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Oct. 21, 2011
About heritage and survival
This year’s Kristallnacht lecture will focus on resilience.
ROBERT KRELL
This year’s Kristallnacht lecturer, Dr. Anna Ornstein, is a unique personality. She is a giant in the field of psychiatry, psychoanalysis and child psychiatry, renowned for her contributions to the study of psychoanalytic self-psychology.
Anna’s psychiatric and child psychiatric training were completed at the University of Cincinnati, where she continued on staff for most of her professional life. She is also a graduate of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis and, following her later-life move to Boston with her husband, Paul, is now also a supervising psychoanalyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute and lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard University.
There is yet another component to her illustrious career. She received her medical degree in Heidelberg, Germany. Another continent, another life. When I began to write about the psychology of Holocaust survivors and psychiatric treatment, I discovered Anna’s brilliant article, “Survival and recovery,” in Psychoanalytic Inquiry, published in 1985.
I first met Anna in Vancouver when she lectured at the University of British Columbia’s department of psychiatry. She had read some of my writings and we confirmed to each other that we were among a relatively few who were writing articles free from the usual professional jargon. In touch ever since, I grew to admire her work more and more. She seldom wrote about the Holocaust – her extensive work is primarily focused on self-psychology – but, when she did write on survivors and survival, it was with understanding, compassion and insight simply unavailable to those who were not there. She had been.
At age 17, Anna and her mother were deported to Auschwitz from Hungary. Her father and two brothers died in the Holocaust. Her childhood sweetheart, Paul, survived a Hungarian forced labor camp. They found each other after the war, married and had three children.
Anna related her story to her family at Passover seders, one chapter at a time. These chapters became a book published in 2004, titled My Mother’s Eyes. My imagination led me to think of Anna as a teenager in Auschwitz looking into her mother’s eyes and seeing what: sadness? hopelessness? determination? Well, perhaps. But the title derives from the reality that her mother’s glasses that “she had worn all her life were taken away from her when she arrived in Auschwitz. I became my mother’s eyes and hands, and she, in turn, used her brains for both of us.” They relied on each other for survival. Anna felt that neither could have survived alone.
Anna’s entire life has been informed and infused with her experiences. Her energy and curiosity, her inquiry into the human condition, her faith in meaningful relationships and the power of the psyche – all have enriched our understanding of human behavior. She is a powerhouse of creativity, a fearless explorer of what makes us tick. It should not surprise us (although it does) that Drs. Paul and Anna Ornstein’s three children are all psychiatrists, two of them psychoanalysts. They are blessed as well with five grandchildren.
Before we met in November 2010 at the Lessons and Legacies Conference at Florida Atlantic University, Anna and I had been asked to comment on a roundtable discussion of child survivors who were also all therapists with psychologic and/or psychiatric training. The result was that Anna’s comments and mine follow one another in Psychoanalytic Perspectives: A Journal of Integration and Innovation (Winter 2007). The section concludes with a poem by Vancouver’s own Lillian Boraks-Nemetz, “An Ancestral Dance in Jewish Prague.”
I felt in good company, as will you when you gather to welcome and hear Anna speak on the topic of Jewish Heritage and Jewish Survival: Lessons from the Holocaust, on Sunday, Nov. 6, 7:30 p.m., at Congregation Beth Israel. Because of the tremendous losses and horror-filled experiences, the professional and lay literature has focused almost exclusively on the psychological damage survivors of the Holocaust might have suffered, not their resilience. This presentation will examine the ways in which Jews and Judaism have survived this and previous persecutions and attempts at annihilation.
Dr. Robert Krell is professor emeritus, department of psychiatry, University of British Columbia, and a Distinguished Life Fellow, American Psychiatric Association. A version of this article appeared in the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre’s publication Zachor. It is reprinted with permission.
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