ABSTRACT
The Holocaust, the almost complete destruction of European Jewry in the years 1939-1945, has been extensively studied and written about from a historical, as well as a psychological, perspective. The psychological and psychiatric literature of this tragedy has primarily emphasized the psychopathological consequences of prolonged physical and psychological deprivations, humiliations, and the depression that followed the inadequate mourning of the survivors' losses of most or all members of their families. The helping professions had also become concerned with the transmission of this national trauma to the second and third generations. In this chapter, I shall question the exclusive attention on psychopathology in this patient population. No doubt, depression and other forms of mental illnesses were not infrequent consequences of the Holocaust. However, even then, as they struggled with their emotional pain and the challenges of building a new life, survivors, on the whole, retained the standards, principles and values by which the fundamental features of their personalities were formed. These psychological building blocks that have become established prior to their war experiences constituted the foundation of their post-Holocaust recovery. To understand the spontaneous recovery that many Holocaust survivors were able to make, it is also important to recognize the psychological mechanisms that may have been involved in the emotional survival of conditions that existed in concentration and extermination camps, in hiding and in labor camps. I believe that similar mental mechanisms may be at work in surviving and recovering from other forms of traumatic experiences.
