated by the Nazis and suffered by their victims, primarily the prisoners’ fear of death and the dehumanising annihilation of their identity; how to characterise men and women whose individuality has been made recognisable only from the six-­figure numbers tattooed on their arms and the colour-­coded triangles on their pajama-­like uniforms, in a deliberate attempt to deprive them of their sense of self, of their ideals and values, of their will to resist and to fight back. While many people refuse to watch Holocaust films – and their ideological or emotional reasons should of course be respected – those of us who are willing spectators could be so for multiple motives complementary to those of the filmmakers themselves. These may include a conscious desire to learn about tragic events of such enormous historical importance, but also an unconscious voyeuristic curiosity (possibly tinged with primal scene fantasies of discovering something forbidden, and therefore frightening and/­or exciting), or even a morbid fascination for a reality so far removed from our current daily experiences, yet relatively close in time to our present lives. A reality, as recent cases of “ethnic cleansing” demonstrate, that is not unrepeatable in the future, much as we may believe its reoccurrence to be unthinkable. Besides, as we identify with the protagonists in the stories narrated by these films – and identification with victims is a common alternative to identification with aggressors – we are left wondering about how we would have behaved had we found ourselves in similar circumstances to those portrayed on the screen. More bravely or more cowardly? Would we have shown more (or less?) compassion and solidarity to our fellow victims? Would we have shared our piece of bread with them, or stolen theirs? Would we have rejected or accepted (as the eponymous character does in Sophie’s Choice) the impossible request to sacrifice the life of one of our children for that of another?

Archival footage and testimonies If we exclude those openly commercial products which “exploit the Holocaust merely as a background for sentimental stories of rescue and deliverance” (Liebman, 2007, p.  6), many other movies on the Final Solution are honest projects which either intend to help their audiences to learn about and understand, or at least throw some light on, the phenomenon of the genocide of Jews; or, instead, by immersing the viewers into a representation of the hellish, chaotic madness of the Nazi lagers, to put across the message that such a phenomenon is a visceral one beyond all rational explanation.

Some may think that fact-­based film is the only acceptable form of representation of historically real events such as those concerning the Holocaust. Others at the opposite end of the spectrum believe that only the creative imagination of artists, as long as fundamentally respectful of events for which we have historical evidence, is a most honest way to represent what they deem to be ultimately unrepresentable. Often, a clear-­ cut distinction between documentaries and fiction features turns out to be an artificial one. There is a problematic scarcity of cinematographic and photographic evidence about life and death in the ghettos and even more so in the lagers. “Because the Nazis were secretive about the concentration camps and particularly careful in concealing the programme for the Final Solution, there are often few documents or artefacts extant that provide evidence of the Holocaust” (Haggith & Newman, 2005, p. 6). We could speculate here that the desire of many filmmakers to create moving images depicting the Holocaust may also be in response to the deliberate attempts by the Nazis to prevent them from being created. Some of the existing material on Hitler’s regime and its atrocities was made by the Nazi themselves for propaganda purposes, such as the pre-­Holocaust influential and impressive Triumph of the Will (1935) by Leni Riefenstahl; Fritz Hippler’s viciously anti-­Semitic The Eternal Jew (1940); or the cynical one-­hour-­long documentary, produced in 1945 and now partially lost, intended to present the “model” ghetto/­camp of Terezín in a deceptively beautified light. Of course, this very material has also been used to denounce the system rather than to glorify it. The main archival footage about concentration and extermination camps is that filmed in 1945 by the liberating Soviet and Western Allies Armies, partly motivated by their prescient concern to produce tangible visual evidence against any future Holocaust deniers. Amongst these works, the most remarkable as a documentary record, and deeply disturbing witness to atrocities (it was never publicly screened until 1984), is Memory of the Camps, shot by shocked cameramen from the British Army when they liberated the concentration camp of Bergen-­Belsen. It shows “corpses slung over the backs of the camp guards, nodding and bouncing like life-­sized rag dolls, which are carried from trucks then tossed, without ceremony, into huge pit” ’ (Haggith, 2005, p. 33).6 A parallel film made by the Americans in the camps they had liberated, the twenty-­two-­minute Death Mills [Die Todesmühlen] (1946), was widely shown to German audiences with the aim of making them (more) aware of the atrocities perpetrated by their Nazi regime. Most of these viewers “reacted with emotion to the scenes of horror, not doubting their authenticity, but not feeling responsible for them” (Gladstone, 2005, p. 61).

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Directed by leading avant-­garde filmmaker Alain Resnais, one of the first and best of the documentaries to use archive footage shot by the Allied troops who liberated the camps, as well as some shot by the Nazis themselves, is the thirty-­minute-­long Night and Fog [Nuit et Brouillard] (1955). Its title is taken from Hitler’s decree that the enemies of German security should “vanish without trace in the night and fog of the Third Reich”. Punctuated by Hanns Eisler’s intense music score, the film alternates colour images of the ruins of Nazi death camps with black-­and-­white stills and harrowing footage of the univers concentrationnaire.7 A voice-­over commentary by poet Jean Cayrol provides factual information as well as lyrical considerations on those tragic events, warning audiences that history may also repeat itself. Holocaust films such as this intend to fulfil the “quasi pedagogic requirement to disseminate knowledge of how the concentration camps worked and secondly, relating to the issue of memory, the requirement that the experience of surviving deportees be faithfully recounted” (Delage, 2005, p. 129). Thirty years later, Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) deliberately avoids showing any archive material on the Holocaust and chooses instead to record, before it would be too late, the memories of those who had lived through it.8 Testimonies recorded in a variety of languages are interspersed with contemporary images of the original locations of the genocide and, featuring prominently, shots of train tracks, cattle cars, and railway stations still bearing the ominous names of Belzec, Auschwitz-­Birkenau, and Treblinka. Arguably the most important documentary (or, as Lanzmann prefers to call it, “fiction of the real”) ever made on the subject, this nine-­and-­a-­half-­hour-­long series of interviews with survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders about their personal recollections of the murder of millions of Jews represents a turning-­point in the history of Holocaust cinema, and probably its highest achievement. “Unlike other films on the aftermath of genocide”, writes Catherine Portuges, Shoah “offers no reassurance nor catharsis, instead enduring as a monument to what has been lost, to a catastrophe whose sequelae continue in the present” (Portuges, 2017, p. 30). The impact on the viewers of the testimonies collected by Lanzmann “is all the greater because through the agency of the unsuspected detail or the often surprisingly cool tone in which they report their experiences, they pierce or disarm viewers’ defenses against the full force of the horror, defenses variously informed by ignorance, abstractions or presumptions of knowledge” (Liebman, 2007, pp. 12–­13). Shoah also makes us realise the extent to which anti-­ Semitism, with its implied justification for the Final Solution, was still engrained in the mentality of several of the interviewees, especially those Polish villagers who at the time were aware, and far from displeased, that train-­loads of Jews were being murdered in their own

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country. Some of those Catholic Poles still considered the Jews to be responsible for the crucifixion of Christ. A  woman is asked by Lanzmann whether she thought there was a difference between Poles and Jews. “Oh, yes!” she answers, “The Poles weren’t exterminated, and the Jews were. That’s the difference”. Lanzmann’s calm, attentive, mostly non-­intrusive listening to his interviewees reminds us of what happens in psychoanalysis, where a similar receptive and containing attitude on the part of the therapist also helps patients to share their most intimate, and painful, material. It may be noted here that in Shoah and other films with a similar structure, individuals can only report on the experiences they have lived through by describing them from their own subjective and limited viewpoint; it will only be the accumulation and comparison of personal testimonies such as theirs, however distorted by the influence of various factors including the passing of time, that will provide historically reliable material and a framework for a wider understanding of the phenomenon of the Holocaust as a whole.

Before and after the Final Solution As most of those deported to Nazi concentration camps either arrived already dead or were murdered within a short time, it could be argued that any film about the minority who survived amounts to a distortion of the truth. The Holocaust is mostly about death by genocide and not about survival (through various combinations of sheer chance, expediency, strength, and bravery), and therefore, some claim that films should reflect this, or not be made at all. In this respect, Lanzmann, the director of Shoah, was aware of the paradoxical nature of his movie, perhaps of all such projects: “I knew that the subject of the film would be death itself”, he stated, “death rather than survival, a radical contradiction since in a sense it attested to the impossibility of the project I  was embarking on: the dead could not speak for the dead” (Lanzmann, 2009, Chapter 18, p. 419). However, the narrative of some movies about Jews set in Europe in the late 1930s and early 1940s is not directly about life and death in extermination camps – though often tragically concluded with train deportations there – but about their protagonists’ vicissitudes in the years leading to the implementation of the Final Solution, for instance, in such countries as Italy and France. The protagonists of The Garden of the Finzi-­Continis [Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini] (1971) by Neorealist director Vittorio De Sica are a wealthy Jewish family from Ferrara. The film focuses on their daughter Micòl’s (Dominique Sanda) troubled relationship with her childhood boyfriend Giorgio (Lino Capolicchio). Their story takes place within the threatening atmosphere which Italian Jewish communities had to endure as a result of

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the anti-­Semitic “Racial Laws” introduced by Mussolini in 1938 before Germany invaded the country and the Finzi-­Continis, like some other 10,000 Italian Jews (such as Primo Levi), were rounded up and deported to Auschwitz. Louis Malle’s Lacombe, Lucien (1974) is an intriguing movie taking place during the German occupation of France. Having failed to join the Resistance, eighteen-­ year-­old Lucien (Pierre Blaise) collaborates with the Nazis, as many other Frenchmen had done in those years, until he is forced to reconsider his activities when he falls in love with a Jewish girl. Some films are about how society dealt with the Holocaust after it ended. Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), Stanley Kramer’s three-­hour-­long Hollywood blockbuster (with a stellar cast including Burt Lancaster, Marlene Dietrich, Richard Widmark, Judy Garland, and Maximilian Schell) describes one of the 1948 courtroom trials against Nazi war criminals by the Allies. Chief Judge Dan Haywood (Spencer Tracy) is in charge of prosecuting four German judges accused of having carried out Hitler’s decrees. In Stephen Daldry’s The Reader (2008) Michael Berg (Ralph Fiennes) discovers that Hanna (Kate Winslet), the illiterate woman who had been his lover in the 1950s, has several years later become a defendant in a Nazi war crime trial, accused of having kept 300 Jewish women locked inside a church where they were burnt to death. The film makes its audience consider how quite ordinary, pleasant people could, under certain circumstances, behave in appallingly cruel ways. In Denial (Mick Jackson, 2016), American historian Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz) is involved in a legal battle not only to defend herself from the accusation of libel moved against her by renowned Holocaust denier David Irving (Timothy Spall), but also to expose the falsifications of those who are still questioning the historical truth of the Nazis’ attempted extermination of the Jews. Both The Reader and Denial were co-­written by the prominent British playwright David Hare. The plot of some Hollywood films centres on characters with psychological problems which, as it emerges when the story unfolds, originated in the traumas they had suffered years earlier as survivors of the Holocaust; these are shown to the viewers in flashback, the filmic equivalent of memory. This narrative structure is similar to the one adopted by a number of films (mis)representing psychoanalysis, for instance Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) and Marnie (1964), where the current psychopathologies of the main characters (Gregory Peck’s paranoia in the former, Tippi Hedren’s neurotic phobias in the latter) are magically resolved once they can reconnect, with some therapeutic help, with the traumatic events they had suffered in their childhood. In The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet, 1964) Sol Nazerman (Rod Steiger), a survivor of the Holocaust now

working as a pawnbroker in New York, is a depressed man who has lost all his feelings until he manages to reconnect with memories of the traumatic times he had experienced in a Nazi camp. It was the first time that its horrors, presented to the audience through Sol’s flashbacks, were recreated in a major American film. In Sophie’s Choice (Alan Pakula, 1982) Meryl Streep’s character, a Polish Jewess now living in New York with a man obsessed with the Holocaust, is struggling with the ghosts of her experiences in a lager, where she was forced to make an impossible choice involving the death of one of her children. What I found disturbing in this film is that Sophie appears to be the one who should feel guilty about her filicidal decision, when in fact the only person responsible for it is the SS officer who had forced her to make it. The psychological mechanism operating here is the projection of one’s own responsibility onto another person instead of recognising it as belonging to oneself and having to feel guilty as a result. This phenomenon applies to those capable of committing the most heinous crimes, systematic mass murders of Jews included, as long as they can attribute the responsibility for their cruelty to their victims (such as rapists who blame their prey for wearing provocative clothes).

Films set in concentration camps Directed and written by two former prisoners of the women’s camp in Birkenau and shot in 1947 in the Auschwitz camp itself, The Last Stop [Ostatni Etap] (Wanda Jakubowska, 1948) is one of the first feature films (alongside Alfréd Radok’s expressionistic The Long Journey [Daleká cesta] [1949] set in the Terezin’s ghetto/­lager) to represent the universe of mass extermination. Its protagonist, Marta Weiss (Barbara Drapinska), is a deportee who joins a group of women struggling within the camp against the kapos and the SS. The Last Stop acquired the status of an iconic document through its portrayal of what soon became a cinematic iconography of the experience of Nazi persecution.  .  .  .  [Its] images of Auschwitz-­Birkenau and their effect on both individual subjectivity and collective experience, [including] the arrival under cover of darkness of deportation trains, [were] subsequently appropriated as an influential source for visual interpretation for other Holocaust film narratives. (Portuges, 2007, p. 79) Its Polish director Jakubowska, a leading exponent of Social Realism in cinema, claimed that constantly thinking about documenting her experiences was what helped her to survive internment in the camp.

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Edith (Susan Strasberg) is the French fourteen-­year-­ old protagonist of Gillo Pontecorvo’s Kapò (1960). Having ended up in a realistically reconstructed Nazi lager, she survives with the help of a sympathetic doctor by changing her Jewish name and identity to that of a criminal (wearing a black triangle instead of a Star of David). Terrified at first of everything that surrounds her, she then consents, out of hunger and a visceral need to survive, to prostitute herself to Nazi officers and then to become a kapo in charge of controlling and disciplining her fellow female prisoners. The beautifully austere, compassionate, and tightly narrated handling of Edith’s vicissitudes for most of the movie fades towards its end as she falls in love with a newly arrived prisoner of war and redeems herself for her presumably immoral behaviour as a kapo by allowing, with the sacrifice of her own life, a most improbable escape of hundreds of prisoners from the camp. In order to describe the consequences of mass persecution and genocide, most Holocaust films focus on the vicissitudes of a single individual, a family, or a small group, as representative of all Jews. In Lajos Koltai’s Fateless [Sorstalánság] (2005), based on Imre Kertész’s fictional account of his own deportation to Auschwitz, a Hungarian adolescent, György, is separated from his family and friends and, almost casually, rounded up with other Jews to be sent to Buchenwald. There, by adopting a strategy of apparent near-­indifference and helped by the solidarity of other inmates, he suffers but also overcomes all sorts of humiliations and abuses. Most powerful is a scene, filmed from high above and intensified by Ennio Morricone’s music, of György and many other prisoners made to stand for hours in a punishing roll-­call, while a few of them struggle to avoid fainting. Using interior monologue as a narrative device, Koltai’s movie “shifts the locus of cinematic discourse to a quasi-­autobiographical mode with documentary undertones, suggesting – however momentarily – a greater receptivity toward confronting and perhaps even integrating parts of the experience (Portuges, 2017, p. 31). Once the camp is liberated by the American Army, György comes back home to Budapest. Here, however, he is met by the rejecting attitude of relatives, former friends, and neighbours, perhaps made uncomfortable by his dishevelled appearance and striped camp uniform, worried that his very presence may make them confront a tragedy too big to be tolerated, or just voyeuristically curious about what he had to suffer in the lager instead of being genuinely interested in his experience of it. Not unlike some other Holocaust movies which focus on the physical and psychological consequences (such as the onset of depression and posttraumatic stress disorder) on the survivors or on their “second generation” offspring, Fateless is then also a film about a man re-­ traumatised upon his return home by being disbelieved

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when he recounted – like many others did, often after great resistance and with much difficulty – his personal story. The protagonist of another Hungarian masterpiece, Son of Saul [Saul fia] (2015) directed by László Nemes (who had himself lost members of his family in the Holocaust), is a young man who can only exist in a camp by denying the enormity of his present reality, while at the same time splitting it off from any other context, including his own personal past history. Having been assigned to the Sonderkommando (the “Special detail” of Jewish prisoners forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria), Saul (Géza Röhrig) finds an anchor of hope in the belief (the script leaves it ambiguous whether realistically justified or not) that a dead body he comes across is that of his own son and becomes determined, against all odds, to give the child a decent burial. One feature of this extraordinarily bleak, yet beautiful, film is its cinematography: in over-­the-­shoulder point-­of-­view throughout, extended shots of [Saul’s] impassive face against a blurred background, and an immersive wall of chaotic sound design, Nemes creates a claustrophobic hell of confusion and incomprehension [.  .  .] This relentless use of close-­ups, shallow focus and long takes denies us spectators the possibility of de-­cathecting or distancing ourselves from Saul’s experience. (Portuges, 2017, p. 30)

Unconventional perspectives: humour, perversion, and identity confusion Freud thought that one of the aims of hostile jokes was “to exploit something ridiculous in our enemy which we could not, on account of obstacles in the way, bring forward openly or consciously; [. . .]the joke will evade restrictions and open sources of pleasure that have become inaccessible” (Freud, 1905, p.  103). However, both Charlie Chaplin and Ernst Lubitsch stated that, had the Nazi genocidal plans been known at the time, they would not have made their hilarious films ridiculing Hitler: The Great Dictator (1940) and To Be or Not To Be (1942), respectively. Other filmmakers, however, have not hesitated to approach the persecution of the Jews from a light or even humourous perspective. Amongst their unconscious motivations there may have been a defensive need to dilute into comedy the tragic dimension of their work’s subject. Radu Mihalieanu’s The Train of Life (1998) tells the fictional and often comical story of a group of Jews escaping the Nazis in 1941 from their Central European

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shtetl by travelling on a pretend deportation train. Peter Kassovitz’s Jakob the Liar (a 1999 Hollywood remake of Frank Beyer’s original East German movie from 1974) is about a shopkeeper (Robin Williams) lifting the mood of the Jewish population by convincing them that he has access to a secret radio which broadcasts news about the imminent liberation of their ghetto by the Russian Army. The most famous and controversial of such unconventional movies on the Holocaust is Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful [La vita è bella] (1997), which was awarded with three Oscars, was successful at the box office, and praised as wonderfully original by many critics, though also found offensive by many others. Within a fairytale structure it tells the story of an Italian father, Guido (played by Benigni himself), who, for the benefit of his child, turns the horrors of the concentration camp to which they had been deported into a fun game to be enjoyed. But, despite its setting, it has been argued that Benigni’s film “is not really about the Holocaust as much as it is about a father-­child relationship and the faith in innocence as a shield against life’s ‘ugliness’” (Lichtner, 2005, p. 237). Describing The Train of Life, Jakob the Liar, and Life Is Beautiful, all released in the late 1990s, as a trilogy, Sylvia L. Ginsparg points out how “the humor in each was derived from an absurd reversal of power from perpetrators to victims” (Valentine, 2007, p. 710) in an attempt “to explore whether the Jews realistically had options or choices they did not make. [.  .  .] Each of the films depicts a hero whose daring imaginative feats result in a shift in the balance of power between victims and perpetrators” (Valentine, 2007, p.  713). Ginsparg believes these films are not just “a mockery or a travesty” of the Holocaust, but that “they represent a very studied attempt to respond to the question ‘Were there other options for the Jews?” ’ (Ginsparg, 2003, p. 714). Other filmmakers have indulged in presenting ambiguous or even perverse relationships which may have developed between captors and prisoners. In Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter [Il portiere di notte] (1973), described as “an allegory of a society’s descent into barbarism, and a portentous critique of authoritarianism” (Valentine, 2007, p.  445), Lucia (Charlotte Rampling), a lager survivor, restarts the sadomasochistic relationship she had engaged in thirteen years earlier with her torturer Max (Dirk Bogarde) – a Nazi officer who now works as a night porter in a Vienna hotel – with inevitably tragic consequences. Their sexual games consist of “a traumatic re-­enactment of an internalized object relation” (Ginsparg, 2003, p. 446); the remarkable lack of dialogue between the two main characters suggests that “the originating traumatic object relations were experienced at the pre-­verbal stage” with the result that neither Lucia nor Max could “put into words their psychotic anxiety and symbiotic hatred for themselves and the other” (Ginsparg, 2003, p. 450). Considered by

some critics as an amoral attempt to romanticise the Holocaust, this provocative movie touches on some disturbing realities about the complex nature of what can develop between victims and perpetrators (a phenomenon diagnosed in the 1980s in the context of kidnappers and their victims as the Stockholm Syndrome). The Night Porter is, in the words of Victor Schermer, “a gruesome fairy tale about mass murderers, cruelty, eroticism, and societal guilt. [. . .] In the end, the viewer is left with the bemused acceptance of the unacceptable as an alternative to succumbing to the psychotic realm of traumatic reality, the impingement of horror on the helpless self. [. . .] While the film is a form of social criticism about sexual and child abuse, peer pressure to deny the truth, and the Holocaust, it is also about the intertwining of Eros and Thanatos in us all” (Schermer, 2007, pp. 939–­940). Another original, thought-­provoking, and controversial approach to the Holocaust is the one adopted by Agnieszka Holland in her film Europa Europa (1990). Its protagonist, Solly (Solomon Perel), is a German Jewish adolescent who, separated from his family, joins the Nazi party and fights in the Second World War in an attempt to avoid persecution and death in a lager. Concealing his circumcised penis becomes for Solly a question of life or death. The focus in this tale of survival is on the sense of identity confusion imposed on individuals whom uncontrollable circumstances have compelled to adapt to situations dystonic to their previously established sense of self.9 A situation like this one is comparable to that suffered by those forced to emigrate as a result of political or religious persecutions in their countries and to adopt a refugee status far from their homes.

Films on those who helped the Jews The protagonists of some Holocaust films are neither the victims, survivors, nor perpetrators, but those who put their own lives at risk in order to hide, protect, or save others. As we learn from our analytical experience, different combinations and interplays of conscious and unconscious components intervene in originating and shaping “rescue fantasies”. Amongst their overdetermined sources we can find an element of unresolved narcissistic infantile omnipotence with its related primitive delusional ideas of immortality. These, in turn, have the role of defences (through a process of conversion into their opposites) stemming from the dependence of children upon caring adults and from the reality of our biological condition as mortals. However, regardless of their unconscious motivation and of the fantasies underlying their performance, rescuing acts amount to

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some of the noblest deeds in the history of our discontented civilisation, including those performed during the Holocaust (a word of Greek origins meaning “sacrifice to God”)10 by many brave Jewish and non-­Jewish people who risked, and often lost, their own lives to save those of others.11 George Stevens’s overlong adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) is a well-­meaning attempt to represent the tense atmosphere in which Jewish teenager Anne Frank (Millie Perkins) lived with her family and others for two years during the war, hidden in an attic by courageous Gentiles. Predictably, the focus of the film, more than on the extermination of Jews taking place in the world outside her Amsterdam attic, is about Anne’s coming of age and about the petty conflicts exploding amongst those forced to share that claustrophobic space. Finally betrayed, they would all be captured by the Gestapo. Anne would die of typhus in the hell of Bergen-­Belsen, a tragic end that contributed to making her an iconic figure worldwide after her diary was discovered and published. The Last Metro [Le dernier métro] (1980), written and directed by the New Wave auteur François Truffaut, is set in occupied Paris where a Jewish impresario is kept hidden from the Nazis in the theatre’s basement by his actress wife Marion (Catherine Deneuve). Another French film from those years, Au revoir les Enfants (Louis Malle, 1987) is about Catholic priests who hide the newly arrived Jewish student Jean Bonnet (Raphael Fejtö) in their countryside boarding school until the Gestapo arrive at the school to investigate the students and the priests running it. An interesting feature based on real events is The Zookeeper’s Wife (Niki Caro, 2017), which recounts the story of Antonina (Jessica Chastain) and her husband Ian (Johan Heldenbergh) sheltering some 300 Polish Jews in the semi-­demolished Warsaw Zoo they were running until safe houses could be found for them, with the Nazis remaining almost to the end incredibly unaware of their activities. Also set in Poland is Korczak (1990), directed by Andrzej Wajda; it describes the heroic dedication of pedagogue Dr  Janusz Korczak (Wojciech Pszoniak) in educating and protecting some 200 Jewish children in his Warsaw orphanage during the war. When “his” children are put on a train to be taken to Treblinka, he refuses to abandon them and goes to his death with them. To the criticism that the film is an “idealization of Polish-­ Jewish relations (and saintlike portrayal of Korczak) [as] a reaction formation against latent anti-­Semitism”, Jeffrey Atlas responds that Wajda’s picture of life in the ghetto may be “an instance of ‘remembering ahead’ a history of beneficence and loving kindness, not to deny the hateful destructiveness but to build images of what might have been and of what should be in the future” (Atlas, 1996, pp. 629–­630).

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Another film about life (and death) in Polish ghettos is the much-­awarded The Pianist (2002), directed by Roman Polanski. It tells the story of concert pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody) who survived the Warsaw ghetto (where he also comes across Korczak with his orphans), avoided deportation to a death camp, and then hid in safe apartments provided by friends. Ill and hungry (“Food is more important than time”, he says as he hands over his watch to be sold), he miraculously avoids becoming a victim of the German suppression of the 1943 ghetto uprising, finds shelter amongst the ruins of his dilapidated city, and eventually saves his life by playing a Chopin Nocturne to the German officer who could have gotten him killed. Filmed in Warsaw, this gripping, realistic movie, faithful both to Szpilman’s Memoir (1946) on which it is based and to Polanski’s childhood recollections of his own time in the Krakow ghetto, “is essentially one person’s story set within his surround; it is an intimately personal and thus painful document of the horrors of traumatic isolation, loss, suffering, and ultimate survival” (Stein, 2004, p. 757). It is also a powerful statement about the extremes of human nature, which can express itself through the brutal destruction of lives, but also through sublime productions of art and beauty. Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) fictionalises the real-­life story of a German industrialist and war profiteer – never without a swastika pin on his button-­hole and enjoying raucous parties with his Nazi friends – who in 1958 was honoured by Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Gentiles. Having witnessed the dramatic liquidation of the Krakow ghetto in 1943, Oskar Schindler converted to the Jewish cause. With the help of his flamboyant personality, vast financial resources, and bribes to the SS, he managed to save more than 1,000 Jewish workers from extermination by literally buying them from their persecutors to employ them in his factories. But describing Schindler’s changed attitude as a conversion may be an oversimplification that does not take into account his somewhat perverse capacity to maintain a split in his personality, allowing him to identify ambiguously with both roles: as a rescuer of Jews and at the same time as a friend of those persecuting them. Indeed, some commentators objected to a Holocaust film featuring a Catholic member of the Nazi party as its protagonist; I would claim that Schindler’s List’s truly unforgettable protagonist is instead the anonymous little girl wearing a red coat, lost in a black-­and-­white world of cruelty and fear, whom, for a brief moment, we watch wandering aimlessly in the streets of the Krakow ghetto. Some were also critical that such a film should use much of Hollywood’s cinematic language and some of its clichés, but despite such objections Schindler’s List remains an influential and profoundly moving masterpiece. *****

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Any film on the Holocaust must expose its horror and make the spectators experience an echo, however distant, of the victims’ own original traumatisation which the film represents. But, at the same time, these movies must also provide a container for such a horror, either through their artistic or their educational form, by constituting a powerful reservoir of memories, thus becoming an important historical, political and moral document. Such a document should allow us to gain a deeper understanding of this painful page in the history of mankind and help future generations to be aware of what must never be ignored. All we can do is to wish, paraphrasing the title of Freud’s Repeating, Remembering, and Working Through (1914), that cinema, by making us remember what we would only like to forget, can help us to work through our feelings about the horrors of the Holocaust, thus making it more possible, or perhaps just less unlikely, for future generations to prevent a repetition of the same atrocities. In their own different languages, for their own different purposes, from their own different aesthetic, ethical, and political perspectives, these films bear witness. They emerge as loud (if often deafening) brave voices, and as vivid (if often disturbing) images which we could hear and view as belonging to a cinematic choral symphony or large fresco. We should watch these movies, and with their help remain watchful. We should listen to these voices. And then . . . reflect. And respect. Mostly in silence.

Notes 1 The expressions “Holocaust movies” and “Holocaust films” used throughout this chapter do not imply that I  consider such diverse works as forming an identifiable cinematic genre. I use them instead as a shortcut to refer to documentaries and feature films which, in their own different and original ways, have as their subject the persecution and extermination of European Jews perpetrated by the Nazi regime in the 1930s and 1940s. 2 A comprehensive chronological list of both narrative and documentary films on the Holocaust can be found on-­line at: https://­en.wikipedia.org/­wiki/­List_of_Holocaust_films   Not to drown in such a vast filmographic ocean, and given the limitations of this chapter, I  shall discuss here only some of the movies made for the big screen, leaving out the numerous and often excellent ones made for television. These include the following: Episode 20 (“Genocide – 1941–1945”) of The World at war (1973–­74), the four-­part American mini-­series Holocaust (1978), Kitty – Return to Auschwitz (1979), Playing for time (1980), The Wall (1982), The final solution: The Wannsee conference (1984), Escape from Sobibor (1987), The Nazis: A warning from history (1997) and Uprising (2001).

3 Such as Silence (1998) by Orly Yadin and Sylvie Bringas. 4 The most popular feature of them all, Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), “was seen by a quarter of the population of Britain, nearly a third of the population of Germany, and had a profound effect on global consciousness of what the Holocaust was” (Gold, 2005, p. 196). A VHS copy of the film was donated to all schools in Great Britain.   In 1978 the nine-­and-­a-­half-­hour NBC’s fictional Holocaust series was watched by 100 million Americans: “More information about the Holocaust was imparted to more Americans over those four nights than over all the previous thirty years” (Novick, 1999, p. 209). 5 From a psychoanalytic perspective, I have only found one book (Diamond & Sklarew, 2018) and a handful of articles in the English language about Holocaust films, though several papers on other topics make reference to them.   Non-­psychoanalytic books on filmic representations of the Holocaust include these: Avisar (1989), Insdorf (1989), Picart (2004), Baron (2005), Haggith and Newman (2005), Saxton (2008) and Ginsparg (2010). 6 See also the documentary on the “making of” Memory of the Camps (2014) which highlights the major role of Sidney Bernstein as a producer of the project and the minor one of Alfred Hitchcock as its consultant. 7 This expression is taken from the title of David Rousset’s 1945 book, L’Univers Concentrationnaire, one of the first accounts of the Nazi camp system, described by him as “a world set apart, utterly segregated, a strange kingdom with its own peculiar fatality”. 8 Available to researchers are also the more than 4,400 testimonies of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies founded in 1979 and located at the Yale University Library and the nearly 55,000 video testimonies of Holocaust survivors and witnesses collected by Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah visual history foundation, founded in 1994 at the University of Southern California. 9 In her commentary to the film, director Holland makes a reference to Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983). 10 It is because of these connotations of the word Holocaust as “voluntary sacrifice” that Lanzmann and many others object to its use and describe instead what happened to the Jews under the Third Reich as Shoah, the Hebrew word for “catastrophe”. 11 I have discussed in more detail “rescue fantasies” and their cinematic representation in Chapter  5 of Moving images. Psychoanalytic reflections on film (Sabbadini, 2014).

References Adorno, T. W. (1955). An essay on cultural criticism and society. London: Prisms, MIT Press. Atlas, J. A. (1996). Korczak. Psychoanalytic Review, 83(4), 629–­ 630. Avisar, I. (1989). Screening the Holocaust: Cinema’s images of the unimaginable. Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press. Baron, L. (2005). Projecting the Holocaust into the present: The changing focus of contemporary Holocaust cinema. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Delage, C. (2005). Nuit et Brouillard: A turning point in the history and memory of the Holocaust. In T. Haggith & J. Newman (Eds.), Holocaust and the moving image: Representations in film and television since 1933 (pp. 127–­139). London and New York: Wallflower.

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Diamond, D. & Sklarew, B. H. (Eds.) (2018). Cinematic ­reflections on the legacy of the Holocaust: Psychoanalytic perspectives. ­London and New York: Routledge. Frank, A. (1947). Anne Frank: The diary of a young girl. New York: Bantam Books, 1993. Freud, S. (1905). Jokes and their relation to the unconscious. SE, Vol. 8 (pp. 1–­247). London: Hogarth Press, 1960. Freud, S. (1914). Repeating, remembering, and working through. SE, Vol. 12 (pp. 145–­156). London: Hogarth Press, 1958. Ginsparg, S. L. (2003). Humor and the Holocaust. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 20(4), 710–­716. Ginsparg, S. L. (2010). Never again: Echoes of the Holocaust as understood through film. New York: International Psychoanalytic Books, 2013. Gladstone, K. (2005). Separate intentions: The allied screening of concentration camp documentaries in defeated Germany in 1945–­46: Death mills and memory of the camps. In T. Haggith & J. Newman (Eds.), Holocaust and the moving image: Representations in film and television since 1933 (pp. 50–­64). London and New York: Wallflower, 2005. Gold, T. (2005). An overview of Hollywood cinema’s treatment of the Holocaust. In T. Haggith & J. Newman (Eds.), Holocaust and the moving image. Representations in film and television since 1933 (pp. 193–­197). London and New York: Wallflower. Greenberg, R. H. (1994). Schindler’s list. Psychoanalytic Review, 81(4), 753–­756. Haggith, T. (2005). Filming the liberation of Bergen-­Belsen. In T. Haggith & J. Newman (Eds.), Holocaust and the moving image: Representations in film and television since 1933 (pp. 33–­49). London and New York: Wallflower. Haggith, T., & Newman, J. (Eds.) (2005). Holocaust and the moving image: Representations in film and television since 1933. London and New York: Wallflower. Insdorf, A. (1989). Indelible shadows: Film and the Holocaust (2nd ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press. Lanzmann, C. (2009). The Patagonian hare: A memoir (Translated from the French by Frank Wynne). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. Levi, P. (1947). If this is a man. London: Orion, 1960. Lichtner, G. (2005). For the few, not the many: Delusion and denial in Italian Holocaust films. In T. Haggith & J. Newman (Eds.), Holocaust and the moving image: Representations in film and television since 1933 (pp.  236–­242). London and New York: Wallflower. Liebman, S. (Ed.) (2007). Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah: Key Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lindy, D. C. (2002). Holocaust movies: Watching the unwatchable. Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 4(1), 127–133. Novick, P. (1999). The Holocaust and collective memory: The American experience. London: Bloomsbury. Picart, J. (2004). The Holocaust film sourcebook. Westport, CT: Praeger. Portuges, C. (2007). Intergenerational transmission: The Holocaust in Central European Cinema. In A. Sabbadini (Ed.), Projected shadows: Psychoanalytic reflections on the representation of loss in European Cinema. London and New York: Routledge. Portuges, C. (2017). Screen memory: The Jewish question: An intergenerational dialogue. Hungarian Studies, 31(1), 19–­38. Rousset, D. (1946). L’univers concentrationnaire. Paris: Éditions du Pavois. Sabbadini, A. (2014). Moving images: Psychoanalytic reflections on film. London and New York: Routledge. Saxton, L. (2008). Haunted images: Film, ethics, testimony, and the Holocaust. London and New York: Wallflower Press.

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Schermer, V. L. (2007). Sexuality, power, and love in Cavani’s The Night Porter. Psychoanalytic Review, 94(6), 927–­941. Stein, A. (2004). Music and trauma in Polanski’s The Pianist (2002). International Journal of Psycho-­Analysis, 85(3), 755–765. Szpilman, W. (1946). The pianist: The extraordinary story of one man’s survival in Warsaw, 1939–­1945. New York: Picador/­St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Valentine, M. (2007). “Those That the Gods Wish to Destroy, They First Make Mad”: An analytic discussion of the depiction of sado-masochism in the film The Night Porter. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 23(3), 445–­457.

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Au revoir les Enfants (Louis Malle, 1987) Denial (Mick Jackson, 2016) The Diary of Anne Frank (George Stevens, 1959) The Eternal Jew (Fritz Hippler, 1940) Europa Europa (Agnieszka Holland, 1990) Fateless (Lajos Koltaj, 2005) The Garden of the Finzi-­Continis [Il giardino dei Finzi-­ Contini] (Vittorio De Sica, 1971) The Great Dictator (Charlie Chaplin, 1940) Jacob the Liar (Frank Beyer, 1974) Judgment at Nuremberg (Stanley Kramer, 1961) Kapò (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1960) Korczak (Andrzej Wajda, 1990) Lacombe, Lucien (Louis Malle, 1974) The Last Metro [Le dernier métro] (François Truffaut, 1980) The Last Stop [Ostatni Etap] (Wanda Jakubowska, 1949) Life Is Beautiful [La vita è bella] (Roberto Benigni, 1997) The Long Journey [Daleká cesta] (Alfréd Radok, 1949) Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, 1964) Memory of the Camps (Sidney Bernstein, Alfred Hitchcock, 2014) Night and Fog [Nuit et Brouillard] (Alain Resnais, 1955) The Night Porter [Il portiere di notte] (Liliana Cavani, 1973) The Pawnbroker (Sidney Lumet, 1964) The Pianist (Roman Polanski, 2002) The Reader (Stephen Daldry, 2008) Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993) Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985) Silence (Orly Yadin, Sylvie Bringas, 1998) Son of Saul [Saul fia] (Laszlo Nemes, 2015) Sophie’s Choice (Alan Pakula, 1982) Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945) To Be or Not To Be (Ernst Lubitsch, 1942) Train of Life (Radu Mihaileanu, 1998) Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935) Zelig (Woody Allen, 1983) The Zookeeper’s Wife (Niki Caro, 2017)

20 Theatre, opera, and literature Bella Rubin

Introduction In 2009, Aukje Kluge and Benn E. Williams in their monumental book, Re-­Examining the Holocaust Through Literature, succeeded in expanding the definition of Holocaust literature by including different perspectives, and thus different genres, in their collection in an effort to “broaden the scope of analysis of Holocaust literature” (Introduction, p. xi). This chapter extends this approach in looking at works of fiction, drama, opera, and a graphic narrative work created by authors, artists, and composers in various countries – Israel, the United States, Germany, and Spain. Amongst the many contemporary works worthy of inclusion in this discussion, I  have focused on several that may be representative; thus, although this work is limited in scope, it may serve as an introduction to a prolific body of works of art being created worldwide directly or indirectly related to the Holocaust and its effect on current and future generations. One more point should be made in connection to the ongoing debate as to whether the Holocaust can be a subject of aesthetic creations. This chapter does not present arguments for or against a particular view but rather seeks to engage readers in a dialog between the works and themselves to widen their perspectives and experience aspects of the Holocaust through identifying with the characters and emotions evoked by each work. This chapter explores three emerging themes that can be found in a number of current works dealing with the Holocaust – memory, family, and the existence of evil. I will examine how they are represented either similarly or differently in each of the works while exploring

the nature of the impact they may have on us as readers and spectators. The following works will be dealt with: two plays by American playwright Andrea Stolowitz, Knowing Cairo and Berlin Diary: (Schluterstrasse 27); several vocal works by the Israeli composer Ella Milch-­ Sheriff; The Child Dreams, an opera composed by Israeli conductor and composer Gil Shohat, based on a play by the same name written by the Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin; the novel Confessions by the Catalan novelist Jaume Cabre; and the graphic autobiography Second Generation: The Things I Didn’t Tell My Father by Michel Kichka (Dargaud, 2016).

Searching for roots through theater Andrea Stolowitz, a third generation survivor, is Lacroute Playwright-­in-­Residence at the Artists Repertory Theatre in the United States and teaches at Willamette University in Oregon. At an international conference in Berlin in 2014 sponsored by the World Federation of Jewish Child Survivors of the Holocaust and their Descendants, Stolowitz proposed that theater and trained playwriting is a way of examining possible outcomes of the past – which take place on the stage in real time. Her characters are often based on real people, at times members of her family. In her own words, “We can try to understand their choices and decisions and how they must have felt. This re-­creation can help us and our audiences to understand events and behaviors. When we base our stories on real people, we often alter specific details to allow us to examine a question” (Personal Communication, 2014).

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In her earlier more traditional play, Knowing Cairo, written in 2002, Stolowitz examines aspects of family relations, in particular, what happens when a child might not want to care for an aging parent. The central character, Rose, an aging German-­Jewish American New Yorker, has characteristics similar to Andrea’s real grandmother. Both of the playwright’s grandparents fled Germany before the Second World War and met in New York in 1938. Her grandfather was a manic depressive, an illness which is said to have afflicted him the day he found out that his brother and nephew and sister-­in-­ law were killed in Auschwitz. Rose often has conflicting views with her daughter Lydia, a character based on Andrea’s real mother, and also with her caregiver Winsome, an African American, who resembles some of Andrea’s grandfather’s caregivers. The main issue in the play is whether Rose can go on living alone in her apartment with or without assistance as she grows older. Also, who should decide what will be Rose’s fate? Stolowitz occasionally uses humor in the portrayal of her characters’ interaction with each other. This creates a kind of bond between the audience and the characters and allows us to feel more comfortable since we may find ourselves in similar situations in life. It makes the actors on stage seem more credible and real to us. We all need to make difficult decisions so why not be just a little optimistic in the process? In the end, however, for practical reasons, Rose becomes resigned to being sent by her daughter to live in a senior citizens home, not entirely by choice. It seems that Lydia could not understand her mother’s apprehension about leaving her familiar surroundings, especially since she had come to the United States fleeing from Germany and the onset of the Second World War and where her relatives perished in the Holocaust. For some survivors, the idea of living in an old age home might revive memories of the concentration camps. It is also possible that their children might unconsciously feel as if they are sending their parents to a camp as the Nazis did. In this play, Stolowitz notes that she could examine the essential ways in which a parent-­child relationship can be frayed and the particular role that the Holocaust had in this situation. The play was not only interesting for me but illuminated some commonalities in all parent-­child relationships where one generation experiences something that the next generation could not really understand. (Personal Communication, 2014) In her more recent play, Berlin Diary: (Schluterstrasse 27), staged in Berlin in 2016, which is based on the 1939 diary of her great grandfather, Max Cohnreich, Stolowitz tries to re-­create on stage a process she undergoes in real time in Germany, while searching for

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information about her family left behind there before and during the Holocaust. This process is fraught with increasing frustration, boredom, uncertainty, feelings of disappointment, loss, sadness, and shock while she is discovering that she will never know for certain who many of her family members were and what had become of them during the Holocaust. The playwright uses a “bifurcated narrator”, two actors playing the same role, to tell her story which symbolizes the fragmented nature of the knowledge she has about her family. It may also reflect a split in her identity as well as a difficulty she may have separating herself from her survivor family members. Eventually, Andrea, the central character in the play, portrayed by both a male and a female actress who often switch roles during the performance, realizes that she has spent more time trying to understand her dead relatives rather than interacting with her live ones, “while I  have been agonizing about all those who died, I  forgot . . . I forgot to think about those who lived” (Act II, Scene 13). In fact, Andrea makes direct contact with several of these living relatives during the play and in each case is left disappointed by not only their lack of information but a lack of interest and understanding of what she is going through. “The live family’s always complicated” (Act II, Scene 11). Andrea also laments when she fails to discover who some of her dead relatives were, since no one is left, and of the ones who are alive, no one gets along. Referring to the few relatives there were in her living family, she asks why they did not spend time together. When Andrea eventually discovers that she actually had relatives living in New York when she was growing up, but never knew about them, she is left with a feeling of emptiness. Not only is this play about “remembering and forgetting” according to Stolowitz, and searching for one’s roots, it makes a poignant statement about the disconnectedness or dysfunction of many family relations amongst second and third generation Holocaust survivors. It also deals with the lack of interest, even alienation, by some family members concerning their lost relations as expressed by Andrea when she asks herself, after being shocked when discovering that twenty of her relatives from Berlin died in the Holocaust, “Shouldn’t I tell them [Andrea’s living family]? Wouldn’t they want to know? Shouldn’t someone know?” (Act II, Scene 10). Andrea realizes “I have more family here [in Berlin] than anywhere else, even if they are dead!” (Act II, Scene 11). It is possible that the lack of interest of Andrea’s relatives may be a psychological defence against their own repressed feelings of shame or guilt or even grief which can cause a chasm of speechlessness amongst family members. It is well known that though many survivors have been unable to speak of their Holocaust experiences, their second and third generation descendants have been deeply affected by the “speechlessness” of

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their family members. When Helen Epstein set out to collect the stories of children of survivors like herself, she discovered that they “were possessed by a history they had never lived” (Epstein, 1979, p. 14). Andrea’s characters become more credible as Stolowitz employs various structural elements such as breaking down the linearity of narrative by seamlessly moving back and forth between past and present. Andrea seems to be in a kind of psychological “time tunnel” reminiscent of what Judith Kestenberg described as “transposition . . . living in two separate epochs, the present and the past” (Kestenberg, 1993, p. 1117). She ponders about what it was like living in Berlin with so many family members living close to one another, enjoying a thriving family life, in contrast to her own. In a way, Andrea seems to want to bring back her lost relatives, at least the memory of their existence. The two actors play multiple roles both as narrators and characters in the play, moving the story forward and taking the spectators through Andrea’s complicated and at times confusing research process. The effects created by constant switching of the roles and merging of past and present allow the spectators into the “real time” of Andrea’s searching process. We become witnesses to what she experiences while learning about her dead relatives. In fact, they become more alive than the living ones. The play succeeds in mimicking the actual process the playwright goes through in order to write the play, which is the real purpose of her search. The digital research documents and photographs screened in the background also emphasize her search, enlisting us as partners in the research process. Stolowitz, as a third generation survivor, has managed to portray on stage what so many descendants of Holocaust survivors actually go through in their quest for information about their family histories. Whether these journeys include listening to the few remaining survivors tell their stories in person or on video or reading accounts written by them and their family members, as time goes by, we know less and less about what actually occurred, but we still seem to be deeply affected emotionally in our search. Those who do not actively search for information about their families are also affected by their lack of knowledge and understanding of their family roots as expressed by Stolowitz’s characters who decline to participate with Andrea in her search. Some people can gain from psychotherapy or joining a second or third generation group to explore and overcome the barriers to knowledge about their past. Gaining knowledge and insights about our past reflects our profound psychological need to feel a sense of continuity and community in our lives (Epstein, 1979, p.  337) which ultimately strengthens our self-­ identity. The last three lines of Berlin Diary are spoken by Andrea: “And the past . . . is the present . . . is the future” (Act II, Scene 19).

Confronting the Holocaust through music: vocal works and opera The impact of the past on our lives as played out in strained family relations amongst second generation survivors is also a theme in a recent film, Past Life, by Israeli director Avi Nesher. It is based on the early life of Israeli composer Ella Milch-­Sheriff, the daughter of Holocaust survivors. She had acquired a diary written by her father and decided to approach the director, also the son of a Holocaust survivor, asking him to make a film (Mitchell, 2016). The story focuses on two sisters, daughters of Holocaust survivors, who discover a secret about their father who was hiding in Poland during the Second World War. Since it is not within the scope of this chapter, I will not describe the film in detail here except to mention that we learn from it about the severity of the composer’s childhood, the difficult relationship she had with her silent, distant father who had lost his first wife and son in the Shoah. This explains why Ella Milch-­ Sheriff composes vocal music dealing with her personal experience as revealed in a filmed interview where she states that she breaks her father’s silence with her music and that she believes that not every memory can be told as a story and not every story can be reduced to words. According to the composer, she does not compose about the Holocaust. Rather, she composes things compulsory in herself which she does not resist, actually confronting the inner thoughts and feelings that she never wanted to deal with, to have a dialog with and through the music was the only possibility for her to express (CultureBuzz, 2012, YouTube). In a recent interview with the composer (Tel Aviv, 2017), she told me that she did not want to write a work about the Holocaust, but she did wish to tell her father’s story. “I had an inner impulse that forced me to write . . . a necessity, a must . . . I had to”. All this becomes evident when we listen to Ella Milch-­Sheriff’s cantata, Can Heaven be Void? composed for a narrator and a mezzo-­soprano, performed by the Israeli Opera in Tel Aviv in 2005. It is based on a book of the same name written by the composer’s father and a poem “Engfuerung” by Paul Celan. The narrator reveals the story of the composer’s father whose wife and son are murdered by the Nazis. The father survives but is left broken and bitter and issues a series of “commandments”, which we hear accompanied by the high-­ pitched frenzied sounds of the violins. The following are a few of these: “Love thyself above all. Harden thy heart, and listen not to it. Do not get close to others and do not allow them to get close to you. Do not rely on anybody. Do not believe – heaven is void” (Can Heaven Be Void?, 2015, YouTube).

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The composer eventually answers the question posed in the cantata’s title saying in an interview given by CultureBuzz in 2009 that, for herself, heaven is not void and that her heaven is full of music. Throughout the work the music evokes deep feelings of anguish, longing, and sadness that she must have felt as a child, yet she copes with these feelings through her musical creativity, even at an early age, as we know from the film, where she is portrayed as a young woman in the process of composing her own composition while trying to overcome institutional demands. Once again we see that her music is a very personal expression of herself. In Milch-­Sheriff’s chamber opera, Baruch’s Silence (2015, YouTube), a small group of people, including a young boy and a doctor – a character who represents the composer’s father – are hiding out in Poland during the war, in constant fear of being discovered by the Nazis. The young boy is confined and cannot run around and play in the small space in which they are hiding. He suddenly breaks free and calls out, “Father, father . . .”. The people are afraid he will be heard, and his father is compelled to confine him and keep him quiet by putting his hand over the boy’s mouth. He struggles to be free; the father must keep him quiet. The others watch fearfully. The doctor, bound by the Hippocratic Oath, is implored to save the child, but he cannot move. He does nothing. We hear the frenzied sound of the strings and the rolling of drums, the music reaching a crescendo and then it stops. There is silence. Only a few gentle notes of a flute and clarinet can be heard, followed by the melodic phrases of an English horn. The boy has suddenly stopped moving; he is limp in his father’s arms. He has suffocated. In order to save the group, the boy has been sacrificed. Everyone is in shock. Although the composer states that she does not compose about the Holocaust, when we hear her music and the words of the libretto, our own thoughts about the Holocaust immediately come to mind as if we ourselves are experiencing the emotions evoked. We identify with the characters through the compelling strains of music. This happens even more intensely as we view the opera The Child Dreams (or The Dreaming Child) by Gil Shohat, which premiered in 2010 in Israel. Most of the libretto is taken from the original play by Hanoch Levin written in 1986, which tells the story of the historical 1939 voyage of the German cruise ship St. Louis carrying over 900 Jewish refugees fleeing from Nazi Germany. Many eventually found a safe haven in the United Kingdom and other Western European countries, but more than 250 were turned away and perished in the Holocaust. Shohat, one of Israel’s most well-­known conductors and composers, has stated that The Child Dreams is not a Holocaust opera since he believes the Holocaust is not a subject that should be presented artistically (Davis, 2010). Instead, he says that his work is universal.

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Spectators, however, cannot experience this powerful work without making direct associations to the Holocaust. We identify with the characters as they are being arrested and transported to their death by soldiers and brutal commanders: a mother separated from her child; a father murdered in front of his family; people holding tight their suitcases trying to escape by boat, searching for a place of sanctuary; children dreaming of a summer they will never again see. These disturbing images become imprinted in our consciousness reinforced by the haunting music evoking longing, fear, loss, despair. Even the Messiah, dressed in a shabby overcoat, is helpless in preventing evil from afflicting the people and for no apparent reason. There is no justice. Why are they being rounded up and transported? Why are their children being taken away by force never to return, fading away before their eyes, putting an end to all hope they might have had? There are no answers. Evil exists in the world. From the first scene, the haunting music together with the sleeping child dressed in white like a shroud evokes a bleak future. The parents watch over their beloved child imagining “thus he will look if he dies”, words that portend what will soon happen though they still cling to hope: “Let time stop now . . . at the peak of happiness for it will never be any better. . . . Let the three of us become a still life” (The Dreaming Child, 2013, YouTube). But time does not stand still. Soon after, a violinist dressed in white blood-­stained clothing is murdered on stage signifying the death of Jewish culture and life. People holding suitcases, trying to escape to safety are caught by soldiers and herded away. The soldiers are transformed into clowns who perform in front of the innocent sleeping child who becomes part of the circus. The music evokes a playful atmosphere where all seems well, creating a kind of fantasy world, yet there is a strange feeling lurking in the background, a hint of what is to come. The child slowly awakens from his dream smiling while seeing that everything is in its place and singing: “books, toys . . . the tranquility of my mother’s face is stronger than the tangled dreams”. A sense of irony pervades as the child sings, “The circus clowns have come to our town . . . bring joy . . . adventures  .  .  . the world is a good and happy place” (The Dreaming Child, 2013, YouTube). The clowns symbolize the invading soldiers and the spectators know full well what will soon happen. The first act ends with melodic music evoking serenity as seen through the eyes of an innocent child, but the second act opens with haunting sounds as a woman dances onto the stage, a vulgar “woman born for love”, a devil-­like temptress dressed in red, and tempts the child. She sings: “The nightmares  .  .  . will tell us the truth  .  .  . the dreams were right . . . there is one dream from which we don’t wake up” (The Dreaming Child, 2013, YouTube).

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The opera continues with the father being shot in the back by the woman in red while the mother and child are temporarily freed, but at a dear price. We hear the high-­pitched strains of a violin, sadly signaling the end of youth, the end of summer. The family is torn apart. The future can bring nothing but despair as the people are seen drifting from place to place on a boat going nowhere trying to find a safe haven. The people sing on, yearning for a solid place to land. The boat stops, but before they can disembark, a man appears below, singing, “I am a poet. I write about you . . . I weep for your fate and describe it” (The Dreaming Child, 2013, YouTube). In the end, the refugees are not accepted and are driven off. The poet is seen tearing up the poems in despair, scattering the pieces of paper in the air. In the last act, called the Messiah, the children, draped in mummy-­like shrouds, their faces and bodies painted in shades of white and grey, appear on stage as if they are suspended in the air. They sing, “We are the quiet children in the world . . . the dead children”. The mother and child are embracing and singing as they let go of each other for the last time. The Messiah appears with suitcases and tries to bury “time” but the brutal commander returns and shoots him, putting an end to hope. The child sings, “I will never stop wanting to live”. “You will stop . . . calm down”, sing the dead children. “No, no, I  won’t give up” sings the child as he slowly fades away into the background, becoming one of the dead children and then they all disappear (The Dreaming Child, 2013, YouTube).

Recoding the memory of the Holocaust through fiction A discussion about memory, family, and evil would not be complete without exploring the novel Confessions by Jaume Cabre, published in English translation by Mara Faye Lethem in 2014. The central character is Adria Ardevol, the son of an antique dealer obsessed with valuable objects of art he acquires cheaply and then sells at many times their original price, and a distant mother who never hugs him or laughs with him. Adria believes that he was born into his family by mistake: “It’s strange: why have we always been so cold with each other in my family?” (2014, p. 127). He narrates various stories that unfold in a non-­linear manner, describing his life in a loveless family midst feelings of loneliness, a child whose parents expect him to be an exceptional student and an accomplished violinist. He spends his time playing with two faithful toy companions, an Arapaho Indian chief and a sheriff, who help him spy on his parents, an activity that leads him to eventually learn that some of his father’s antiques were acquired dubiously, which may have led to his death, for which

Adria blames himself for many years. In particular, there is a recurring story about one of his father’s possessions, a valuable violin made by Lorenzo Storioni of Cremona in 1764, a period in which there was a continuation of a tradition of violinmakers still working after Stradivarius’s time. The violin is commonly known as a symbol in Jewish culture throughout the ages as a source of joy, optimism, and hope for the Jewish people during periods of persecution and anti-­Semitism culminating in the Holocaust. In fact, violins are so important that, like the survivor Torah scrolls program, there is a Violins of Hope project that has collected and restored survivor violins which are used by orchestras around the world (Grymes, 2014). Adria discovers that his father purchased the Storioni violin from a notorious doctor who carried out painful experiments on Jewish children in Auschwitz. With this knowledge, he has experienced the end of innocence. In fact, Adria is involved in writing a treatise on the problem of evil, which is the book itself. Adria goes through this difficult stage in his life at a time when he has suddenly lost his beloved Sara, and is struggling with the existence of evil in the world as well as personal loss. The violin as a symbol was actually introduced in the beginning of the book with the narration of a story taking the reader back to medieval times when a fire destroyed the forest whose trees were used to construct violins. Jachiam of the Muredas murders the culprit who burned down the trees, and becomes a fugitive who eventually plants the maple tree from which the Storioni violin, known later as the Vial violin, is made. Is this fire a foreboding of future events to be played out during the Holocaust where millions of Jews and other victims of Nazi persecution were first humiliated, incarcerated, starved to death, and in the end, systematically and brutally murdered in gas chambers, their bodies burned in crematoria? Readers may not yet be aware, but as the narratives continue revealing other epochs of European history, we become immersed in the forces of evil. One narrative takes us back to the Inquisition where the monks are portrayed as those in power who perpetrate violence and evil in the name of religion. Evil operates in many forms, and it is no accident that its victims have often been Jews whether in past ages or more recent history. At various intervals in the non-­linear narrative, the monks in the Inquisition become the brutal Nazi SS commanders of the concentration camps who are determined to eliminate “the rats”, as they call the Jews, by any means necessary to promote themselves and remain in power as expressed by the commander of Auschwitz, Obersturmbannfuhrer Hoss: “Auschwitz-­Birkenau is designed, created and calculated to exterminate rats” (2014, p.  281). Cabre breaks down the relationship between the novel (narrativity) and memory (Winter, 2012, p.  13) by juxtaposing different historical events,

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not in a linear historical narrative, but through the non-­linear narrations of his characters. In this way, the readers see the past as images – the memory of human catastrophes of different ages becomes merged with the reality of the present. This recoding of memory (Winter, 2012, p.  14) shows effectively how evil can penetrate itself into human events. One way that evil has been like a festering sore in Adria’s life is his conflict with his ownership of the Storioni violin as a result of inheriting his family’s antiques. On the one hand, he loves the violin which gives him great pleasure and comfort when playing it. On the other hand, he is aware of its origins, that his father purchased it in 1945 from a Nazi fugitive, and that it had been stolen from a Jewish prisoner at Auschwitz. Sara, who is Jewish, objects to his keeping it: “He was a Bavarian Nazi who had to flee and thanks to your father’s money he was able to disappear” (Cabre, 2014, p. 558). She goes so far as to leave him because of this moral dilemma. He knows it is possible to return the violin to a Jewish heir, thereby extricating himself from an act of evil committed by his father which led to his death by murder. However, Adria, throughout the years after his parents’ deaths, has assumed the role of the compulsive collector of rare valuable objects, possessed in the same way by a “demon” as his father had been and cannot seem to disconnect from this practice. This moral conflict is eventually resolved when years later a Jewish man comes to his home claiming that the violin should be returned to him as restitution: “I came to get back Berta’s [his wife] violin” (2014, p. 613). Adria, after hearing his painful story, gladly gives him the violin. “Justice was done” (2014, p.  614) he later told his friend. “I feel good” (2014, p. 615). The violin was a kind of savior for Adria. This brings to mind how some Jewish musicians who played in concentration camp orchestras at Auschwitz, Theresienstadt, and other camps were able to survive having received better food rations because they played the violin and were useful to the Nazis. Throughout the various narrations, the reader becomes more aware of the power of memory and the possibility of losing touch with the past and its impact on our lives. The main narrator, Adria, is actually dictating his autobiographical narratives because he is slowly succumbing to Alzheimer’s disease and is obsessed with having his confessions recorded before he loses his memory. This brings to mind some important questions: what will happen when the last eyewitnesses to the Holocaust die? How will the memory of the Holocaust be represented? Adria never comes to terms with the problem of the essence of evil which has been a driving force throughout his life as stated toward the end of the novel when he is desperately trying to finish his autobiographical manuscript before his memory fades:

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I don’t know where evil is and I  don’t know how to explain my agnostic perplexity. I  lack the tools of the philosopher to continue the journey. I insist searching for the place where evil resides and I  know that it is not inside a person. Inside many people? Is evil the fruit of a perverse human will? Or not: does it come from the Devil, who inoculates those he wishes to with it? . . . And God, where is He? Abraham’s severe God, Jesus’ inexplicable God, cruel and loving Allah. . . . Ask the victims of any perverse act. If God exists, his coldness in the face of evil’s consequences would be shocking. What do the theologians say? As poetic as they make it, in the end, deep down, they come up against its limits: absolute evil, relative evil, physical evil, more evil, the evil of guilt, the evil of pain. . . . My God. It would be laughable, if evil wasn’t accompanied by pain. And natural catastrophes, are they evil as well? Are they another evil? And the pain that they provoke, is that another pain? (2014, p. 707)

Growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust: graphic autobiography Another contemporary work that explores the themes of memory, family, and evil in a very different genre from those discussed earlier – a graphic autobiography – is presented here in Second Generation: The Things I Didn’t Tell My Father (Europe Comics and Dargaud, 2016) by Michel Kichka, a well-­known Israeli author and cartoonist, originally from Belgium. The first time the Holocaust was mentioned in a comic book was in 1944 in a work called, La bete est morte! (The beast is dead!) (see “The Holocaust through Comics” by Tal Bruttmann, 2009), but the most renowned work of this genre is Maus by Art Spiegelman published in 1986 and 1991 (Pantheon Books, New York). Using comics to tell about the Holocaust is becoming more popular, serving as an effective way of reaching younger generations (see Rosenberg, 2017, for a review and, as an example, Michael Kovner’s Ezekiel’s World: A Graphic Novel, 2015, published by Cohel, Jerusalem) though authors are unique in their presentations. Whereas Spiegelman narrates a recorded account of the Holocaust through his father’s perspective (Bruttmann, 2009, p. 176), Kichka narrates the story of his own life as the son of survivor parents, revealing his father’s experiences during and after the Shoah, in the process. Michael Kovner, the son of Abba Kovner, a partisan and leader of the 1943 Vilnius Ghetto uprising, creates fictional characters in order to have a dialog with his father who has long since died (Rosenberg, 2017, p. 62). Maus was the only one of these works that was written in animal form where the Jews are mice, the Nazis are cats, and the Poles are pigs. Perhaps it would

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have been too painful for Spiegelman to confront his father’s horrible story without using animals as symbols. In this way he is also able to cope with the strained relationship he had with his father as the son of survivors. Kichka tells the story of his life – in comics and text – his relationship with his survivor parents and his siblings, focusing not only on his father’s story of the Holocaust, but on his own artistic development as an illustrator. He goes back to his childhood, adolescence, and later development as an artist, describing incidents with humor, sadness, joy, and occasional irony which comprise how his life has been influenced by having grown up in the shadow of the Holocaust.

Kichka’s father was a prisoner in Auschwitz, the only one from his family who survived the Second World War. He did not speak much about his lost family, but Michel remembers a few photographs his father showed him that were taken before the war. They always made him cry. However, when he describes his family life in comics, he often uses humor. In one of the early frames of his autobiography, when Michel and his siblings are young children sitting in the kitchen having dinner with their parents, his father says, “This soup reminds me of Auschwitz. Do you know why?” “No, Dad,” says Michel. His father replies, “Because we didn’t have any soup there. Burp!” (see Figures  20.1 and 20.2, Chapter

FIGURE 20.1  Credit Line: Deuxieme Generation – Ce que je n’ai pas dit a mon pere Source: ©DARGAUD 2018, Michael Kichka, www.dargaud.com, all rights reserved, Europe Comics for this English Language edition

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FIGURE 20.2  Credit Line: Deuxieme Generation – Ce que je n’ai pas dit a mon pere Source: ©DARGAUD 2018, Michael Kichka, www.dargaud.com, all rights reserved, Europe Comics for this English Language edition

I, pp. 5–­6). The use of humor in the way Kichka depicts his family life helps us see through his eyes how he grew up with the underlying knowledge of the Shoah and its effect on his life and that of his brother and sisters. This is similar to the way Andrea Stolowitz uses humor in the portrayal of her characters on stage. Humor seems to have played an important role in the way these authors have managed to cope with having parents or grandparents connected to the Holocaust. Michel’s father always expected him to be the best in class (see Figure 20.3). Young Michel again and again strives to live up to his father’s standards, a common trait amongst children of survivors since their parents

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were often deprived of completing their own education during the war. These children see themselves as fulfilling their parents’ dreams (Wanderman, 1975). The drive toward education and achievements ran high in the Kichka family as Michel describes how each of his siblings, in his or her own way, tries to escape from the pressures put on them by their parents. For one of the Kichka children, this does not end well. Michel’s younger brother eventually commits suicide, leaving a permanent effect on the family’s well-­being. Before leaving for Belgium to get to the funeral, a friend of Michel’s stops by to comfort him saying, “There goes another victim of the Shoah!” On the flight he thinks to himself,

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FIGURE 20.3  Credit Line: Deuxieme Generation – Ce que je n’ai pas dit a mon pere Source: ©DARGAUD 2018, Michael Kichka, www.dargaud.com, all rights reserved, Europe Comics for this English Language edition

“I was already familiar with the second generation syndrome. Was I  safe from such harm?” (Kichka, 2016, Chapter 3, p. 52). During the shiva (week of mourning) that night, Michel’s father starts talking incessantly for the first time about his experiences during the Shoah, recalling many of the horrors he went through. On the day of his liberation, he threw himself on a pile of dead bodies to avoid being shot by a Nazi. He cannot stop talking and the family begins to worry about him. Why was he suddenly releasing such deep emotions on the day of his son’s death? Since Michel’s father was the one who discovered his son’s lifeless body, Michel thinks that seeing him must have triggered all the images of the dead he had been suppressing for years. Perhaps his

father’s feelings of guilt were also revived from the past after his son committed suicide. Michel goes through a difficult time after his younger brother’s suicide, feeling sad and guilty, unable to concentrate on his work, yet he and the rest of the family all cope with the situation and continue to maintain strong family ties despite the sadness and guilt each of them feels and the fact that they live in different countries, Belgium and Israel. Michel continues to develop his artistic ability against all odds. He believes he has inherited his talent for drawing from his father. At age twelve, he shows himself learning to draw from his father’s caricatures of Hitler, Goring, and Goebbels that were drawn after he

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FIGURE 20.3  (Continued)

was liberated from Buchenwald (see Figure 3, Chapter 2, p. 38). He later expresses the desire to become an illustrator and create comics but is discouraged because it is not considered practical. It is not until he is living in Jerusalem and starts a family that he finally achieves a degree in graphic art summa cum laude from the art academy. He asks himself a question, “But had I earned it for myself, this time, or for him yet again? . . . As ‘son of’, am I not always fated to please him in order to make up for what he went through?” (Kichka, 2016, Chapter 2, p. 49). In his autobiography, Michel Kichka has focused on personal memory which has helped him to come to terms with his father’s past and his own need to define himself as an individual by separating from his survivor father without feeling guilty (Wanderman, 1975). Many of these feelings expressed by Michel, which led him to

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pursue a life of achievements and to find his own path in life without assuming the burden of his father’s suffering and losses, have been shared by other children of survivors. For example, in my recent essay, “The End of Innocence”, I  recount: “I  wanted very much to please my parents, to accomplish what they had not . . . I must have been trying both to gain everything that my parents had lost . . . and to give back to my parents what I  felt they deserved because of their suffering” (Rubin, 2017, p. 46). After all, they had survived the Holocaust as partisans, members of the Bielski Otriad, the largest Jewish partisan camp in Poland (today Belarus). My mother, Taube, was the sister of Tuvia Bielski, the commander of the camp, and of Zus, Asael and Aron, the other Bielski Brothers who together managed to save 1,200 Jews from being murdered by the Nazis. For nearly three years, my

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FIGURE 20.4  Credit Line: Deuxieme Generation – Ce que je n’ai pas dit a mon pere ©DARGAUD 2018, Michael Kichka, www.dargaud.com, all rights reserved, Europe Comics for this English Language edition

parents were living in the forests, withstanding freezing cold winters, with little food, under constant fear of being discovered. They had to give their baby, my sister Lola, to strangers for safekeeping, not knowing if they would ever see her again. They had lost everything; their world was turned upside down. Years later, as the child of survivors, I  must have felt that I  had to gain back what was taken from them (2017, pp. 44–­46).

Conclusion As we can see by the contemporary works presented here, we are still struggling to come to terms with the

Holocaust, an event in history that has touched not only its victims but the generations who follow in profound ways perhaps never to be fully understood. Moreover, these works are but a few of many artistic works being created in different genres. One recent work presented at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival in New York called “The Last Goodbye” consisted of a re-­creation of the concentration camp Majdanek in a virtual reality setup produced by Stephen Smith in association with the University of Southern California and the USC Shoah Foundation (Alexander, 2017). Pinchas Gutter, an eighty-­five-­year-­ old Holocaust survivor, tells his story, not in person but through holograms. Viewers can step inside a room, walk around the space, listen to the survivor’s tale, and feel

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as if they are actually in the camp. This kind of experience might contribute to making the memory of the Holocaust more personal, its impact felt more strongly, especially for those with little or no knowledge of the Holocaust. Perhaps by engaging with such works in a variety of genres, we can better understand and cope with our own memories or thoughts of the Holocaust, our family relationships and the knowledge that evil exists in the world in different forms. These artists have found unique ways to give a voice to those who have been silenced by the Shoah and to pass it on to future generations who will be exploring how they have been personally and collectively affected. As Efraim Sicher stated in his study of intergenerational transmission in Israeli fiction, “muteness is turned into voice through the act of writing, albeit at the expense of self-­exposure, an exposure of the inward-­turned pain” (Sicher, 2001, p.  51). They have made it possible for themselves and for us to confront and to work through a traumatic past rather than repress it as had been done previously. This process can pave the way for us to continue to commit ourselves to searching for meaningful lessons from the Holocaust.

References Alexander, N. (2017). How virtual reality is reinventing Holocaust remembrance. Haaretz, 25 April, p. 8. Bruttmann, T. (2009). The Holocaust through comics. In A. Kluge  & B. E. Williams (Eds.), Re-­examining the Holocaust through literature (pp. 173–­200). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Cabre, J. (2014). Confessions. London: Arcadia. CultureBuzzIsrael (2012). CultureBuzz Converses with Ella Milch-­Sheriff – A Composer on a Mission YouTube. Davis, B. (2010, January 25). Interview: Shohat’s dreams. Jerusalem Post Magazine. Retrieved from jpost.com. Epstein, H. (1979). Children of the Holocaust. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Grymes, J. A. (2014). Violins of hope. New York: HarperCollins.

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Horowitz, S. (2008). Foreword. In A. Kluge  & B. E. Williams (Eds.), Re-­examining the Holocaust through literature (pp. vii–­ viii). Cambridge Scholars, 2009. Kestenberg, J. (1993). What a psychoanalyst learned from the Holocaust and genocide. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 74, 1117–­1129. Kichka, M. (2016). Second generation: The things I didn’t tell my father. Paris: Europe Comics and Dargaud. Kluge, A.,  & Williams, B. E. (Eds.) (2009). Introduction: New voices and directions in Holocaust literature. In A. Kluge & B. E. Williams (Eds.), Re-­examining the Holocaust through literature (pp. xi–­xv). Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars. Milch-­Sheriff, E. (2015a). Baruch’s silence – chamber opera YouTube. Milch-­Sheriff, E. (2015b). Can heaven be void? – cantata YouTube. Mitchell, W. (2016). Haifa: Avi Nesher talks Holocaust drama “Past Life.” Retrieved from www.screendaily.com/­features/­ haifa-­avi-­nesher-­talks-­holocaust-­drama-­past-­life/­5110302. article. Rosenberg, P. (2017). The graphic novel as a way of knowing: Michael Kovner’s Ezekiel’s World. PRISM: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Holocaust Educators, 9, 62–­73. Rubin, B. (2017). The end of innocence. PRISM: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Holocaust Educators, 9, 44–­49. Shohat, G. (2013). The dreaming child – opera YouTube. Sicher, E. (2001). The return of the past: The intergenerational transmission of Holocaust memory in Israeli fiction. Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 19, 26–­52. Spiegelman, A. (1986). Maus: A survivor’s tale I. New York: Pantheon Books. Spiegelman, A. (1991). Maus: A survivor’s tale II. New York: Pantheon Books. Stolowitz, A. (2002). Knowing cairo. Retrieved from www.playscripts.com/­play/­814. Stolowitz, A. (2016). Berlin diary (Schluterstrasse 27). (unpublished) Wanderman, E. (1975). Children and families of Holocaust survivors: A psychological overview. In L. Y. Steinitz & D. M. Szonyi (Eds.), Living after the Holocaust: Reflections by the post-­ war generation in America (pp. 115–­123). New York: Bloch. Winter, U. (2012). Images of time: Paradigms of memory and the collapse of the novel of contemporary history in Spain (2000–­2010). In L. Martin-­Estudillo & N. Spadaccini (Eds.), Memory and its discontents: Spanish culture in the early twenty-­ first century. Hispanic issues on line, 11, 12–­34.

21 Challenges on stage Ira Brenner

Introduction In a letter to me from the preeminent psychoanalyst, Jacob Arlow, he emphatically stated that the subject of the Holocaust was better dealt with by artists and poets than by analysts (Arlow, 1997, personal communication). The occasion which prompted his making this stunning declaration, a paraphrasing of the judges’ opinion after the Eichman trial (see the chapter on “Analyst as Historical Witness”) was his acknowledgment of having received the book I  had sent to him. The Last Witness: The Child Survivor of The Holocaust was co-­authored by Judith Kestenberg and me back in 1996. At that time in my career, I craved the recognition and approval of my esteemed elders, and Arlow fit the profile perfectly. Knowing that he and Kestenberg were colleagues and that he was on the board of her foundation, I was expecting, at the very least, a supportive congratulations for this groundbreaking book that we had published. I was, therefore, rather stunned and stung by his response. As I pondered the meaning of his words over many, many months, I ultimately concluded that he was not criticising the book itself as much as he was lamenting the limits of psychoanalysis. As I was still in my youthful idealisation of the field, I could not accept that such a luminary could sound so resigned. After all, I needed psychoanalysis as my Rosetta Stone to decipher the incomprehensibility of the human mind, and that need was felt most acutely as it pertained to the Holocaust, where I had felt such a sense of vulnerability and confusion all of my life. So here it was, after all of my early years of research and clinical work, that one of the greatest

minds in the field was telling me that I was looking in the wrong place for answers! The Holocaust was simply too huge, too horrible, and too incomprehensible. More than twenty years after receiving his letter, I continue to struggle with Arlow’s contention, but I understand what he meant so much better. But on the other hand, how does one creatively represent unspeakable cruelty, genocide, massive psychic trauma, unresolvable grief, miraculous stories of survival, and extraordinary feats of resistance and bravery in the face of overwhelmingly destructive forces? How is possible for the artist to achieve this goal without trivialising, commercialising, politicising, or otherwise doing an irreverent injustice to the millions of victims of the Nazi regime? The portrayal of these themes on stage pose a special challenge, and my recent experience as a consultant to a production of Charlotte Delbo’s Who Will Carry the Word? gave me a firsthand opportunity to understand some of these challenges. Before I describe this experience, I think it might be helpful to provide a context in the form of offering some background about both Delbo and her work.

Charlotte Delbo Charlotte Delbo (1913–­1985) was a French writer and member of the French Resistance during World War II. Politically active since her youth, she joined the French Young Communist Women’s League in 1932. As she was interested in the theatre as well, Delbo was in South America working for the famous actor, Louis Jovet, and his theatrical company when the Wehrmacht invaded France in 1940. Instead of staying out of harm’s way,

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she soon returned to France to be with her husband and fellow resistance fighter, George Dudach, to actively oppose the occupation with her comrades. This fateful decision was precipitated by the capture of a friend who was tried and sentenced to death by a Vichy government court tribunal in 1941, as she presumably felt guilt being away while her friends were being “guillotined”. Delbo and her husband were assigned to be couriers to the internationally acclaimed poet, Louis Aragon, and their assignment was the printing and distributing of pamphlets and related written material. They were caught on 2 March 1942 when another courier was followed by government agents to their flat and the outlawed “evidence” was discovered. Dudach was executed by firing squad in May  1942 and Delbo was imprisoned near Paris until she was sent to Auschwitz on 23 January  1943. Then she was sent to the woman’s camp at Birkenau and then to the Raisko satellite camp for about a year, after which she was sent to Ravensbruck. In 1945, near the end of the war, she was released to the safety of the Swedish branch of the International Red Cross, and when she regained enough strength, she returned to her beloved France. She returned to the family home which remarkably had not been destroyed. There she found the intact belongings of her sister who had also been sent to Auschwitz but who did not return. Delbo was affected very deeply and quite likely was mentally tortured by survivor guilt for the rest of her life. As a member of one of very few convoys of non-­Jewish French prisoners sent there, this story is not well known and an extremely important facet of the Holocaust. Although she remained interested in social and political issues afterward, she is best remembered for her extraordinary writing about her concentration camp experience (Delbo, 1997), which is both unflinchingly bold and yet quite poetic. Her major contribution is the trilogy, Auschwitz and After consisting of None of Us Will Return, Useless Knowledge, and The Measure of Our Days (Delbo, 2014). Langer, in his introduction to the second edition, described her “remarkable style of direct confrontation that lures us into the maelstrom of atrocity while simultaneously drowning all intellectual defences” (Langer, in Delbo, 2014, p. xx). While the first volume was written shortly after her liberation, she postponed publishing it until 1965, fearing that her words could not do justice to the magnitude of the horror she witnessed and endured. She had great doubts about how people who had returned from the camps could actually explain what they had been through, as though the act of survival itself almost negated their credibility. A recurrent theme in her work is the expression, “Try to look. Just try and see”. In other words, she was exhorting us to not look away. Interestingly, the developmental line of the defence of dissociation includes gaze aversion of the overstimulated infant as a precursor (Brenner, 2014).

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The consultation Through our mutual contacts with local Holocaust organisations, my name was given to a very well-­known director, actor, and playwright who was waiting for the rights to produce a staged reading of Charlotte Delbo’s Who Will Carry the Word? (Delbo, 1982). This extremely powerful play is essentially a very thinly disguised personal account of Delbo’s own experience in the camps. Having worked extensively in all facets of dramatic representations of the Holocaust, this very experienced director was well aware of the difficulties inherent in such work. She had hoped that a consultation with a psychoanalyst familiar with the Holocaust could further enhance her and her actors’ appreciation of the characters’ psyches under such duress. As another opportunity to apply psychoanalytic thinking (Freud, 1933) to the world outside the consultation room, I  was delighted and hoped I could be of assistance. And from her end, perhaps she had a foreshadowing of a set of unique challenges that lie ahead. While awaiting confirmation of the theatre company’s permission to proceed, I  did some background reading about the play and about Charlotte Delbo’s own remarkable life, as described earlier. Having known virtually nothing about her until this point, I  quickly appreciated her unique contributions to Holocaust literature and wondered about my own ignorance about her until this point. The fact that her major works were not translated into English until the 1990s is no doubt a contributing factor, but perhaps, ironically, her voice may not been as loudly heard by others because she was not Jewish. While the Jews under Nazi domination were singularly doomed, clearly there were many other groups who suffered greatly, and Charlotte Delbo’s work epitomises that historical fact. I  note parenthetically that on a recent trip to the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., long after the production of the play, I saw a reference to Charlotte Delbo, which I had obviously missed the last time I was there. I was on the verge of being a part of this important project, and found myself eagerly waiting in anticipation for the green light so they could proceed. From the outset, there was an unusual snag in the process, as the channels to get the legal rights to produce the play required permission from Delbo’s estate in Europe as opposed to gaining permission from a well-­known publishing company. Communication back from the estate was very slow and the time was quickly approaching for the theatre to know definitively in order to fit the production into its very exacting schedule. While it was not an option to proceed without formal permission as both the director and the theatre maintained the highest level of integrity with such matters, it was quite likely that they could have “broken the rules” with impunity,

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as the royalty was quite minimal and there were no other productions of that play scheduled in the tri-­state area. Given the nature of the play, which portrayed how survival in the camps often required violating some of the capricious and deadly sadistic rules if the inmates could get away with it, I was struck by how the dilemma over adhering to irrational authority was repeating itself before any casting or rehearsals even began. Just as we psychoanalysts learn that the earliest interactions with a patient can have enormous unconscious meaning and presage things to come thanks to the “compulsion to repeat” (Freud, 1914), here, too, I  learnt about these early issues and listened with great curiosity. Amongst the different themes and genres that attract the interest of playwrights, there are many popular plays written about the “behind the scenes” drama that inevitably occurs with every production. From Shakespeare to Shaw and from Pirandello to today’s writers, the anxiety, the rivalries, the comedy, satire, and the tragic complications that can and have occurred are a perennially favourite topic. I was beginning to understand why that is so, as the suspense, intrigue, and uncertainty began to fill the air. Would a play about French Christian women sent to their fates at a concentration camp for allegedly subversive political activity against the Nazi regime be allowed to be produced again? The play Who Will Carry the Word? was literally about the absolute necessity of at least one of these doomed women to survive and tell the world what was really happening behind the barbed wire. And here I  was, being a witness to an almost uncanny situation where there was great uncertainty over whether the production company would be able to carry out its mission to “carry the word” to its audience. It seemed that permission was finally granted from the mysterious caretakers of Delbo’s estate just at the last possible moment before another play had to be inserted in its place. As though it survived a “selection” at the entry ramp of Auschwitz, the play was allowed to live another day, as long as it was able to do its job. And so the production team breathed a deep sigh of relief and immediately set to work. Because it was slated to be a staged reading, it would not be a full-­scale production with an elaborate set, costumes, and special effects. Moreover, there would have been few if any rehearsals as the actors read from their scripts in hand. Several years before, I  had the privilege of co-­ producing a staged reading of a play, which was an important experience for me. Written by psychologist, Rivka Greenberg, Ph.D., it is about “the third generation” (see Chapter 15). This performance took place at a recent winter meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in New York as a joint effort of the Holocaust discussion group and the Psychoanalysis and Theater discussion group, chaired by Fred Sander, M.D. Here several professional actors literally walked in off the street and read their lines. But they read them so well

and with such emotion that we were amazed to learn that they had never seen them before, never rehearsed them, and did not even know what type of play they had contracted to perform until they saw their scripts! For the play under discussion here, the director had a longstanding interest in Delbo and waited many years to bring this play to life, so she had a while to think about what she wanted. She envisioned something in between a full production and a cold reading, which was heartily endorsed by the governing board of the theatre. A consummate professional and serious student of the Holocaust, she had the means and the talent to give the play its due and she could not wait to get started. One of the important artistic issues in this play is the need for many women’s parts. As Delbo adapted her hellish ordeal to the stage, many of her fellow prisoners’ voices were expressed through the characters who had speaking parts. Some were central characters and some may have had only a line or two. The first decision here, therefore, was to decide how many actors were needed and what, if any, of the script needed to be cut. In other words, another “selection” needed to occur; this time the responsibility fell upon the director, whose keen eye determined how to best accomplish this feat. She decided on casting eleven women for the roles, incorporating some of the smaller parts by double-­ and triple-­casting the actors and saving all the lines. While necessary for the constraints of the production to limit the number of those on stage, it would have been tantamount to silencing the voices of these victims had the director not been as sensitive as she was. She was determined to have everyone’s voices be heard so they all could truly “carry the word” to a new set of audiences. While cutting lines or eliminating a part is done, this kind of editing is not an accepted practice and in fact is actually against copyright laws for most theatrical publishers. I, therefore, wondered whether the nature of this script gave the handling of this problem even more psychological significance. Did she, unconsciously, feel any uneasiness over possibly having to make symbolic life and death decisions, or was I reading too much into all of this? I was reminded of one of the first presentations I  had given about the psychodynamics of intergenerational trauma, which occurred at a profoundly moving conference for children of survivors in Israel in 1988. It was entitled “Unconscious Fantasies of the Selection in Children of Survivors”. The topic caused such an uproar that I  could not complete the reading of my written text because so many people interrupted and wanted to share their own eerie sensations about this phenomenon, but until that moment did not have the words for it. I sensed that I had made a large group interpretation and had no choice but to turn my formal presentation into an open group experience, tossing my carefully typed manuscript away and getting caught up in the electric atmosphere of the moment. While the

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director, herself, was not a child of survivors, her mother’s best friend was a death camp survivor who played a very important role in her young life. So, I could not help but wonder how much of this “2G stuff” (Levine, 1982) had rubbed off on her, as it were. The late notification of getting the rights to the play created a deadline pressure which resulted in another departure from the usual manner of theatrical productions, such that the time-­consuming protocol of scheduling times for auditions might have not allowed for enough rehearsal time. Therefore, the director personally invited women in the acting community whom she believed would be suitable. Having been part of the acting community for many years and having almost a sixth sense for casting actors that would “fit” the roles, she justifiably felt confident about her choices. She had previously worked with almost everyone she had “pre-­ cast” and invited; those one or two with whom she did not actually work before were well known and well regarded, although there was some variability in their experience. She also had had many social interactions with most of them over the years, and in short, felt quite comfortable and quite pleased with the cast. Everyone was overtly quite enthusiastic about the project, so it came as an unpleasant surprise to her that when she announced that she had found a psychoanalytic consultant who had expertise in the psychological effects of Holocaust who was willing to meet with them, there was little interest on their parts. In fact, she sensed some subtle opposition to this idea which puzzled and disappointed her. A very intuitive individual, she suddenly felt a ripple of failure and an almost unshakable sense that the production was doomed from the first read through! How is it, she wondered, that what seemed like such an obvious asset to this very powerful project would engender such dismissiveness and resistance on their parts? Had she misjudged them? Was some kind of group process developing already that challenged her authority? Was it really such a good idea in the first place to haul in an analyst to “talk” to the cast about the horrors their characters would experience once again as they were brought back to life on stage by this new set of actors? Would it overwhelm them and were they not quite ready for it all? Would my efforts to help them better understand the situation they were about to portray actually backfire and make things worse for them? Might some of them even become symptomatic as they dared to delve into the roles of women who were shaved, tattooed, mercilessly degraded, dehumanised, starved, beaten to death, mauled to death by dogs, or simply forced to live in their own filth and become so weak that they could not fend off the rats who chewed away their near lifeless bodies? How much did they, a group of largely non-­Jewish actors, actually know about life in the death camps? And, how much did they want to know? Were they able to truly heed Delbo’s challenge,

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or were they blithely thinking that this would be just another role that they could temporarily invest in, without it taking any emotional toll on them? Certainly, those of us clinicians who work with survivors of massive psychic trauma are quite familiar with the associated occupational hazards; the director also had a vague, but growing sense of a rocky road ahead. I had served in this capacity in another Holocaust play, A Shayna Maidl, with a much less experienced cast in another setting, and my efforts were both appreciated and I believe helpful. This play, written by Barbara Lebow (Lebow, 1988), is about the bittersweet reunion of two sisters who were separated by the war, one surviving the concentration camp, and the other living comfortably in New York City. The horrors of the camps were there, but the war was over; the play was a study in contrasts of the vastly different lives the two had led during the war. In the Delbo play, the setting was in the camp and the horrors were immediate and unrelenting. In Who Will Carry the Word? a disconcerting process was starting to develop very early on with this cast of eleven women. Was there also something about an all-­female cast of this size that contributed to a group regression? Certainly the extremely graphic nature of the play’s dialogue with its utterly direct and unvarnished description of unspeakable ways to destroy women was rather disturbing. That was its intention. Written in a poetic and at times lyrical way which belied the unspeakable nature of the subject, the words to be spoken by the actors conveyed experiences that were so foreign and unimaginable that even those very familiar with “life in the concentration camp” could become filled with shock and horror. It was, however, because of this very nature of the play that the director had been determined to finally have her chance to make it happen. She felt remarkably “at home” with this material, but was her cast equally as prepared? The director had extensive experience in all facets of play production and creatively designed a minimalist set using only lighting and spoken sound cues to create a sense of life in a concentration camp. She also chose drab, colourless dresses and bought matching material which she cut for headscarves. Then she found a swath of thick red felt which she meticulously cut into small triangles which were sown onto the dresses, thereby identifying the women as political prisoners. Auschwitz had an elaborate labelling system for categorising  the inmates according to their “crimes”, starting with the infamous tattooing of numbers on the  forearm, then forcing them to wear filthy, lice infested uniforms which were “recycled” from those already murdered or simply worked to death. Sewn onto the uniforms were yellow stars for the Jews, inverted pink triangles for homosexuals, green for criminals, black for Sinti and Roma, and red triangles for the non-­Jewish political prisoners,

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which were immortalised in the play. During the preparation of the red triangles, the director was so intently preoccupied with this task that she did not realise that the tip of her index finger had become numb due to the persistent pressure from cutting with the scissors which impinged on the nerves of her finger. This neuropathy lasted several months and was especially persistent throughout the run of the play. As a reflection of her intense powers of concentration, she was totally focused on this production, thoroughly invested in every last detail, and knew every word of the script. She had waited many, many years for her chance and now the time had arrived. The play dramatises the plight of the 230 French women, including Charlotte Delbo, who were arrested, turned over to the Gestapo, and incarcerated in an old French fortress turned prison at Romainville where they got to know one another before being transported to Auschwitz. As a result, they entered the camp with an unusual sense of solidarity and esprit de corps, proudly singing the French national anthem, an intensely patriotic call to arms against tyranny and foreign invaders. These extraordinary women carried out their legendary act of defiance while marching through the infamous gates of hell, which were cynically crafted with the words, “Arbeit Mach Frei”, or “Work Will Set You Free”. Of those 230, only forty returned. Each of these women’s lives is immortalised through a biography in Delbo’s remarkable document, Convoy to Auschwitz, written in 1965 but not translated into English until 1997. Delbo observes that the older women mostly died off and that the majority of those who did make it were the younger ones. The play focuses on a barracks of twenty-­two such women, whose prewar lives and concentration camp experiences clearly incorporate the actual stories of Delbo and her compatriots. As a result, it is very much like a documentary for the stage. As it turned out, the cast of eleven women were mostly of an age that would have put them in the “unlikely to survive” category. While this detail would have had little effect on the audience given the makeup, lighting, and so forth, I wondered if it might have unconsciously affected the actors and increased their sense of vulnerability because as the group dynamics unfolded, more regression became evident. As noted earlier, a staged reading does usually not require the same depth of immersion into the character that a full production demands, but in this case, the rehearsal schedule was almost equivalent to that of a full production. This expectation was known to everyone at the outset, and it was entirely consistent with the director’s reputation for seriousness of purpose and striving for the highest standards. Nine rehearsals were scheduled. Remarkably, none of these was fully attended by everyone in the cast until opening night, as, curiously, something always seemed to come up and at least one

player would cancel at the last moment and call out sick. Most of the time, it was a mysterious pain syndrome, which I will discuss further. As a result, someone, symbolically, was always absent from the dreaded concentration camp “roll call” and was in the “infirmary”. Almost from the outset, there was an element of dissension and rebellion against the authority. The director, who for all of her accomplishments, was actually quite modest, even shy at times, and would at times err on the side of appeasement rather than confrontation. She was known to be slow to anger and very fair-­ minded. As a true idealist at heart, she wanted to believe that everyone would always try to do her best and that people would be rewarded simply for doing well. While she was quite sophisticated psychoanalytically and in fact had a lot of “street smarts”, she, nevertheless, could exude an air of vulnerability such that certain character types might try to take advantage of her good nature. She was quite aware of this propensity and shared this self-­observation with me as the rehearsals took their unusual turn. In a most immature and unprofessional way, a number of the actors began to complain about the arduous schedule, the length of the rehearsals, and even the harshness of the director. At first, the most professionally experienced ones were scornful of what they saw as a flawed work ethic in this sub group of “complainers”. A  particular incident crystallized the developing negative transference towards her, which occurred during the rehearsal of a brutal scene at the “appel” or roll call. This twice-­a-­day exercise in standing at attention while everyone was accounted for was actually a time where the prisoners were forced to stand for hours, endure endless beatings, and be forced to witness atrocities and murders visited upon their comrades. Apparently unaware that she might have been reacting to an unconscious identification with the prisoners, one of the actors actually wanted to break character and sit down. She became stricken with back pain and foot pain, insisting that she could not stand any longer. However, she then discovered that she was unable to sit down very well either, and when she did, she could not stand up again! Clearly, she became unable find any position where she was comfortable and she had become immobilised. Her body seemed to express her feelings of helplessness and misery over feeling trapped and controlled by an authoritarian. The irony of the situation was not lost on the director, but the nature of the relationships in theatre productions is such that psychoanalytic interpretations are usually off-­limits, especially during the middle of a rehearsal in front of the rest of the cast. Consequently, the director bit her tongue and urged the ailing woman to try to maintain her position for a short while longer while they perfected the scene. Later on, the director was stunned to hear from others that she was perceived

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by them also as being too hard on this actor for “not letting” her take a rest! So, the director became cast in the role of the evil Nazi taskmaster who mercilessly pushed her prisoner/­actor beyond her capabilities, sadistically forcing her to stand until she almost dropped. Curiously, a small epidemic of mass hysteria (Zavala, 2010) then broke out as more than half of the cast sequentially became afflicted with an identical set of symptoms resulting in the rash of last-­minute absences. Under less talented leadership, this somatic insurrection could have threatened the whole enterprise. The director, despite her sense of foreboding, was unprepared for this form of rebellion and felt hurt over the distorted group perception, especially from those with whom she had worked extensively, for they knew how sensitive and compassionate she actually was. In our Holocaust discussion group at APSA, it has been long recognised that survivors and their children can frequently project their aggression onto the analyst and perceive him/­her as a sadistic Nazi. This Nazi transference may become extremely uncomfortable to tolerate, even for seasoned clinicians. Now this phenomenon had developed in the group and the director was feeling extreme discomfort and anger in response, thereby projectively identifying with the group’s influence upon her. In helping her understand what was happening so she could better withstand their reaction and not get drawn into this regression, I found myself functioning more like an analytic supervisor working with a colleague in order to help her better tolerate an especially odious negative transference, consider the possibility of an enactment, and explore potential countertransference pitfalls. The director, at this point, felt comfortable enough to share some childhood antecedents, that is, irrational, aggressive behaviour from female authority figures, which was very frightening to her when she was young and likely got re-­activated during this time, contributing to her current distress. The group regression reached a nadir when close to opening night they were rehearsing a scene in which the remaining prisoners were allowed back into the roll call square after a brutally cold winter. In order to convey their rediscovery of this notorious and now grossly muddy part of the camp, the director asked that women walk around in the square and create the sense of re-­acquainting themselves with that hated part of the camp. Instead, they all walked around the stage in single file, in a square. The visual effect to an audience would not only have been uninteresting and confusing, but it was not what the director had asked them to do. Instead, they simply “followed the leader”, one after another around in the formation of square. When the director repeated her expectation, she was met with the angry rebuke, “That’s NOT what you said!” This refrain was repeated by several of the women who were absolutely convinced of what they heard and insisted that they

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were correct. Misunderstandings certainly can occur during the blocking of a play, where the movement of the actors around the stage is carefully worked out. This blocking usually begins with the director explaining her vision of the action, which then can be elaborated upon by the players themselves. This kind of collaboration enables both members of the dyad to work together until the actor begins to own the action as her own, in keeping with what is “in character” for any given role. A healthy give-­and-­take occurs, but when there are difficulties in the relationship, as likewise in the analytic situation, be it from a passive director/­excessively silent analyst or an over-­controlling director/­imposing analyst, or an anxious or oppositional actor/­patient, then problems develop. Such was the case here. Almost in lockstep agreement, the group insisted that the director told them to walk “IN A” SQUARE! Essentially, they insisted that they were obeying her orders, to the letter! There was no room for negotiation at this point, and the conviction of the group’s belief in what they heard was absolute. They were right and she was wrong; the followers had become the leaders, turning the tables on her en masse. The director had never experienced such a moment with any cast ever before and felt ganged up upon in a very disturbing way. She discovered afterward, from a confession of one of her most loyal friends, that after this rehearsal, the cast assembled in the green room and openly discussed how rigidly dictatorial the director was! Not only did she then feel appalled and totally misheard, but very much to her credit, she, most importantly, felt curious about this unprecedented mutiny from her cast. With our discussion of this incident, she was better able to consider the possibility of the group’s own identification with the Nazi aggressor, which was once again projected onto her (David, 2011). Through such an understanding, she was better able to transcend the pitfall of a getting drawn into a power struggle and contain the anxiety, somatisation, and somewhat paranoid accusations levelled against her. As proof of her ability to do so, professionalism prevailed over regression and the production proceeded to completion. It was very highly regarded, well reviewed, and deeply moving to all those who were fortunate enough to attend a performance of the staged reading.

Discussion This play has been so highly recognised that it was chosen to be one of the twenty-­five top plays highlighted in Robert Skloot’s classic text on Holocaust-­related theatre (Skloot, 1988). It was included not only because of the quality of Delbo’s writing, but also because of the content as it pertains to the little-­known plight of women, particularly non-­Jewish women, who were French nationals condemned to Auschwitz as political

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prisoners. They were treated just slightly better than the Jews and they had a higher survival rate, but their struggle for survival was no less uncertain for them. It is noteworthy that the women were portrayed in a way that emphasised their humanity, social cooperation, physical comforting of one another, and superhuman efforts to retain their dignity. Although not a morality play and not a depiction of the controversial and now obsolete thesis espoused by Bettelheim that only the superior survive (Bettelheim, 1943), the tension between surviving to “carry the word” versus annihilation through total dehumanisation and destruction of the self is present throughout. In a different way, the play, The Cannibals, written by Hungarian Jewish writer, George Tabori, looks at life in the death camp also. Here, the plot centres around the almost unimaginable plight of prisoners who agonise over whether to consume human flesh in order to live. With black humour and a bit of surrealism, everyone gets killed except the two who refused become cannibals. For Delbo, however, the situation is more nuanced. As Skloot points out, at the end of the play, the character Gina decides to throw herself against the electrified fence and kill herself rather than be forced to join the “White Kerchief” commando. It is their most odious job to join the killing machine by preparing unsuspecting children for the gas chambers (Skloot, 1988). Gina expresses her determination not to be totally reduced to a subhuman state and take ultimate control of her destiny. Earlier in the play, one of the mothers of a mother-­ daughter dyad represented on stage crosses herself, perhaps foreshadowing the inevitable temptation to do literally anything in order to survive. She prays to Jesus that she will not become evil like the depraved Nazis who are in charge of the camp. Here the prisoner appeals to a higher power for protection and strength against the barbarians and against that universal aspect of human nature in herself, that she too, could become a monster and do anything to survive a few more days. Curiously, during a performance where another actor’s family was in the audience, she crossed herself also, even though it was out of character for her role and was never discussed with the director. This improvisation totally bewildered the director, but she resisted the urge to ask the actor directly about this initiative, as it was her usual style not to critique her casts once the performances began, lest they feel criticised, become self-­conscious and inhibited, such that it adversely affects one’s acting. We, therefore, could only speculate on her motivation. We hypothesised that this woman was also praying for protection, but the fact that she added this piece of business only when her family was present suggested that it may have been an unconscious communication to them as well. Perhaps this devout Catholic wanted to give them a sign that she had not really lost her own faith, that she was

not sympathising or associating with the Jews, and that she really was okay; she was just “pretending” to be in a camp. After all, what they were viewing was just a play. But what a play!

Conclusion Assuming their roles in this play were somewhat overwhelming for the women, many may not have even been conscious of its effect upon them. However, at least two of them were aware enough that they could not wait for it to be over, despite the quite solid work done by one of them. Their feelings of great relief were expressed on social media through the posting of a photo of them voraciously gorging themselves on cheesesteak sandwiches as they celebrated the end of the play. It was as though the starving prisoners were now liberated and could finally eat as much as they wanted. It is notable that the script repeatedly addresses the relentless effects of prolonged starvation and the almost hallucinatory pleasure of conjuring up delicious recipes of what they wanted to eat after they were free again. Between the inordinate amount of absences due to sudden health issues, the negativism, the mutinous tendencies, and the group’s identification with the aggressor which was projected onto the director in the form of a Nazi transference, there was much “clinical” evidence of a major regression in the rehearsals of this play, which might have jeopardised the success of this production. From a Bionian perspective, it could be said that a “basic assumption” group process (Bion, 1961) characterised by fight-­flight seemed to have developed that threatened to subvert the central task of the work group, that is, the creation of the play. The director’s capacity to contain and detoxify the cast’s anxiety and aggression enabled the production to proceed and become very successful. However, there was a complete deterioration of at least one relationship and a lasting negative effect on several others. The play and the process were rarely, if ever, discussed when any of the actors would come in contact with the director afterward. Like a negative symptom associated with a traumatic experience, it was almost as though it never happened . . .

References Arlow, J. (1997). Personal communication. Bettelheim, B. (1943). Individual and mass behavior in extreme situations. Journal of Abnormal Psychology and Social Psychology, 38, 417–­452. Bion, W. R. (1961). Experience in groups and other papers. London: Tavistock. Brenner, I (2014). Dark matters: Exploring the realm of psychic devastation. London: Karnac Books. David, F. (2011). Internal racism: A psychoanalytic approach to race and difference. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Delbo, C. (1982). Who will carry the word? (Trans. C. Haft). In R. Skloot (Ed.), The theater of the Holocaust. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Delbo, C. (1997). Convoy to Auschwitz: Women of the French resistance (Trans. C. Cosman). Boston: Northeastern Press. Delbo, C. (2014). Auschwitz and after (Trans. R. Lamont, 2nd ed.). New Haven: Yale University Press. Freud, S. (1914). Remembering, repeating, and working through. S.E., 12. Freud, S. (1933). New introductory lectures. S.E., 22. Kestenberg, J., & Brenner, I. (1996). The last witness – The child survivor of the Holocaust.

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Lebow, B. (1988). A Shayna Maidl. New York: New American Library. Levine, H. B. (1982). Toward a psychoanalytic understanding of children of survivors of the Holocaust. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 5, 70–­92. Skloot, R. (1988). The darkness we carry: The drama of the Holocaust. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Tabori, G. (1982). The cannibals. In R. Skloot (Ed.), The theater of the Holocaust. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Zavala, N. L. (2010). The expulsion of evil and its return: An unconscious fantasy associated with a case of mass hysteria in adolescents. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 91, 1157–­1178.

22 At the water’s edge: poetry and the Holocaust Janet R. Kirchheimer

For my father, Julius Kirchheimer, z”l, and my mother, Margot Strauss Kirchheimer

every day at breakfast. She said it was the best time she ever had.

How I Knew and When

Age 24 – My father tells me, “Otto Reis got out of G ­ ermany in 1941. He took a train to Moscow, the Trans-­Siberian railroad to Vladivostok, a boat to Shanghai, a boat to Yokohama, a boat to San Francisco, and a bus to Philadelphia, his wife and three sons staying behind. Carola Stein signed affidavits for them, but the government said she didn’t make enough money.

Age 8 – My father hangs upside down on a pipe that was part of a fence that separated our street from the next. All of his change falls from his pockets. He looks so young. Age 15 – “There were one hundred and four girls in the Israelitisch Meisjes Weeshuis orphanage in Amsterdam. Four survived,” my mother says. “I remember Juffrouw Frank, the headmistress. She made us drink cod-­liver oil each morning. She said it was healthy for us.” Age 17 – My father tells me his father and sister Ruth got out of Germany and went to Rotterdam. They were supposed to leave on May 11, 1940, for America. The Germans invaded on May 10. Age 21 – My mother tells me Tante Amalia told her that on the Queen Elizabeth to America in 1947, after she and Onkel David were released from an internment camp on the Isle of Man, she was so hungry she ate twelve rolls

Age 31 – My mother’s cousin refuses to accept money a rich woman left him. Says the money has too much blood on it. My mother tells me that in 1939 her cousin had asked this woman to sign affidavits for his wife and two daughters. She said no. Age 33 – My father asks me to dial the number. His hands shake. He asks my cousin if she wants to send her three children out of Israel during the Gulf War. She says she can’t let them go. Age 42 – A waiter in a Jerusalem hotel tells my father he should come to live in Israel, because it’s home. My father tells him, “Home is anywhere they let you in.”

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As a poet, I am often asked to explain poetry. Webster’s New Riverside Dictionary (1996, p.  527) defines it as 1. the art or works of a poet, and 2. writing in metrical verse. Although true, such definitions do not do justice to poetry. To paraphrase Yvor Winters, a poem is a statement in words about a human experience with particular attention paid to the emotional connotations of language. Edward Hirsch (Poet’s Choice, 2006, p. XV) writes about poetry: “It moves and dances between speech and song. These words rhythmically strung together, these electrically charged sounds, are one of the ways by which we come to know ourselves.” Robert Frost in his essay “The Figure a Poem Makes” (Selected Prose of Robert Frost, 1966, p. 20) asserts, “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.” And poetry is as simple and complicated as that. Born in a small village in Germany, my father hid, along with his parents, older sister, and younger brother in the cellar of their home during Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, on November  9, 1938. The next morning, he was ordered to report to the town hall. Along with nine men, he was arrested and sent to Dachau. He was sixteen. In 1942, my father’s parents, sister, and brother were deported to Westerbork, and then to Auschwitz, and murdered upon arrival. My mother, also born in Germany, was six years old when she was backed up against a wall at school in 1936. Her classmates threw rocks at her and called her Jude – Jew – because she refused to say, “Heil Hitler.” Her parents got her out to the Jewish girls’ orphanage in Amsterdam, the Israelitisch Meisjes Weeshuis. I consider myself lucky. My parents answered all my questions about the Shoah and what happened to their families. Some of my friends told me their parents refused to discuss it. When I  was young, I  remember visiting a childhood friend of my father. They would stand off in a corner speaking about the Holocaust in low voices, stopping when I walked by. But I wanted to know. In my teens, I asked what happened. My father and I made lists of the transports of Jews from his village, we talked about Kristallnacht and Dachau, about the watercress his mother planted each spring near the house and used as a border around the kartoffel salat (potato salad), how his younger brother wrote in one of his last letters, “with God’s help, we will come to America.” One night at the kitchen table, my mother sang me “The Song of Lorelei” that she learnt as a young child. She told me her mother threw out her gold and silver jewellery from the window of a train after Jews were ordered to turn it in, saving only her wedding band; that she had to go back to Germany to the American Consulate to get her visa for America; that she only spoke Dutch and could barely communicate with her mother; how after coming to America her father walked

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home from work in the blizzard of 1947, collapsed, and died in her mother’s arms. I did not set out to be a poet. As a kid, I was a voracious reader and thought that when I grew up I would write short stories about the Holocaust. I can still see the change falling out of my father’s pockets. All the fathers in the neighbourhood were much younger. I knew from a young age that my family and I were different, though I did not understand why. We were the only Jews in the neighbourhood; we were not American in the ways the other kids and their parents were. It took years for me to realise I was being raised more European than American. I grew up in two different worlds – one that does not exist anymore and one in which I  still do not, many times, feel at home. Like some other children of survivors, I struggled with the culture of America. I remember trying to explain to some non-­Jewish friends that my parents were German Jews. They could not understand how one could be both German and Jewish. Even though they were Irish or Italian Catholic, it was only possible for me to be defined by one identity: Jew. I felt I was on the outside looking in. There were many times I wanted to jump into the melting pot, blend in, be an American kid sitting on a porch swing eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but I could not. There are cultural identities that choose us, and there are cultural identities we choose. The Holocaust chose me, and I chose to keep it. I tried to run away but each time I  tried, the stronger the pull was to come back. Finally, I  stopped running. My childhood fuelled my desire to write, as did my shyness, and the longing to enter other landscapes created by writers. It would take me many years to understand that being a poet is how I came into this world. How to Spot One of Us We’re the ones who didn’t know our relatives spoke with accents, the ones whose parents got nervous if we didn’t come home on time, were afraid to let us go places by ourselves, who told the neighborhood kids the numbers on their forearms were their phone numbers, who won’t visit Germany, who wake up night after night from dreams, who never talk about the past, or never stop talking about the past, and we’re the ones who dream about big families, who wish words could just be words, wish “camp” or “selection” didn’t make us flinch, and sometimes we’re the ones who do everything we can so you don’t know who we are.

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I took a short story writing workshop, but the teacher told me, “I think you’re a poet, not a short story writer.” Less than six months later, I was in a poetry workshop, and my life has never been the same. Poetry allows me to say what I  cannot say in other forms of writing. It allows me to live in ambiguity. Eliza Griswold, in an interview in Poets and Writers (Eliza Griswold’s Wideawake Field, May/­June 2007, p.  64) said, “What poetry allows for is dealing with ambiguity, which is impossible to deal with in a nonfiction article. . . . There are paradoxes that are essential to understand what’s going on. There are experiences that there’s no other language for, no other place for.” According to Wikipedia, Ambiguity is an attribute of any idea or statement whose intended meaning cannot be definitively resolved according to a rule or process with a finite number of steps. The Holocaust and its after-­effects can in no way be resolved according to a rule or process. There is no process of finite steps to comprehend it. Each new piece of history I  learn leads to another maze. Only when I  was in a workshop did I  realise that poetry was the way I could encounter and write about the Shoah, my family, and myself. Town Hall “What for?” my father asked. “What did I do? I’m only sixteen,” and the gendarme told him if he didn’t like it, if he asked any more questions, he could go home, they’d arrest his father instead. And he saw his father, in the next room, paying his tax bill, and he didn’t call out, afraid they’d arrest him too, afraid his father would want to take his place, and the gendarme said he had a job to do, a quota of ten men, and he didn’t care how he filled it. And my father knew the gendarme, went to school with his daughter. He was told to empty his pockets, turn in any money and weapons, and he turned in his pocketknife, and told the gendarme he had to go to the bathroom, and another gendarme, Wilhelm, took him, and he knew Wilhelm too. He told Wilhelm not to worry, he wasn’t going to run away, and Wilhelm said he knew, but he was doing his job. As my father and nine men were loaded on a truck that said “Trink Coca-­Cola” he turned and saw Wilhelm crying like a child.

For all the stories I’ve heard from my parents, I  always knew much could never be spoken. I  knew things were held back. And I  knew I  could not ask. Poetry was the way to bridge the chasm between that which could be spoken and that which could not. Learning the craft of poetry – the word choices and their connotations, the music of the line, the breath, line and stanza breaks, and more – allowed me to write about that maze of twists and turns brought up by wrestling with the Shoah. Poet and writer Kahlil Gibran Sand and Foam (2008, p. 26) wrote, “Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky, we fell them down and turn them into paper, that we may record our emptiness.” Delving into the Shoah leaves us empty. It leaves us bereft of humanity. How can it not? There have been extraordinary writers who have chronicled the Shoah in academic work, memoir, fiction, and more, but poetry is the way I  try to figure out the world and my place in it. Dogs “I came across something,” my father tells me as I’m driving him to cardiac rehab, “in my mind,” as if his mind were a filing cabinet or the dish where coins and keys are kept. It was something an old man told him when he was a boy, how the stones freeze in winter, but the dogs who chase you don’t, and two days later we’re sitting on the back porch on Rosh Hashanah afternoon, and he tells me that the way of life he grew up with in southern Germany no longer exists, and if he thinks about it too much it will make him crazy and is not worth the consequences, and I want to tell him that I can hear the hazzan singing in shul, and I can smell the raisin challahs his mother baked for a sweet New Year. But it will not stop the dogs, so we just sit there and watch the birds that have gathered at the feeder. My father and I  would talk about the Shoah: what his life would have been like if Hitler had never come to power; would he have made Aliyah to Israel (then Palestine); what would his profession have been; what if his parents, older sister, and younger brother survived; what would our family life have been like? There are so many ifs when attempting to understand the Shoah. If schoolkids hadn’t backed my mother, six years old at the time, against a wall, thrown rocks at her, and called her Jude.

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my aunt hadn’t escaped to Holland and worked as a maid to make enough money to help get my mother out of Germany. my mother hadn’t had to live in an orphanage in Amsterdam and wait until my grandparents could get immigration visas. my mother hadn’t had to return to Germany to meet her parents so she could get her visa for America. my father hadn’t had to leave his home and family to immigrate to America. the United States government hadn’t had immigration quotas. the United States hadn’t made him, a seventeen-­ year-­old, fill out affidavit after affidavit after affidavit. the Germans hadn’t invaded Holland one day before his father and sister were to leave for America. the boat they were supposed to be on hadn’t been bombed in the harbor. they hadn’t been sent to the left instead of the right. life didn’t depend on if. Perhaps the Shoah was the perfect storm of ifs – if my father’s sister’s visa number had not been too high; if my father’s invitation to go to England on the Kindertransport had not been stolen; if my mother’s uncle had not been taken to Stutthof, murdered, and his death certificate sent to his family; and if and if and if and if and if . . . My parents would never have met in Germany. If the Holocaust had not happened, I  would not have been born. The Photograph in My Hand My mother, four years old, blond curls, wearing a smocked dress, in a field of goldenrod, her doll on her lap and her dog at her side. Two years later, the girl in the photograph would be backed up against a wall at school, by kids in her class for refusing to say “Heil Hitler”, and they would throw rocks, beat her up, call her Jude, her dress would be torn, and her parents would have to find a way to get her out of Germany. She would be sent to an orphanage in Amsterdam, and they would wait two years for their visas to America. I want to ask the girl what would have become of her if her parents hadn’t found a way out? Would she have survived? Would she have been experimented on like her cousin Hanni

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who returned home after the war and rarely left her room, or would she, like another cousin, Bertl, have tried to cross the Pyrenees into Spain and never be heard from again? What if Hitler had never come to power, would she and her parents still have come to America? Would she have met my father, and who would she have married if she had stayed in Germany, and who would she have become and what would have become of me? I cannot let go of it. Poetry rises and falls on ambiguity. Poetry without it is not poetry; it is prose with line breaks. We do not speak poetry in our daily lives. It is manipulated language. The poet leads the reader. The word choice, the resonance(s) each word conjures, the line and stanza breaks, whether the poem is formal or free verse and, as poet Cornelius Eady stated in a workshop, how much information the poet chooses to reveal and to withhold, and there is so much more that goes into writing a poem. H.L. Hix states in “Ambiguities that Clarify” in The Writer’s Chronicle (February 2017, p. 65): If the world were made, first and foremost, of things, then in our language uses  .  .  . we would want always to disambiguate. We’d want to analyze, to take things apart so we could see each thing on its own, separated from the rest, taken out of its relationships. . . . If, however, our world consists not so much of things as of relationships, then we want ambiguity. We need it. Only ambiguity, itself a relationship between meanings, could hope to signify relationship in a manner adequate to its purpose. We can’t say what holds between things if we’re too exclusively intent on separating things. What we’re after is, ultimately, not analysis but synthesis: not taking things apart but putting them together. We don’t want to eliminate ambiguity, we want to get good at it. The Shoah is filled with ambiguity. We can study history and posit the conditions that allowed it to happen, but each time I wade in, I drown. It is why I believe poetry is one of the best ways to attempt to understand the Shoah. Poetry does not deconstruct; rather it puts things together. It can hold contradictions and make us want to dig deeper. Hix (ibid, p. 66) continues, “The poem is both closed (in the sense that it tells us what to think) and open (in the sense that it leaves us to

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decide for ourselves what to think).” The poet leads the reader, yet at the same time lets the poem work on more than one level, allowing the reader to decide its meaning. I am not equating poetry with Torah, but I think my own writing and study of poetry is analogous to studying Torah. Torah, like the poetic canon, is so vast, has so much to show us, that a lifetime of study would not yield more than a drop in the ocean of what it has to teach. Poetry, using metaphor and a variety of other literary techniques, gives the reader more than one way to view the text. Torah, with its seventy faces of interpretation, gives us the opportunity to view the text from many different angles and points of view. Poetry and Torah employ some of the same literary techniques. They both invite us in to have that initial reading (p’shat in Torah study) and then call us to dig deeper, to explore, and learn more (d’rash). “Just as water is from heaven, as it says, ‘At the sound of His giving, a multitude of waters in the heavens’ (Jeremiah 10:13), so the Torah is from heaven.  .  .  . Just as [the downpour of] water is accompanied by loud thunderings, as it says, ‘The voice of the Lord is upon the waters’ (Psalms 24:3), so the Torah was given with loud thundering” (Jacob Neusner, A Theological Commentary to the Midrash: Song of Songs Rabbah [Studies in Judaism] 3rd Edition, 2001, p. 43). When I study Torah, I try to keep in mind that all I know is that Torah, like water, is a source of life, and I do not know what will happen, what I will discover. What an amazing gift Torah gives me – it folds and unfolds like origami before me, and it invites me to see more and more each time I engage with the text. Martha Collins (A Conversation with Martha Collins, The Writer’s Chronicle, May/­Summer 2011, Vol. 43, Number 26, p. 27) states, “I really believe that poetry is a dialogue between oneself and the poem. . . . For me, it’s the poem on the page – it’s talking to me and I’m talking to it.” There are times when Torah comes to me with loud thunder, and I have moments of clarity and think I  understand, but mostly I  have these quiet moments, ice melting slowly on the page, that elucidate a word or, if I am lucky, a sentence. Torah is talking to me, and I am talking to it. In her Bechtel Prize-­winning essay (Teachers and Writers, 2006, p.  3), “The Pen Has Become the Character: How Creative Writing Creates Us”, Sarah Porter writes, To be a writer means, perhaps, exactly this: surrendering the defined, expressible self to the wider possibilities of the page. It means giving up the belief that you know who you are, in exchange for a chance at discovering who you are, again and again; after all, the self that jumps up at you from your writing might exceed anything you  had previously imag-

ined. For me, and I  believe for most other writers, the exhilaration of writing comes exactly when the words pick me up and carry me with a will of their own: when I look back, dizzy with momentum, and can hardly believe that I’m the one who wrote the lines I’m reading. . . . By giving us a new perspective on ourselves, a new point of view, the words we read are helping to create us: they promise to make us bigger, freer, more authentic human beings. Poetry and Torah allow me to discover myself over and over again, to be dizzy with momentum from wrestling with the text, to gain new points of view, to grow in ways I had not previously imagined. My study of Torah has been enhanced by engaging with its poetry, and my poetry has been informed by Torah. Torah is sacred, and I believe that all great poetry reaches toward the sacred. Martha Collins then states (ibid, p. 25): I’m from a family of musicians; I played piano and violin. But I hated to practice because I could always hear in my mind what I was supposed to be playing before I could play it. That was not interesting to me. What I  discovered when I  began writing poetry – unlike a term paper where you plan and then write it, unlike a sonata where you know what it sounds like before you can play it – was that I never knew what was going to happen when I started. That was exciting. My poetry about the Shoah starts with a word, idea, or a story I have heard, something that knocks me off balance. Once I start writing, I have no idea where the poem will take me. I write each poem first as prose and cry every time. Then, I can get to work crafting the story into a poem. David Biespiel addressed poetry in The Rumpus, “Ten Things Successful Poets Know” (December  12, 2013). The following is my paraphrasing: Poets jump off bridges of the known, the imagined, the felt, the lived. We freak out about unanswered or unanswerable questions concerning life and death, joy and sorrow. Poets embrace negative feelings – they can inspire us; we know they are part of a poem’s emotional potential. Self-­disappointment in the process of writing is a constitutional right. We let negative thoughts pass through our heads; writing poetry is participating in one of the most ancient arts of human experience. We’re okay with writing that is difficult and joyful. When we’re disappointed in our writing, we are experiencing what Jacob experienced in his dream – wrestling with the angel of the poem’s life. Poets are fascinated by the mind’s quiet, as well as by the jazz of the world

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around us. Poems come at any time and from anywhere. We resign ourselves to reality. It’s where lives are lived, where dreams are born, where memory makes its bed. Reality is where history impacts the imagination. It is the stuff of poetry. What I  know as a poet writing about the Shoah is that I  am embarking on something very difficult. I want to honour the victims, the survivors, and their descendants. I  am wrestling with something of epic proportions, and I  am working with and resigned to reality. I  am a witness to history, and history is a weighty task. There is no making the poem up. As Edward Hirsch stated in an interview for AFTER, a documentary I  am producing about the Shoah and poetry (2016), “One of the jobs of poetry is to try to bring the dead to life.” That is my reality, the stuff of my poetry. I could not force poems about the Shoah. I had to let them come to me. And once I did that, the poems would not stop coming. It took years, but I  wrote more than 100 poems. I  would see poetry everywhere – choosing not to get on a crowded subway car, watching a German shepherd walk toward me, dreaming about getting a number at a concentration camp, or a snowstorm. At the Picture Window The snow falls and I watch my father shovel the driveway and the more he shovels the more snow falls and he can’t clear away the snow and I can’t stop the snow from turning to ashes before it falls to the ground. Theodor Adorno, a German sociologist and philosopher was known for his critical theory of society and for writing: “To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric” (“An Essay on Cultural Criticism and Society” in Prisms, 1983, p. 34). In Mindful Pleasures: A literary blog, Brian A. Oard writes, “The original quote (always taken out of context) occurs in the concluding passage of a typically densely argued 1949 essay, Cultural Criticism and Society.  .  .  . This is a harsh, devastating idea, and Adorno eventually came to consider it something of an overstatement. In his late work Negative Dialectics he offers this conditional revision . . . I quote from the English translation by E. B. Ashton: Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have

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been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living – especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living.” After the Shoah, everything is fractured. How can we believe in God? How can we believe in His Covenant with the Jewish people? How can we write poems? How can we continue to go on? In Night (2008, pp.  82–­83), Elie Wiesel wrote about the hanging of two adults and a child in a concentration camp. “Where is God? Where is He?” someone behind me asked. . . . Behind me the same man asking, “Where is God now?” And I  heard a voice within me answer him, “Where is He?” “Here He is – He is hanging here on this gallows.” We can no longer believe in God after the Shoah, yet we believe in God. We can no longer have a Covenant with God, yet there is a Covenant. Poetry after the Shoah is barbaric, yet we continue to write. Everything we believed in and knew has been shattered, yet we still go on living. The world still spins after the Shoah, when perhaps it should have stopped. The American writer Alfred Kazin was asked if there was meaning in the extermination of European Jewry. He responded, “I  hope not” (Preempting the Holocaust, 2000, p. XVI). What meaning can there be? Six million are dead. I never got the opportunity to meet the vast majority of my relatives. It is impossible to consider what the six million could have created and contributed to this world. I  can ascribe no meaning to the Shoah, other than to work to never let genocide happen again to anyone, anywhere in this world. Yes, Adorno is correct. To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric. How can there be culture after such atrocity? Opera, writing, art, film? How can it contain meaning? But we are human; it’s all we have, all we can do. My parents had a choice after the Shoah – to love or to hate. They had every right to hate, but they chose love. They chose life. They chose to continue to believe in God, even though they were deeply disappointed in Him. They taught me to love, and I chose to love and to write, to live and to write in a world of paradox and ambiguity, and to try to turn something barbaric toward the holy. Adorno wrote Negative Dialectics. The poet John Keats wrote about negative capability: “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (The Letters

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of John Keats, 1958, pp. 193–­4). I take Adorno seriously. Yes, culture and barbarism can go hand in hand, but I  have deep faith that poetry is capable of influencing culture for the better. I believe we need to write after Auschwitz. I believe we need to write about Auschwitz and all its implications, not only for the dead, but for the living as well. Survivors’ lives were not easy. Many felt guilty for surviving. The living had dreams and nightmares about the dead. That is what I  write about. Survivors tried to shelter their children from their pain. They did not succeed. They had joy, though it was always tinged by sadness. They loved. They lived. They died. That, too, is what I write about. Poetry after the Holocaust is necessary. Christian Wiman, in Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet (2007, p. 120), states, “Let us remember . . . that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.” Tell Me, Josef Do you know that the clouds of summer still give way to the clear skies of fall, that at sunset the horizon seems to tumble from blue, pink, and orange to black ink that spills across the sky, and do you know that I dream you were liberated from Auschwitz, that you returned to Maastricht and visited your friend Paul, and he returned the leather schoolbag you gave him the night before you were deported, and he gave you the four postcards you sent him from Westerbork before you were sent to A ­ uschwitz, and do you know that the postcards you wrote were given by Paul to the Joods Historisch Museum in Amsterdam, and I found copies on the Internet, and do you know I will travel to the museum this January and see the words you wrote as an eleven-­year-­old, the words that are here now in place of you, and tell me, Josef, do you know that sometimes in the middle of the night, I look out the window and watch the sky, and I see rain begin to fall and watch more fall down?

This poem came to me late one night as I was thinking about Josef, my father’s little brother. The family got out of Germany to Maastricht, Holland. Paul was Catholic, and it was dangerous in 1942 for the two boys, both eleven years old, to be friends. I found out Paul had given the postcards to the Museum and were put up on the website only two weeks before I found them. That night in bed, I could not stop thinking about Josef; how, if he had survived, my father would have been so happy. I kept wondering what our lives would have been like if Josef and the rest of the family returned from Westerbork or Auschwitz. The words kept coming, and I could not stop writing. This poem gave me a new perspective on myself, made me a more authentic human being. It is one of my favourite poems, and I am astonished each time I read it that I am the one who wrote it. I  keep going back to it, seeing something different each time. I write because I  have to write. It is as simple and complicated as that. In Passwords – Teaching Wislawa Szymborska: In Praise of the “I Don’t Know” (Teachers and Writers, January – ­February, 2001, Volume 34, Number 3, p.  4), Sarah McCarthy writes: Wislawa Szymborska believes poets pursue truth by engaging in what she calls the continuous and unutterable, “I  don’t know.” In her Nobel Prize speech, Szymborska declared, “Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was absolutely inadequate.” According to Szymborska this declaration of uncertainty “expands our lives to include the spaces within us as well as those outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended.” As soon as I have completed one poem and start the next, I do feel “wholly inadequate.” I have nothing to say, no faith in my writing, in my abilities as a poet. But once I  allow myself to begin to write something, anything, I begin to be filled with wonder, and that allows me to keep writing, to find out what I  do not know. Writing is the journey of my life. If, at the beginning of a poem, I know exactly where I am going, exactly what the poem should be, there is no discovery, nothing to be learnt. There is no reason to write. Picnic Sunday mornings during the summer, my parents would pack up our blue Ford and we’d head to the beach, my brother and I in the back seat, the trunk filled with bathing suits, chairs, and an aluminum ice chest.

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We’d eat in the same pavilion, at the same wooden picnic table. My mother would cover the table, put out peanut-­butter-­and-­jelly or baloney sandwiches, some flavor of Kool-­Aid, and fruit for dessert. A large Italian family sat at the next table. Grandmothers, dressed all in black, dished food from large pots. People were always coming to their table. Relatives, I’d tell myself. Aunts and uncles yelled at the kids to sit at the table, the kids my age, cousins, playing, fighting, screaming, and I’d watch them from our table, that big family, mine so small. I can still see that large family and their relatives coming each Sunday. When I first started writing this poem, I  felt uncomfortable – I  was describing my family and how each week we would eat by ourselves, and I was not sure I should write that poem. But I realised that I was describing my experiences. My father once told me “You write what you feel” and always encouraged me. He was old enough to remember much of what life was like before and during the Nazi regime and told me his stories. Breaking Laws Kristallnacht broken glass Nazis arrest him sixteen-­years-­old Dachau November 1938 a striped cotton uniform it’s almost winter he shares a bunk with a man in his fifties who freezes to death one night the next morning a kapo tells him take off the man’s long underwear do it quickly before the SS come for the body you will freeze at night too if you don’t it is the custom of some Jews not to wear clothes from a dead body and to save one’s life the rabbis teach one must break custom

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he washes the underwear that night places it over a chair next to the woodstove to dry sleeps on it still damp to make sure no one will steal it When he told me this, I was completely knocked off balance. I took notes while he spoke and knew I would shape it into a poem. The title, “Breaking Laws”, is about so many laws being broken: Kristallnacht; arrest; sixteen years old; being sent to a county jail; then to Dachau; getting a thin, cotton uniform (my father told me luck was getting a hat); the man freezing to death in the bunk they shared; a kapo telling him to take the underwear; breaking custom; sleeping on them so another prisoner, a fellow Jew, would not steal the underwear. In a poem, in that short amount of space, where every word is carefully chosen, so much can occur. Ambiguities can be held, and a poem can say the unsayable. How could I communicate what happened to my father and not appear in the poem – not make editorial comments? How can a reader understand what I am trying to say and yet allow readers to bring their own experiences and interpretations to the poem? As my teacher, Mary Stewart Hammond, told me when I  first started studying with her, “stay out of the poem.” Even when the poems were about me, I had to let the words tell the story, to allow the poem to lift off the page and become something more than just the story. “Poetry is what happens when nothing else can,” wrote Charles Bukowski (new poems, book 3, 2004, pp.  186–­187). The German-­language poet, Paul Celan, who survived the Shoah said, “Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through” (Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen, Celan’s Collected Prose, 2003, p. 34). Family History The doctor comes in, introduces himself, asks questions about my health (good), recent illnesses (none), operations (tonsils removed when I was four), maternal grandparents (grandmother died at ninety-­two from old age, grandfather died at sixty-­six from a heart attack), paternal grandparents (died before I was born).

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The doctor says it is important for my medical history to know how they died. So I tell him they died in Auschwitz. He has no more questions and tells me to undress for the physical exam. Going to the doctor is routine, but for me it is anything but. What do I write for family history? How do I say I do not know what my father’s family would have died from? How do I explain to a doctor all the history coursing through one short answer: gassed and burned in Auschwitz? The Netziv writes in the preface to Ha’amek Davar (2005, Volume 1, p. 2), his commentary on the Torah: Poetry is not simply characterized by meter, rhyme, alliteration, etc. The essence of poetry is that it contains many deeper allusions packed into fewer, more powerful words. One who treats poetry as prose will gain only the most superficial understanding of the material, and will not catch all of the allusions that the author intended us to find. Similarly, the Torah contains much depth – one who just understands the basic prose meanings will miss  much of the intended meaning. A poem can appear deceptively simple, but it is always working on more than one level – the simple meaning, what lies beneath, and what makes it lift off the page, as Mary Stewart Hammond stated in many workshops. All great poetry can change our understanding of the world and the language we use to make sense of it. “I  lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I’m here,” writes poet Sylvia Plath (The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, 2008, p.  144). My goal in my poetry about the Shoah is to give voice to the dead who had much of their humanity stripped away before they were murdered. I want my poems to tell them they are still here. I want to tell my family members who were murdered that I am still here. Mary Kinzie in A Poet’s Guide to Poetry (1999, pp. 13–­ 14) writes, “The best poems satisfy by surprise, either because they reject something more familiar, or because they teeter on the edge of confusion in knowing something else. Understanding the poem we are reading is a process that moves from ignorance through partial insights to higher levels of understanding.” Poetry comes to tell us we are not alone. We all feel emptiness. We all deal with loss in our lives. Learning a New Language My father is teaching me German. He still speaks fluently, even though he escaped from Nazi Germany almost seventy years ago, when he was seventeen.

We study nouns and verbs. We study when to use the formal pronoun, Sie, you, and when to use the more familiar, Du. One must be offered permission to use the familiar. We study dialects. The word Ich, I. The Berliners pronounce it Ick. Those from Frankfurt am Main, Isch. Those from Schwaben, Ich or I. He tells me when he was a kid he and his friends used to say in a Berliner dialect, “Berlin jeweesen Oranje jejessen und sie war so süss jeweesen.” I was in Berlin and ate an orange, and it was very sweet. “And then we added, ‘dass mir die brüh die gosh runterglaufe is,’ ” with the juices running down my mouth. He explains: “It is in our Schwäbisch dialect. I should say, it was our dialect.” My poetry about the Shoah is ultimately about human dignity and resiliency, the power and bravery to continue on, and the courage to create new lives. It is also about love – the kind of love that must prevail when hate is the other option. As I stated before, I believe we need to write about the Shoah and all its implications for the living, as well as to honour and give voice to the dead. Poetry of the Shoah asks us to look to the past to help create a better future. Poetry after the Holocaust is not barbaric; it is obligatory. “Now the time has come to forge an opening to feeling, to tumultuous emotion and to imagination, and to channel them into the world of creativity. . . . Now the time has come to disintegrate the horror into images and word” (“Memory Without Survivors,” Aharon Appelfeld, haaretz.com, 2005). Child survivor and writer Appelfeld impels me to continue writing, and now to produce a film, called AFTER, that explores poetry written about the Shoah by renowned contemporary poets. The Shoah brings up more questions than can be answered. Poetry, like Torah, invites us in, to look past that cursory reading, to dig deeper, to engage with the poem, and asks us to look at the questions the poet brings up, those that can be answered and those that remain unanswerable. Sound Barrier Three Israeli Air Force F-­15s, invited by the Polish government, thunder through overcast skies, over Auschwitz, the screech breaking its silence. Slowing, the jets follow the railroad tracks leading into the camp, into the crematoria, then peel away. Oma, Opa, Ruth, Josef, can you hear my screech

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in every line, the breath of each stanza, the hiss and moan of every poem? You remain right behind my eyelids as I write, letting each sound emerge, primal and piercing, as I fly on my own. “These poems have come from a great distance to find you,” writes Edward Hirsch in How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry (1999, p. 1). My poems come to you also from a great distance, from a time long ago, and from a culture that no longer exists. My poems invite you to come along with me as I wrestle with the Shoah, its aftermath, and all its implications. They want to find you. When I began writing this chapter, I knew two things: 1. I believe poetry has much to teach us, and 2. I had no idea what I was going to write. It can be terrifying to be in a place of not knowing – it is not how many of us are taught to navigate this world. But poetry is always there, inviting me to teeter at the edge, the edge of knowing, of not knowing. It asks me to be open to surprise, mysteries, and doubts, to stay in the not knowing for as long as I can, and to be willing to listen to all that poetry of the Shoah can teach me.

References Adorno, T. (1983). An essay on cultural criticism and society. Cambridge: Prisms.

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Appelfeld, A. (2005). Retrieved from www.haaretz.com/­ memory-­without-­survivors-­1.153444. Biespiel, D. (2013). Retrieved from http://­therumpus.net/­2013/­ 12/­david-­biespiels-­poetry-­wire-­10-­things-­successful-­poets-­do/­. Bukowski, C. (2004). New poems book 3. London: Virgin Books Ltd. Celan, P. (2003). Celan’s collected prose. New York: Routledge. Collins, M. (2011). A  conversation with Martha Collins. The Writer’s Chronicle, 43(26). Frost, R. (1966). Selected prose of Robert Frost. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Gibran, K. (2008). Sand and fam. Delhi: Rajpal & Sons. Griswold, E. (2007, May/­June). Eliza Griswold’s wideawake field. Poets and Writers. Hirsch, E. (2006). Poet’s choice. New York: Harcourt Inc. Hirsch, E. (1999). How to read a poem: And fall in love with poetry. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company Hix, H. L. (2017, February). Ambiguities that clarify. The Writer’s Chronicle. Kazin, A. (2000). Preempting the Holocaust. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kirchheimer, J. R. (2007). How to spot one of us. New York: Clal. McCarthy, S. (2001, January–­February). Passwords – teaching Wislawa Szymborska – in praise of the “I  Don’t Know”. Teachers and Writers, 34(3). Netziv (2005). Ha’amek Davar. Jerusalem: Yeshivat Volozhin. Neusner, J. (2001). A theological commentary to the Midrash: Song of Songs Rabbah (Studies in Judaism) (3rd ed.), Lanham: University Press of America. Oard, B. (2011). Retrieved from http://­mindfulpleasures.blogspot.com/­2011/­03/­poetry-­after-­auschwitz-­what-­adorno.html. Porter, S. (2006). The pen has become the character: How creative writing creates us. Teachers and Writers. Webster’s New Riverside Dictionary. (1996). Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. Wiesel, E. (2008). The night trilogy. New York: Hill and Wang. Wiman, C. (2007). Ambition and survival: Becoming a poet. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press.

23 A Kaddish for Auschwitz Sergio Lewkowicz1 Translated by Mara Louise Bredahl Ciria

I would like to start with a poem by Primo Levi, an Auschwitz survivor, who wrote it in January 1946: In the brutal nights we used to dream Dense and violent dreams, Dreamed with body and soul: To return; to eat; to tell the story. Until the command of dawn Sounded brief and low “Wstavach” (Get up); And in the chest the heart cracked. Now we have found home again, our bellies are full, we have finished telling the story. It’s time. Soon we shall hear again that foreign command: “Wstavach”. (1997, p. 6) According to Holocaust survivor accounts, they dreamt a lot. These were violent dreams that came as soon as they closed their eyes in the few hours that were meant for sleep. Dreams are highly representative. The human mind never ceases to represent, to try to symbolise, to give meaning – even in the most adverse situations and even when experiencing the highest degree of dehumanisation possible as was the case of the Holocaust. Yet can the theme of traumatic experiences, such as the Holocaust (Shoah) and the type of violence we are routinely subjected to in our day-­to-­day life, such as robbery, physical assault, and murder be represented psychically? Is it possible to reflect on these situations?

Can we imagine and try to elaborate on what happened at Auschwitz? Authors like Adorno support the idea that one cannot imagine what happened; that only those who went through the actual situation can possibly understand what it is and cannot truly convey it. Consequently, one would no longer be able to write poetry after Auschwitz. Yet I believe that any attempt to represent, imagine, share, and reflect on such a dreadful experience actually humanises, remembers, and honours the millions of victims that the Nazis dehumanised. When the victims, or we ourselves, turn silent about these traumatic experiences we make them pathogenic and sometimes this pathogenicity can be passed down from one generation to another, as can be seen in the chapters on intergenerational transmission. As a Jewish man myself, when I  visited Auschwitz, I was struck by a series of feelings: anxiety, indignation, disbelief, and even a certain detachment, which was an attempt to isolate what I was seeing when realising what had happened there. It surely was a shocking visit. At the end of the day, I entered a facility that looked like a chapel, a place of meditation and prayers. With candles burning, in the dim light, a sad soft voice could be heard reciting Kaddish, the Jewish prayer in memory of the dead, along with other Jewish prayers. Everyone was silent and, as I sat there, I felt overwhelming desolation. Goebbels used to say that no Kaddish would ever be allowed inside Auschwitz. He said that Jews would die without Kaddish; they would simply perish and disappear (Didi-­Huberman, 2003). That helped me understand the importance of this chapel located in the largest cemetery in the world, and where Kaddish is now permanently recited.

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This homage to the dead is so significant that it is also the subject of two films: The Son of Saul and Labyrinth of Lies. In Son of Saul, the whole storyline develops around Saul’s search for a rabbi to perform the Kaddish for his supposed son. It did not really matter whether he was actually his son or not, but rather the possibility of maintaining the Kaddish, a Jewish tradition that was so important, so humane, and so civilised (Nemes, 2015). In the film Labyrinth of Lies, amidst all the lies that covered up the extermination of Jews, the surviving character manifests the need to return to Auschwitz to say Kaddish for his twin sisters who were murdered there (Ricciarelli, 2015). Ka-­Tzetnik 135633 (his concentration camp number and part of his writer’s name) apud Amós Oz (2012) describes: “On the planet of ashes, the inhabitants had no names, nor spouses, nor parents, nor children. There is no remembrance. . . . The identity is gone and Judaism is gone. Auschwitz is the reverse of Eden: Adam named all creatures. The Nazis removed their names and undid them. All the seams of Jewish continuity and human existence burst. Except words. Until not even words exist” (p.  158). That is why the Yad Vashem Museum in Israel not only holds extensive documentation and research on the Holocaust, but also aims to recover the names of all the victims, there being room for six million names in the Hall of Names. It seems to me that this attempt at rehumanising the dehumanisation carried out by the Nazis is absolutely fundamental if we are to conceive and represent what happened during the Holocaust and at Auschwitz, and consequently be able to reflect on what happened. Let us start with Georges Didi-­Huberman’s (2003) “Images in spite of all”. Four photographs were taken by a member of the Sonderkommandos, the group of Jews who worked in the gas chambers and in the furnaces where they incinerated the bodies. It was a secret job. They were not allowed to mingle with the other prisoners and could not discuss what they were doing. They received daily doses of alcohol to be able to bear the brunt of the “dirty work” they had to carry out. And in time, they, too, were all killed and replaced by incoming Jews. The photographs used in Didi-­Huberman’s book were taken in August 1944, when the Polish Resistance managed to smuggle a camera into the concentration camp and passed it on to an anonymous man in Birkenau, of whom the only thing that is known is that he was a Greek Sonderkommando. While the other prisoners repaired the roof of crematorium V, this prisoner was able to take a photo from within the gas chamber, showing the incineration of the bodies that had just been gassed. After leaving the crematorium, the prisoner also managed to photograph a group of women who were already naked, ready to enter the gas chamber. His last photo depicts the top of the birch trees that surrounded the place and that hid what was happening there from everyone else. The extermination camp was called Birkenau precisely due to the birch forest, which is still there today in Birkenau.

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Members of the Polish Resistance then hid the roll of film with the photos inside a tube of toothpaste which remained buried until the end of the war. This is the only authentic document made by prisoners during the extermination of millions of people. It came to have enormous value as evidence, as testimony, and as an image for everyone to see what was truly happening. The photos are currently displayed in Birkenau as gravestone-­like totems. We ought to ask ourselves why those people took such a risk to take and protect these photos? Didi-­ Huberman (2003) thinks it was precisely for the world to bear witness. The Nazis had said there would be no evidence left; that no one would ever believe it if anyone were to describe what was happening at Auschwitz. This was, therefore, an attempt to put in images what was unimaginable, unthinkable. In fact, the fear of not being remembered and the need to bear witness made hundreds of prisoners try to write diaries, jot down memories, hide evidence, and so on. Thousands of letters and buried objects, like messages hidden in bottles, were found by the Nazis and destroyed. Many, however, still wash up when there are floods in the region. Hence, it becomes clear that even in extreme situations like Auschwitz, there is still a need to give shape to the unrepresentable, to the unspeakable. As Didi-­ Huberman (2003, 2012) says: an attempt to make the unimaginable imaginable to others, to those who were not there. Hitler’s “Final Solution” was kept in absolute secrecy. Everything had to be kept secret. Approaching the extermination area, and especially taking photos, was absolutely forbidden. Even after the defeat, it was still necessary to destroy the evidence by blowing up the gas chambers and crematoria. Everything was done so that there would be no evidence at all, so that no one would ever believe what had really happened there. It was to remain unimaginable – a true job of disappearing, which is what was to happen to the minds of the prisoners. In light of that, those four photos sought to break the silence of the voices and of the images by representing a real historical moment in August 1944. They allow us a terrifying glimpse into a moment of truth about what was happening at Auschwitz (Didi-­Huberman, 2003, 2012). Another survivor, Kertesz (2004), reported that the first loss upon arrival in Auschwitz was language. With the total annihilation of one’s personality, with maximum dehumanisation, comes the loss of words, he says. By surviving, one can no longer speak one’s previous language. One goes on to speak an “atonal” language, an exile language, a post-­Auschwitz language. A  language of testimony and guilt, more than a language to communicate and relate to others. For Kertész, the survivor is in solitary exile in his own country. He cannot have a relationship or even think about the possibility of having children, as he described in an excerpt from “Kaddish for an Unborn Child”, again raising the importance of the Kaddish (2002):

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She said that I  kill her with my mind, then I awaken compassion in her, and, after her compassion awakens, I make her my listener, the listener of my terrible childhood and my horrible stories, and how she wanted to take part in those stories so as to draw me out from the maze, from the quagmire, from the mud of these stories, to lead me to her love, so that we may leave this swamp together and keep it forever as a reminder of a serious illness: and then I suddenly let go of her hand (that is how my wife described it) and ran back into the swamp, and she no longer had the strength, my wife said, to follow me in a second time, and who knows how many times, to get me out of there. . . . She then realised how much destructive force I had within me. (p. 126–­127) If we think like Adorno once did and after he reversed his position that we can no longer write poetry after Auschwitz, thereby considering everything to be unrepresentable, unspeakable, or unimaginable, we will end up stepping away from what actually happened and from the people who died there. We will be doing exactly what the Nazis expected us to do. And yet one of the functions of art is to provide a small light that may allow us to see and imagine what one has not experienced. Granted, our sight is very different from that of the survivors. For us, Auschwitz is fiction. It is merely a Museum that represents the history of that very destructive moment for humanity. For survivors, it is part of their lives. However, as Didi-­Huberman (2003, 2012) noted, if we look closely enough, the dead are still there – in the ashes of the lake, in the flowers, and mainly in the birches, the silent witnesses to the tragedy and which together form the largest cemetery on earth.

Trying to give meaning These experiences on the edge of the representable are a challenge to the mind. Building on Freud’s ideas about helplessness, Bion (1962) speaks of a death anxiety – a mental pain that he calls nameless terror and that needs to be transformed into a symbolic form in order to be thought and communicated. This way, the mental pain can be transformed into psychic suffering that can be elaborated on or worked through. Meltzer (1984) considers this process to be an aesthetic experience similar to the process with which artists handle their emotionality. Kertesz (2002) describes this situation well: I write because I  have to write, although I  do not know why, the fact is that I am surprised that I work

uninterruptedly and with absurd dedication, as long as I work I am, if I did not work, who knows if I  would be, there is a remarkable correlation between my work and my lasting. (p. 34) He says that it seems that this was the only solution offered to him. “Even if it does not solve anything, it, on the other hand, does not leave me in that insolubility which I must still feel as insoluble” (p. 35). When we look at the writers of the Holocaust, we find several perspectives, several voices, several narratives, and yet a recurring incessant need to speak about the experience of horror, of evil, of emptiness, of the unspeakable, of the unutterable. An experience which, in itself, is unconceivable and which can only be reached partially and ambiguously. A  kind of experience that language is unable to translate, an empty space where language becomes impotent. Experience that, strictly speaking, cannot be told, but that the writer needs to tell and tell again, as we see with Kertész. This can also be seen in the writings of Bolaño (1999), who, when referring to the Chilean dictatorship in his accounts, speaks of his attempts to narrate the unspeakable: “to re-­count infinitely, without origin or end, to account for the unconceivable experience of horror” (Bolaño apud Giraldo, 2007, p. 13). Thus, it seems to me that situations that are on the edge of the representable lie within this space that contemporary literature alludes to: one that seeks to speak of something that always escapes reason, which escapes rational thought, which is beyond language. And again, art and psychoanalysis seem to converge as another form of “Kaddish”: trying to attain this “something” that always escapes us because it is inapprehensible, that which can only be alluded to, approached, guessed, imagined, and felt. In fact, rituals paying one’s respect to the dead also seem to have been decisive in the process of civilisation itself. No longer living as nomads and spending time caring for the dead reveals the human way of dealing with loss and death through a grieving process that is typically human. Yet this was incompatible with the Nazis’ dehumanisation of their victims. Treating the prisoners as creatures, as things, and not as human beings, significantly facilitated the purpose of their destruction by making the extermination process easier. Praying the Kaddish was the opposite of this; it was holding onto a remnant of being human. By analogy, and while keeping a sense of proportion, we can see an eerie similarity in the dehumanisation we employ when we look at beggars, foreigners, immigrants, and those who are different from ourselves. We do not truly see them. Obviously we do not aim to destroy them like the Nazis did, but we do, consciously

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or unconsciously, aim to be indifferent to their plight. As Hanna Segal (2005) pointed out, silence in the face of destructiveness is the greatest crime in psychoanalysis. I believe this same principle applies to indifference shown towards minorities, to those who are different, and to those who are vulnerable.

Note 1 Training and supervising psychoanalyst of the Porto Alegre Psychoanalytic Society. Latin American representative on the Board of the IPA

References (In Portugese) Bion, W. R. (1962). Uma teoria sobre o preocesso de pensar. In Estudos psicanalíticos revisados – second thoughts (pp. 101–­ 109), 1988.

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Bolaño, R. (1999). Discurso por ocasião da entrega do Prêmio Rómulo Gallegos em 1999. Caracas, Venezuela, disponível em https://­www.letraslibres.com/­mexico/­discurso-­caracas-­ venezuela. Recuperado em 30/­03/­2019. Didi-­Huberman, G. (2003). Imágenes pese todo: memoria visual do Holocausto. Barcelona: Paidós, 2004. Didi-­Huberman, G. (2012). Cascas. Revista Serrote, 13. Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Moreira Salles Giraldo, R. G. (2007). Roberto Bolaño: Fragmentos de um discurso do vazio. Revista Escrita. Rio de Janeiro: PUC. Kertesz, I. (2002). Kadish por uma criança não nascida. Rio de Janeiro: Imago. Kertesz, I. (2004). A língua exilada. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2004. Levi, P. (1997). A trégua. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Meltzer, D. (1984). Dream life. London: Clunie. Nemes L. (Diretor). (2015). O filho de Saul [filme]. Hungria. Oz, A. (2012). Os judeus e as palavras. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Ricciarelli, G. (Diretor). (2015). Labirinto de mentiras [filme]. Alemanha. Segal, H. (2005). Psychoanalysis, literature and war. London and New York: Routledge.

1

Section VI Never again?

24 Toward reducing large group conflict

Henri Parens

My memoir, Renewal of Life – Healing from The Holocaust, was published in 2004 (Parens, 2004). I started writing on August 14, 2002, the sixtieth anniversary of the date when my mother was sent from Drancy to Auschwitz. Along with 1,014 other Jewish refugees who had sought asylum in France, she was programmatically massacred. Only one of her convoy survived. In Part I, I speak of “What Happened to My World”. I felt compelled to write how I experienced these events over the stretch of time since they occurred; how I felt them in 2002–­2003; which is how I still feel them today, seventy-­five years later! Here, I will just say a few words. On May 10, 1940, the German army attacked Belgium. I was eleven. In Bruxelles, alarmed Jews – and others – fled to safety in France. Safety there soon turned into concentrations camps, first Récébédou and then Rivesaltes in the unoccupied zone of France, Vichy France. Asked (pleaded, really) and encouraged by my mother to do so, I escaped from Rivesaltes on May 1, 1941. I was twelve. After a frightening journey, I arrived at my destination in Marseille and from there found temporary asylum on the Méditerranée Coast in an OSE Home for children – war orphans and refugees. Then, having been inscribed by my mother, from within Rivesaltes, onto a list to be sent to America, on June  25, 1942, at age thirteen, I  arrived in Ellis Island with forty-­nine other refugee children, to permanent asylum, to start the work of recovery from psychic trauma, losses, starvation, and more; to start life anew. In Part II, I reflect sixty years later on how my Shoah experience has influenced my life, that of my wife and of our three sons, and, then, how it started to touch my grandchildren. Foremost, three dates stand out for me:

(1) May 1, 1941: I escaped from Rivesaltes; I was twelve; (2) May–­June 1942: from Marseille, via Casablanca, then across the Atlantic, on June 25, 1942, I arrived in America with forty-­nine other refugee parentless children. (3) August 14, 1942: my mother was sent to Auschwitz from Drancy, where, like so many others, she was murdered. I had learnt that my mother had not survived about five years after my arrival in America. But it was through the help of Judy Kestenberg who interviewed me in her study of Child Survivors (Kestenberg & Brenner, 1996) that I found out that she had been murdered only three months after I had arrived in America. My mother and father divorced when I  was three, and while my mother and I  went to Bruxelles they had stayed in Lodz, Poland; this resulted in my not knowing to this day what became of my father and my brother. In my memoir I  detail my experience of re-­ finding three cousins in Bruxelles, the only survivors of our large Polish family. Then I  describe my return to Rivesaltes with its ruins, the shame of France everywhere; as well as my tormented visit to Drancy. Then, my long-­delayed visits to Yad Vashem in Israel, and my equally long-­delayed accepting lecture invitations to Germany (Munich, Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Koeln, Ulm, and others). I reflect on a number of issues of much consequence to me including, “What has become of religion for me, my question about God?” And then I reflected on “guilt and shame at surviving”. I had not yet been able to drag myself to Auschwitz and reflected on not yet having done so. Eventually, several years later, on July 31, 2007, with my wife, two of our three sons, and one grandson, I finally was able to painfully visit Auschwitz.

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In Part III – “Ayeika?” – “ ‘What have you done with your life?’ ” an accounting is due. Healing from the Holocaust is a life-­long process, a process that influenced my life’s work. For me, healing from the Holocaust has been facilitated by healing others, children especially. To this day, fifty-­five years after I  began doing so, I  continue to do clinical work, a most rewarding labour. Side by side with clinical work, I have taught in Child Psychiatry and in Adult and Child Psychoanalysis. But of more relevance to this chapter, I have studied and carried out empirical research in both psychoanalytic (Individual) Child Development and in psychoanalytically explored Large-­Group Social Challenges and Disorders. In 1970, starting in a long-­term direct observational study of mother-­child dyads, two compelling findings-­driven studies unexpectedly but cogently took me on a forty-­ seven-­year journey of individual and large-­groups studies that were unequivocally dictated by my Holocaust experiences. What did I find, what did I do with these findings, how did I get to where I am today? The first compelling finding taught me, amongst other things, that I  wanted to help mothers! I  wanted to help my mother. My mother, who really was alone (with me) since we had left Lodz. My mother, who worked long hours as a seamstress to give us food and shelter. My mother, who was unable to get our well-­to-­do cousins to help her (and me) get out of Bruxelles before the advancing Germans. My mother, who told me I  must escape from Rivesaltes – and leave her behind. Was my “interest in helping mothers” driven by my wanting to rescue my mother? Or was it to atone for, or in some way repair, my not having helped her, to be sure, not having helped her enough? Not having prevented her murder? Within eighteen months of the start of our biweekly observational/­interactional project, the mothers began to speak of how much they were learning. Several times, one or another of the mothers said, “I wish I had known this before I had my children”. The mothers listened to us, to what we would say; they learnt from us. But we also listened to the mothers. By eighteen months into the project, they were visibly moving toward becoming “good-­enough” mothers, as Winnicott (1965) said. It is breathtaking to consider that one can formally, by educational means, help parents rear their children in ways that optimise their children’s development. The finding was unexpected; our project mothers were in effect reducing and even preventing the development of experience-­derived-­emotional disorders in their children. In a nutshell, our nineteen years later follow-­up study showed that our child-­adolescent subjects fared more favourably in their “General Adaptation” and their “Aggression Profiles” in comparison with the population from which they came. And equally striking,

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we found highly advantageous changes from growth-­ disturbing toward growth-­promoting parenting in their mothers (Parens, 1993). These findings led me to direct our work.

Toward the prevention of emotional disorders in children via parenting education Society dictates how parents of every ethnic, religious, racially diverse group will raise their children. Given what the mothers taught us, it became clear to me that rearing children toward achieving good mental health can be better realised when parents have formally acquired knowledge about optimising children’s development than they can learn just by trial and error. It made sense to me that we should undertake this move toward formal parenting education. Needless to say, this is not intended to replace intuition, sensitivity, and above all, love; these are prerequisites to becoming a parent. But combining these with formal parenting education will secure a much greater chance of good mental health in the generation they are rearing. Parenting educational materials must obviously target people before they become parents. There are many “How To” books; some good; some very troubling – like Johanna Haarer’s (1934) book, The German Mother and her First Child, which urges mothers to demand unconditional compliance of their child, a book the Nazis strongly recommended. In time I wrote a couple of them myself, “good” ones I think. But kids who get pregnant at thirteen, fourteen years of age do not read such books. To get to them before they get pregnant we decided to write Parenting Education books including a Textbook and a Curriculum for Students in Grades K thru 12 (Parens, 2010) in order to start this specified education when school begins. But also in the course of this research, another highly consequential finding emerged, an unexpected finding in the children’s behaviours that derailed my original research plan and compelled me and my forbearing colleagues in a most unexpected direction.

Aggression – How it develops and is shaped in each of us About four months into the project one of the infants presented us with vivid behaviour that just really surprised me. Fascinated by fifteen-­week-­old Jane’s activity, I filmed her surprisingly tireless, pressured intent on exploring an evidently fascinating piece of her New World, a set of plastic rings on a string. What impressed me was the pressure on her face, in her

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body, and her high-­level energy and determination as she did this, continuously for twenty minutes; at fifteen weeks of age! Totally unaware that a powerful motive was fuelling my obsession with this issue, I  continued to mull it over, the fact that, while – as I construed it – I saw this seemingly innocent aggressive push to learn about the world into which she had just been born, that she and her cohort of infants also showed the kind of aggressive behaviour we all know them for, crying angrily when food is held off too long or when they are colicky. Fine. For a while I became preoccupied with this behaviour in Jane and our other infants. I collected data of both types of aggression. At a point I realised that I had a problem: psychoanalysis’s basic theoretical underpinnings for aggression could not account for the Jane-­type aggression. In the 1970s, the psychoanalytic theory of aggression held that humans are born with a self-­destructive instinct – to return live matter to its original inorganic state (Freud, 1920, 1930) – which Freud held, its counterpart the “life instincts” compel humans to externalise and therewith redirect onto the outside world (see Parens, 2014, pp. 255–­261). Being something of a theorist in my field, I say with confidence: our findings were not explainable by the death instinct theory of aggression (Parens, 1973). But why was I  so compelled to struggle with these findings? I was driven! What truly is aggression? It did not occur to me then, as it did some thirty years later, when writing my Holocaust memoirs, that I  came to understand why I  was so driven to understand Jane’s behaviour: if this is aggression, this certainly was not what drove the Nazis to want to destroy us? “Don’t you think your interest might have had something to do with the Jews’ Holocaust, the six million who were massacred?” I did not then recognise that it was a problem I had to try to solve in an effort to further understand and master my own family’s tragedy and that of millions of others.

Multi-­trends theory of aggression Looking at our subject-­children’s manifest aggressive behaviours from birth on, we catalogued them into four categories: (a) Unpleasure-­related destructiveness (rage reaction of infancy); (b) Nonaffective destructiveness (feeding activity); (c) Nondestructive aggression (innately driven pressured sensori-­motor activity); and (d) Pleasure-­related destructiveness (teasing and taunting activity). In the leap from data to hypothesis, I  propose that there are three trends in aggression: (a) Nondestructive aggression (category c); (b) Non-­ affective destructiveness (category b), and (c) Hostile aggression/­destructiveness (categories a and d).

Nondestructive aggression is inborn, biologically generated and essential for adaptation; it fuels mastery of self and environment, assertiveness, and goal-­achievement. Non-­affective destructiveness is also inborn, is identified in Ethology as “prey aggression”. The need to destroy in the service of alimentation is not driven by anger, hostility, or hate. It is, therefore, affectively “neutral”. It is the trend Hostile aggression/­destructiveness that causes so much of our problems. Hostile aggression (HA) (the overarching trend from annoyance to anger, and on to hostility, to hate, and to rage). Note that HA is an umbrella term which includes that well-­known range of hostile feelings that spans varying levels of intensity from irritability to anger, then, to hostility, hate, and rage and all the increasingly more destructive thoughts and behaviours these feelings give rise to. When we feel “anger” we do not react by feeling driven to inflict pain on that which causes the anger; an apology may quiet the pain, and the anger goes away. A  critical step takes place, though, when the pain one feels mounts to: “This pain is too much!” Or, “I  can’t take it!” The emotional pain one then experiences crosses one’s line of tolerance. At this point, HA psychodynamically changes into Hostile Destructiveness (HD) (the subtrend of HA from hostility to hate and rage). Unlike anger, hostility per se, hate, and rage, drives one to want to inflict harm and when the pain intensifies further, to destroy the perpetrator of the pain. HA, and therefore HD, are not inborn; however, the mechanism for the generation of HA and HD is inborn; but this mechanism must be activated to generate HA and HD respectively, and it is so activated by an experience of psychic (emotional) pain; thus: Psychic Pain is required for the generation of HA and Excessive Psychic Pain generates HD. Therefore, the Multi-­Trends Theory of Aggression (MTTA) holds that experience is the foremost generator of hostile aggression (HA) and hostile destructiveness (HD). And then, most critical: HA and HD can be moderated or heightened by experience (Parens, 2008a[1979]). I felt profound hope when I  came to understand the meaning of this equation. It addressed my push to understand why we humans cause one another so much pain. I  eventually sensed that this equation had a key place in our understanding the Holocaust. Of course, of itself the equation cannot explain the Holocaust; but it belongs somewhere in our effort to understand it. And to prevent another one! Thinking in big leaps: given this understanding of aggression we must take it into consideration and keep it in key focus in rearing our children. The thought that how children are treated is where hostile destructiveness starts dissolved the demon death instinct on which so much human destructiveness has been blamed. But much more important than that theoretical riddle is that if excessive psychic pain equals hostile destructiveness,

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then the left side of the equation would determine the right side. This means that in rearing our children, the better children can be protected from “unnecessary” experiences of excessive psychic pain, the less will hostile destructiveness be generated in them. And with this, the less likely they are to go along in being drafted by those who hate “others”, experience more or less intense levels of hostile and even malignant prejudice against “others”, to join them in causing “others” harm – and genocide. These findings have fuelled my growing conviction that it is achievable to obtain, if not the prevention, at least a substantial reduction of hate and violence all around us.

Getting into the study of prejudice After my team and I had developed four volumes of Parenting for Emotional Growth (PEG) materials (packaged in Parens, 2010) and written our first book for parents and other child caregivers on Handling Children’s Aggression Constructively (Parens et al., 1987), fortuitously in mid-­ 1990, I was asked to make some remarks on prejudice at our local Psychoanalytic Institute. It was the first time I formally spoke about prejudice to a professional audience. It opened the door to my formally thinking about the topic and in April  1998 I  presented my first study on prejudice to an international audience in Lima, Peru (Parens, 1999). That same year I was asked to give a plenary to the American College of Psychoanalysts on the “Influence of Trauma on Development”; the Programme Chair, who had learnt that I am a Holocaust child survivor, asked if I would be willing to personalise it. After some reflection I  accepted the assignment. At the plenary, I  dedicated my lecture to Judy Kestenberg who with Ira Brenner had been studying the individual histories of child survivors and the effects on them of their Holocaust experiences (Kestenberg  & Brenner, 1996). I dedicated my lecture to her because of her dedication to the study. After three yearly requests that I agree to be interviewed by her, I was able to acquiesce when Judy, recognising my continuing distress at the thought, encouragingly, warmly, gently “bribed” me by telling me that she would try to find out what had happened to my mother. Judy did; and my gratitude for her doing so moves me to this day. In Washington, DC, in May 1999, with inner turmoil which at a moment during my lecture I could not contain, I presented “Some Influences of the Holocaust on Development – One Man’s Experience”. This was the first time I spoke in public as a professional about my own Holocaust experience. Of course we talked at home, usually at Passover, from the time when our oldest son turned seven or eight,

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about what had happened to me, to their grandmother, grandfather, and their uncle, my brother, and our large Polish family, and millions of others during the Shoah. A small number of friends knew I was a survivor; only a few colleagues knew. I was not being secretive; like so many survivors, I  could not talk about it. But as time passed, after personal tentative requests by colleagues that I talk about it as a professional, my silence was broken. This then led to my formally studying prejudice and eventually to my writing my Holocaust memoir.

A model of prejudice I progressively developed my model of prejudice (Figure 24.1) from 1996 on, it evolving to its full development in 2010 (Parens, 2014). In Diagram 1, the reader can follow the normal obligatory steps we all take in the development of our self-­conceptualisation intertwined with the formation of our primary love-­relationships that lead me to say that “We all have prejudices”. But what kind of prejudice is this? Does this normal preference for “one’s own kind” lead to our wanting to depreciate, harm, and destroy those “strangers”? The factors I have proposed so far readily explain the tendency in us to develop prejudice; but this is benign prejudice, it does not carry the wish to harm others. We cannot account for prejudice that leads to harming and even destroying others on the basis of these developments alone; I think this is so even where identification with familial mores brings substantial negative prejudice against “others”. I put forward that it is hostile aggression and hostile destructiveness that forge our benign prejudice into prejudice of a very different kind: into “hostile prejudice” which rouses the wish to harm, and into “malignant prejudice” which intends to destroy. The sum of interacting forces detailed in my model (Figure 24.2) suggests pathways to the development of Hostile and of Malignant Prejudice. But then, the model

The Newborn Primary Narcissistic Self

Self-specification

Object-specification

Libidinal object Identification

Stranger

Stranger Anxiety

Benign prejudice FIGURE 24.1  The Development of Benign Prejudice

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FROM BENIGN TO MALIGNANT PREJUDICE Trauma

Individual Inborn dispositions Developmental conflicts

Group

Societal

Individual

Home, School, Community

Event-dependent

Terrorism, Massacres

Chronic

War, Economic Stress

High-Level Hostility & Hate

Individual process Defenses Mechanism: Simple (displacement, denial, projection, splitting, etc. & Reality-distorting cluster Revenge

Accumulated Societal HD Institutionalized fundamentalism Revenge

Education

further forges identification

All forms of extremism;

ethnic, religious, nationalist

Benign Prejudice

Hostile Prejudice

Malignant Prejudice

Group process Communal Ucs high level hostility & hate Defenses Mech.: Simple & Realitydistorting cluster; Revenge

FIGURE 24.2  The Complex Psycho-­Genetics of Hostile and Malignant Prejudice

also reveals where we can fruitfully develop preventive interventions – some of which have already long been in place. And I have taken on the question: “How can we intervene to lessen or even prevent the generation of hostile and malignant prejudice?” (Parens, 2007). Much has been done, continues to be done, and must be pursued to get us closer to the goal we want to reach. But yes, there are key obstacles that stand in our way 1

2

The Janus Dilemma: Perhaps the largest problem is that the terrorist’s action, viewed by the victim as a crime against humanity, is seen by the perpetrator as an act of valour, of honor. It is society that declares this valuation. It is, therefore, society’s challenge to solve this group phenomenon, this Janus dilemma. Changes are required within each of us: Bar-­on, Sagy, Awwad, and Zak (1997) as well as by Eyad El-­ Sarraj, Director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme (2005),1 each on opposing side of the Palestinian-­Israeli conflict have made this point. Bar-­on struck at the heart of the matter: he holds that in order to make efforts at peace and co-­existence work, it is important to recognise that “the peace process can bring about a severe crisis of identity. Who are we if there will be no enemy who tries to kill us” (Bar-­on et  al., 1997, pp 63–­64)? As Halperin (1997) notes, while such efforts encounter difficulties, results are sufficiently rewarding to continue making such efforts. And the world has been able to achieve

such peace and co-­existence: some after much blood shed in Revolutions and in Wars, which after decades of reciprocally inflicted catastrophes on one another many have achieved peaceful coexistence and even friendship; and some in remarkably less, even non-­violent means as achieved in India (led by Mahatma Gandhi); efforts by Martin Luther King, Jr. in the United States; in South Africa (led by Nelson Mandela) in the workings of their “Truth and Reconciliation” Commission; the shift, however limited, from autocratic rule to democracy in Myanmar (led by Aung San Suu Kyi), to name a few. Despite these obstacles, I  am not pessimistic. And I should add that in 1932, Freud was not totally pessimistic about such matters. As he wrote that “For incalculable ages mankind has been passing through a process of evolution of civilization . . . [and] one thing we can say: whatever fosters the growth of civilization works  .  .  . against war” (Freud, 1933a, pp.  214–­215). Sharing Freud’s conviction, following the path into which my preceding work compelled me: my current era of work has taken me into the domain of large-­group conflict. How can we reduce their occurrence and intensity and how can we prevent them? Given that I felt compelled to throw out the death instinct basis of war, then, what large-­group psychodynamics could I  put forward that might explain “all the destructiveness around us?” Briefly here’s where my exploration went on the question why we have not only prejudice and genocide, but also wars.

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The vicissitudes of human narcissism In War is Not Inevitable (Parens, 2014), which I  wrote to reach across disciplines including but also beyond psychoanalysis, I detailed the complexity of individual and large-­group narcissism. Here let me briefly say that while there are similarities, there are substantial differences between the narcissism of the individual and that of large groups. A fundamental difference between them is that individual narcissism is inborn; it is “primary narcissism” (see Parens, 2014, chapter. 3). But the narcissism of any large group is not inborn. Rather, while large groups are not endowed with “primary narcissism”, by virtue of their collective achievements, they acquire a sense of group-­self-­value, a “secondary narcissism” that is shared collectively by members of the group. Pernicious narcissistic injury: when a powerful large group or a group in power is rendered hyper-­narcissistic by its stature, and harshly humiliates and/­or exploits an economically/­industrially weaker or smaller group, it causes the latter group an intense-­level collective traumatising narcissistic injury. This trauma over time becomes inscribes into the victimised group’s identity, whereby it becomes, as Volkan (1991, 2010) has specified, a “chosen trauma”. Civilisation’s well-­known examples of such large-­group pernicious narcissistic injury include colonialism, slavery, malignant prejudice, and the collective criminal humiliation of genocide. As Kiernan detailed, while genocides go back to 7,000 years ago, it was from the fifteenth century on, with the dawn of the modern era (2007, p. 5), that the stronger, the prepared, have attacked the weaker, the unprepared in increasingly larger numbers. But while a status quo may remain settled for some time, the reverberations of severe narcissistic injury make themselves felt and in time, the injured, the oppressed group, will make its complaints heard and felt. More often than not, as has occurred over time the world over, a cyclicity of retaliatory conflict becomes established. The Cyclicity of Hyper-­Narcissism and Narcissistic Injury. Both hyper-­narcissism and narcissistic injury create reactivities in groups that mushroom into conflict and even war. Clearly hostile hyper-­narcissism, but specifically malignant hyper-­narcissism, commonly activates the “hyper-­narcissistic skew”, “We are better than them!” To be sure, in the course of history this hyper-­narcissistic skew has given the hyper-­narcissistic group motive-­ power to harm, even to destroy the other. But not as visible is the fact that narcissistic injury too tends to generate its own “hyper-­narcissistic skew” – “we the good; they the bad, those who oppressed and tried to destroy us!” In time the narcissistically injured group has often retaliated in uprisings, even in revolutions and wars. We saw this vicious cycle between neighbouring groups take place in Europe during the last 150  years

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in the series of wars between Germany and France and their respective Allies: first during the Franco-­Prussian War of 1870–­1871, then in World War I (1914–­1918) and then again, in World War II (1939–­1945) (Parens, 2014, pp. 73–­75). The German launching of World War II is a clear example of this cyclicity. So are, amongst others, as Akhtar (2005) has told us, the Hindu-­Muslim reciprocal attacks in the India-­Pakistan region that have occurred over centuries and, as Kiernan (2007) has detailed, the centuries of Burundi-­Rwanda/­Hutu-­Tutsi reciprocal wars and genocides.

Conclusion My research further opened my eyes and mind to what Freud so foresightedly stated in 1933 ( Parens, 1933, p.  146): we can, and he recommended that we do, enlarge the contribution psychoanalysis can make toward preventing social problems. Toward doing so, in 2014, I  examined the position taken by most eminent recent thinkers Primo Levi (1986), Hannah Arendt (1977), and Saul Friedlander (1997). Each wrote that the Holocaust perpetrators were “ordinary people”. Arendt ventured the view that the Nazi criminals “were not psychopathic”. I took up the questions, “What are ‘ordinary/­average’ people?” “Is a person who commits murder ‘ordinary’?” (Parens, 2014, pp. 222–­225). In considering these questions I  put forward that, according to Karl-­Heinz Brisch (2014), Educator Katarina Rutschky (2001) wrote that, in Germany since the 1600s, child rearing ideology prepared German children to be unconditionally obedient and well-­disciplined citizens! It was not sufficiently recognised that rearing children to “unconditional obedience” – requiring that children yield their sense of autonomy – might put their “moral imperative” in jeopardy and lead to their losing their moral integrity in the face of demands made by external authority (Parens, 2011). Then, under the leadership of an anti-­socialising authority, these unconditionally obedient citizens did what they were told to do regardless of its immorality or unlawfulness – they murdered over eleven million humans not for what they did, but because of who they were! With palpably painful shame, dismay, and courage, our esteemed German colleagues Lotte Koehler from Munich (repeated personal comm.), Werner Bohleber from Frankfurt (1995, 2010), Karl Heinz Brisch from Munich (2014), and Berliner Herman Beland (2015) essentially wrote/­said that such rearing to unconditional obedience made highly civilised Germans capable of the genocide they perpetrated. I  am in full agreement with these colleagues, that so rearing children led to the antisocialisation of a large group who then committed crimes against humanity; they had become a collective of antisocial (“psychopathic”) individuals. Research and clinical experience

24 CHAPTER

To war d re d uci ng l ar ge g r oup    

have made clear to us a tenet increasingly established in psychoanalysis and anthropology: that our child rearing methods dominantly determine what kind of adults our children become. Nearly five decades of study, clinical work, and research brought to my awareness that in psychoanalysis and developmental psychology we have learnt more during the twentieth century about how to shape and optimise a child’s psychological development and the consequences that may follow from these than seems to have been known during the many centuries that preceded it. Our thirty-­seven-­ year-­long direct observational/­educational project led us to see that by programmatically imparting psychoanalytically informed explanations, parenting and its impact on children could be optimised beyond our own expectations. This finding led me to assert that there is “an urgent need for universal parenting education” (Parens, 2008b) for children in Grades K through 12 – our next generation of parents – as well as for “already parents”, child caregivers, daycare workers, teachers, etc. To this end, we have written four volumes of psychoanalytically informed parenting education materials (2010) programmed to rear emotionally healthy, empathic, morally responsible children. Following from and in eventual parallel with our own efforts, colleagues in the United States and in Europe are using strategies they have individually devised and are engaged in similar early-­childhood prevention work – too many to here individualise. The European colleagues are in a number of countries in Europe and beyond. I  want to single out K-­H Brisch, who recently helped Israelis launch his BASE prevention programme (Brisch, 2007) in Tel Aviv. In fact, in their emails to me, both Kalle Brisch and Assaf Levin from Tel Aviv expressed their appreciation to me as well as their heart-­warming enthusiasm for their reciprocal collaboration, the thoughtful and responsibly committed German, and the welcoming and thankful Israeli Jew! Revisiting for the nth time Freud’s (1933b) hopeful vision of what psychoanalysis can do toward optimising Human life, with hope, in March  2015 I  decided through the Thomas Jefferson University and its Jefferson Digital Commons to put our Parenting for Emotional Growth educational materials, including (1) The Textbook, (2) Curriculum for Students in Grades K thru 12, and (3) Two Volumes of Workshops for Parents and other Caregivers (Parens, 2010) on the Internet, accessible for download free of charge at http://­jdc.jefferson.edu/­ parentingemotionalgrowth. I  appreciate enormously that at the time of this writing these materials have been downloaded in fifty-­five countries. On all these fronts, for as long as I can, my work will continue.

Note 1 National Public Radio, Morning Edition of 8/­23/­2005.

References Akhtar, S. (2005). Hindi-­Muslim relations: India. In S. Akhtar (Ed.), Freud along the Ganges: Psychoanalytic reflections on the people and culture of India (pp. 91–­137). New York: The Other Press. Arendt, H. (1977). Eichmann in Jerusalem – A report on the Banality of evil. London: Penguin Books, Ltd. Bar-­On, D., Sagy, S., Awwad, E.,  & Zak, M. (1997). Recent research and intervention activities in the Palestinian-­Israeli context: An overview. In D. S. Halperin (Ed.), To live together: Shaping new attitudes to peace through education (pp. 57–­69). Paris, France: UNESCO: International Bureau of Education. Beland, H. (2015). Collective mourning – Who or what frees a collective to mourn. In C. Levitt (Ed.), Hostile and Malignant prejudice: Psychoanalytic approaches. London: Karnac Books. Bohleber, W. (1995). The children of the perpetrators – The after-­effects of National Socialism on the following generations. Presented in Toronto, May 4, 1995. Bohleber, W. (2010). Destructiveness, intersubjectivity, and trauma – The identity crisis of modern psychoanalysis. London: Karnac Books. Brisch, K. H. (2007). B. A. S. E. Babywatching. DVD developed by PD Dr. med. Karl Heinz Brisch, Munich, Germany. Retrieved from http//­www.base-­babywatching.de. Brisch, K. H. (2014). German perspectives on Henri Parens’ pioneering work in Philadelphia: The development of attachment-­based parenting programs. In R. N. Emde & M. Leuzinger-­Bohleber (Eds.), Early parenting and the prevention of disorder: Psychoanalytic research at interdisciplinary frontiers (pp. 203–­215). London: Karnac Books. Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the pleasure principle. Standard Edition, 18, –­64. Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and its discontents. Standard Edition, 21, 59–­145. Freud, S. (1933a [1932]). Why war? Standard Edition, 22, 197–­215. Freud, S. (1933b). New introductory lectures on psycho-­ analysis, XXXIII: Femininity. Standard Edition, 22, 112–­135. Friedlander, S. (1997). Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vol. 1: The years of persecution, 1933–­1939. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Haarer, J. (1934). Die deutsche Mutter und ihr erstes Kind. München: Lehmanns. Halperin, D. S. (Ed.) (1997). To live together: Shaping new attitudes to peace through education. Paris, France: UNESCO, International Bureau of Education. Kestenberg, J. S., & Brenner, I. (1996). The last witness: The child survivor of the Holocaust. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press. Kiernan, B. (2007). Blood and soil – A world history of genocide and extermination from Sparta to Darfur. Newhaven, CT: Yale University Press. Levi, P. (1986). The drowned and the saved. (Translated from the Italian I sommersi e i salvati by Raymond Rosenthal). New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Parens, H. (1973). Aggression: A  reconsideration. Journal of American Psychoanalytic Association, 21, 34–­60. Parens, H. (1993). Toward preventing experience-­derived emotional disorders: Education for Parenting. In H. Parens  & S. Kramer (Eds.), Prevention in mental health (pp. 121–­148). Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, Inc.

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Parens, H. (1999). Toward the prevention of prejudice. In M. R. Fort Brescia & M. Lemlij (Eds.), At the threshold of the millennium: A selection of the proceeding of the conference, Vol. II (pp. 131–­141). Prom Peru: SIDEA. Parens, H. (2004). Renewal of life – Healing from the Holocaust. Rockville, MD: Schreiber Publishing. Superior Edition 2014 recommended by new Publisher; same Publishing House; Parens, H. (2007). Malignant prejudice – Guidelines toward its prevention. In H. Parens, A. Mahfouz, S. Twemlow,  & D. Scharff (Eds.), The future of prejudice: Psychoanalysis and the prevention of prejudice (pp. 269–­289). New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Parens, H. (2008a[1979]). The development of aggression in early childhood (2nd ed.) Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. [First edition (1979). New York: Jason Aronson.] Parens, H. (2008b). The urgent need for universal parenting education – A documentary. Produced by Parens, H. & Gilligan, P., Director, Thomas Jefferson University, Medical School Media Division, Philadelphia, PA. Parens, H (2010). CD: Parenting for emotional growth: A textbook; Two series of workshop; A curriculum for students in grades K

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Thru 12: And lines of development. Production Manager, Liz Mikita; Media Division. Philadelphia, PA: Thomas Jefferson University. Retrieved from http://­jdc.jefferson.edu/­ parentingemotionalgrowth. Parens, H. (2011). Handling children’s aggression constructively – Toward taming human destructiveness. Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson/­Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. Parens, H. (2014). War is not inevitable – On the psychology of war and aggression. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Parens, H., Scattergood, E., Singletary, W.,  & Duff, A. (1987). Aggression in our children: Coping with it constructively. New York: Jason Aronson, Inc. Rutschky, K., (Ed.) (2001). Schwarze Pädagogik. Quellen zur Naturgeschichte der bürgerlichen Erziehung (8th ed.). Munich: Ullstein-­Bücher, Allgemeine Reihe. Volkan, V. D. (1991). On “chosen trauma”. Mind and Human Interaction, 3, 13. Volkan, V. D. (2010). A  discussion: Psychoanalytic considerations on large-­group psychology. Fall Newsletter of the American College of Psychoanalysts, XLIV, 5–­7. Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The maturational processes and the facilitating environment. London: Hogarth, 1976.

25 Holocaust, Rwanda, and Palestine Janet Kestenberg Amighi

When asked what they want to be when they grow up, trauma survivor children often respond with “If I grow up.” Perry & Szalovitz, 2017, p. 12

Introduction The Holocaust gave rise to the popular saying, “never again” but instead of “never again” it has been again and again. The organised persecution of children as members of an ethnic, racial, and/­or religious minority group has reoccurred in myriad ways that challenge the limits of our imagination of what humans are capable of doing and capable of justifying. Ongoing research contributes to a cumulative body of knowledge regarding the most impactful causes of traumatisation of children, protective factors, and effective interventions. Comparison of cases has raised concerns that it creates false equivalences in the nature of the suffering, the cultural narratives, and neglect of post-­ and continuing trauma conditions (Kidron, 2012; Kirmayer, Gone, & Moses, 2014). However, others offer such comparisons, hoping that they will shed further, but nuanced, light on both commonalities and differences (Brave Heart & DeBruyn, 1998; Kidron, 2012). When Judith and Milton Kestenberg and colleagues established the International Study of Organized Persecution of Children in 1981, they were focused on interviewing child survivors of the Holocaust. But as the name implies, the goal has always been to draw lessons from those interviews that might help in regard to prevention, understanding, and interventions with children in other places and other times who survived or are suffering from organised persecution of children.

The starting point comes from the studies of child survivors of the Holocaust. I will focus on variables that Holocaust and trauma researchers have put forth as the most damaging environmental experiences, as well as protective and resilience-­promoting factors. I  compare three instances of children who have suffered organised persecution: the Jews of the Holocaust, the Tutsis of Rwanda, and the Palestinians of Gaza. Among the key variables embedded in the descriptions in this chapter are these: 1) environmental traumas: duration, intensity, types of violence, and ethnic prejudices; 2) Individual variables: age and gender; 3) potential protective and resilience-­promotive factors: parenting style, play, self-­ agency, resistance, community solidarity, and narrative; and 4) adjustment and long-­term patterns.

Children of the Holocaust The Holocaust was part of a Nazi effort to clear their country and conquered territories of Jews (among others deemed threatening and unfit). It lasted as long as twelve years in duration, depending on the place. The intensity of trauma to children is reflected in their ninety per cent death rate (Cohen, 2017). Not only were infants and the youngest children more susceptible to starvation and diseases, but in concentration camps children were selectively chosen for death. Details of

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the persecution varied depending on place and circumstance but included prejudice, eviction from home and loss of belongings, child separation from family, and witnessing of beatings and the deaths of family, friends, and neighbours. Assaults on their bodies included hunger, illness, and fear. Children who hid among corpses reported feeling safe because the corpses did not hit them or hurt them (Kestenberg, 1992). The father of a nine-­year-­old boy, seeing shame and humiliation in his son’s eyes, defied a Nazi soldier and was beaten to death (Kichler, 1982). Later the child joined the resistance. Regarding death, many children called it peace (J.S. Kestenberg & M. Kestenberg, 1996). The impact of age is difficult to measure, but appears to be significant. The youngest children not only had the highest death rate, but also were the most developmentally fragile. Until five years of age, active maturation processes, such as myelination of axons and neurogenesis, make the brain very vulnerable to developmental setbacks and psychiatric disorders (De Bellis & Zisk, 2014; Lubit, Rovine, Defrancisci,  & Eth, 2003). When children are repeatedly exposed to stress, their brains are bathed in cortisol. Over time, cortisol has a toxic effect to the detriment of regulation of emotions and behaviour (Carrión, Weems,  & Reiss, 2007). Some studies suggest that young children in developmental transition are also more vulnerable to losing the ability to control aggressive impulses (Kereste, 2006). For the youngest, it may be hardest losing the emotional availability of parents who are themselves barely coping or have been killed. Those children in the process of attachment formations would be most impacted in their future empathy by the failure of responsive others (Laub & Auerhahn, 1989). In one study in the aftermath of a disaster, six-­year-­old children became more oriented to self-­preservation while in contrast the older nine-­year-­olds became more generous (Szalavitz, 2013). Saben and colleagues found that younger children had more anxiety and fears of injury. They experienced more helplessness and more readily absorbed derogatory depictions of their own group, leading to feelings of humiliation (Saben, Sossin, & Yasik, 2017). Humiliation also stems from seeing still-­idealised parents battered and helpless (J.S. Kestenberg & M. Kestenberg, 1996). Furthermore, trauma is more difficult to recognise in small children. Although they may lack the cognitive abilities to comprehend their situation, making them appear less affected, they are often impacted on a bodily level (J.S. Kestenberg  & Kestenberg Amighi, 1996; Van der Kolk, 2015). Qouta, Punamäki, and El Sarraj (2008) observed that multisensory experiences can be particularly disturbing, such as seeing corpses, hearing screams, and smelling burning bodies. Older children and adolescents have an advantage when they can remember positive prewar memories, making harsher times seem like an aberration. They also

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may derive resilience from internalised secure attachments to a parent from before the violence began (Saben et al., 2017). The older they were, the more understanding of the danger, oddly, the less toll it took on their development (J.S. Kestenberg and M. Kestenberg, 1996), suggesting the importance of meaning. However, older children and adolescents generally have higher levels of being haunted by trauma-­laden memories of what they witnessed as well as depression. Some symptoms appear to be more age-­correlated (such as re-­experiencing trauma), but others, like avoidance, anxiety, and numbing, are not (Neugebauer et al., 2016). Gender also often has a critical, but complex, impact. Multiple studies report that girls are diagnosed with PTSD at twice the rate of boys despite the also common finding that boys generally have higher exposure to violent trauma. Trauma appears to have a stronger neurological impact on girls, who exhibit a rapid maturation (shrinkage) of one part of the insula region of the brain, an area related to emotion processing, while no such change is seen in boys (Stanford, 2016). Girls also have higher exposure to sexual assaults. Though rape was not common in the camps, other forms of sexual assault were (Limberg, n.d.; Ofer & Weitzman, 2009). Girls were rated higher in anxiety and boys in belligerence (Masten & Narayan, 2012). Secure parental attachment is amongst the most powerful protective and buffering factors. However, parenting styles are very vulnerable to the stress of severe trauma (Masten  & Narayan, 2012). If disorganised attachment results, children can be doubly traumatised (Almqvist & Broberg, 2003; De Bellis & Zisk, 2014). Traumatic symptoms in mothers not only contribute to a disengagement of the care-­giving system, but it also alarms children to see their mothers depressed and anxious (Masten & Narayan, 2012). The key appears not to be the presence or absence of parents, but rather the quality of the caregiver-­child relationship. Using the Kestenberg archives, Saben et al. (2017) found no relationship between Holocaust child survivors living with families versus having non-­familial care and suffering depression in later life. The level of post-­war symptoms was more related to how much the caregiver suffered depression and had difficulty with post-­war adjustment (Masten & Narayan, 2012). Play, artistic activities, and study can also mediate trauma. Through play, children can re-­enact disturbing events, and use animate and inanimate objects to bridge the separation from parents, family, home, and community. In response to traumatic loss, these become multisensory building blocks to object relationships (Brenner, 1996a). During the Holocaust, small children in the Warsaw ghetto played what they saw, such as raids and funerals (Eisen, 1988). In the camps, children played block elder, roll call, and even gas chambers (J.S. Kestenberg & M. Kestenberg, 1996). One boy described

25 CHAPTER

Hol o cau st, Rwa nda , and Pa l e stine     

his avoidance of Nazis as a game of hide and seek, which gave him a degree of control over his survival strategies. At Terezinstadt children had an art teacher who helped them beautify their world and their memories (Cechova, 1964). Poetry too provided an outlet. One boy wrote, “If in barbed wire, things can bloom, why couldn’t I?” (Monnig, 2014, p. 52). Some children identified with teachers in camps and wanted to study, in part because the Nazis forbade it (Albertus 1989, cited in J.S. Kestenberg & M. Kestenberg, 1996), Play and creativity helped children regain a sense of normalcy. But most children had little opportunity to play. While adults often regressed, children were often forced to grow up quickly. This placed a heavy burden on children, but also gave them an important role to play. One child who took care of himself and his father recalled that he felt a hundred years old (Kaplan, 2006). Child survivors referred to their adult looks and their new sense of responsibility (J.S. Kestenberg  & M. Kestenberg, 1996). Some children became breadwinners for the family, stealing food, trading for food, acting as beggars, and serving as runners, housekeepers, and sexual partners for Kapos (J.S. Kestenberg & M. Kestenberg, 1996; Monnig, 2014). While this could be extremely stressful it also could give them a sense of agency and community connection. The supportive nature of being part of collective perseverance is sometimes overlooked. A  collective narrative situates the child into a larger, more potentially meaningful context (Lemelson, 2007). Individual trauma can be made more bearable as part of a narrative of social suffering. In fact, the United Nations uses such a narrative in their therapeutic treatment of survivors (Carrion, Hass, Garrett, Song, & Reiss, 2010). The converse is also true. The breaking down of community ties, the absence of a coherent narrative, and cultural vitality predispose children to emotional disturbances in times of war and other trauma. Indeed, without a collective narrative there can be no meaning in the individual horrors experienced. The Western focus on individual suffering tends to obscure the importance of the collectivity (Elbedour, Bensel,  & Bastien, 1993; Marshall  & Sousa, 2014; Nguyen-­Gillham, Giacaman, Naser, & Boyce, 2008). Victor Frankl wrote that those who had a cause, something to live for, a loved one, or an ideological commitment had higher survival rates. To return to one’s roots and traditions, links the Nazis tried to eradicate, helped maintain an identity within the often identity-­ less world of the camp (Frankl, 1959). A focus on collective suffering and identification of a political cause may transform poorly regulated aggression into meaningful resistance. High exposure to violence often predisposes children to aggression (Vollhardt, 2009), but aggression in service of self, family, and community survival may counter feelings

of helplessness and passivity. Indeed, Jewish children, especially the older ones, were more outspoken to the Nazis than were adults (J.S. Kestenberg & M. Kestenberg, 1996). Some undertook risky ventures. Children smuggled food and medicines into the ghettos and joined ghetto youth movements and the resistance (“Children during the Holocaust,” n.d.). Children also engaged in acts of sharing of food, clothing, and emotional support within the concentration camps (Kay, 1998). Their resistance to the Nazis and to their circumstances brought them a zest for life which was transmitted to the next generation (J.S. Kestenberg  & M. Kestenberg, 1996). Younger children at times participated, and sometimes engaged, in revenge fantasies imagining killing their guards (J.S. Kestenberg, 1992). The need to overcome danger and survive became embedded in a survivor’s personality until adulthood at least (J.S. Kestenberg  & M. Kestenberg, 1996). We can see here the integration of rapid maturation, aggressive impulses, and activism. These were not universal responses. The anti-­ authority stances of children were at times expressed within the community. In the camps, some adolescents behaved like tough adults controlling and organizing other residents. Teachers in the secret school in Terezen described the “lawlessness” of children. Some children refused to listen to their parents, seeing their authority as a façade. There also were children who were totally obedient and dependent. Furthermore, roles could fluctuate. An independent child caught by the Nazis could regress and become very child-­like (J.S. Kestenberg  & M. Kestenberg, 1996). After the war, the dichotomous patterns of aggressiveness and passivity continued to be found among child survivors. Adults in Jerusalem described some of the children arriving by train as adult-­like, quiet, bearing expressionless faces of ageless children. Many were distrustful of adults, and were in constant fear that they would still be killed (J.S. Kestenberg & M. Kestenberg, 1996). Children exhibited inhibition, apathy, and silence, retaining what they later described as an inner emptiness (Kangisser-­Cohen, Fogelman, & Ofer, 2017). On the other hand, some of these children exhibited aggressive behaviour. Children in a transition centre in England were described as animal-­like creatures who grabbed toys from each other. One boy spoke about killing as though it were an adventure (J.S. Kestenberg  & M. Kestenberg, 1996). Many liberated Buchenwald children were very unruly; to them, freedom meant abuse of power. They were destructive and totally disobedient (Hemmendinger, 1986), quite a contrast to the super-­ obedient children. After liberation, adjustment to new circumstances was fraught, filled with chaos and confrontation with the reality of their losses (Saben et al., 2017). Sometimes,

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no family remained; they had no homes to return to, no cemeteries that they could visit to help the mourning process (Young, 2017); their home language was no longer relevant, and their belongings were gone. They had no reasonable past to ground them. In the first six months, some children screamed every night and could not stop talking about experiences, but after six months or so they usually calmed down (J.S. Kestenberg  & M. Kestenberg, 1996). With good family support, they could attempt to focus on fitting in and adapting. Their strategy was often not remembering and not identifying themselves as child survivors (Kangisser-­Cohen et  al., 2017). They choose silence about the past (Danieli, 1988) and somatization of their pain. Commonly the “past” sufferings of survivors, especially child survivors, were not recognised nor well received by the society they joined. Neither in the United States, nor Israel, nor most of Europe did members of society or even mental health professionals want to address the wrongs that had been committed, nor ways in which these societies bore some of the culpability. Instead the public encouraged survivors to get on with their lives. In Israel non-survivors were often cast as people who went passively to their deaths. This rhetoric or silences profoundly isolated survivors and impeded their integration into their new homelands (Danieli, 1988; Kestenberg, 1982). Emphasising childhood resilience may be another way of denying trauma and helping governments evade responsibility for interventions (Dyregrov, Gupta, Gjestad,  & Mukanoheli, 2000). German reparations were an important step, but often the youngest child survivors who could not remember were denied payments and others were subjected to harsh interrogations (Kangisser-­Cohen et  al., 2017; Kestenberg, 1982). For many survivors, more than financial compensation, they wanted restorative justice, a re-­establishment of morality (Lifton, 1986). The lack of acknowledgement of children’s traumatic experiences happened in family households as well. Almost all child survivors interviewed for the Kestenberg project said that their parents did not recognise that children were traumatized; rather they convinced themselves that children were resilient. Children were complicit with this. Seeing parents in pain, they did not want to impose their own anguish on them (Cohen, 2017). Many took on responsibilities to help where parents were too incapacitated psychologically. In other words, they were pressured into becoming the grown-­ ups again as they had during the war (Saben et al., 2017). When they, in turn, had children, they often looked to their children for emotional support. There are many pathways which child survivors have followed. It is likely, as Professor Neugebauer notes, that it is not that some individuals thrive and others live in despair, but rather that in most individuals those states alternate and fluctuate (cited in Wolfe, 2014). Suzanne

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Kaplan (2006) suggests that it is affects that continue to revive the experiences of the past. However, many survivors who once tried to suppress the past with silence, after decades, became more eager to share their stories and to find other child survivors with whom to connect (Kangisser-­Cohen et  al., 2017). Child survivor support groups have been integral to a sense of belonging and recreation of lost families in the United States and Israel and elsewhere. Through groups, books, films, and public speaking, child survivors have found meaning in their lives and constructed a narrative that both reshapes and is shaped by the world’s current consciousness (Kangisser Cohen, 2005). Some found meaning too by seeking justice for others, becoming politically involved, volunteering, or going into reparative careers, social work, psychology, medicine, and art (Suedfeld et al., 2005; M. Kestenberg & J.S. Kestenberg, 1988). Lifton (1967) wrote about the mission to restore a shattered sense of humanity. Having been helped themselves, many hidden children have become altruistic people who respond well to groups of peers (M. Kestenberg & J.S. Kestenberg, 1988; Vollhardt, 2009). Many survivors have tried to raise their children with high ethical values to propagate goodness in the world (Brenner  & Kestenberg, 1996). They worked to “repair and restore what could never be replaced” (Brenner, 1996b, p. 129). As they moved into old age, some survivors reflect back on what they had suffered and were now suffering. They may feel that the world owes them something for what they had gone through and for now having to face old age alone. Many still find it hard to trust people, and almost all are afraid of helplessness or any loss of control over their destiny (J.S. Kestenberg &.M. Kestenberg, 1996).

Rwanda After years of being considered second-­class citizens under Belgian/­Tutsi rule, Hutus created the independent government of Rwanda in 1962. Tutsis were now the second-­class citizens. Hutu fears of a Tutsi militia reprisal (Epstein, 2017), Tutsi interest in their land, and anti-­ Tutsi propaganda built up an “ideology of antagonism” (Doughty  & Ntambara, 2005; Dutton, 2007, p.  108). When the plane of the Rwandan president crashed in 1994, Tutsis were blamed, triggering government forces and other Hutu allies to begin what would be a hundred-­ day massacre of Tutsis. The United Nations withdrew and European military forces rescued their own citizens (Dutton, 2007). Hutu mobs and militias drove two million people from their homes and land, raped innumerable women and girls, and killed approximately 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates. Only one out of thirty Tutsis survived (McGreal, 2013).

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When the Hutu militias fell upon Tutsis, they targeted children, killing with machetes and clubs (Geltman  & Stover, 1997), hurling children into fires, and throwing explosives into the river as Tutsis tried to escape. They said that you have to kill little rats to exterminate the big rats (Lasting wounds, 2003; Wright, 2014). Some moderate Hutus took in their neighbors and hid them. Muslim neighbours also offered refuge (Doughty  & Ntambara, 2005). A  few found hiding places in the bush and in refugee camps of neighbouring countries. Forty-­one percent of children saw either their mother or father killed (Schaal & Elbert, 2006). Almost all children interviewed in one study saw dead bodies and body parts, their homes destroyed or looted, and believed that their lives were in danger (Dyregrov et  al., 2000). Children witnessed trusted adults and children killing other children and heard cries for help (Lasting wounds, 2003). Many children hid under corpses (Dyregrov et al., 2000). Some children said that they did not care if they lived or died (Lasting wounds, 2003). Researchers found that the PTSD symptoms (found in about forty-­four per cent of child survivors) were correlated with the number of traumatic incidents to which the child had been exposed (Schaal & Elbert, 2006). Age was also a factor. Children aged eight to thirteen during the massacre had higher levels of PTSD than did younger children (Schaal & Elbert, 2006). ­However, the younger children’s inability to recall details and/ or ­verbalize their trauma may mean that it often goes underreported (Boris et  al., 2008). Both older and younger children reported that they only registered what was happening as a panicky feeling in their body. Trauma may stay with the child as an image or perhaps the sound of the perpetrator’s voice. In such form, stress persists as a sense of inexpressible bodily discomfort (Kaplan, 2006). For girls, rape and sexual mutilation were endemic as a weapon of war and extermination. One child interviewed was six when she was raped (Rwanda: Broken Bones, 2004). In some cases, men who were HIV positive purposefully spread their illness. Girls later died of AIDs they contracted from their rapists (Wolfe, 2014). Militias told women after a rape that their lives would be spared so they could die of sadness (and shame). Many became pregnant and reluctantly raised the children born of rape (Nowrojee  & Fleischman, 1996; Rwanda: Broken Bones, 2004). While boys typically have about three times the rate of exposure to trauma compared to girls, because of the very high number of rapes, girls’ exposure rates rose significantly (Tolin  & Breslau, 2007). However, attackers selectively killed men so that after the massacre ended, the Tutsi population was seventy per cent female (Nowrojee & Fleischman, 1996). Little has been reported about the supportive role of family, though one can imagine that there was

little amidst the killing and its aftermath. There are no reports of children finding solace in play, creativity, or study. The intensity of the violence also gave little room for self-­efficacy, though children exercised remarkable attempts to survive. Even small children had to take on mature responsibilities, saving their own lives or aiding other ­members of the family. One survivor described how her mother was more emotionally crushed than she and her sisters who were all hiding together (I was tested, n.d.). ­Children also gave support to the larger community in a few instances, gathering stones to throw as attackers stormed a church, for example. Some youngsters were able to run off to join the Tutsi militias that eventually prevailed. However, after the massacre ended, there was little support for children. The community of Tutsis and whatever protection it might have offered had been decimated by the razing of homes, killings, the break-­up of Tutsi-­Hutu families, and wide dispersion of the surviving population in refugee camps abroad (Dyregrov et  al., 2000). Having survived mostly on their own, many children came to distrust adults and lose respect for the authorities who failed to protect them (Kayitesi Blewitt, 2009). With families lost, surviving children aged eight to fourteen often became the rescuers taking in siblings and in many cases non-­family orphaned children, a community tradition (Geltman & Stover, 1997). Distant family, perhaps overwhelmed themselves, marginalised these fragile child-­headed households (Schaal & Elbert, 2006). Any misbehaviour on the children’s part was not seen as symptoms of trauma, but labelled as delinquent (Kayitesi Blewitt, 2009). Children who were still homeless were taken into orphanages where UNICEF-­trained adults and peers offered them emotional support. There they found some (though still inadequate) access to food, schooling, and medical care. They fared better than those who were taken in by older siblings and had no adult supervision and fewer resources (Schaal & Elbert, 2006). Those children who have been reunited with mothers who are dying of AIDS also face an uncertain future (Rwanda: Broken Bones, 2004). Even afterwards as some semblance of community was being re-­established, for traumatised survivors there was little meaning or narrative to help them understand why neighbours and even family members had turned on them. In a society where emotional expression is discouraged, survivors were silenced, afraid to talk of their anxiety and fears, afraid of being labelled as “mad” (Kayitesi Blewitt, 2009). Some somaticized their stress in the form of rapid breathing and panic attacks, which locally is understood as the result of the souls of unburied family members (Sakai, Connolly, & Oas, 2010). This acted as a fitting metaphor as it took years to find all the bones.

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Older children tended to dissociate their lives into distinct, separated pieces, the past being shut off from the present, a pattern common in the case of Holocaust survivors as well (Kaplan, 2006). Thus, older children and adults generally refused to recount or explain the recent events. This lack of narrative has been particularly hard for younger children throughout the process. Add to this the combination of economic and emotional stress, HIV, grief, isolation, and stigma (Nowrojee & Fleischman, 1996). What children and caregivers faced is summed up in the syndrome “Guhahamuka” in Kinyarwanda, the local language. It is characterised by what westerners would call “despair”, “hopelessness”, and “worthlessness”. It also includes symptoms of excessive crying, being easily startled, repeatedly dreaming of bad events, night wakening, and attempting suicide. Rwandans label this as a single condition, while western psychiatrists see these as comorbid with PTSD (Boris et  al., 2008). Researchers report that about forty-­two per cent of children were overly fearful of strangers, acting inhibited and withdrawn. Seventy per cent acted aggressively when frustrated (Schaal & Elbert, 2006), repeating that familiar pattern of inhibition versus aggression though in Rwanda with considerable overlap. International findings suggest that the negative effects in children, such as fear and anger, are associated with depression of caregivers while positive affects appear to have more independence (Kim-­Cohen, Moffitt, Caspi, & Taylor, 2004). Psychiatrist Richard Neugebauer relates that when he visited Rwanda in 1997, the dead were more alive than the living who were completely bereft. Many homes were burned down, and those left standing were side by side with the homes of perpetrators whose male family members were mostly imprisoned, though many were to be released (cited in Wolfe, 2014). Within four years, the rebel Tutsi government instituted a programme of reconciliation. After ten years, they built memorials including a special room for the children who died and instituted an annual week of mourning; the government released many Hutu killers from overcrowded prisons, pushed them to confess to the butchering of families, and to locate corpses for families (Wolf, 2014). Though the government holds commemorative ceremonies, they urge people to put the past behind them. Mention of Hutu or Tutsi identity is forbidden (Staub, 2006). Hutu friends and neighbours want to forget, but some survivors need to remember (Lasting Wounds, 2003). Particularly for rape victims, they are shamed and silenced. After ten years, for many it is as if time has stood still. Their lives are still dominated by the genocide and rapes (Rwanda: Broken Bodies, 2004). Adjustment is also impeded by the absence of reparations. Those criminally charged were to be fined, but this was never enforced. The government has created an assistance, but not a compensation, fund, perhaps

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out of fear that it will cause ethnic resentment (Mugiraneza, 2014). The church has apologised for the role of the clergy in the massacre and the United Nations admits that it withdrew from Rwanda in the midst of the killing, but many Hutus are unrepentant. Reconciliation is incomplete with blame going in both directions. Some Hutus still blame the Tutsis for provoking the massacre. Many now fear that Tutsis will exact revenge (Rwanda: Broken Bodies, 2004). For many Tutsis there is lingering resentment that so many perpetrators were allowed to apologise and move on. One boy described how he wanted to find and kill the man (a former neighbour) who had killed his sister with a hammer. He thought of running away and joining the army so he could hunt down the villains. This, he said, is what disturbs my mind the most. But a supportive woman helped him turn his energy into studying hard (Kaplan, 2006). Some still accept the notion that they themselves are responsible for what happened and God is punishing them for it (Kayitesi Blewitt, 2009). The genocide has created a long-­lasting distrust, disrupting even kinship ties. The community is far from repaired nor has a healing narrative emerged. The government attempt to balance forgiving and forgetting with commemorations has brought insufficient restorative justice. The most significant sources of support beyond the government have come from community organisations such as the Association of Widows of the Genocide, the Society of Women Against AIDS in Africa, and church ministries. (Rwanda: Broken Bodies, 2004). Few of these focus on children. Some recommend work to engage caring older women with the child-­headed households (Boris et al., 2008), to construct a community narrative, and to gain more emotional and material support for children. Several Rwandan teenagers say that they find telling their stories, albeit years later, a very healing experience (I was tested, n.d.).

Gaza, Palestine In 2006, a year after approximately 6,000 Jewish settlers were evacuated from Gaza, Hamas won the Palestinian elections. Then Israel, Fatah, and Egypt imposed a blockade on Gaza. There was disruption of access to electricity, fuel, building materials, medical devices, books and family visits to prisoners as well as a seemingly random selection of banned foods. Thousands of jobs were lost. The greatest intensity of violence coincided with three recent wars. In response to Palestinian rockets fired at southern Israeli towns from Gaza, Israel launched three brief wars in 2009, 2012, and again in 2014. The third lasted seven weeks, during which Israel’s IDF fired 5,226 rounds at Gaza (Crisis in Gaza, 2014). The United Nations estimated that approximately 500

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Gazan children were killed and about 3,100 wounded, 1,000 were left with permanent disabilities, and 1,500 were orphaned (Children of Gaza, 2014; Rudoren, 2014; Excessive number of fatalities, 2014). Hundreds of schools were hit, often mid-­day, including eighty-­ nine United Nations schools and shelters (in some of which militants had stored weapons) (Jalbout, Dryden-­ Peterson, & Watkins, 2014). In the fall, there were few facilities for schools, and many first and second graders were afraid to return to schools where they had seen people killed (Rudoren, 2014). Sixty-­five thousand to one hundred thousand people in Gaza were left homeless (More Than Half, 2014). When Hamas fired 4,591 rockets into Israel killing six adults and one child (Crisis in Gaza, 2014), Israeli children living near the Gaza border spent the war hiding in bomb shelters. The Israeli minister of education was eager for children to return to school, a place where they could find assistance and emotional support (Rudoren, 2014). In the interim and post-­war periods in Gaza, there is still little tranquility. Children are subject to midnight home invasions, arrests, strip searches, sonic booms, rising domestic violence, and Palestinian internecine battles (Dimitry, 2011; Reality of Gaza, 2014; UNESCO, 2017). About seventy-­eight per cent of youths interviewed during the first Intifada (uprising) reported that their homes had been raided by Israeli IDF soldiers at least once. More than one-­third reported that their home was raided more than ten times (Barber, 2008). Youths, twelve years of age and up, are frequently arrested, most often for throwing stones. Their hands are tied; they are blindfolded and taken for interrogation; and at times are put into solitary confinement for up to one month. No child is accompanied by a parent or lawyer during interrogation (Children in Israel, 2013). Looking at the occupied territories as a whole, according to the Israeli Prison Service, each year approximately 700 Palestinian youth ages twelve to seventeen are prosecuted and jailed for resistance-­related “crimes” (most often stone throwing) by the Israeli military courts (Children in Israel, 2013; Imprisonment, 2017). Close to ninety percent of youth reported a tear gas attack in their schools; one-­third had this happen more than ten times (Barber, 2008). Approximately 7,000 explosive remnants of war are thought to be buried in the debris where children study, live, and play (Graham, 2015). It is very stressful. Some Gazans say that there is no place to run and no place of safety (Sousa, Kemp, & el-­Zuhairi, 2014). Because of the blockade of all border crossings, families cannot escape the wars by running away. Even schools have not proven to be places of safe refuge. This violence is accompanied and exacerbated by Israeli ethnic prejudice, interest in taking over Palestinian land, and the perception of all Palestinians as

dangerous. Arnon Soffer, a lecturer at the IDF National Defense College, was quoted in the Jerusalem Post in 2004 as saying: Those people [Gazans] will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day. (Leibowitz, 2007) In 2017, Raphael Israeli, professor at Hebrew University (at a gathering of Likud members) described Arabs as a danger to Israel, a fifth column, contributing nothing to Israeli society, only sucking up Israeli resources (Levinsen, 2017). Children growing up in states permeated by such prejudice either absorb the messages and feel degraded or they are likely to embrace a resistance model. Age, too, may be a factor in how the experiences and narratives are perceived. Older children with more access to public spaces and more risk-­taking behaviour have more exposure to danger and confrontations with the Israeli military. They are more often arrested and beaten. They suffer greater degrees of functional impairments, depression, and PTSD. This is true for children in Israel as well (Dimitry, 2011). There has been less study of the impact of trauma on very young children in Gaza. Girls are generally more restricted in extra-­domestic life than boys, thus giving boys significantly more exposure to trauma-­causing experiences, such as being beaten by Israeli police or taken into detention. Furthermore, while girls engage in agriculture and household work, teenage boys more often face unemployment and a lack of daily structure. It is not surprising that boys thus tend to show more behaviour problems, more aggression, and hyperactivity. One study found that in contrast to the more common pattern, females often possess similar or lower rates of PTSD than males in Gaza, requiring less psychological support (Thabet, Elhelou, & Vostanis, 2017). Many Gazan children do enjoy some resilience-­ promoting aspects to their lives. Where parents are able to offer responsive parenting, children have strong support systems. Children, in turn, in turn, can strengthen what has been termed parental resilience (Gavidia-­ Payne, Denny, Davis, Frances, & Jackson, 2015). Mothering responsibilities in a trauma zone can provide an amplified sense of meaning. Parental resilience can then reverberate back to the children (Punamaki, Qouta, Miller, & El-­Sarraj, 2011; Sousa et al., 2014). However, in the hardest hit areas of Gaza, parents are sometimes rendered incapable of offering good parenting as a result both of exposure to the shelling of their

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homes, deaths, and helplessness in the face of danger to their children. Children absorb their parental anguish. Perhaps because of this dynamic of shared psychological reactions among mothers and children, mothers routinely try to hide their pain from their children, as evidenced in narratives like: “I cry when I’m alone but I don’t cry in front of them” (Sousa et al., 2014, p. 211). Through play, the children re-­enact disturbing events, such as arrests, beatings and funerals. They play Arabs versus Israelis (Ferrante, 2014). While mothers worry how this affects them, it is common for children to reenact situations that surround them (Qouta et al., 2008). Gaza children also draw, sing songs, and write poetry. Study, creativity, and play also provide psychological protection. Children who are not too traumatised are eager to study, perhaps more so because of many damaged schools, closed borders, and, in the West Bank, roadblocks, all of which make studying challenging (Palestinian Children Deprived, 2010). To learn becomes a form of resistance. One child wrote “I can’t even find words that could express to you how hard is it to lose your home, and see a bunch of stones and rubble. But, seeing it this way is what motivated me to study, to help and support all friends and families that lost their homes.” One young girl said, “I  personally became a poet after I lost my home. It is as if I rebuilt it with my poetry” (Shalhoub-­Kevorkian, 2009, p. 342). Palestinians cultivate community connections by referencing past generations, keeping keys to lost homes, reciting resistance poetry (for example, Mahmud Darwish), and even imbuing their dances (debka) with resistance messages. As a result, resistance is embedded in the culture. Many Palestinians have also come to define helping others, surviving, and narrating their history to others as a form of resistance (Dimitry, 2011; Shalhoub-­ Kervorkian, 2005, 2009). In this culture of resistance, men and boys are given respect if they suffer beatings or arrest at Israel’s hands. When young boys throw rocks at settlers, thereby endangering their own community, residents are often supportive, recognising the need of these youth to escape helplessness. In 1987, it was the youth who began a grass roots revolt (the Intifada) against Israel. The stone became “a symbol of the uprising,” and the children throwing them, “atfal al-­ hijara,” ‘”the children of the stone” (Papi, 2016). The leadership of the community generally encourages the resistance activities of youth. In 2016, about 100 children were trained in martial arts in Al Quds Brigade summer camps and many more in Hamas camps (Zaanoun, 2013). However, the percentage of those who actually engage in violent behaviour is low (Barber, 2008). Adolescents who perceived the world as unjust, without meaning, and incomprehensible suffer more psychopathology (Staub, 2006). In contrast, involvement

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in political struggles can protect youths’ developmental and psychological well-­being (Qouta et al., 1995). Activism during the conflict has been positively correlated to a number of positive behaviours, including higher social competence and civic involvement in the community for both males and females and higher empathy, lower antisocial behavior, and higher public religiosity for females (Barber, 2008). Thus, though parents worry that children will resist parental authority, they also fear overwhelming apathy among their children. Overall, a sense of agency, individual and community efficacy has been linked repeatedly to resilience. When a child can meet moderate challenges successfully, this seems to have an inoculating effect against future experiences of trauma. On the other hand, if the trauma is beyond the child’s ability to withstand, if community supports are torn down, the child can become more debilitated and vulnerable in future cases of stress (Masten & Narayan, 2012). The trauma can overwhelm the protective factors. After the recent wars, researchers found pervasive, lingering fear among children that was not limited to times of acute fighting (Sousa et al., 2014). While some children run and hide at any loud sound and tend to be clingy, others become more aggressive and engage in risk-­taking. Among children who experienced an average of four traumatic events, one-­third reported significant traumatic stress reactions including repetitive thinking about bombing, feeling unsafe, bed wetting and nightmares, speech disorders, being aggressive, rejecting authority, and finding it hard to pay attention or study (Altawil, Nel, Asker, Samara,& Harrold, 2008; Graham, 2015; Thabet, A., Tawahina, A., Sarraj, E.,  & Vostanis, 2013). Psychological symptoms such as depression were less often reported as the society stigmatised such things as evidence of weakness. Some Palestinians search for reparative professions such as nursing, teaching, and even automotive repair as healing. What is most challenging for young people is the feeling of hopelessness. Even if they study hard, their opportunities are limited. Because of the Israeli and Egyptian siege, all borders are closed and Gazan students cannot go to study in the West Bank and rarely get permission to study abroad (Alqarout, 2013). Like the other survivors, especially in the early decades, Palestinian children feel abandoned, ostracised, and excluded, with little external recognition of their suffering and hardships (Shalhoub-­Kevorkian, 2009).

Conclusions Each of the three cases discussed here is unique, differing in duration of the violence, intensity, culture, and many details, yet one can discern several common themes and useful insights.

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First of all, these cases make clear that the commonly used term “posttraumatic” can be very misleading. In the case of the Palestinians, for example, the trauma has not ended (Lemelson, Kirmayer, & Barad, 2008). In fact, the concept of an end date for trauma is almost always misleading. Liberation for Holocaust survivors did not end the trauma. Many children were displaced, in orphanages, with unfamiliar families, and most faced unreceptive new societies (Valent, 1998). Rwandan children after the massacre died in large numbers in unhygienic refugee camps; most others returned to live in difficult conditions. In all cases, children faced silence, dismissal of their trauma, and often negative narratives. One could better speak of post-­war than post-­trauma. The resurfacing of disquieting symptoms in ageing child survivors of the Holocaust reminds us that even those who exhibit resilience still remain profoundly affected. There is no distinct dichotomy of resilience and lack of it (Neugebauer et al., 2016). Judith Kestenberg called our attention to a “tension beyond diagnosis” among those who just manage to hold themselves together (cited in Valent, 1998). In regard to individual factors, age and developmental stage appear salient in how children are impacted by trauma. Older children tend to show more symptoms of severe stress and thus those who were very young are likely to receive less attention but suffer at a somatic level. As Kestenberg described, they may also transpose traumas suffered by others around them into their own lives, perhaps using them to better integrate the memory fragments they have (Fogelman, 1998; Kestenberg, 1989). In addition, gender as well as genetic vulnerabilities are salient. A number of factors offer protection, such as responsive parenting, strong family and community support, a meaningful narrative, and an opportunity to exercise self-­agency and resist. However, resiliency is not easy to achieve in the face of long-­term or high-­dose childhood trauma. When the family and community are helpless in the face of an overwhelming power, when humiliations are repeatedly imposed, and when attacks and losses are relentless, self-­efficacy often fails and recovery can be a life-­long process. Individual healing often proceeds best within the context of community healing. Collective metaphors and narratives have proven important in the healing process. Ageing child survivors of the Holocaust show us the long-­term importance of narratives of survival reinforced in community connections. Rather than lessen, decades later, symptoms of past trauma can resurface and intensify. Political narratives can make the trauma more comprehensible and meaningful, and inspire community-­oriented activism. In the commemorative museum in Rwanda, survivors find stories of other genocides, which helps put their own stories in a broader context. This may contribute

to greater empathy for others as opposed to tendencies towards competitive victimhood or revenge efforts. Ervin Staub and Vollhardt spoke of “altruism born from suffering” which transforms the pain of the past into post-­traumatic growth (Staub  & Vollhardt, 2008). This sort of altruism is seen in all three groups ranging in form from dedication to help those in the community, to altruism for others outside the community as well. Also part of the healing process is the formation of collectivities of survivors. The establishment of Holocaust child survivor groups and organisations helped to reconstitute lost families and communities (Fogelman & Savran, 1979). These groups, plus narratives of survival, films, and books helped move grown-­up children from feeling ignored to becoming empowered members of child survivors groups. Such community groups exist in Gaza and Rwanda as well. Unfortunately, it often takes decades for this process to unfold. In all three cases, we find children who grew up quickly, sometimes reversing roles with regressed parents, and sometimes being involved in forms of assistance and resistance. In Palestine in particular, the aggressiveness often found in children experiencing chronic violence can in part be channelled into community altruism. In an interesting study of five-­ and six-­year-­old children in Croatia, the authors found that, during the war, levels of sharing and helping others increased (Raboteg-­Saric et al., 1994). The interview approach of ISOPC can also remind us to think long term. Three or four decades after the Holocaust, the interviews still often had a therapeutic impact. Among their valuable qualities was the inclusion of information about pre-­war times and the long-­ term process of post-­war adaptations. These put the intense trauma into normalising contexts. The story partially shifts from the horrors of persecution to the sometimes uplifting stories of survival and heroism.

References Almqvist, K., & Broberg, A. G. (2003). Young children traumatized by organized violence together with their mothers – The critical effects of damaged internal representations. Attachment & Human Development, 5, 367–­380. Alqarout, A. (2013). Higher education in the Gaza strip: Policies, quality, and the role of NGOs. Global Access to Postsecondary Education. Retrieved from www.ean-­edu.org/­ assets/­alqaroutreport.pdf. Altawil, M., Nel, P. W., Asker, A., Samara, M.,  & Harrold, D. (2008). The effects of chronic war trauma among Palestinian children. In M. Parsons (Ed.), Children: The invisible victims of war – An interdisciplinary study (pp.  1–­21). Peterborough and England: DSM Technical. Barber, B. K. (2008). Contrasting portraits of war: Youths’ varied experiences with political violence in Bosnia and Palestine. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 32(4), 298.

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Boris, N. W., Brown, L., Thurman, T., Rice, J., Snider, L., Ntaginira, J.,  & Nyirazinyoye, L. (2008). Depressive symptoms among youth heads-­of-­household in Rwanda: Correlates and implications for intervention. Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, 161(9), 836–­843. Brave Heart, M. Y. H., & DeBruyn, L. M. (1998). The American Indian Holocaust: Healing historical unresolved grief. American Indian and Alaska Native Mental Health Research, 8(2), 56–­78. Brenner, I. (1996a). Multisensory bridges in response to object loss. In J. S. Kestenberg & I. Brenner (Eds.), The last witness: The child survivor of the Holocaust (pp. 69–­78). Washington, DC: Psychiatric Press. Brenner, I., (1996b). Child survivors as parents and grandparents. In J. S. Kestenberg & I. Brenner (Eds.), The last witness: The child survivor of the Holocaust (pp.  107–­129). Washington, DC: Psychiatric Press. Brenner, I.,  & Kestenberg, J. (1996). Superego in young child survivors. In J. S. Kestenberg  & I. Brenner (Eds.), The last witness: The child survivor of the Holocaust (pp. 53–­67). Washington, DC: Psychiatric Press. Carrion, V., Hass, B., Garrett, A., Song, S.,  & Reiss, A. (2010). Reduced hippocampal activity in youth with posttraumatic stress symptoms: An fMRI study. Journal of Pediatric Psychology, 35(5), 559–­569. Carrión, V., Weems, C. F., & Reiss, A. L. (2007). Stress predicts brain changes in children: A  pilot longitudinal study on youth stress, posttraumatic stress disorder, and the hippocampus. Pediatrics, 119, 509–­516. Cechova, R. (1964). Garden. In H. Volavkova (Ed.), I never saw another butterfly: Children’s drawings and poems from Terezin concentration camp (pp. 24–­25). New York: McGraw-­Hill. Children during the Holocaust. Holocaust Encyclopedia, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Retrieved from www. ushmm.org/­wlc/­en/­article.php?ModuleId=10005142. Children in Israeli military detention: Observations and recommendations. (2013, February, 2). UNISEF. Retrieved from www.unicef.org/­oPt/­UNICEF_oPt_Children_in_Israeli_Military_Detention_Observations_and_Recommendations_-­_6_ March_2013.pdf. Children of Gaza: A generation scarred and under siege (2014, August 28). Institute for Middle East Understanding. Retrieved from https://­imeu.org/­article/­the-­children-­of-­gaza-­a-­genera tion-­scarred-­under-­siege. Cohen, B. (2017). Starting over: Reconstituted families after the Holocaust. In S. Kangisser Cohen, E. Fogelman,  & D. Ofer (Eds.), Children in the Holocaust and its aftermath: Historical and psychological studies of the Kestenberg Archive (pp. 62–­80). New York: Berghahn. Crisis in Gaza. (2014, September 1). BBC News. Retrieved from www.bbc.com/­news/­world-­middle-­east-­28439404. Danieli, Y. (1988). On not confronting the Holocaust: Psychological reactions to victim/­survivors and their children. In Remembering for the future: Theme II: The impact of the Holocaust for the contemporary world (pp.  1257–­1271). Oxford, England: Pergamon. De Bellis, M., & Zisk, A. (2014). The biological effects of childhood trauma. Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Clinics of North America, 23(2), 185–­192. Dimitry, L. (2011). A  systematic review on the mental health of children and adolescence in the areas of armed conflict in the Middle East. Child: Care, Health and Development, 38, 153–­161. Doughty, K.,  & Ntambara, D. (2005). Resistance and protection: Muslim community actions during the Rwandan genocide. Community Learning Projects. Retrieved from

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25 CHAPTER

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Kaplan, S. (2006). Children in genocide: Extreme traumatization and the affect propeller. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 87(3), 725–­746. Kay, A. (1998). Generativity in the shadow of genocide: The Holocaust experience and generativity. In D. McAdams & E. de St. Aubin (Eds.), Generativity and adult development (pp. 335–­359). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Kayitesi Blewitt, M. (2009). Trauma in young survivors of the Rwandan genocide. Research Center for Leadership in Action, NYU. Retrieved from https://­wagner.nyu.edu/­files/­ leadership/­SurvivorsRwandanGenocide040109.pdf. Kerestes, J. (2006). Children’s aggressive and prosocial behavior in relation to war exposure: Testing the role of perceived parenting and child gender. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 30, 227–­239. Kestenberg, J. S. (1989). Transposition revisited: Clinical therapeutic and developmental considerations. In P. Marcus & A. Rosenberg (Eds.), Healing of the wounds: Psychotherapy with Holocaust survivals and their families (pp. 67–­82). New York: Praeger. Kestenberg, J. S. (1992). “Children of survivors and child survivors. In S. Robinson (Ed.), Echoes of the Holocaust Issue No. 1, April 1992. Jerusalem: Talbieh Mental Health Center, 27–­48. Kestenberg, J. S.,  & Kestenberg, M. (1996). Aging of children of the Holocaust. In J. Kestenberg  & I. Brenner (Eds.), The last witness: The child survivor of the Holocaust (pp. 131–­156). Washington, DC: Psychiatric Press. Kestenberg, J. S., & Kestenberg-­Amighi, J. (1996). Children in concentration camps. In J. Kestenberg  & I. Brenner (Eds.), The last witness: The child survivor of the Holocaust (pp. 1–­26). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press. Kestenberg, M., & Kestenberg, J. S. (1988). The sense of belonging and altruism in children who survived the Holocaust. Psychoanalytic Review, 75, 533–­560. Kidron, C. (2012). Alterity and the particular limits of universalism: Comparing Jewish-­Israeli Holocaust and Canadian-­ Cambodian Genocide legacies. Current Anthropology, 53(6), 723–­754. Kim-­Cohen, J., Moffitt, T., Caspi, A.,  & Taylor, A. (2004). Genetic and environmental processes in young children’s resilience and vulnerability to socioeconomic deprivation. Child Development, 75(3), 651–­668. Kichler, L. (1982). Hiding in a bunker, passing as an Aryan: Manya’s unforgettable story. In A. Eisenberg (Ed.), The lost generation: Children in the Holocaust (pp.  118–­123). New York, Pilgrim Press. Kirmayer, L., Gone, J., & Moses, J. (2014). Rethinking historical trauma. Transcultural Psychiatry, 51(3), 299–­319. Lasting wounds: Consequences for genocide and war for Rwanda’s children. (2003, April 3). Human Rights Watch. Retrieved from www.hrw.org/­report/­2003/­04/­03/­lasting-­wounds/­con sequences-­genocide-­and-­war-­rwandas-­children. Laub, D., & Auerhahn, N. C. (1989). Failed empathy – a central theme in the survivor’s Holocaust experience. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 6(4), 377–­400. Leibowitz, R. (2007, October 10). I didn’t suggest that we kill Palestinians. Jerusalem Post. Retrieved from www.jpost.com/­ Features/­I-­didnt-­suggest-­we-­kill-­Palestinians. Lemelson, R., Kirmayer, L.,  & Barad, M. (2008). Trauma in context: Integrating biological, clinical, and cultural perspectives. In L. Kirmayer, R. Lemelson,  & M. Barad (Eds.), Understanding trauma: Integrating biological, clinical and cultural perspectives (pp. 451–­74). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levinsen, C. (2017, September 6). Senior Israeli politicians celebrate book that says that Arabs should be incarcerated in

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26 Holocaust as a weapon against the Jews Thane Rosenbaum

What will the Holocaust mean after all of the survivors are gone? If it is in any way possible for genocide to have had a heyday, the Holocaust surely once had such a moment in time. The world’s greatest mass murder, which for decades had succumbed to the shrill sounds of global silence – in part due to shock, and the rest to embarrassment – “enjoyed” a period when it was the atrocity du jour, the anthem to man’s inhumanity to man. This period began toward the end of the 1970s (exemplified by the hit 1978 miniseries Holocaust) and reached its zenith by the mid-­1990s. During that improbable time, the Holocaust had bizarrely become a cultural touchstone fashioned from the ashes of Auschwitz. Yes, you read that right: A Jewish genocide was once in vogue, and it was not a passing trend. It had cultural staying power – with all the cachet that inevitably turned it into a cliché. The Holocaust was hip. Cattle cars and tattooed forearms found their way into cocktail conversations. Knowing something about the Holocaust – almost anything – was a litmus test for entry into polite company, even though the material itself was impolitic, wholly alien, and had no place in any social circle. The Holocaust doubled as both the era’s clarion call and siren song, bringing out a schizophrenia in societal norms that continues to bedevil our current age. After all, reflecting upon an atrocity too long tends to normalize it; pretending to have figured it all out trivializes

it; subjecting it to all sorts of cultural and artistic representations may end up distorting it beyond recognition. The shameless voyeurism that accompanied the study of the Holocaust would become the big bang that led to the presumptions of reality TV and even, perhaps, to Donald Trump’s White House ascendency. Nothing was deemed private; everything was declared knowable. Hubris, an artifact of the ancient Greeks, had risen to an art form in the postwar West. The Holocaust was framed as a freak accident of history that was made to look presentable so it could be viewed in public – a taboo subject now out in the open. An atrocity was suddenly democratized. Everyone should see it; everyone should know it; and once that happens, everyone can claim proprietary ownership of it. Yet, if the Holocaust was truly unimaginable, ineffable, and unknowable – as so many had claimed it to be – then it should have resisted all efforts to expose it to too much light. Awe and humility should have shielded the Holocaust from pop cultural poking. After all, this was somber material, not necessarily for everyone, metaphorically not subject to a Freedom of Information request. At the very least, its uniqueness should have rendered it beyond the capacity of those who would dare to re-­imagine or purport to comprehend it. And so, for roughly twenty years, in an otherwise divisive and fractious world, there was at least one cultural consensus: Nazis were evil beyond measure, and the Holocaust was unspeakably horrible. Yet, paradoxically, everyone believed they had an obligation to speak about it, to offer an opinion, to profess an expertise, to

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register the appropriate levels of disgust and pity, and then say, by way of benediction, “Never Again.” Silence became the one thing the Holocaust demanded, and yet the world had little interest in shutting up. In the information age that eventually replaced mainstream media with the self-­empowerment of the Internet, knowledge was immediate, varying and debatable, and absolutely nothing was entitled to be left alone. If it could be Googled, then it was open for business – regardless of how presumptuous and dirty that business would turn out to be. Without warning, the unimaginable had vaulted over the unfathomable and was anointed as newly accessible. The ineffable now had a common language. Once-­sacred symbols were transformed into kitsch. False analogies emerged as the new ethic; desecration was the forerunner to today’s disruption – and piety be damned! The Holocaust, which had been the exclusive trademark of Jewish suffering, became universalized, easily adaptable to anyone’s misery. Anne Frank was the template teenager who suffered through a difficult emotional time. Thank God she had a diary. Rogue (even law-­abiding) cops were referred to as Gestapo. Anorexic models were marketed as the “Auschwitz chic.” AIDS was the Holocaust of gay men; the fur and leather trade was the Holocaust of the animal kingdom. The Shoah became a misapplied proxy for all manner of human calamity – everyone possessed it, and everyone would get a chance to personalize it, like a library book always available and renewable at the circulation desk. But if the Holocaust was everywhere, then it was nowhere; if it could be universally experienced, then it had no particular meaning and possessed no unique moral properties. Modesty was certainly nowhere to be found. Jews themselves weren’t sure whether all this Holocaust hoopla was a badge of honor, or a pernicious fashion statement: The yellow armband and tailored patch redux – without the walled-­off ghettos and death marches. Here was the perfect example of a well-­ meaning world once again killing Jews – this time with kindness, the trivialization of historical truth and the desecration of memory. The misappropriation of the Holocaust was an offense to the moral universe, and to the six million dead. From the early 1990s through a few short years after 9/­11, annual Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance) commemorations were held in thousands of synagogues and Jewish Community Centers around the world. Many Christian institutions and universities honored the day, too. City councils across America, and even the House of Representatives, passed resolutions marking the genocide of the Jewish people as a black day in world history. The study of the Holocaust was added to the curriculum of middle and high schools as a civics lesson on the fall of civilization. Endowed chairs

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in Holocaust studies, and classes in Holocaust literature, were added at both public and private universities. Trips to Auschwitz were organized. A  March of the Living crossed paths with millions of ghosts trying to head in an altogether different direction. The Holocaust Memorial Museum opened in Washington, D.C. in 1993, and soon became the biggest attraction within the Smithsonian family. There were month-­long waiting lists to get a reservation. Visitors were each given a card with the name and a brief biography of someone who had perished in the Holocaust. Apparently, walking through the Museum while clutching a card somehow humanized the experience. Few seemed offended by such simulations. Yet, when guests left the museum, they were usually headed off to some other Smithsonian attraction, or to Dupont Circle for a late lunch. No such agreeable options awaited those whose names were written on those cards. The grand statues of Lincoln and Jefferson no longer held much interest when compared with the artifacts and offerings of a museum dedicated to mass death. Hitler, Heydrich, and Himmler were the founding fathers of gas chambers and killing fields. In addition to making the murderers real, the instruments that were used in perpetrating the crimes where given prominent places of viewership. The museum even showcased an actual cattle car. One could walk through and . . . who knows what feelings such movements were intended to arouse? One thing was for certain: A fading Declaration of Independence surely could not keep pace with tantalizing spectacles such as these. The success of family trips to the nation’s capital now depended on whether they were lucky enough to score tickets to the Holocaust Museum. The Disney Corporation, suffering from amusement park envy, took notes on how to manage the overflow crowds that awaited entry into a house of horrors unlike anything they could possibly offer in Anaheim or Orlando. Other museums attempted to outdo one another as curators of Holocaust art. Some became theaters of the absurd. The Jewish Museum of New York mounted an exhibit featuring Zyklon B canisters displayed as Chanel handbags and Auschwitz itself constructed out of LEGO. A few months after the Holocaust Memorial Museum opened, Schindler’s List became a global box office phenomenon, spawning a foundation that videotaped the oral histories of tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors worldwide. The film oddly showcased two Nazis – one hopelessly beyond evil, the other redemptive – where the Jews were bit players and the rescue of 1,200 somehow overshadowed the wide-­scale moral failure that culminated in eleven million total dead. Not long after that, the sitcom Seinfeld built an entire episode around amorous lovers “making out” in the balcony of a theater while watching the movie – demonstrating that a film that ultimately became a sanctified household

26 CHAPTER

Hol o cau st a s a w e ap on     

name could also take a joke. It got even worse. Another Seinfeld episode featured a disagreeable restaurateur who was labeled as the “Soup Nazi.” Seinfeld co-­creator Larry David went on to star in his own comedy series, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and proved that Nazis and the Holocaust may have been his obsession all along. In one episode, the term “survivor” became the butt of a joke when a Holocaust survivor was conflated with someone who endured a reality TV series of the same name. Both survivors squared off, comparing their relative sufferings. David was not done. In still another episode, a chef with numbers on his arm ended up being not a Holocaust survivor, but a lottery player who penned his ticket on his arm – suggesting that tattoos on forearms have many purposes, and that the Nazis had devised nothing special. Such degenerate Holocaust art took on other forms. Mel Brooks set a record for Tony wins with his Broadway musical The Producers, in which Nazis were far too busy frolicking on stage to have time for a genocide. Near the end of the 2001 Tony ceremony, Brooks was noticeably exhausted from having taken the podium to claim his many prizes. After acknowledging everyone involved in the success of the musical, he finally thanked Hitler for being so funny. Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir Night became an Oprah Book Club selection in 2006. He toured the grounds of Auschwitz with Oprah Winfrey, and later escorted President Barack Obama and Chancellor Angela Merkel when they visited Buchenwald. (Sometime in between those visits, Wiesel narrowly escaped a kidnapping by a Holocaust denier in San Francisco.) Documentaries about the Holocaust flourished, seemingly taking home the Oscar each year, as if a tiny statue of a baldheaded man was a fitting honor for a film about the nakedness and depravity of humanity. History books, such as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, became international bestsellers – even as its finger of blame shifted onto those beyond card-­carrying Nazis. Holocaust memoirs increasingly appeared on the pages of book reviews around the world. There were so many, in fact, a few charlatans snuck in, as well. Binjamin Wilkomirski fabricated an entire childhood in a death camp, despite not being Jewish and living nowhere near Poland when he was an infant during the war. Herman Rosenblat, an actual survivor, concocted a love story that was slated to become a feature film, until it was revealed that the kind of love he was describing was logistically impossible and had no place in a death camp. The low point was the astounding critical and commercial success of the 1997 Italian film Life is Beautiful. Even its title was an appalling distortion: Beauty neither lived nor survived in such places of ineradicable evil.

The Nazis were in the business of mass murder, whereas the film seemingly was set in a parallel universe where Jewish inmates had the luxury to walk freely, communicate to their relatives through the camp intercom, and manage to invent a game to amuse a child who apparently had no idea the grave danger they were all in. And to top it off, in answering his critics, the film’s director and star, Roberto Benigni, made a statement that, however he intended it, was far from benign: “We all own the Holocaust.” Neo-­Nazis, and skinheads with mostly empty heads, didn’t fare so well during this period. The historical event that they had insisted was pure fiction was now universally accepted as the darkest chapter in human history, the blackest hole in the moral universe, the genocide to end all genocides. The critical mass of Holocaust obsession had reached proportions too gargantuan to deny. It was now an atrocity of unqualified demonic dimension, seared into the world’s historical memory bank with the most unforgettable of fire. And then, as quickly as it had ascended into the cultural consciousness, as improbably as it had inspired the artistic imagination, as definitively as it had reprimanded the world for its unsurpassable indifference, it just as quickly lost its moral mojo and soon faded as a cultural and moral touchstone. Yes, there were still movies being made, but far fewer and none that could compete with superheroes and mutants (ironically, X-­ Men was a Holocaust film, of sorts, with an opening scene set in a fictionalized Auschwitz). Far fewer books about the Holocaust were written, and rarely are they now reviewed in major publications. Social conversations turned to the war on terror – Islamist extremists are the new-­look Nazis for the new millennium. A Holocaust fatigue set in, and with each passing year, the command that the mass murder of European Jewry once had on the world’s conscience lost its power to shame. Yom HaShoah commemorations cooled to embers, and are less frequently held and more sparsely attended. The degrading of the Holocaust, which began the moment artists misappropriated its story and misapplied its message, gave way to something arguably worse – its irrelevance. No longer the banality of evil, the Western world’s fascination with the Holocaust begat the banality of overexposure. The result: We now live in a time when most people have heard of the Holocaust, but very few have absorbed its magnitude. It has fallen into the Trivial Pursuit dustbin of utterly superficial knowledge – a conga line of horror that includes the Inquisition and blood libels in the Pale of Settlement. This was to be expected all along. Maybe the Holocaust was intended to be forbidden knowledge. Making it accessible also made it pornographic, nakedly vulnerable to crassness and indignity. Perhaps it should have been left to the piety of purists.

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Meanwhile, the community of Holocaust survivors dwindled with each passing day. Obituaries continually noted one less witness to the handiwork of the Nazis and their collaborating henchmen. While the survivors walked the earth, they represented unimpeachable evidence of the crime. They were the living embodiment of the dead – their stand-­ins and truth-­tellers. But they also constituted a nightmare for Holocaust deniers who couldn’t so easily explain them away. When neo-­Nazis decided to march in Skokie, Illinois in 1978, they did so precisely because Skokie had one of the highest concentrations of Holocaust survivors in the world. Goose-­ stepping into a hamlet filled with Holocaust survivors was a legal but spiritually lethal way for neo-­Nazis to stamp out what otherwise could not be erased. They could not kill them, but they could further damage them – adding insult to the once injured. Now, with so few survivors among us (and many left impoverished and neglected), and with fatigue already set in, the impulse to honor and commemorate continues to diminish. The Nazis knew all along that numbers are numbing. A single murder is a crime, millions murdered just a statistic – an insight attributed to yet another mass murderer. No matter how many cities hosted Yom HaShoah ceremonies, and no matter how many people attended, there would never be enough of them to light the sum total of six million candles. What remains of Holocaust memory is now poisoned with even greater ill will and bad faith. It has been hijacked once again, in the same lifetime, by a sinister movement that trivializes and falsifies the Holocaust even further. On campuses, for example, Students for Justice in Palestine has disrupted Yom HaShoah commemorations, hosted events and rallies that equate Zionism with Nazism, charged Israelis with committing genocide against the Palestinian people, and proclaimed that Israel has turned Gaza into Auschwitz. On both sides of the Atlantic, such twisted, abhorrent thinking is fashionable on university campuses, despite the fact that many of SJP’s intersectional partners would be stoned, beheaded, or burned alive if they lived in Gaza. Israel, meanwhile, remains the only nation in the region that functions as a liberal democracy where an

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open, pluralistic society enjoys rights nowhere else seen in the Middle East. In so many pernicious ways, this latest misappropriation, this vulgar corruption, is worse than conventional Holocaust denial. The existence of the Holocaust – the reality of its moral indictment of humanity – is not a difficult argument to win. Such claims were mercifully confined to crackpot conventions. They were in the same category as having to prove that there was once an African slave trade, or that the world is round. In such low-­budget intellectual battles, the deniers revealed themselves to be nothing but barbarians and baboons. When it comes to anti-­Semitism cloaked in the smug smock of human rights, however, the toxic atmosphere against Zionism makes even the exploitation of the Holocaust fair game so long as it is being directed at delegitimizing the State of Israel – an especially favorite pastime of university and Leftist communities in the West. In such dizzying games of three-­card monte, the Holocaust is not a myth, but an operating manual that Israelis are following, with great precision, in their “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians. The fact that the Palestinian population has more than doubled since the Six-­Day War becomes only an inconvenient and easily ignorable truth. After all, genocide requires subtraction in the census, not multiplication. Meanwhile, Iran continues to host its International Holocaust Cartoon Competition. But even here, the message seems to be that the relevance of the Holocaust is not in its moral lessons, or in its duty to the dead, but rather the multiplicity of ways in which it is being exploited by Jews, and Israelis, to manipulate world opinion, creating a false sympathy for the Jewish people, and a blank check for Israelis to harm Palestinians and deny them statehood. In such deviously cynical word games, the Holocaust is associated not with Jewish loss but with Israeli plunder – the self-­justification of Israel to become the Nazi bully in the Middle East. So appealing and inexorably long lasting is anti-­ Semitism that it can all too easily reconstitute itself into a vile movement where the Holocaust becomes not a tragedy but a weapon against Jewish continuity and the very existence of the Jewish state. The Holocaust is dead. Long live the Holocaust.

Afterword Ira Brenner

Hitler’s prediction of a Thousand-­Year Reich did not materialise. It lasted a mere twelve years – twelve years of Hell. His vision of world domination by a superior Aryan race ended in flames, ruination, and “murder-­ suicide” on a national scale (Brenner, 2016). His unwillingness to admit defeat caused his own people to suffer even further decimation at the hands of the Allies. It was the German people’s punishment for letting their Führer down and failing to be victorious. The last gasp of madness was the mass suicide in his bunker in April  1945, in which Hitler, his new bride Eva Braun, and a number of others in his inner circle including six children died of cyanide and gunshots. In addition to the many millions of military deaths on all sides, approximately eighteen million civilians died. About a third of them, or six million, were Jewish. Two-­thirds of European Jewry, or about one-­third of the world’s Jewish population, were murdered or died from the perils of persecution. The “Final Solution” was very effective, but not a total success. My own improbable existence is a testament to this fact. As has been noted by Baselice and Thomson in this volume, it is only about now that the Jewish population has been restored to its pre-­Holocaust numbers. They were the victims of a deeply flawed and murderous ideology which required their total elimination. The Nazi regime, with all its power, was nevertheless doomed to fail. It is the fate of all fascist states. As a closed system forbidding dissent or constructive criticism, the leadership existed in a bubble of its own making (Albright, 2018). This dictatorship was especially doomed, as its raison d’être and cure for all of Germany’s ills was the complete destruction of an ethnic group. Moreover, those people selected for extinction, the Jews, were probably the worst possible choice. It was not because of their military might, political power, or economic strength. It was because they had been around for thousands of years and a source of their cohesion was the premium they placed on the importance of remembrance. It is one of their central tenets,

as this ancient tradition of documenting and celebrating their struggle for survival can be found in their sacred texts, secular writings, poetry, music, and art. Naturally, it continued throughout the darkest times of the Shoah, which was a source of great strength and hope, but also provided extensive evidence of the greatest crimes against humanity which the Nazis tried to hide, their penchant for relentless record keeping notwithstanding. The psychological aftermath of this genocide, almost fourscore years later, continues to reverberate, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. A  recent attack upon a young Israeli man wearing a kippah in an upscale section of Berlin (Haaretz, 18 April 2018) drew international attention because the victim of this hate crime was actually not Jewish. In fact, he was an Israeli Arab. Twenty-­one-­year-­old Adam Armoush told reporters that he did not believe that anti-­Semitism was a big problem in Germany and donned the Jewish skull cap as an “experiment” to see what if anything would happen. It apparently did not take long for the Jew hate bait to work, as he was assailed by a younger male who ran into him, swinging a belt and hurling curses at him in Arabic. As an Arab himself, he knew exactly what his attacker was yelling at him and implored him to stop cursing. The victim’s friend took a video of the attack which went viral and made the incident available to a very broad audience. Although he only sustained minor physical injuries, he was quite shocked and shaken up. The demographics of Europe have changed significantly in recent years, resulting in a new wave of old problems. The massive influx of Muslim immigrants and refugees from the war-­torn Middle East has overwhelmed the German social systems and has created a huge “integration problem”. Accompanying these newcomers to Germany are their attitudes and prejudices from back home, which in this case includes virulent anti-­Israel sentiment. In many of their minds, Jews are synonymous with Israel, and Israel is synonymous with decades of oppression of

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VI  Ira B re n n e r the Palestinians. Further inflamed by the Trump administration’s move of the United States embassy to Jerusalem and the killing of Gazans trying to breach the Israeli border, tempers have flared and large demonstrations have occurred in Germany in protest of this decision. Reportedly, the German government’s response up to this point has been tepid and grossly inadequate, as the police have not accurately differentiated such hate crimes from those perpetrated by more familiar right wing extremists, for example, neo-­Nazi groups. As a result, of the 552 reported hate crimes against Jews in Germany in 2017, only 19 were ascribed to “foreign ideology”, that is, coming from Muslim immigrants (Bershidsky, 2018). The idea has been advanced that Germany now has a new form of anti-­Semitism, an imported variety. Observers have questioned whether this particular manifestation of Jew hatred is merely symptomatic of the larger immigration problem or reflective of the deeply ingrained and very longstanding prejudice against the Jews. Erik Erikson’s psychosocial stages of development inspire me to consider that in the aftermath of large-­group trauma, such as the Holocaust, perhaps one might consider that the individual and the societal task is one of reconciliation versus repetition. The legacy of this trauma is the essence of this text. The chapters written by survivors, whose personal ordeals have especially informed their contributions, include those by Krell, Oliner, Ornstein, Parens, and Richman. On both sides of the barbed wire, as it were, the dwindling members of the perpetrator/­survivor generation bear witness, as explored by Laub, while those of us in the Second Generation and beyond experience the ripple effect. Chapters written by Eickhoff, Epstein, Fogelman, Gampel, Greenberg, Kogan, and Mann-­Shalvi speak to these issues of intergenerational transmission of trauma, unresolved mourning, guilt, and shame. It is difficult to put this event in a historical context as we are still too close it, but Bohleber, Lothane, Loewenberg, and Volkan provide deep insights into this challenge. Already, one crucial point is abundantly clear: The hope that the world would never see another genocide after the Holocaust was wishful thinking and in retrospect, sadly, quite naive, as evidenced by the horrific “ethnic cleansing” in erstwhile Yugoslavia, the brutal murder of nearly a million people in Rwanda (see Kestenberg Amighi’s chapter), and the ongoing persecution of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. If, indeed, we are a species uniquely capable of great violence, and if, indeed, Freud’s notion of a repetition compulsion is valid, then we are capable of not only of Holocausts, but of bringing all of mankind to the brink of extinction. Akhtar has made a convincing argument for an advancement in our thinking from Psychoanalytic Anthropology to Anthropological Psychoanalysis (Akhtar, 2018). From this standpoint, recognising the

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influence of the history of our culture expands our understanding about the development of the psyche. In this context, it must be noted that wherever Homo Sapiens has appeared in his worldwide migration and conquest of the planet over the last 300,000 years, there is increasing evidence from fossils and from ancient DNA that other species have become extinct. This correlation is thought to be more than coincidence or just from climatic factors. From the megafauna, such as mastodons and wooly mammoths, which were no match for his/­ her ever-­growing success as a hunter, to other species of hominin who quite possibly coexisted with him/­her until before the dawning of the agricultural revolution a mere 10,000–­12,000 years ago, humans are capable of awesome destructiveness. Having evolved into a biped, his/­her hands became freed up to build tools as well as create rather lethal weapons for hunting and for warfare. As Freud, invoking the famous Latin proverb in Civilizations and its Discontents (1930), noted rather pessimistically: “Homo homini lupus” or “man is a wolf to man” (p. 111). To consider, therefore, that as relatively recently as the last Ice Age, our species may have been competing for resources with three other species of “human” is a remarkable anthropological fact that may have enormous psychological implications. However, very little credence has been given to the possibility of transmitted ancestral memory, as Freud’s speculations about such phenomena (Freud, 1987) were never fully appreciated or integrated into mainstream psychoanalysis (Brenner, 2004). After all, even the mountains of clinical evidence about transmission over two, three, or four generations is not yet fully accepted, so it would be a stretch for many to make such a claim going back thousands of years. But, if we were to engage in a thought experiment, imagine that today’s bigots and racists can trace their prejudices back to our caveman ancestors who confronted not just other races of humans, but literally other species of humans. They looked a bit different and posed a major threat to their ways of life. After all, we know from contemporary studies of anthropoid apes that only one species generally dominates a given ecosystem, which in principle may be extrapolated back in time to our competition with other hominins. Could the memories of their fateful struggles, therefore, have been so momentous that vestiges were retained in our unconscious minds, forming a template for what we now refer to as racism? Given what we know about the repercussions of stranger anxiety in the developing child and what we know about the psychology of in-­groups and out-­ groups within one species, it is likely that the associated fear and aggression was magnified between species with our evolutionary cousins. The Neanderthals, discovered throughout Europe, were shorter, stockier,

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heavier-­boned, and had larger turbinate bones, that is, big noses, for more efficient nose breathing in cold weather. They were much more advanced than originally thought when their remains were first discovered about a century ago; they were better adapted for colder weather, which did not serve them well as the climate warmed up. Fossilised bones of the so-­called Hobbit People (Homo Floriensis), discovered in a cave in Indonesia quite recently, suggest that this species of hominin was related to an even earlier species of man, Homo Erectus, a finding which complicates our evolutionary tree. Though small-­brained and only about three feet tall, this now extinct little man used fire, made tools, and was a skilled hunter. Local legends of encounters with a mysterious, ancient race of little people have persisted for millennia and evidently have a basis in fact. Another recently discovered species is the lesser known Denisovans, whose remains were found in a Siberian cave. They may have also resembled the Neanderthal, but their DNA is distinctively different enough to justify considering them a separate species of human. With the convincing evidence that Homo Sapiens was not alone in being the sole species of human, it gives new meaning to Erik Erikson’s ideas about racism and prejudice. He emphasised the importance of pseudo-­speciation (1975), a tendency to dehumanise and denigrate “the other”, such that the persecuted group is characterised as being subhuman, not quite human, and therefore, inferior. Nazi ideology demanded that the Jew be seen as a degenerate race, not quite human, and not worthy of life. They were often caricatured as short, squat, and with big noses. The demonic Jew epitomised the lowest of the low of the “untermenschen”, those inferior non-­Aryans who could be enslaved, tortured mercilessly for sport, or simply murdered in order to make more room for the living space, Lebensraum, of the superior race. The Jew had no rights whatsoever and could not be redeemed under any circumstances. Invoking an utterly perverse and mendacious interpretation of Darwinism infused with Teutonic mysticism, the goal was to rid the world of the Jew, making those countries under Nazi control “Judenrein”. Then, through selective breeding of the pure blooded Aryans, the new world order would thus take hold. Ironically, the latest findings based on the study of the human genome would have horrified the Nazi elite because these studies reveal that in fact those they hated the most were, in fact, themselves. As Harvard geneticist, David Reich (2018) observes, The Nazi ideology of a “pure” Indo-­European Aryan race with deep roots in Germany, traceable through artifacts of the Corded Ware culture, has been shattered by the finding that the people who used these

artifacts came from a mass migration from the Russian steppe, a place that German nationalists would have despised as a source. (p. 267) He goes on to say, In Nazi Germany, someone with my expertise at interpreting genetic data would have been tasked with categorising people by ancestry had that been possible with science of the 1930s. But in our time, the findings from ancient DNA leave little solace for racist or nationalistic misinterpretation. In this field, the pursuit of truth for its own sake has overwhelmingly had the effect of exploding stereotypes, undercutting prejudice, and highlighting the connections among peoples not previously known to be related. (p. 286) Reich prefers the optimistic view of the future in which scientific knowledge will ultimately prevail over ignorance, suspicion, and politics. Like the ancient principles of Yin and Yang, it unfortunately does not seem to take into consideration the vagaries of the human mind, unconscious motivation, and the role of destructive/­ self-­destructive forces, which Freud postulated as the controversial “death instinct” (Freud, 1920). As scientific technology continues to advance, visionaries and experts such as Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Stephen Hawking have expressed great concerns that one development, Artificial Intelligence, or AI, could soon progress well beyond human capacity to manage it and have catastrophic implication for our entire species. No longer simply being “the stuff of dreams” and Sci-­Fi writers, this would be the point of super-­intelligence when machines become smarter than humans and could then decide our fate. Perhaps just a projection of our own genocidal prehistory and history, or perhaps a real possibility, it would make the Holocaust a mere foreshadowing of the future. The worst-­case scenario would be a wholesale extinction of mankind, a robot-­controlled omnicide. A “Final Solution the ‘Human’ Problem” would be the result of this superior intelligence concluding that human beings are superfluous or interfering with their own success (Bostrum, 2014). Artificial intelligence, or AI, in the hands of megalomanic, corrupt, and narcissistic leaders, who believe they could control it, might therefore pose one of the biggest existential threats of the future. In the words of Vladimir Putin, the leader of Russia and grand master at geopolitical chess: “Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind. It comes with colossal opportunities, but also threats that are

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VI  Ira B re n n e r difficult to predict. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world” (RT, 1/­9/­17). What we will have learned from the Holocaust may be of the ultimate importance.

References Akhtar, S. (2018). Mind, culture, and global unrest: Psychoanalytic reflections. London: Karnac Books. Albright, M. (2018). Fascism: A warning. New York: Harper Collins. Bershidsky, L. (2018, April 20). Germany has a new anti-­semitism problem. Bloomberg Online.

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Bostrum, N. (2014). Superintelligence: Paths, dangers, strategies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brenner, I. (2004). Psychic trauma-­dynamics, symptoms, and treatment. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. Brenner, I. (2016). Shame and murder-­suicide: Adolf Hitler and the Nazi cult of death. In S. Akhtar (Ed.), Shame – developmental, cultural, and clinical realms (pp. 71–­90). London: Karnac Books. Erikson, E. (1975). Life history and the historical moment. New York: W.W. Norton. Freud, S (1930). Civilization and its discontents. S.E., 21 (pp. 59–­ 214). London: Hogarth. Freud, S. (1987, April 18). A phylogenetic fantasy. Haaretz. Reich, D. (2018). Who we are and how we got here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past. New York: Pantheon Books.

Index

Note: Figures are indicated by page numbers in italics. adaptive mourning 78 Adenauer, Konrad 131 Adorno, Theodor W. 165, 200 – 201, 205, 207 Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study 73n1 African Americans, shock treatment of 27 – 28 aggression 212 – 214 aggressor, identification with 123 – 124 aging: and re-traumatization 67 – 72 Agnon, Shmuel Yossef 107 AI see Artificial Intelligence (AI) Albania 30 “Ambiguities that Clarify” (Hix) 198 – 199 Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet (Wiman) 201 ambivalence of feelings 20 – 21 Antelme, Robert 104 anti-Semitism: of Eichmann 156; in Goldhagen 134; historical 155; and Holocaust 3; in Korczak 172; Mitscherlichs on 151n1; as Nazi Party position 8 – 9; in Shoah 168; Trump and 125 – 126; Zionism and 234 Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD) 157, 160n8 Appelfeld, Aharon 203 Appy, Gottfried 113 archival footage 167 – 168 Arendt, Hannah 12, 156, 159 Arieli, Dana 108 Arlow, Jacob 187 Armenian genocide 3, 18 – 19 Armoush, Adam 235 art: “degenerate” 20; trauma and 71, 72; as vehicle for transmission of unrepresentable 35; visual 71 – 72, 72; see also fiction; film; poetry; theater Artificial Intelligence (AI) 237 – 238 Aryan 7 A Shayna Maidl (Lebow) 190 Ashton, E. B. 200 ASPD see Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD) Assmann, Jan 137 Atatürk, Kemal 26 attachment 124 “At the Picture Window” (Kirchheimer) 200 Aung San Suu Kyi 215 Au revois les Enfants (film) 172 Auschwitz 12, 44, 49, 103, 108, 192 – 193, 205 – 208 Auschwitz and After (Delbo) 188

Austria 6, 10 autobiography, graphic 180 – 185, 181 – 185 autoimmune heart disease 69 baboons 156 Baeck, Leo 22 Barnes, Harry Elmer 13 Bar On, Dan 136 Baron-Cohen, Simon 159 Barth, Karl 13 Bauman, Zygmunt 14 Becker, Ernst 75 Begley, Louis 70 – 71 Behave (Sapolsky) 160n3 Benigni, Roberto 171, 233 Benjamin, Walter 33 – 34 Berenbaum, Michael 47, 85 Bergen Belsen 13, 167 Bergmann, Martin 84, 150 Berlin Diary: (Schluterstrasse 27) (Stolowitz) 175 – 176 Bernstein, Sidney 173n6 Bettelheim, Bruno 22 – 23, 93 Better Angels of Our Nature, The (Pinker) 156 Beyer, Frank 171 biases: in-group/out-group 155 – 156 Bielski, Aron 180 Bielski, Asael 180 Bielski, Tuvia 180 Bielski, Zus 180 Bielski Otriad 180 Biespiel, David 199 – 200 Blévis, Jean-Jacques 56 Blitzer Wolf 86 Blos, Peter 23, 146 Blum, Daniel 53 Body Keeps the Score, The: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (van der Kolk) 95 Bogner, Anshel 42 – 43 Bohleber, Werner 216 Bosnia 3, 30 Botella, César 56 Botella, Sára 56 boundary experiences 69 – 70 boycotts 9

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Inde x

Brand, Joel 12 “Breaking Laws” (Kirchheimer) 202 Brenner, Ira 150, 187 Brettler, Eva Chava 48 – 49 Breuer, Joseph 150 Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz (Rosenberg) 108 Brisch, Karl-Heinz 216 British object relations 111 Broder, Henryk 91 Brodman, Aliana 91 Brooks, Mel 233 Brownshirts 7 Buchenwald 13, 45 – 46, 104 Bukiet, Melvin 91 Bukowski, Charles 202 Bush, George H. W. 53 Bush, George W. 53 Buss, David 159, 160n13 Cabre, Jaume 175, 179 – 180 Caloz-Tshopp, Marie-Claire 104 Camus, Albert 23 Can Heaven be Void? (cantata) 177 Cannibals, The (Tabori) 193 carbon monoxide 11 Caro, Niki 172 Cavani, Liliana 171 Cayrol, Jean 168 Celan, Paul 13, 147, 177, 202 Chamberlain, Stewart Houston 3 Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine 146, 150 Child Dreams, The (Shohat) 175, 178 – 179 children: adjustment of, to liberation 221 – 222; as Holocaust survivors 44 – 50, 220; of perpetrators 143 – 148; play in 220 – 221; prevention of emotional disorders in 212; “replacement” 78 – 79, 101; as self-object 136 Chile 207 chimpanzees 155 “chosen glories” 30 “chosen trauma” 29 – 30 Churchill, Winston 11 cinema see film Cleckley, Hervey 157 collective trauma 108 Collins, Martha 199 commemoration, culture of 131 – 136 communicative memory 138 communicative silence 131 Communists, American 94 Concretism 112 Confessions (Cabre) 175, 179 – 180 contingent shift 160n9 Convoy to Auschwitz (Delbo) 191 coronary artery disease 69 counter-identification 137 countertransference 33 – 34, 36, 96, 101, 113 Crabwalk (Grass) 135 Crete 26 Curb Your Enthusiasm (television program) 233 Cyprus 25 – 28 Czechoslovakia 10, 90 – 91, 107 Daldry, Stephen 169 Dallaire, Roméo 33 Dark Matters. Exploring the Realm of Psychic Devastation (Brenner) 150

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Darwin, Charles 153, 160n1 David, Larry 233 Dawidowicz, Lucy 14 Dazzo, Marianne Trompetter 49 Death Mills (film) 167 “degenerate” art 20 Delbo, Charlotte 187 – 192 Denial (film) 169 denialism 13 – 14, 132, 234 Denial of Death (Becker) 75 De Sica, Vittorio 168 – 169 destructive being 104 Deutsch, Helene 22 de Wind, Eddy 146 Diary of Anne Frank, The (film) 172 Diary of Anne Frank, The (Frank) 166 Didi-Huberman, Georges 206 Dinur, Yehiel 35 dissociative identity disorder 144 – 145 Döblin, Alfred 7 “Dogs” (Kirchheimer) 197 drama: as trauma 4 – 5 dramatology 4 dreams 58, 78, 120 – 122, 205 Dudach, George 188 Dühring, Eugen 8 Duntley, Joshua 159, 160n13 “Ego and the Id, The” (Freud) 147 Egypt 28 – 29 Eichmann, Adolf 11 – 13, 21, 149, 156 Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt) 12, 156 Eichmann Trial 35 Einstein, Albert 26 – 28, 46 Eissler, Kurt 146 Eliach, Yaffa 43, 50 Elias, Norbert 140 Empowerment Act 9 end of life 68 – 70 England 6 Epstein, Franci 90 – 91, 93 Epstein, Helen 84, 177 Epstein, Kurt 90 – 91 Erikson, Erik 236 Estonia 11 Eternal Jew, The (film) 167 Europa (film) 171 evil: and evolutionary psychology 153 – 154; Freud on 6; and in-group/out-group biases 155 – 156; and morality 4; moving beyond 159 – 160; and obedience 156 – 157; as pathology 4; and psychopathy 157 – 158 evolutionary psychology 153 – 154 evolution of violence 154 “Eyewitness” (Antelme) 104 Ezekiel’s World: A Graphic Novel (Kovner) 180 facial bones 154 Faimberg, Haydée 105, 112 family dynamics 111 – 118 “Family History” (Kirchheimer) 203 family memory 138 Fateless (film) 170 father image 137 Fernheim (Agnon) 107 Feuchtwanger, Lion 7 fiction 179 – 180

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“Figure a Poem Makes, The” (Frost) 196 film: archival footage 167 – 168; contributions to understanding of Holocaust 165 – 166; on helping Jews 171 – 173; psychoanalytic contributions to understanding of, on Holocaust 166 – 167; set in concentration camps 169 – 170 Fire, The (Friedrich) 135 fist 154 Fogelman, Eva 44, 92 – 93 Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (Chamberlain) 3 France 6, 187 – 188 Frank, Anne 13, 22 – 23, 166 Frank, Hans 11 Frankl, Viktor 75, 221 Frei, Norbert 131, 146 Freud, Anna 146 – 147 Freud, Sigmund 4 – 6, 10, 19 – 21, 37, 75, 78, 111, 143 – 144, 146, 170, 217 Friedländer, Saul 18, 46, 130, 139 Friedrich, Jörg 135 Frost, Robert 196 Gampel, Yolanda 103, 112 Gandhi, Mahatma 215 Garden of the Finzi-Continis, The (film) 168 – 169 gassing 11, 159 Gates, Bill 237 Gaza 224 – 226; see also Palestine Gellately, Robert 6 genocide: history of term 3; Rwandan 3, 18 – 19, 95, 222 – 224; and search for meaning 75 German Mother and her First Child, The (Haarer) 212 Germany: Basic Law and 140; Holocaust monument in 134 – 135; remembrance in 129 – 144; reunification of 140 Gerut, Rosalie 93 Gibran, Kahlil 197 Gilbert, Martin 10 Goebbels, Joseph 9 – 10, 21, 23 Goldhagen, Daniel 134, 233 Goodall, Jane 155 Göring, Hermann 21, 24n21 graphic autobiography 180 – 185, 181 – 185 Grass, Günter 135 Great Dictator, The (film) 170 Greece 25 – 26 Green, Gerald 85 Greenberg, Irving 85 Gross, Raphael 15 Grossman, David 103 – 104 Grubrich-Simitis, Ilse 143, 148 Grynszpan, Zindel 10 Grynzpan, Herschel 154 Guhahamuka 224 guilt 115, 130, 145 – 146; borrowed 147 – 149, 151n1; survival 27 – 28 Guntrip, Harry 22 Gutter, Pinchas 185 HA see hostile aggression (HA) Haarer, Johanna 212 Habermas, Jürgen 14, 140 Hamburg firestorm 129 Hare, Robert 160n10 Hauer, Nadine 136 Hausner, Gideon 149 Hawking, Stephen 237 HD see hostile destructiveness (HD)

healing 44 – 49 health: childhood trauma and 68 – 69 Heimlich, Un 105 Herero and Namaqua genocide 3 Herman, Judith 95 Herzl, Theodore 12 Hess, Rudolf 156 Heydrich, Reinhard 158 Hidden Child Conference 47, 49 Hilberg, Raul 14 Himmler, Heinrich 9, 15, 21 Hippler, Fritz 167 Hiroshima 103 Hirsch, Edward 196, 200, 204 Hirsch, Freddy 107 historicisation 133 Historikerstreit 14 history, listening to 33 – 35 Hitler, Adolf 5; as charismatic 19; from demagogue to dictator 7 – 9; and in-group/out-group biases 155 – 156; joins Nazi Party 7; and stab-in-the-back myth 7; tyranny of 9 – 10 Hitler’s Willing Executioners (Goldhagen) 134, 233 Hix, H.L. 198 – 199 Hobbes, Thomas 6 Hoggan, David 14 Holland, Agnieszka 171 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr. 19 Holocaust: denial 13 – 14; denial of 13 – 14, 132, 234; narratives of 13 – 16; private histories of 4; public histories of 4; as taboo 165; as unique 3; as weapon against Jews 231 – 234 Holocaust Memorial Museum 232 Holodomor 3 Höß, Rudolf 21 hostile aggression (HA) 213 hostile destructiveness (HD) 213 “How I Knew and When” (Kirchheimer) 195 – 196 How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry (Hirsch) 204 “How to Spot One of Us” (Kirchheimer) 196 – 197 Hungary 12 Hussein, Saddam 53 Huxley, Aldous 16 identification: with aggressor 123 – 124; counter-identification 137; with leader 157; negative 136; projective 65; religious 63 – 64; transgenerational 136 – 138; with victim 121 – 123 identity: mourning and 76 – 78; second-generation 83 – 95 “If” (Kirchheimer) 198 “If This Is a Man” (Levi) 151, 166 immortality projects 75 – 76 Inability to Mourn, The (Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich) 145 India 215 – 216 individuation 124 – 125 in-group biases 155 – 156 intentionalism 14 intergenerational effects, of trauma 69, 96 – 101; see also second-generation identity; third-generation identity; trans-generationality intergenerational transmission 143 – 144 Iran 234 Iraq 53 Irving, David 13 Israel: Law of Return of 66 Israeli, Raphael 225 Italy 168 – 169

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Jackson, Mick 169 Jakob the Liar (film) 171 Jakubowska, Wanda 169 Jews: boycotts of 9; Holocaust as weapon against 231 – 234; in Lagarde 8; in Turkey 26 – 27 Jochhein, Gemot 33 Jovet, Louis 187 Jucovy, Milton 84 Judgment at Nuremberg (film) 169 Kaddish 42 – 43, 205 – 208 Kahn, Leon 43 Kalikstein, Kalman 46 Kaplan, Suzanne 222 Kapò (film) 170 Karpf, Anne 91 Kassovitz, Peter 171 Kastner, Rudolf 12 Kazin, Alfred 200 Keeley, Lawrence H. 155 Kerr, Alfred 7 Kestenberg, Judith 44, 83, 105, 122, 143, 146, 150, 187, 211 Khmer Rouge 3, 95 Kichka, Michel 175, 180 – 185, 181 – 185 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 215 Kinzie, Mary 203 Klein, Hillel 83, 151n2 Klein, Menashe 46 Klemperer, Otto 7 Kluge, Aukje 175 Knowing Cairo (Stolowitz) 175 – 176 Koehler, Lotte 216 Koerbel, Margot 91 Kogan, Ilany 151n2 Kohl, Helmut 133 Kohut, Heinz 19 Koltai, Lajos 170 König, Helmut 139 Konitzer, Werner 15 – 16 Korczak (film) 172 Kosovar Albanians 30 Kovner, Michael 180 Kramer, Stanley 169 Kristallnacht 10, 21, 154 – 155, 158, 196 Krystal, Henry 83 Kulka, O. D. 107 Kuper, Jack 46 Labyrinth of Lies (film) 206 LaCapra, Dominic 18 Lacombe, Lucien (film) 169 Lagarde, Paul de 8 Laible, Eva 146 – 147 Landscape of the Death Metropolitan (Kulka) 107 Langbehn, Julius 8 Lantos, Tom 80n3 Lanzmann, Claude 158, 168 “Last Goodbye, The” (Smith) 185 – 186 Last Metro, The (film) 172 Last Stop, The (film) 169 Last Witness, The: The Child Survivor of the Holocaust (Kestenberg and Brenner) 187 Latvia 11 Lau, Israel Meir 44, 46 Laub, Dori 49 – 50, 150

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Lau-Lavie, Naphtali 46 Law of Return 66 leader following 156 – 157 Lear, Jonathan 54 “Learning a New Language” (Kirchheimer) 203 Lebow, Barbara 190 Lemkin, Raphael 3 Leon, Gloria 86 Levi, Primo 13, 151, 166, 205 Levin, Hanoch 175 Lewin, Jack 49 Li, Yiyun 69 Liebrecht, Savyon 91 Life is Beautiful (film) 171, 233 Lifton, Robert J. 92 literature 179 – 180 Lithuania 11 Locarno Treaty 10 Loch, Wolfgang 145 – 146 Long Journey, The (Radok) 169 Lot’s wife 52 Lowe, Keith 129 Luther, Martin 10 Magritte, René 106 Mahler, Margaret 37 male-bonded coalitionary violence 154 – 155 Malle, Louis 169 Mandela, Nelson 215 Man’s Search for Meaning (Frankl) 75 Margalit, Avishai 54 Markle, Gerald E. 34 Marks, Jane 47 Marnie (film) 169 Marr, Wilhelm 8 Mask of Sanity, The (Cleckley) 157 mass psychology 5 Maus (Spiegelman) 91, 180 McCarthy, Sarah 201 meaning, search for 75 Medusa’s Head (Freud) 146 Mein Kampf (Hitler) 3, 7 Melson, Robert 47 memoir writing 70 – 71 memorialisation 47 – 49, 134 – 135 memory: communicative 138; family 138; mourning and 79; negative 139 – 140; traumatic 36 Mengele, Josef 44, 49, 90 mental patients 11 Merkel, Angela 233 Mihalieanu, Radu 170 – 171 Milch-Sheriff, Ella 175, 177 – 178 Milgram, Stanley 156 Mindful Pleasures: A literary blog (Oard) 200 Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory 86 Mitscherlich, Alexander 132 – 133, 145 – 146, 151n1 Mitscherlich, Margarete 132 – 133, 145 Mommsen, Hans 14 Mommsen, Theodor 151n1 moral emotions 54 Moralisation Gap 159 Moses, Rafael 151 “Moses and Monotheism” (Freud) 143 Moskovitz, Sarah 44 – 45 Mostysser, Toby 91

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mourning: adaptive 78; identity and 76 – 78; life-cycle and 76 – 78; memory and 79; pathological 78; and secondgeneration identity 87 – 89; subjective experience of 74 Mourning and Melancholia (Freud) 78 Münkler, Herfried 139 – 140 Munnik, Albert 41 – 42 Munnik, Violette 41 – 42 Musk, Elon 237 Myanmar 215 Myth of the 20th Century, The (Rosenberg) 3 Namibia 3 narcissism 216 narratives 13 – 16 narratology 4 Naumann, Klaus 129 Naumann, Michael 140 Nazi Phantom, The (Arieli) 108 Negative Dialectics (Adorno) 200 – 201 negative memory 139 – 140 Nemes, László 170 neo-Nazis 234 Nesher, Avi 177 Neugebauer, Richard 224 Niederland, William 28 Nietzsche, Friedrich 19 Night (Wiesel) 200, 233 Night and Fog (film) 168 Night of the Long Knives 9 Night Porter, The (Cavani) 171 nihilism 75 Nolte, Ernst 14 nondestructive aggression 213 Nossack, Hans Erich 129 “November criminals” 6, 20 November Revolution 6 – 7 Novick, Peter 33 – 34 Nunberg, Hermann 150 Nuremberg Laws 9 – 10 Nuremberg trials 35, 158; genocide in, as concept 3 Oard, Brian A. 200 Obama, Barack 233 obedience 156 – 157 obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) 114 oceanic feelings 37 Oliner, Samuel 50 opera 177 – 179 Operation Barbarossa 11 Ornstein, Anna 49 Ornstein, Lajos 77 Ostow, Mortimer 149 out-group biases 155 – 156 Oz, Amós 206 PAKH See Psychotherapeutischer Arbeitskreis für Betroffene des Holocaust, PAKH e.V.(Psychotherapeutic study group of persons affected by the Holocaust) Pakistan 216 Pakula, Alan 169 Palestine 12 – 13, 109, 224 – 226, 234 Parens, Henri 211 particularism 14 Past Life (film) 177 paternal representation, break of 100 – 101

pathological mourning 78 Pawnbroker, The (film) 169 “Pen Has Become the Character, The: How Creative Writing Creates Us” (Porter) 199 phantom 105 “Photograph in My Hand, The” (Kirchheimer) 198 photography 206 Pianist, The (film) 172 “Picnic” (Kirchheimer) 202 Pilcer, Sonia 91 Pincus, Florence 92 Pinker, Steven 156 – 158 Plath, Sylvia 203 play 220 – 221 poetry 195 – 205 Poet’s Guide to Poetry, A (Kinzie) 203 Poland 10 – 11, 13, 62 – 65, 158, 168 Polanski, Roman 172 Pontecorvo, Gillo 170 Porter, Sarah 199 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 5, 43, 85 prejudice 214, 214 – 215, 215 Producers, The (play) 233 projective identification 65 Proust, Marcel 58 psychiatry, failure of, in caring for Holocaust survivors 42 – 43 psychoanalysis: testimony and 36 – 37 psychopathy 157 – 158 Psychotherapeutischer Arbeitskreis für Betroffene des Holocaust, PAKH e.V. (Psychotherapeutic study group of persons affected by the Holocaust) 28 – 29 PTSD see post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) Rabinek, Franci 90 – 91 radiation 104 radioactive nucleus 104 radioactivity, psychological 105 – 107 Radok, Alfréd 169 Raffael-Leff, Joan 147 raiding, in history of Homo sapiens 155 railways 21 Rakoff, Vivian 83, 92 Rakover, Yossel 16 “rally effect” 157 rape 223 Raphael, Lev 91 Rashomon effect 4 Rassinier, Paul 13 Reader, The (film) 169 Reagan, Ronald 133 reality-testing 148 Red Diaper babies 94 Re-Examining the Holocaust Through Literature (Kluge and Williams) 175 Reich, David 237 Reich, Wilhelm 9 Reich Citizenship Law 10 Reichel, Peter 135 Reichstag fire 9 Reinhardt, Max 7 religious identification 63 – 64 Renewal of Life - Healing from The Holocaust (Parens) 211 “replacement children” 78 – 79, 101 “rescue fantasies” 171 – 172 resilience 44

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Resnais, Alain 168 restitution 5 re-traumatization 67 – 72 Riefenstahl, Leni 5, 167 Riviere, Pichon 112 Röhm, Ernst 7, 9 Rorty, Richard 15 Rose, Gilbert 71 Rosenbaum, Thane 91 Rosenberg, Alfred 3 Rosenberg, Göran 108 Rosenstrasse demonstrations 32 – 33 Rosenthal, Gabriele 136 Rüsen, Jörn 130 Russia 6 – 7 Rutschky, Katarina 216 Rwanda 3, 18 – 19, 95, 222 – 224, 236 Sadat, Anwar 28 – 29 Sand and Foam (Gibran) 197 Sander, Fred 189 Sapolsky, Robert 160n3 Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (Lowe) 129 Savran, Bella 84, 92 Schermer, Victor 171 Schindler’s List (film) 172, 173n4, 232 – 233 schizoid personality 22 schizophrenia 43 Schlieffen Plan 6 Schmitt, Carl 9 Schneider, Christian 54 Schorske, Carl E. 33 – 34 Schreber, Paul 11 Schudrich, Michael 65 Sebald, Winfried Georg 107 second-generation identity 83 – 95, 136 – 137 Second Generation: The Things I Didn’t Tell My Father (Kichka) 175, 180 – 185, 181 – 185 Second German Reich 6 Segev, Tom 92 Seinfeld (television program) 232 – 233 self-destructive instinct 213 selfobject 76, 78, 80n5, 136 Semel, Nava 91 separation 124 separation-individuation 124 – 125 September 11 attacks 52 – 53 Serbia 30 Seventh Million, The (Segev) 92 sexual intercourse 9 sexual mutilation 223 Shertok, Moshe 12 Shoah see Holocaust Shoah (film) 35, 168 shock treatments 27 – 28 Shohat, Gil 175, 178 Sievers, Leo 8 Sigal, John 83 silence 121, 131 Six-Day War 234 Skloot, Robert 192 Skokie, Illinois 234 Smith, Stephen 185 – 186 social Darwinism 153 social psychology 5

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Soffer, Arnon 225 Sonderweg 14 song 177 – 179 Son of Saul (film) 170, 206 Sophie’s Choice (film) 169 “Sound Barrier” (Kirchheimer) 204 South Africa 215 Spellbound (film) 169 Spiegelman, Art 91, 180 Spielberg, Steven 172, 173n4 “stab-in-the-back-myth” 7, 20 Stangl, Franz 21 Staub, Ervin 47, 227 Stein, Alexander 165 Stein, André 47 Steinitz, Lucy 91 Stevens, George 172 Stolowitz, Andrea 175 – 177 Stolzfus, Nathan 33 Storm Troopers 7 “Storyteller, The” (Benjamin) 33 – 34 Stunde Null (Zero Hour) (German historical period) 129 Suedfeld, Peter 47, 50 suicide bomber 76 survival guilt 27 – 28 symbiosis 37 symbols 19 – 20 Szonyi, David 91 Szpilman, Władysław 13 Tabori, George 193 Tanay, Emmanuel 49 Tec, Nechama 47, 50 Télescopage des Générations et Identifications Aliénées (Faimberg) 105 “Tell Me, Josef” (Kirchheimer) 201 testimonial event 35 – 36 testimony, psychoanalysis and 36 – 37 Tetens, H. T. 13 theater: of Delbo 187 – 192; searching for roots through 175 – 177 third-generation identity 119 – 126, 137 Thoughts for the Times on War and Death (Freud) 75 Three Emperors’ League 6 time, trans-generational 108 – 109 “time tunnel” 122 To Be or Not To Be (film) 170 Tower of Faces 43 “Town Hall” (Kirchheimer) 197 Train of Life, The (film) 170 – 171 transference 37, 96, 98 – 99, 101 transgenerational identification 136 – 138 trans-generationality 103 – 110; see also second-generation identity; third-generation identity trans-generational time 108 – 109 trauma: art and 71, 72; “chosen” 29 – 30; collective 108; drama as 4 – 5; effects of, in early life 68 – 69; events as 56; intergenerational effects of 69, 96 – 101; and retraumatization 67 – 72 Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (Herman) 95 traumatic erasure 36 traumatic memory 36 traumatic parapraxes 36 Treaty of Versailles 6, 10, 19 Triple Entente 6 Triumph of the Will (film) 167

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Truffaut, François 172 Trump, Donald 52 – 53, 55, 125 – 126, 231 Tucholsky, Kurt 7 Tugendhat, Ernst 15 Turkey 25 – 27 Übermensch 19 Ukraine 3, 11 unconscious 20, 21, 29, 32, 34, 36, 56, 58, 64, 75, 76, 77, 86, 98, 101, 104, 105, 106, 111–114 passim, 122, 123, 124, 131, 137, 143–144 passim, 147–151 passim, 166, 167, 170, 171, 189, 191, 193, 208, 236, 237 Vampirism (Wilgowicz) 105 Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre (VHEC) 46 – 48 van der Kolk, Bessel 95 van der Leeuw, Piet Jacob 146 Versailles Treaty 6, 10, 19 victim, identification with 121 – 123 violence: evolution of 154; male-bonded coalitionary 154 – 155; psychological 167 visual art 71 – 72, 72 vocal works 177 – 179 Volkan, Vamik 111 – 112 völkisch 9 von Kaulbach, Wilhelm 143 Von Rath, Ernst 154 von Weizsäcker, Richard 134 Vrba, Rudolf 49 Vrba-Wetzler report 49 Wackwitz, Stephan 136 Wagner, Richard 8 Wajda, Andrzej 172 Waldoks, Moshe 85 Walter, Bruno 7 Wannsee Conference 11 – 12, 158 War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (Keely) 155

“War Guilt” clause 19 Warsaw ghetto 11 Wartime Lies (Begley) 70 – 71 Wasserman, Jakob 7 Waszkinel, Romuald 63 – 64 Weber, Max 18 – 19 Wehler, Hans-Ulrich 135 – 136 Weimar Republic 7, 156 Weitzmann, Chaim 12 Weksler, Svi 65 Weksler-Waszkinel, Romuald-Jakub 63 – 65 Welzer, Harald 15 – 16 Who Will Carry the Word? (Delbo) 187 – 192 Wiesel, Elie 13, 45 – 46, 200, 233 Wiesenthal, Simon 149 Wilgowicz, Perl 105 Wilhelm I 6 Wilhelm II 6 Williams, Benn E. 175 Wiman, Christian 201 Winfrey, Oprah 233 Winnicott, Donald W. 19, 58 Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us (Hare) 160n10 World War I 6 – 7 writing, memoir 70 – 71 Wydra, Boris 43 Yalom, Irvin 69 – 70 Yugoslavia 236 “Zero Hour” (German historical period) 129 Zimmerman, Rolf 14 – 15 Zionism 12, 234 Zookeeper’s Wife, The (film) 172 Zündel, Ernst 14 Zyklon B 11, 159

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