A Study of Injustice in the Lives of Survivors’ and

Nazis’ Offspring

Background

• 2,500 studies (Krell & Sherman, 1997) deal with impact of Holocaust on survivors

• Flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, hypervigilance, depression, and so forth

• Symptoms under PTSD established in DSM-IV-TR• Guidebook for diagnosing psychopathology

Background

• Eventually studies expanded to include survivors’ offspring

• Vicarious, secondary traumatization• Depression, anxiety, poor coping, and so

forth

Background

• Some studies on the impact of the Holocaust on perpetrators, including SS personnel and Nazi doctors

• Studies focused on presence or absence of pathological personality traits

• Used psychometric instruments & interviews

Background

• Studies describe several defense mechanisms• Compartmentalization-cognitive,emotional

barriers• Splitting off (Dicks,1972) psychic numbing,

dissociation = suppression of feeling(repressed guilt)

• Doubling (Lifton, 1986) better than splitting • Sustained psychiatric disturbance,sociopathic

character

Background

• Eventually studies expanded to include perpetrators’ offspring

• Pathological transmission• Born guilty, inability to mourn,psychic

damage,shame,and so forth

Framework

• Indiviuocentric• Psychoanalytic• Pathological

• Relational• Injustice• Responses (actual

experiences)

Question

• What would happen if you bring children of Nazis in a face-to-face meeting with children of Holocaust survivors?

Breaking Taboo

• Justification of Nazism• Challenge to the Holocaust’s status as symbol of

absolute evil• Voice of moral obtuseness• Obfuscate distinction between good & evil

Purpose

• Consider different contexts• Study opposing viewpoints• Hear the other side• Understand unjust behavior rather than judge it

from moral standpoint

Questions

• How stories about past injustice are transmitted from former Nazi parent or survivor parent to child

• How had these children of victims and of perpetrators dealt with their heritage, with the past injustices and their parents’ involvement in those injustices

• How had they found out about the past injustices• How had the made sense of the stories transmitted to them

by their parents• What impact did it have on their identities

Questions

• What coping responses did they use to deal with the past injustices

• How had they tried to rebalance the past injustices in their present lives

• Did the children of survivors want to avenge the injustices their parents suffered

• Did the children of Nazis feel their parents’ roles in those injustices were justified

• And how did they view the descendants of the other side

Method

• 31 subjects invited to attend joint meeting at the Harvard Medical Education Center

• 20 subjects attended• Mean age 43, ranging between 30 and 48• 14 female 6 male• Interviews conducted in German & English

Method

Semi structured interview• Subjects’ developmental histories special attention to

finding our about the war, the Holocaust, parents’ involvement

• Subjects’ reports of their responses to information on the Holocaust

• Subjects’ perspectives on retributive justice• Subjects’ views on descendants of the other side

Results

• Organize data into themes (Opler, 1945)• Opler used themes to describe general features of

Apache culture• Theme=any emotive-cognitive evaluation

common to both groups

Results

• Ethnic Identification (example, page 58)• Double Victim (example, page 59)

Results

• Empathic Response (feelings of guilt,outrage,shame, resentment,indignation)

• A Sense of Justice

A Sense of Justice

• Motivated to right existing wrongs• Legal sanctions & financial reparations set up by

Western Allies & Germany to restore justice to victims

• Widergutmachung• Opposite results resented by survivors and

Germans• No Tradeoffs

A Sense of Justice

• Parents did not sufficiently engage in retributive actions

• Restore Moral Balance

Experimental Evidence

• Harm-doers compensate victims if they have adequate amount of compensation

• Although harm-doers would like to compensate victim, they also want to avoid contact

• If harm-doers have time to think about their acts less likely to compensate victims

Evidence Applied to Victims

• Most survivors did not engage in retributive actions because no level of compensation would be adequate

• Preferred to avoid having contact with Nazis• Found other ways to reduce distress

Historical Data

• If an injustice is not rebalanced between people, the imbalance does not disappear with the death of the original people, but is extended to their descendants (Thomas, 1958)

Example

Child of Nazi: My current academic work, which is a translation of a sort of pro-Zionist novel from English into German, and the effort of getting that published with the appropriate attention paid to the elements of the book is another. Yes, I feel like that is a big part of my life. It doesn’t right anything. That can’t be, how can anything be made right that was done wrong them. But I can try to be different.

Example

Child of Survivor: I think I have a much more powerful sense of vengeance than most people do. There were times when I said I would just love to shoot a Nazi. I’m not stopped from doing an act of violence toward a war criminal on ethical grounds. It is not like I say to myself acts of violence are always bad. So I'm not stopped by the ethical issue. I'm stopped by a practical issue. I don't want to go shoot some Nazi living in Argentina and then spend the rest of my life in jail. I know if I was going to die soon, I would love to have the option to do that.

Historical data suggest that retribution can last for centuries

Framing Context

• Organized a meeting between CN and CS to examine how a past injustice impacts interpersonal behavior now

Context

• Emotionally arousing experience:signs of distress crying, trembling, raised voices

• Presence of the other side evoked strong feelings• Essentially friendly context less than friendly

feelings toward the participants• Incompatible prescriptions for action?

Findings

• Descendants of survivors and Nazis differed in the rates of equal-unequal statements they communicated as they talked to each other

• Descendants of Nazis made more equal statements compared to descendants of survivors who made more unequal statements

`

Example

Equal• “We have no choice

about our inheritance. Both sides, we did not ask to be born a Jew or German. It happened to us and we have to deal with it.”

Unequal

• “My parents suffered the most. We come from different pasts and to try and blur that minimizes the memory of my parents.”

Findings

• Findings from the lag sequential analyses showed (a) that the simple probabilities of descendants of Nazis making equal statements after descendants of survivors made unequal statements and DS making unequal statements after DN made equal statements were significantly more likely to occur that its expected probabilities would lead us to predict and (b) most likely transitional patterns of responses at lag 1 were between group invalidation and within group validation

`

Findings

• When talking about their own hurts rather than their parents’ sufferings, some survivors’ children gave the impression that they were willing to accept and give meaning to Nazis’ children’s hurts

• Example page 156 “I understand and I believe you are a victim too”

• Compassion for the other side’s hurts transformed some of the participants’ values

Implications

• In different contexts values change

• Considerable variation among prisoners in concentration camps

• Some Kappos,some indifferent, some Muselmänner (page 124)

Implications

“ I know the attitude wasn’t right. But was it wrong? I was young and I wanted to live. You can’t judge, Mona, you never know what you would do in those circumstances. Things were different in the camps” (page 122)

Implications

• Considerable variation among the German guards in the way they treated the prisoners

• Some sadists, some indifferent,some kindly by nature (p.132)

What does this suggest about values in decision making?