The legacy of survival

HARRY KARLINSKY

Normally focusing on book reviews, this week’s Isaac Waldman Library-Jewish Independent series features a film reviewed by a community member.

The horrors for those who endured Nazi persecution did not end with the war. Although a significant percentage of Holocaust survivors have shown remarkable resilience, others have been crippled by a range of disturbing psychological symptoms. In Boaz Yakin’s new film Death in Love, the connection between the Holocaust and subsequent psychopathology is made painfully clear.

The film opens with scenes from a Nazi concentration camp. After being abandoned by her parents, a young Jewish woman’s survival depends upon a horrendous moral dilemma – either to engage in a sexual affair with a Nazi doctor or become the subject of gruesome medical experiments. She chooses survival and, remarkably, appears to fall in love with the Mengele-like doctor.

Flash forward to New York City, where a televised account of the World Trade Centre basement bombing establishes the year as 1993. The woman – now played by a 64-year-old Jacqueline Bisset – is married with two sons and a little-seen husband. Disturbed and unlikable, she displays a number of characteristics frequently reported in Holocaust survivors. She has fears of abandonment, choosing her husband because of her belief that this particular man will never leave her. There are problems involving anger regulation, with dish-smashing and furniture-toppling tantrums. She uses seductive survival strategies “from there” and has been involved in at least two recent affairs. She appears hardened, emotionally disconnected from her family and others. Flashbacks not only suggest the intrusive recollections consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder, but leave little doubt that the marked pathology and dysfunction now evident within the character arise directly from her Holocaust experience.

Unfortunately, the repercussions of Holocaust traumatization extend beyond the survivors. The children of the damaged mother are equally damaged. The youngest, played by Lukas Haas, is house-bound and emaciated; the other, played by Josh Lucas, is the central character of the film. Each represents a pattern of psychopathology that has been described in some of the descendants of Holocaust survivors.

Perhaps Haas’ agoraphobia can best be conceptualized as the understandable behavioral consequences that can occur when an intense distrust of the world is transmitted from parent to child. His severe emaciation – perhaps too heavy handedly – symbolically emphasizes the connection of his distress and dysfunction to the experience of those in the camps. A pianist, he ultimately ensures even this small pleasure is no longer available to him when an encounter with his brother’s ex-girlfriend overwhelms his limited coping skills.

Although the older brother is more functional, he is no more psychologically healthy. He appears to have internalized many of his mother’s maladaptive coping strategies. He too is morally compromised, a con man who works in a bogus fashion model agency that exploits average-looking women. And like his mother, his sexuality seems more a means to an end than satisfying, graphically on display within a sadomasochistic affair with his female boss. He has the self-loathing and existential despair of a defeated man.

After viewing Death in Love, it would be easy to be convinced that the long-term consequences of the Holocaust must continue to morbidly contaminate not only those who survived, but their descendants as well. Yet the literature on the existence of psychopathology in the Second Generation is mixed. Most studies do not confirm the assumption of significant emotional distress in this population. It appears it is only those offspring of a clinical population of parent survivors (i.e., those who have come to the attention of mental health professionals) that are at increased risk for psychological difficulties as compared to the general population.

Death in Love, like its characters, is flawed. There is a preposterous return of the stranger/murder mystery plot that yields an unsatisfying and almost an incongruously laughable ending. There is a predictable confidence game subplot that is distracting. Much of the film is overwrought and, at times, the imagery is pretentious. The film colludes with the mistaken notion that all those affected by the Holocaust are broken and damaged. Yet the film does serve as a useful reminder of the horrors of the Holocaust and how its presence can dominate the lives of not only those who survived but their descendants as well. And the film’s haunting and brutal images linger.

Harry Karlinsky is a UBC psychiatrist. His first novel, The Evolution of Inanimate Objects: The Life and Collected Works of Thomas Darwin (1857-1879), will be published by Insomniac Press this fall. This article is reprinted with the permission of Canadian Psychiatry Adjourd’hui.

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