Holocaust study offers lessons in trauma and resilience

MIRAH LANGER

“One can so often feel extremely helpless in the face of hearing trauma. However, when one understands the power of bearing witness to the pain by listening, and how beneficial it is for any trauma survivor to feel heard, it leads to us all feeling like there is something we can do for people who have been through the trauma.

Farber, a Johannesburg-based clinical psychologist in private practice, interviewed nine elderly survivors of the Holocaust, who as children or teenagers had been imprisoned in concentration camps. It was a retrospective study that aimed to understand the long-term impact of trauma on child Holocaust survivors over seven decades.

“I was very privileged that the survivors opened up and told me their stories, and I was moved by the level of gratitude from the survivors for my having listened,” said Farber about the process of interviewing the survivors who formed the core of her study.

As one of the survivors whom Farber interviewed said to her, “No one has ever asked me those kinds of questions because they don’t want to hear the answers.”

She said that in many cases, the families of the survivors had been too anxious to ask them the difficult questions about their experiences out of fear of upsetting them. Conversely, the survivors had been afraid of inflicting their trauma on loved ones by talking about their pain. For years, they never spoke, carrying their pain alone, leading to an “existential sense of being both alone in the world and lonely”.

Thus, when they were able to speak openly to Farber, it was cathartic, a finding consistent with other research in the field.

Farber began the process of interviewing the survivors in 2006 for her PhD at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits). She was stringent in ensuring that her study adhered to stringent ethical standards. The sensitivities of her work were carefully monitored through university supervision. She also formulated her core questions with the help of survivor Don Krausz. This year, Farber was awarded a doctorate for her study.

She found that all the survivors in her study – both resilient and depressed – suffered from ongoing “catastrophic grief” regarding the loss of their family during the Holocaust. She coined this term as it described the grief experienced by child Holocaust survivors. Also, the word “shoah” in Hebrew means “catastrophe”, and this was mirrored by the intensity and extent of the grief that followed child survivors into old age.

“In a normal traumatic bereavement, you might lose a parent. These survivors experienced multiple losses. Some lost their mother, father, brother, sister, friends, and extended family – a whole community.

“I had a sub group of resilient survivors and depressed survivors. The resilient survivors have very good coping skills and the other sub group suffered from PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] and depression. Ongoing PTSD and depression meant that many were burdened with constant traumatic memories and flashbacks that kept them captive in their Holocaust experience. Even the resilient survivors had PTSD symptoms.”

The key mechanism that resilient survivors employed was an ability to compartmentalise their grief and trauma.

“While the more traumatised survivors were just completely overwhelmed, others were able to move their experience of trauma out of the way as they were faced with the challenges of survival.”

Yet, although “there is a big difference between the two groups, when they started to speak, it became clear that they were all suffering from catastrophic grief. Towards their older years, it left them with a sense of ongoing grief that lead to despair.”

Farber said that during some of the interviews, when the elderly survivors told their story, they regressed and wept as though they were children at the age they lost their family members. Others told their story with a level of emotional disconnection, a defence that helped them to live with their overwhelming grief and trauma. “It is never too late to grieve. It was also an opportunity for them to speak about the love that they received from their beloved families and describe their heart-breaking memories.”

She said that there was pain and hope in these experiences.

On the one hand, such catastrophic grief had stayed with the survivors and did not dissipate in intensity over the seven decades that had since passed. On the other hand, their resilience and capacity to love their families was remarkable.

All the survivors had married, and many had children after the war. They told Farber that these roles as parent and spouse had given them a significant sense of meaning, fulfilment, and connection.

In particular, said Farber, the survivors were able to draw depth from these relationships because their own childhoods had, before the disruption of the war, been characterised by meaningful family connections.

Research like hers has shown that as long as a person has formed a “good-enough attachment” in childhood before trauma hits, they are able to find resilience in the aftermath.

The survivors were “able to keep their capacity for attachment intact, and this had a regenerative power in helping them to build good relationships despite their trauma”.

Farber said that writing up the hours of testimony proved to be very difficult and traumatic, and she was supported by her two Wits supervisors, Professors Cora Smith and Gill Eagle.

The original roots of Farber’s study lie partially in her own family’s connection to the Holocaust. She lost three great-grandparents and a great-uncle during this time. Two of them were murdered in the Dvinsk Ghetto, and the other two were shot in a Lithuanian forest during a mass killing.

“I grew up with two very traumatised grandfathers. The one spoke about it and cried a lot, and the other did not speak at all. He was too traumatised.”

“I was their eldest grandchild, and I felt deep empathy for what they had been through. I carried their stories.”

Her doctorate now opens with a dedication to those family members who were victims of the Shoah.

“It feels very important to me that their names are in the PhD because their bones lie in some forest somewhere and they don’t have a grave; they don’t have a name and I feel that they have now been memorialised… As a Jew, completing this work has been a very powerful experience.”