ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the author's reactions to the hospitalized psychiatric patients as well as to survivors whom he/she has met in his/her personal and professional life. It suggests that processes of deletion, erasure, and the denial of extreme trauma might compose a continuous spectrum. The chronically hospitalized survivors represent the more extreme points on this range, with their tragic fate as the ultimate enactment and consequence of their own, and society's, attempt to cut off and not know extreme trauma. Raised in Israel, the author has known many Holocaust survivors. Some of them functioned marginally, some even manifested psychiatric symptoms. However, many of the survivors the author knew growing up, as well as subsequently as a psychologist, functioned sufficiently well despite their symptoms. Those who grew up in Israel shortly after the war have personal memories of survivors in our daily lives.
