ABSTRACT
In his last book, The Drowned and the Saved, Primo Levi pondered the fact that some survived extermination camps and some did not; he rightly put much weight on the play of chance. His own scars were deep, but his resilience was amply evident in his ability to not only to survive Auschwitz, but in his ability to write of his experience of it. There is general consensus that resilience is product of interactions of one's biology, psychology, and chance. Resilience lies in the nucleus of Darwin's "the survival of the fittest". The earliest medical notion of "resilience" was construed as the product of "good" rather than "poor" protoplasm, a pejorative but not completely wrong medical concept. Healing from the Holocaust has required active, vigorous, continuous, indeed life-long efforts, conscious ande unconscious. It has required efforts to cope with pain and loss of family, even uprooting from one's ongoing life and home; to mediate and sublimate one's omnipresent reactive rage.
