The strength of values

PAT JOHNSON

Psychiatric professionals who treated Holocaust survivors after liberation predicted dire lives, imagining permanently damaged individuals incapable of zest for life, incapacitated by chronic depression and unable to experience hope. Instead, according to a world-leading psychoanalyst who spoke here Sunday night, many or most survivors went on to meaningful, productive lives, disproportionately involved in the helping professions, and often filled with joy and an appreciation for everyday pleasures.

The survivors’ ability to not only survive, but to thrive, is a phenomenon that owes much to the very nature of Judaism, according to Dr. Anna Ornstein, whose address to the annual community Kristallnacht commemoration was titled Jewish Heritage and Jewish Survival: Lessons from the Holocaust.

Physical survival was pure chance, she noted. But what made psychological survival possible in the midst of panoramic inhumanity?

“How do we understand and explain this?” she asked.

Physical passivity was necessary for survival in the camps, Ornstein said, noting that standing exhausted in line for hours, or to conform to other demands of the Nazis, required outward compliance, which assisted in physical survival. But camp inmates lived double lives, she said, with defiant internal strength and makeshift family-like social support systems accounting for psychological survival. Prisoners spontaneously formed social units, sleeping closely to preserve body warmth, for example. The Nazis deliberately disrupted these social orders, but new ones would form of necessity. These social units ensured that, in a desert of inhumanity, ordinary human interactions continued, including loving and caring, even fights, disagreements and reconciliations. Innermost selves were expressed in these groups of three or four – no more than five, according to Ornstein – reinforcing the internal values systems the inmates brought into the camps.

On their return to civilization, Ornstein said, survivors were less likely to be obsessed with the horrors of their past than to experience appreciation for the simple joys of daily life, from clean linens and hot showers to the knowledge that, when they fell ill, they would be cared for and, when the end came, they would die with a sense of dignity and be buried in an individual grave.

Ornstein, a lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard and professor emerita at the University of Cincinnati, made a connection between the ability of camp inmates to maintain humanity amid chaos and the ability of the Jewish people for 2,000 years to survive in the absence of a unifying geography.

“The book, the Torah, became the Jews’ portable homeland,” she said. In an analogous way, survivors of the Holocaust were able to sustain themselves on the values with which they were raised. But what of the child survivors, who did not have the benefit of experiencing the Jewish tradition of formal education in schools and informal education in the home before being thrown into the maelstrom of the camps? Ornstein asked.

One example she cited was Bella, a girl who was liberated at the age of five, with no recollection of anyone ever caring for her. As she grew up in the absence of blood relations or any conventional form of family life, Bella made sense of the world and her place in it through the study of Jewish history.

“The whole Jewish history and the Jewish people is my family,” she told psychiatric researchers who interviewed her in adulthood.

Similarly, Jack, who was liberated as a child after two-and-a-half years in the camps, found meaning in life as a surrogate for the dead.

“I have a lot of seeing to do,” he told researchers decades later. “My parents, who died, see through me.”

Ornstein herself, who was a child survivor who lost her father and siblings in the Shoah, said she was motivated to become a doctor to live up to the expectations and hopes her parents had for her brothers. Her husband, also a survivor, is also a noted psychiatrist. Their three children are all psychiatrists as well.

She spoke of her and her husband’s extraordinary experiences as medical students in West Germany after the war, when housing shortages led the local government to force sometimes-unwelcoming homeowners to provide rooms to them. Landlords included a former card-carrying Nazi party member whose five children were Hitlerjungend, and who justified himself by claiming a fear that he would have lost his pharmacy licence had he not joined the party. Another landlady was the wife of an SS officer imprisoned after the war and made life unpleasant for the couple.

While people are often astonished that Ornstein and her husband stayed in Germany to study medicine after what they had been through, she said the experience broadened her empathy and understanding, forcing her to confront her own moral positions.

“Where would I have been during the Third Reich had I not been a Jew?” she asked, wondering inconclusively if she would have been one of the innumerable bystanders or among the small number who risked their lives to help those more imperiled.

While acknowledging the rage and revenge that survivors might justifiably have felt, she also addressed the concept of “radical empathy,” noting that it is easier for nations to forgive than individuals. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, accepted reparations payments from Germany, without which the development of early Israel would have been enormously more difficult. But, she said, this is not the same thing as a victim sitting face-to-face with a perpetrator.

In thanking Ornstein, Beth Israel’s Rabbi Jonathan Infeld said he recently reviewed the interview the Spielberg Foundation did with his own father, who said he and his friends sustained themselves for five years in the camps by envisioning revenge. When, improbably, a moment came at liberation when he and fellow survivors encountered a Nazi soldier separated from his comrades and the opportunity for revenge presented itself, they let the soldier pass.

“The true revenge comes through our survival,” Infeld said.

Before the lecture, six Holocaust survivors – Janos Benisz, Alex Buckman, Marion Cassirer, Evelyn Kahn, Tom Szekely and Sophie Cymbalista – were accompanied by six Hillel students from the University of British Columbia to light the candles. Mayor Gregor Robertson, who was scheduled to read a proclamation from the city, was replaced by Councillor Tim Stevenson, who apologized that the mayor had a last-minute need to be present at the Occupy Vancouver site. Stevenson spoke of his visit to Auschwitz and said he plans to study in Israel next year.

The annual commemorative lecture is sponsored by the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and Congregation Beth Israel. Cantor Michael Zoosman sang El Maleh Rachamim, a prayer for the souls of the departed.

Pat Johnson is director of development and communications for the Vancouver Hillel Foundation.

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