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From the address given by the psychologist Hillel Klein at a conference of Holocaust scholars held in 1980 at Yad Vashem.
In my work I have studied mourning and survivor guilt as positive forces for reindividuation and recovery and thus understand them in a different, less alienating manner than my colleagues who see it as a pathological counterpart of Concentration Camp Syndrome. In studying the different ways in which survivors coped with disaster, with “normal” life, and with reestablishing family ties, I have been repeatedly impressed with the diversity, rather than the uniformity, of these ego-adaptive and coping mechanisms within the life histories of survivors.
Psychological revival after liberation took place within the context of marriages and the birth and development of children. The themes of separation, dependency, responsibility, trust, attachment, loss and cohesion were played out within families. These motifs appeared in different guises within the families, as did affective and cognitive styles. Often what appeared to be psychopathological in origin might later be appreciated as a step towards psychosocial integration and revival. In the revival we see the capacity of the survivor to integrate and work through the total experience of the Holocaust by accepting one’s capacity to change the survival guilt into human responsibility by retaining the self-cohesiveness and self-sameness.
There is also a fear in the survivor of pathos and therefore the tendency for grotesque anecdotes in the style of survivors in relating to their traumatic experiences and remembering their past. It is expressed in the everyday language of the positive experiences of moving through constructive activity, namely, the capacity of will to live, to find meaning and hope, to develop intensive attachment in object relations and vivid imagery, and creative fantasy formation.
Among survivors there was a polarity between the drive to master psychologically overwhelming experiences and the passive submission and repetition of Holocaust trauma. In telling and working through the experience of the Holocaust, the survivor and his family took an active stance toward mastery and adaptation. In this regard we cannot minimize the importance of a specific Jewish style of survival and final mastery of the experience of the Holocaust. Among Jewish survivors there was a need to find a historical connection with previous generations and their sufferings. There was a search for a specific Jewish meaning to the suffering and a traditional link with the Jewish past.
Source: Gutman, Yisrael and Saf, Avital (eds.), The Nazi Concentration Camps: Proceedings of the Fourth Yad Vashem International Historical Conference, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, 1984, pp. 550-551.