Collective Trauma, Collective Healing

Promoting Community Resilience in the Aftermath of Disaster

Jack Saul

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415884174
• eBook ISBN: 9781136903908
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Santé mentale en psychologie

Collective Trauma, Collective Healing is a guide for mental health professionals working in response to large-scale political violence or natural disaster. It provides a framework that practitioners can use to develop their own community based, collective approach to treating trauma and providing clinical services that are both culturally and contextually appropriate. Clinicians will come away from the book with a solid understanding of new roles that health and mental health professionals play in disasters—roles that encourage them to recognize and enhance the resilience and coping skills in families, organizations, and the community at large.

The book draws on experience working with survivors, their families, and communities in the Holocaust, postwar Kosovo, the Liberian civil wars, and post-9/11 lower Manhattan. It tracks the development of community programs and projects based on a family and community resilience approach, including those that enhance the collective capacities for narration and public conversation.

Part One Collective Trauma and Recovery Global Perspectives

Families and Generations

DOI: 10.4324/9780203842188-1

The Second Generation

In the fall of 1981, I drove to New York City with a friend, Yaakov Naor, to attend the inaugural Children of Holocaust Survivors conference, where more than 600 children of Holocaust survivors gathered for the first time. I had met Yaakov, an Israeli psycho-dramatist, at Danvers State Hospital, just north of Boston, where I worked during graduate school as a psychology intern. Yaakov’s parents, like thousands of others, had immigrated to Israel from Europe after World War II. Growing up as a Jewish American, I had studied the Holocaust and, while in graduate school at Boston University, I immersed myself in Holocaust studies under renowned professor Elie Wiesel. But Yaakov’s recollection of his experiences growing up with survivor parents finally brought home the reality of this genocide for me.

Before the conference, many Holocaust survivors’ children already realized that they somehow were affected by their parents’ experiences from the war. Even though they might have endured nightmares about the camps and running from Nazis, they were not yet sure that the commonality of their experiences warranted its own description “children of survivors.”

The conference was also attended by professionals who had been working therapeutically with survivors and their families. Following a keynote presentation by Helen Epstein, author of the book Children of the Holocaust, the conference took an awkward turn when professionals began presenting research on the pathology of survivors and what was commonly referred to as “survivor syndrome.” The survivors’ children, who had come together to celebrate their movement as a peer support organization, were upset to hear such stark clinical presentations, particularly addressed at their parents. They soon fought to have their own voices heard amidst the generational gap. The conference managed to end on a positive note: Dr. Henry Krystal, a psychiatrist and survivor himself, called attention to the warm connection and harmony between the generations underlying their difficulties and misunderstandings (Peskin, 1981).

Until the early 1980s, much of the clinical research and writing on Holocaust survivors was focused on pathology, e.g. “survivor syndrome”: a description of symptoms and difficulties as they were presented in the clinic. This perspective began to change, highlighted particularly in the work of two clinicians—Yael Danieli, a New York psychologist who researched adaptation styles in survivor families (Danieli, 1982), and Hillel Klein, an Israeli psychiatrist and psychoanalyst whose clinical and research interests led him to examine the adaptive or resilient processes in survivors, their families and communities (Klein, 1982).

Dr. Klein, himself a survivor, had worked for over 35 years as a clinician and researcher with survivors and had done extensive work on survivors’ reintegration in kibbutzim and in families within the context of psychotherapy. Eva Fogelman, an active leader in the children of survivors’ movement, introduced me to Dr. Klein. Later I assisted him with his writing on “survival and revival,” which was posthumously published in English (Klein, 2012).

Much of the early approach to understanding the Holocaust’s impact on survivors focused on psychopathology. This was in part due to the task of clinically documenting the massive trauma and loss they had experienced in order to make claims for restitution from Germany. Government-financed support proved to be extremely important for survivors for economic and therapeutic reasons, but also as acknowledgment of Germany’s culpability.

A former student of Donald Winnicott at the Tavistock Clinic in London, Dr. Klein was interested in how survivors maintained emotional connections to lost loved ones, enabling them to mourn. In contrast to the prevailing view of survivor guilt as a psychological problem, he saw survivor guilt as a way of maintaining an emotional connection to those who had died, facilitating the process of mourning and engaging in the difficult task of finding meaning in one’s survival. He often saw many survivors express this by transforming feelings of guilt to a sense of responsibility to the dead, such as “How can I live my life in a way that honors the memory of those who did not survive?”

In the early 1980s, Dr. Klein encouraged other mental health professionals to look at the “adaptive mechanisms” that enabled survivors to endure horrifying experiences and then go on to rebuild their lives and create new families. For Dr. Klein, this capacity was crucial to the recovery process. He wrote,

In studying the different ways in which survivors coped with disaster, with “normal” life, and with re-establishing 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.

Klein, 2012, p. 28

The survivor’s process of healing or revival includes retaining a sense of self-cohesion and continuity, he said, “connecting the nuclei of his previous identity and world of past representations and values with the duties and responsibilities of his present world” (p. 28).

For many Holocaust survivors, marriage represented a re-emergence from the Weltuntergang—the end of the world. It was a life-affirming act, not just of love, but as a way to counter the massive disruptions in their lives, and to attempt to remedy the dehumanization and loneliness they had experienced during the war (Danieli, 1985). A new family was a symbol of rebirth, providing a sense of continuity with the past and hope for the future (Perel & Saul, 1989). The family context was then crucial for the process of recovery and re-adaptation—a place for intimacy after having lived for years without privacy or protective boundaries.

Survivors often feared that they had been emotionally scarred by what they had experienced in the camps and that somehow this would damage their children. Yet many quickly married and started a family—having a child meant that they were still human. A child was a tangible reaffirmation of life and symbolized the replacement of lost loved ones.

Dr. Klein believed that survivors struggled to work through the themes of loss, separation, dependency, guilt, and hopelessness within the family context. Survivor families often had intense emotional interdependence, which expressed itself in difficulties with separation. Parents tended to place strong demands on children for achievement, to both adhere to external values as well as internally generated standards. While Dr. Klein rejected the notion of psychopathology transmission from one generation to another, he believed families could transmit common motifs and emotional sensitivities between generations.

Most survivors immigrated to the United States, Israel, Canada, and Australia after the war and experienced a profound sense of dislocation, which contributed to closed boundaries between families and the outside world. These immigrants faced the usual litany of problems: the decline of parental authority, lower social status, and a clash of values with the new society. Children often became liaisons between the family and the new environment.

Families’ sense of isolation was further intensified by a “conspiracy of silence,” the collusion between survivors and society to avoid talking about the Holocaust. This silence often prevented these families from accessing important social and material resources that would have been helpful to their adjustment and cultural transition.

Many survivors’ children came to feel that they were imbued with a special mission in life—to make up for the parents’ disrupted lives and those of lost family members. This created a particular bond between survivors and their children, and kept the parents overly involved in their children’s lives.

When children of survivors read Children of the Holocaust (Epstein, 1979), they often felt that the book accurately captured what had gone on in their own homes. Frequently, these children questioned how any of their own suffering had any legitimacy compared to what their parents had gone through. In the same circumstances as their parents, they wondered, would they have been able to survive? Many felt that they carried a heavy burden and placed impossible demands upon themselves about how to live their own lives. They often felt that they had to make up for all those whose lives had been cut short. Some felt compelled to accomplish something meaningful, while others felt that whatever they accomplished, it would never be significant enough.

Whether their parents spoke or were silent about their Holocaust past, children often felt that their parents’ past had somehow penetrated them as if by “osmosis.” Adult children of survivors spoke about not being able to remember actual moments when their parents told them about their past, yet somehow they could recall images, phrases, and incomplete memories related to what their parents had experienced during the war.

Parents’ sharing their Holocaust experience with their children can be a unifying experience and an important part of the process of mourning for the survivor. This disclosure could help the family emerge from an atmosphere of secrecy, demystifying and clarifying important components of the family’s history and its losses—such as explaining to young children why they had no grandparents, uncles, or aunts. It might provide new opportunities for intimacy among family members and may lead to mutually empathic exchanges between the generations (E. Fogelman, personal communication, 1988). However, most families in these circumstances must negotiate between silence and communication. It may be too overwhelming for some survivors to speak about their past, and parents may choose to spare their children from some experiences they endured. The practice of “speaking about speaking” is equally important for families whose members have experienced other traumatic events. Mutually acknowledging that some experiences may be shared in time and some may never be shared at all can preserve family connections despite the fact that secrets do exist.

Due to the experience of massive loss, the dominant motifs for many Holocaust survivor families are the restoration of lost family and moving beyond the destruction (Klein, 1982). Despite the tendency for parental over-involvement and over-protectiveness that this might trigger, survivor families have found ways to maintain cohesion and loyalty to the past while facilitating the maturation of their children. But a traumatic past can easily over-burden families who are dealing with the stresses of normal developmental challenges, and these families do not always attribute their coping strategies, resilient or not, to the family’s Holocaust past.

For many families, the structure and support provided by community and culture were crucial to their successful adaptation. Most Jewish survivors of the Holocaust did not go to therapy, and often viewed it as an admission of being harmed by their experience. Instead, they engaged in an array of supportive community activities—informal peer networks, rituals of remembrance, gatherings of survivors from the same European town, creating testimony archives, planting thousands of trees as symbols of rebirth and life, and situating their personal suffering within the context of the history of the Jewish people. Dr. Klein saw Jewish culture, religion, and identity as key factors in survivors’ adaptation during the war and in rebuilding their lives afterwards.

A Return to Poland

We sat in the town square of Zarki, preparing for lunch. Only recently were tourists appearing in small Polish towns, and the locals kept their distance, inquisitively eyeing our small group. A young girl about 12 years old curiously watched these foreigners for some time. Sala asked her in Polish to join us for some cake, and in their conversation she discovered that the girl attended the same school that Sala had attended some 50 years before, when she was 12. Sala began to sing a Polish song and the girl joined her; together they sang a number of songs that were still taught at the school. The girl was curious about Sala and offered to take us to the local community center a few blocks away. When we arrived, Sala recognized the building as the synagogue she had attended each week with her family before the war.

In the early 1990s, with the Soviet Union dissolved and the Eastern Bloc finally open, many Jews who had emigrated before and during World War II returned to visit the countries of their youth, often accompanied by their children. My wife Esther’s parents, Sala and Icek, had spoken for years about possibly visiting Poland together, and now they felt ready, though the family knew that it would be an emotionally difficult trip. They wanted their son, Leon, and Esther to know about their lives before the war.

Both Sala, 66, and Icek, 72, were extraordinarily hearty people, both physically and mentally. They grew up in the country in the Upper Silesia region of Poland. Each would have said that maintaining a sense of dignity despite all odds, remaining hopeful to reunite with surviving family members, and sheer luck, had enabled them to survive the Holocaust.

Sala grew up in an educated and aristocratic Hasidic family in the small town of Zarki. She was the youngest of seven children. When the war broke out, 18-year-old Sala fled the ghetto of Zawiercie and spent a year living in hiding in the woods, stealing strawberries, potatoes, and eggs from the local farmers. When this life proved too difficult to sustain, she surrendered herself to a men’s labor camp, hoping they might need someone like her to work in the kitchens. She preferred the predictability of the camp to the dangerous uncertainty of life in the woods. She spent the next five years living in nine different labor camps. She had a great deal of pride in how she was able to fend for herself and maintain her self-respect through attention to her hygiene and her ethical behavior toward others. After liberation in 1945, she eventually realized that of the 80 or 90 members of her extended family, she was the sole survivor. She was one of only a few Jewish survivors from her entire town.

Icek was from a religious family in the small village of Koziegłowy. A hard worker in his family’s construction material factory, he made deliveries by horse and carriage from age eight. His physical stamina later served him well in the Nazi labor camps near Russia. He too was the sole survivor of a large extended family, eight siblings, and the only Jewish survivor from his village. After liberation, Icek met Sala on the road, recognizing each other from the vicinity where they had lived. Like many Holocaust survivors at the time, they felt elated to be free and quickly wanted to build a new life. Knowing each other’s respective families was sufficient to establish they were suitable as partners. They eventually arrived in Belgium, where they connected with other Jewish war survivors. They lived in and ran a clothing store in Leuven, not far from Brussels.

Like many survivors at the time, after laying the foundations for a new life Sala went eventually for “treatments” paid for by the German government. For several years she spent the month of July at a spa, taking baths, receiving hydrotherapy (water treatments for pain and stress relief), being massaged, and walking barefoot on the wet grass at dawn. Spa treatments had been used for centuries to cure nervous disorders and soothe the body. While at the spa, the survivors also attended ballroom dances and classical music concerts. Despite this, Sala was plagued by memories from the camps during the rest of the year; she regularly suffered nightmares and often engaged in fits of screaming.

Sala and Icek often met with other survivors in Belgium, and a few years after the war they moved again, to Antwerp. There they felt safe and supported in a thriving Jewish community, primarily made up of other Polish survivors. Some survivors found themselves only able to speak about their past in ways that were debilitating. Sala and Icek somehow found the strength to speak openly about their camp experiences and life before the war with friends, business associates, and customers at their clothing store. They were storytellers, speaking about their triumphs in the camps. Both had come close to death numerous times, either through disease, the harsh conditions, or at the hands of the guards. Icek had been caught sending love letters to a woman who was a prisoner in the adjacent camp, and he was almost transferred from the kitchen to the work factory where he probably would not have survived. But he had also run a black market for food at the camp, which enabled many inmates to receive the extra nutrition they needed to survive. A German guard, himself benefiting from the food distribution, prevented Icek’s transfer.

Eventually, some years after the war, Sala and Icek began to contact survivors from the neighboring towns where they had grown up before the war. Together they created memorials for the towns’ inhabitants whose deaths had never been formally acknowledged.

It was not until 1991, two years after martial law was lifted, that they decided to visit Poland with their children. When Icek walked down the main street of his village many people recognized and greeted him. They were glad to see him...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Collective Trauma, Resilience, and Recovery
• Part One: Collective Trauma and Recovery Global Perspectives
• Families and Generations
• Refugees in New York City From Clinic to Community
• Promoting Family and Community Resilience in Post-War Kosovo
• Part Two: From Global to Local Urban Terrorism in Lower Manhattan
• 9/11 The First Three Weeks
• School and Community Forging Collaboration
• Promoting Collective Recovery
• Community Initiated Recovery Activities
• Collective Narration and Performance
• Part Three: War and Migration—Little Liberia, Staten Island, NY
• Little Liberia Fostering Community Resilience
• Seeking Truth and Justice
• Summary
• Reference
• Index