“If Somebody Throws a Rock on You, You Throw Back Bread”

When asked the question, “Does the Holocaust affect your political views?” a surprising number of survivors interviewed for the Transcending Trauma Project (TTP) clearly stated that they do not harbor any hatred toward the national groups that perpetrated crimes against them and their families. Irrespective of their experiences during the Holocaust, about one third of the survivors in the sample were able to separate out their emotional responses toward the perpetrators of the specific crimes against them from their views of all Germans, Poles, or other groups that collaborated with the German Nazi government. On the other hand, about the same number of survivors expressed hatred toward their perpetrators and the entire national group that participated in the destruction of their families and their lives. This is not an unexpected response even now, over 50 years after the Holocaust, given what the survivors experienced. ¹