Memorial Candles: Children of the Holocaust

Dina Wardi, Naomi Goldblum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317799542
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

As the children of the Holocaust reach adulthood, they often need professional help in establishing a new identity and self-esteem. During their childhood their parents have unconsciously transmitted to them much of their own trauma, investing them with all their memories and hopes, so that they become 'memorial candles' to those who did not survive. The book combines verbatim transcriptions of dialogues in individual and group psychotherapy sessions with analyses of dreams, fantasies and childhood memories. Diana Wardi traces the emotional history of her patients, accompanying them on a painful and moving journey into their inner world. She describes the children's infancy in the guilt-laden atmosphere of survivor families, through to their difficult separation from their parents in maturity. she also traces in detail the therapeutic process which culminates in the patients' separation from the role of 'memorial candle'.

Chapter 1

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Survivor parents — uprooting and separation traumas

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Death in the Nazi concentration camps and forced labour camps requires no explanation. It is survival that requires explanation. It is the survivors of the destruction that astonish us.

(Bluhm 1948, p. 25)

Survival was the supreme goal of the inmates of the ghettos, the forced labour camps, the concentration camps and the extermination camps. For the purpose of survival they marshalled all their powers, both physical and psychological, for months and years. Terrible bodily suffering, illnesses, incessant hunger, tiredness and feebleness — all these were the lot of the camp inmates. In order to exist they developed the ability to improvise quickly in situations of sudden threat and danger. The chances of survival were thus dependent in large measure on the person’s age and physical stamina, but this was not enough. Ultimately, survival in the extermination camps was a matter of luck (Bettelheim 1960).

The camp inmate needed to preserve in his heart a feeling of autonomy, of dignity and of reality in order to be prepared at all times to take advantage of any situation that might be able to stave off the danger of death for even a short while. Among the factors leading to survival must therefore be counted the moods that created the inmate’s psychological state, and the psychic energy he was able to marshal in the terrible conditions reigning in the kingdoms of death.

Many researchers who studied psychological aspects of the Holocaust focused on the changes that took place in the mental state of the survivors. It must be remembered that the primary purpose of the Nazi psychological warfare, which was the destruction of the Jewish people as a collective, was realized partly through the destruction of the identity and personality of each individual as a person and as a Jew. The traumatization at the time of the terrible transport to the camp, the first selection at the camp gates, the incessant violence within the camp, the isolation that did not permit any hope of a future — all these drove the inmates to regressive behaviour and ultimately led to the total breakdown of their individuality. Life in the camps was a protracted process of traumatization, which was intended to destroy all inner reality and all representations of the familiar world and what it stands for (H. Klein 1987).

Personal identity is the product of a system of identifications and processes that occur to the infant, the child and the adolescent in the course of their psychological growth. The system of identifications plays a central role in the person’s ability to form object relations and in the learning processes that are with him all his life. Identification is also the central component of the internal structure of the ego and the superego. Therefore any interruption or damage to this process of identification has long-range effects.

The external reality that was forced upon the camp inmate was powerful enough to destroy their personal identity and sense of belonging. This loss had a great impact on the personality of many survivors and on their ability to function in their lives after the war, as well as on their children, the members of the second generation.

The changes that occurred to the psyche of the survivors were thus an effect of the traumatic experiences they had undergone, and the defence mechanisms required by the persecuted psyche to cope with these traumatic experiences. In order to adapt, the inmates needed to marshal defence mechanisms that caused changes in the internal structure of the ego and the superego. But a person’s ability to preserve an independent and consolidated self-identity is dependent upon his ability to preserve the internal identifications that are vital for the preservation of the continuing internal sense of a stable and secure ego, as well as increasing perception of other objects. The continual psychological violence therefore damaged precisely the inmates’ ability to preserve their personal identity in a consolidated and independent form.

One of the topics discussed in this book is the question of whether the Nazi system succeeded in arresting or completely eliminating the identification processes within the surviving inmates who had been children or adolescents at the time of their stay in the camps. To what extent did this system succeed in warping these identification processes, including the internalized representations of the parents, siblings and other relatives that had been consolidated in the children’s psyches before the war began? This question is very important for the transition between the generations, from the survivors to their sons and daughters, in the areas of identity and identification.

Separation from one’s family

‘The last time I saw my parents and sisters going further and further away from me, in the direction of the camp, comes back to me again and again, day and night. Their last glance at me at that moment will be with me for the rest of my life. I think that from then on nothing more happened to me.’

Fania, who is about fifty years old, a married woman with four children, was about eleven when she was separated from her family in one of the camps. On the surface she seems to be living a full life. She got married, she bore and raised four children, but in reality she carries within herself since that day the heavy burden expressed in her last sentence: ‘from then on nothing more happened to me.’

The fact that survivors say very little about their separation from their parents, siblings and other family members can be misleading. The topic of separation is indeed often omitted from the story of what happened to them during the Holocaust, or drowned in a sea of events that seem more important. Sometimes, after many years have passed, some of them are ready to talk about the separation from their families (generally in answer to their own children’s direct questions), but even then their descriptions are usually short and narrated in a monotonous voice. However, this appearance is misleading. A deeper look shows that the trauma accompanying the survivors’ separation from their families is very deep — perhaps the most difficult trauma to cure.

The separation from their families left residues of pain, anger, guilt feelings, and feelings of loss and emptiness in the psyches of the survivors. It remained a wound in their souls, which may seem to have been covered over by a scab, but still gives them no rest.

This ‘unfinished business’ generally takes the form of nightmares, dreams and fantasies. But for some of the survivors the trauma was so great that it was completely repressed, and it is expressed only indirectly, in ways that seem inexplicable, such as psychosomatic symptoms and other mental disturbances. Separation from their family, especially from their parents, during childhood or youth, caused the formation of a break in their identity, which led to the formation of a zone of apathy in their personal identity. Among survivors who were adults at the time of the Holocaust the damage was different and somewhat less.

Krystal (1968), and later J.S. Kestenberg (1972), emphasize the point that if one takes into account the regressions that took place among the survivors — both those due to the sharp break between them and their dear ones, and those due to the fact that the adults became entirely dependent on other people, and were forced to give up their status as adults and transfer it to their Nazi persecutors — then the distinction between childhood traumas and the traumas of adults becomes less clear.

The fact that the camp inmates became totally dependent on their captors, and that the parents were humiliated in front of their children, could not but lead to the destruction of their children’s image of them as parents who could love and defend them.

Elie Wiesel (1972) claims that when the two generations of a family were permitted to stay together, a very deep psychological conflict was often created for the children. The deterioration of their physical and psychological state caused the parents to become dependent on the children, while the survival of the children was almost always dependent on their ability to abandon their parents. But not only children were trapped in a psychological conflict; even young adults who had grown up before the Holocaust in warm and loving families often regressed so severely as to lose all their faith in their parents. To this day many of them are still seesawing between two extreme positions — between idealization of their lost families and bitter accusation of these families for not finding any way to protect them.

Mina, fifty-five years old, married and the mother of a grown daughter, tells the following story:

‘Nearly forty years have passed since then, and only now can I tell a little of what happened to me during all those months and years. The inability to express these horrors has severely affec ted my entire existence to this very day. Beneath my emotional apathy are hidden terrible traumatic experiences, human horrors, bodily torture, physical and psychological suffering that cannot be repaired. During dozens of miles of death marches, countless hours of backbreaking labour, from a certain moment a person loses himself. He is abandoned because he has become apathetic. People are not built to live alone, neither when things are bad nor when they are good.’

‘When I heard the echo of the shot at my mother, who was marching behind us in that death march, I was stricken dumb. I couldn’t utter a sound. For more than a month I was unable to speak.’

‘When I returned from the camps no one was able to understand me. I felt a hundred years old, ancient in my soul although my body was only sixteen years old. I no longer had any desire for a spiritual or social life, or for a marital life. Nothing interested me any more. Very slowly we returned to the cycle of ordinary life, but we never came back to ourselves. We did not remain embittered, we did not hate anyone, but we did not want to remember, we only wanted to forget.’

One senses very clearly the breaking point in Mina’s story: the moment she heard the echo of the shot that ended her mother’s life, and did not react in any way but continued on the death march and became frozen within herself. Her physical muteness lasted for a month, but her emotional muteness is still with her: ‘we never came back to ourselves.’ Lifton (1980) defines this muteness as the psychic closing-off that remains with the survivor throughout his life, while he remains incapable of freeing himself from it. The abandonment here was mutual — Mina’s mother abandoned Mina by dying, and Mina abandoned her mother: she allowed her to die alone at the side of the road, and thus she lost her own self as well.

Mina’s fragmentary sentences include feelings of abandonment, anger, sadness, pain and guilt, whose intensity is so great that the ego is forced to defend itself against them by excessive use of the mechanisms of repression and denial: ‘we did not want to remember, we only wanted to forget.’ The total repression of her traumatic separation from her mother undermined and cut off the natural process of identification with the mother which is so important for an adolescent girl. But feelings of anger and frustra tion are also characteristic of adolescence, and these feelings are entirely split off, including the feelings of anger at being abandoned. Their place is taken by harsh guilt feelings, alongside which there often develops an idealization of the parents, especially the figure of the mother.

Leah, who was born in Poland, was nine years old when the Germans captured the town in which her family lived. The family — including her parents and her two little sisters, as well as uncles, aunts and cousins — hid in the cellar of their house. Leah looked old for her age and also had an Aryan appearance, so she was delegated to leave the hideout, wearing a dress of her mother’s, to find food for the whole family.

This continued for several weeks, until one day, when Leah returned to the cellar with two loaves of bread hidden in her bosom, she found it empty. From that day on she never saw any of the members of her family alive.

Leah’s daughter said that her mother tended to repeat the story of this event compulsively, in a monotonous and emotionless voice. Here as well the moment of abandonment was transformed into a memory laden with rage, pain and guilt. The compulsive attempt to return in memory to that empty cellar apparendy expresses the need to find a solution to an insoluble conflict: her inability to reactivate the terrifying feelings that filled her heart when she stood at the door of the cellar prevents her from filling the internal void in her psyche. The void of the empty cellar is also the void of her interior, which became a constant threat.

The destruction of her parents’ image began even before Leah found herself alone in the world, when the burden of providing food for the entire family, including aunts, uncles and cousins, was placed on her shoulders. The normal identification based on continuity between the generations, which is a central element in the process of adolescence, was interrupted for her, as it was for many survivors who were children or adolescents at the time of the Holocaust. The changes in the attitude of the children and adolescents to their parents’ image were not essentially different from those that occurred to adults, but among the adults there was a frequent tendency to idealization of the parents’ images, which covered up the excess of guilt feelings. The feelings of guilt and pain at the loss of spouses and small children constitute another important factor, which will be discussed later.

The separation from the parents often occurred after a long period when the children and adolescents watched their parents undergoing a process of regression, during which the parents’ ability to serve as a source of livelihood, defence and security for their children gradually diminished; the separation, which occurred at the end of this traumatic process, only put the final seal on the inner splits that warped the normal framework of identification between children and parents. These inner splits led to structural changes in the psyches of the children and adolescents, which were expressed in an accelerated process of growingup, involving hasty learning and internalization of new legal and moral values which were entirely different from those they had known before.

We thus witness an excessive use of the mechanisms of defence, denial and compartmentalization, which had become vital for the preservation of some basic integrity of the ego. But the excessive use of these mechanisms necessarily leads to structural changes in the ego itself. Emotional experiences that flood and terrify the ego eventually bring about internal splits and rifts, which are expressed in the inactivation of the ego functions which previously served as agents and balancers of the psyche (A. Freud 1967).

It is against the background of the break in the sense of continuity of intergenerational identification that one must understand the centrality of the guilt feelings in the survivor’s personality. The survivors’ guilt feelings became an essential element intimately connected with the core of their identity, and they remained such for many years after the liberation (H. Klein 1987). These feelings not only preserved the centrality of the conscience, but also became an important factor in the preservation of the internal continuity of the ego and object representations that had been created within the survivors before the war, as well as in the preservation of the sense of time. That is, the element of continued identification with the images of the parents and the extended family was preserved coverdy or indirecdy, alongside the break in identification, precisely through the guilt feelings that continually recurred to the survivors during the course of their lives.

Nevertheless, there were times when the guilt feelings became obstacles to the survivors’ capacity to adapt to the new world after their liberation, and to the possibility of reaching an integration of the two worlds — before and after the Holocaust.

We again witness the paradoxality of continuity: guilt feelings serve as a connecting element with the images of lost relatives, but at the same time they make it more diffic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Survivor parents - uprooting and separation traumas
• 2 Designating the children as ‘memorial candles’
• 3 The dialogue between survivor mothers and their infants
• 4 Identification with death
• 5 The aggressor and the victim
• 6 Self-esteem and sexual identity
• 7 Parting from the role of ‘memorial candle’
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index