|
|
March 10, 2006
Caring for the victims
Holocaust lessons are yet to be learned.
MONIKA ULLMANN
Concentration camp survivors believed that when the world witnessed
the horrors of the camps, it would never happen again. They were
wrong – nobody stopped the killing fields in Cambodia, the
genocide in Darfur nor in Rwanda – genocide fed by racial hatred
is alive and well in the modern world.
The lessons the world might have learned from the Holocaust are
drowning in a river of blood. But the people responsible for our
collective and individual welfare – professionals in all areas
and walks of life – need to acquaint themselves with the literature
that came out of the Holocaust so that they recognize the symptoms
of the disease of fascism when they encounter it. That was the pivotal
message of Dr. Robert Krell at a meeting of the Vancouver Academy
of Independent Scholars last week at the Chief Dan George Centre.
"[United Nations general secretary] Kofi Annan should have
gone nuts when he heard that one group of people in Rwanda was calling
the other group 'cockroaches', he should have known what that meant,
but he didn't, because he didn't study the Shoah," said the
psychiatrist and author, who is himself a survivor of the Nazi terror
in his native Holland.
His presentation Reflections on the Impact of the Holocaust on Consequent
Studies of Sociology, Philosophy, History, Science and Psychiatry
drew a larger than expected audience. Krell's stated purpose to
"personalize the theoretical" was well-served by his description
of his own experience as a "hidden child,' saved by the kindness
and courage of a Christian family who took him in and his transformation
into "Robbie Munnik." His father was able to visit him
a few times, and he was taught to call him "uncle."
The psychological effects of the life-threatening situation were
such that, from the age of two on, "I was a good boy; I knew
how to stay quiet and never cried," Krell recalled. He also
acquired an older "sister," who became strongly attached
to him and taught him to read and write. At age five, his parents
came to claim him, and it was at this point that he cried, indeed,
howled with rage. He also discovered that he was Jewish. And that
his parents had lost their parents to the Nazis. Weaving his own
experience into the dominant assumptions of the day about how children
perceive the world, Krell described how suffering was assumed to
be limited to older children and teenagers. It took 40 years for
professionals like psychiatrists and doctors to acknowledge that
massive childhood trauma has a lasting effect. "It is precisely
the past we cannot get past before we retrieve and examine it,"
said Krell, adding that he didn't grasp the enormity of what happened
to him until years later.
Krell then described the studies that were done on a group of 426
older boys who had survived a concentration camp. "It's a story
about resilience," he said. "Psychiatrists told these
boys that they would never recover, and at first they did behave
like aggressive criminals. But eventually, the overwhelming majority
became normal citizens, surgeons, rabbis, businessmen, physicists
and writers. What does this teach us? It teaches us that the children
hungered for life, that they had an abnormal hunger to succeed."
Krell was scathing in his assessment of professionals who became
collaborators of the Nazis. He pointed out that without the knowing
participation of professionals, the gas chambers, indeed, the entire
horror of the Nazi regime, could not have happened. He asked the
audience to consider the question: "Can you be a well educated
professional without knowing the Holocaust?
"I despair over the notion that a law class can be preoccupied
with its exams, or that physicians can be consumed by their studies,
without knowing how easy it is to be subverted within their profession,"
he pointed out.
At the end of the talk, several people made comments. Political
correctness and moral relativism were cited as serious barriers
to fighting the virus of fascism. One man felt it was enough to
"be strong," to which Krell responded with a comment about
how strong Jews cause great uneasiness to this day. But perhaps
the most insightful comment came just before the meeting was adjourned.
"The Holocaust is a pivotal tragedy and doctors and lawyers
were collaborators. So we should be educating ourselves in learning
the capacity for compassion," observed a woman in the front
row.
Monika Ullmann is a Vancouver freelance writer and editor.
She can be reached at [email protected].
^TOP
|
|
