CHAPTER
ONE
In my ongoing quest to create a thesis that is as much sociological as it is psychological, as much told with a subjective perspective as from the seemingly “objective” point of view, I have realized that the only way to tell and analyze my subjects’ stories is to tell my own alongside them. Thus, in the true spirit of a “participant observer,” I believe this is the time and place to introduce the relationship between myself, those I interviewed, and the interviewing context itself. As I mentioned before, I have come to understand that the content of each interview was as much a product of the environment in which it was produced as of the subjects who, on the surface, produced it. My experience in and reaction to the interviews was an equally strong influence on both the participants and the data. It is important, therefore, to describe both the biases and perspectives I brought into the project, as well as the lessons I have learned through my time with the survivors. Everything I write and everything I say about the project is deeply connected to, and produced by, this interplay.
Indeed, I have been influenced tremendously by a number of ethnographers and sociologists who speak of “reflexivity.” Barbara Myerhoff, for example, writes, “I could never imagine trusting my own or anyone else’s work as fully again without some signposts as to how the interpretations were arrived at and how the [author] felt while doing so.”[1] It is clear to me now that a reflexive researcher really cannot separate herself from her study, and from the objects of her study. To use Fabian’s terms, the producer, process, and product are interconnected in their influence on each other and must be acknowledged as such.[2] As I will discuss later, I realized early in the project that I could not keep myself out of my discussion of the interviews I conducted. In fact, I found the interviewing process itself to be so profoundly life-changing—in both positive and negative ways—that I cannot even separate that experience from myself anymore, or from the writing. I have thus been watching myself carefully from the beginning, because I saw the effects the process had on me even after the first interview.
Beyond my own biases, or “pre-commitments,” are, of course, those of my subjects. What types of conclusions can I make from three to nine hours of time spent with an individual who has had an entire lifetime to shape and mold his narrative? How do I know what motives he or she had for agreeing to be interviewed, and what types of political or personal issues drove what he or she chose to tell me? How will I ever know what was left out and why I heard what was told to me? And how can I know if I am even interpreting what was given to me correctly, or at least, appropriately?
All I can do is make myself a participant in the study, and in the thesis. I know now that I cannot simply quote the interviewees; I also have to talk about myself. I cannot present my twenty subjects without presenting myself as well. My readers have to be acutely aware that they are only glimpsing these survivors through my eyes, and through my own all-too-brief glimpses at them. In reality, I am presenting my interpretation of a number of individuals who presented me their own interpretations of themselves. Therefore, in order to illuminate as clearly as possible where my “interpretations” have come from and what types of influences in which they are grounded, I would like to tell my own story here. Below is a chronicle of the progression of my thesis project, from its inception to its present place and identity.
I spent my sophomore year designing an independent, interdisciplinary concentration in Human Resilience Studies. I anticipated it as a course of study that would allow me to—and I quote my proposal—“explore what allows some survivors (of virtually any trauma or negative life experience) to conquer their fears and pain, and what keeps others deeply submerged in torturous nightmares and anxiety for decades.”[3] I proposed that my investigation of human resilience would “seek to define the term using psychological, historical, scientific and neurological, sociological, anthropological, philosophical, and religious ideas and works.”[4] Looking back at this twenty-page manifesto that I spent months writing and re-writing, I can only laugh at my naïveté. Nonetheless, I have devoted over half of my college career to this topic: the resilience of the human spirit.
I took classes on aging, on relationship disturbances in childhood, on Jewish life in the shtetls of Eastern Europe, and on the experience of mental illness. Believing resilience was “quite possibly at the foundation of all survival, and in a sense, all weakness,” I wanted to approach the concept from a variety of different angles. I was attempting to find a critical link, the one ingredient that allows an individual to survive and thrive after any trauma. At first, I saw resilience as an attribute, or a collection of attributes, that all “thrivers” must have. I wondered whether it had to be innate or whether it could be learned. Later, I began to see resilience as more of a process, or set of processes, that can allow an individual to deal “better” with traumatic circumstances. While one often seemed to need at least some of the resilient attributes to be equipped to engage in the resilient processes, this new conceptualization allowed for a greater range of experience. Indeed, in this view, a person could be seen as resilient in some aspects or contexts and not so resilient in others. My understanding of resilience would continue to grow and change.
The progression of my thesis can be followed through the description of a series of shifts in focus, methodology, and analysis. I cannot call them all decisions, per se, because many were highly serendipitous and occurred through no fault of my own. Often, I felt as if I were following two steps behind the thesis, which seemed to take on a mind and a momentum all its own. There were, indeed, some dramatic twists and turns in the process, and they clearly illustrate how I came to my current conceptualization of the project. I will therefore begin by describing my original plans, and attempt to show how it has changed.
Early on, I knew that Holocaust survivors would provide a vital window through which to explore the concept of resilience. I theorized that if I wanted to understand a phenomenon that occurs as a response to trauma, I would need to look at individuals who survived one of the most extreme traumas to date. If any generalizations could be made as far as a “resilient spirit,” I speculated, they would have to come from survivors of a trauma that tested the absolute limits of physical and psychological tolerance. My initial thesis proposal thus centered around these survivors, and is described in part below:
I…plan on focusing on the question of whether Holocaust survivors are truly resilient in the nature of their coping strategies and levels of functioning… survivors of the Holocaust are often considered the epitome of resilience simply because of the tremendous scope and scale of the trauma they endured. However, it could be argued that these individuals, because of their collective inability to come to terms with the senselessness of the Holocaust and the wholesale damage it incurred, are not functioning above and beyond what can be expected… Because I am still very much undecided on where I stand on this issue, I would like to focus my thesis on coming to some kind of a conclusion as to the resilience of Holocaust survivors.[5]
I went further to assert that Holocaust survivors “provide a case study of tremendous strength and determination. Whether they can be rigidly classified as resilient or not, survivors of the Holocaust embody the kind of endurance and resistance which is essential to the overcoming of any trauma or any life change.”[6] Initially, and for a significant amount of time, I think I truly believed this statement, and believed in this view of the project. I wanted to be able to say, “Survivor A is resilient, for these reasons,” and “Survivor B is not resilient, for these reasons.” I thought that if I did the right research and asked the right questions, I would be able to make these distinctions and believe in their accuracy and validity. As I delved further into my ideas about resilience and Holocaust survivors, however, I realized that drastic alterations would need to be made to my initial proposal in order to do justice to the concept and to the people. This would come much, much later.
I thus began my thesis with little more than a whimsical, reductive idea of what I wanted to study and how I wanted to study it. I was naïve, I was over-optimistic, and I was convinced that the end result would be identical to my initial vision. I found out quickly that this was not to be. In reality, I never planned to conduct interviews. Although the idea had crossed my mind early in my undergraduate career, I had immediately and readily dismissed it, assuming it would be too difficult, too complicated, and way too much work. My first plan was to comb through memoirs, interviews and transcripts of interviews, and films and documentaries on the subject of the Holocaust and Holocaust survivors. I was especially interested in the videotaped interviews that were being conducted under the auspices of the Shoah Foundation, Steven Spielberg’s worldwide effort to record and catalog the oral testimonies of tens of thousands of survivors. I later found out that a great deal of interviews were also on hand at the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University.
It was in April of 1999 that I happened to attend a speech given by Ray Fishler, in commemoration of Yom HaShoah, the Jewish Day of Remembrance for the Holocaust. On a whim, I approached Ray afterward and asked if he would mind being interviewed. He agreed, much to my utter panic. Armed with a collection of hastily prepared questions (as seen in Appendix A) that were loosely constructed both from my main interests at the time and from the preliminary research I had done, I arrived at the designated time and place the next day. I spent an hour with Ray and his wife, Rhoda, asking questions about his coping strategies, his views of the world after having experienced the Holocaust, and his understanding of his survival and of being a survivor. While I began with the questions I had prepared, the interview immediately “took off” as a rather intimate conversation between Ray and I. In fact, I was so fascinated with him and the responses he gave me that each question spawned three more, and I was able to more fully understand what was most interesting to me and how to ask the right questions so that these bits of information would come pouring out.
At the end of the interview, Ray’s wife informed me that she had conducted over seventy interviews for the Shoah Foundation and that the protocol the interviewers followed did not include the types of questions I had asked. In fact, Rhoda told me, they were interested strictly in the oral history of the Holocaust experiences of each survivor. Only a brief amount of time was devoted to getting the gist of their lives before and after the Holocaust, and there certainly was no place for or interest in understanding the psychological effects of the experience or the individuals’ processes of coping with it.
At this point, Ray interjected that he had never before been asked many of the questions I had put to him. I found this shocking. I simply could not believe that, with all the speeches and interviews he had given, no one else had brought up what I perceived to be clearly relevant and, of course, the most interesting issues surrounding surviving such a trauma. It was around this moment that I began to wonder if I was going to be able to investigate what I wanted to know by analyzing interviews conducted by people who were exploring other issues. Clearly, the Shoah tapes were not going to provide me with the data I needed. Ray and Rhoda began to urge me to conduct interviews of my own.
So in late April of my junior year, my thesis project took its first dramatic turn. In what I can now call Shift #1, I decided to conduct interviews with twenty Jewish Holocaust survivors in the New England area, starting in Providence and working my way farther away if necessary. I received a Royce Fellowship, which provided me with the means to travel to interviews, as well as to buy a transcription machine and a bushel of audiotapes. I was excited about the new direction, but I was also extremely apprehensive. For one, I had never taken a course or received any instruction on the methods of qualitative interviewing or of analysis of qualitative material. I had decided that twenty was a good, solid, methodologically sound number, but I had no idea how much data I would be receiving or how much analysis would be required. At that point, I didn’t even know how I would access the survivors themselves. I would say “winging it” would be an understatement for that particular phase of my project.
Roughly a month later, I hastily put together a proposal for the Institutional Review Board in order to be able to work with “human subjects.” Because I was in a rush to get started on the interviewing, I conceded to use aliases for the participants, which allowed the proposal to be pushed through the system a little faster. By early June, I was ready to start interviewing. I had revised my questions guide to account for and delve deeper into some of the issues that Ray’s interview had brought up, but I was still committed to a semi-unstructured interview method. I was not sure if I was a “good” interviewer yet, but I felt confident at least that I would be able to ad-lib when necessary. In fact, I was convinced already, just knowing the nature of the individuals with whom I would be speaking, that they would be more comfortable with a “conversation-style” structure rather than a strict question-and-answer session.
While I was preparing my questions, I did some preliminary research to understand the central concepts. It was around this point that I ran across a statement in Lawrence Langer’s Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory that dramatically impacted my aims for the project. He writes of the interviews he analyzed for his project (all from the Yale archive), “virtually all videotaped interviews begin in the same way, innocently conspiring to establish an atmosphere of school, community, friends—that is, about the normal world preceding the disaster. And most of them end in the same way too, implying a severance between the camp experience and what followed: tell us about your liberation (and your life afterwards).”[7]
What particularly struck me was the portion in parentheses, and the parentheses themselves, at the end of the segment. Whether this showed Langer’s implicit feelings about the importance of this topic, or whether he was simply illustrating the importance it was given in the interviews, I was intrigued by the clear disregard toward the post-Holocaust lives of survivors. This became the basis for my main research question. I was interested in the processes of coping with trauma in general, but I gradually became more interested in how these survivors are able to cope fifty years later than in how they coped at the time.
I thus organized my interview questions around a number of central themes (the first real draft of my “Interview Questions Guide” can be seen in Appendix B). First, I wanted to discuss their attributions regarding their survival—who or what they believe was responsible for their lives. Second, I wanted to delve into the state of their religiosity after such a trauma—their belief or non-belief in God, and when and how this belief may have changed as a result or in the process of the trauma. Third, I developed questions regarding their feelings about “recovery,” or the level of acceptance of the trauma they had experienced, and their coping strategies in the psychological realm. Fourth, I was interested in the identities and senses of self of these survivors—whether they viewed their personalities as having been altered by the Holocaust, and whether it impacted their identities as Jews, as people, as innocent human beings.
I was particularly curious about where their identities as Holocaust survivors stood in relation to the other facets of their identities (for instance, as parents, children, spouses, employees). Fifth, and closely related to the previous set, I had questions about their relationships with their spouses and other family members, and the status of their work lives, and the impact of the trauma on those areas of their lives. Sixth, I wanted to know if they were experiencing or had experienced any psychological or physiological symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Seventh, and entirely in the service of my own conceptual goals, I was interested in the survivors’ thoughts on resilience, trauma, and survivorship. I was hoping to gain a deeper understanding of what these concepts mean to the individuals to whom they apply. Finally, I added four general questions aimed at further understanding their systems of meaning-making and the centrality of the Holocaust and its effects in their lives.
I contacted the Holocaust Museum in Providence and got the names of two survivors who speak often about their experiences and are involved with the museum and the synagogue nearby. I contacted both of them and set up times to conduct the interviews. I prepared myself with the academic and intellectual rigor to which I have accustomed myself. What I missed, however, was the emotional factor. In all honesty, when I began planning the interviewing phase, I thought, “This will be a piece of cake!” I figured nothing could be more difficult than anything else I’d already experienced. Put simply, the Holocaust has been a tremendous part of my life for as long as I can remember. I have seen countless plays, read scores of books, taken a variety of classes, heard a number of testimonies. I have studied with Elie Wiesel; I have visited Auschwitz, Birkenau, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Plaszow, as well as Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Israel. I have gotten just about as close as I can; I have seen, touched, smelled, and felt the Holocaust (to the extent that I can). So I thought these interviews would be, like I said, no big deal.
And then reality set in. I conducted the first full interview (I had begun to view my time with Ray as more of a pre-interview) in a two-hour stretch and came home exhausted. I could barely think straight. I wasn’t upset, I wasn’t depressed, I had just never felt such weariness, such depletion of all my capacities—mental, physical, emotional, and beyond. I could not figure it out. I had the second interview two weeks later, and the results were similar. It was then that I realized this wasn’t going to be quite as easy as I thought. I took an unplanned but perhaps not completely involuntary break soon after that. I spent two weeks decidedly not contacting any organizations or individuals who would assist me in getting acquainted with more survivors.
By mid-July, I finally had to acknowledge that I needed to get back on track. As I had reached a dead-end in Rhode Island, I began the next phase of recruiting by sending emails to Jewish organizations and synagogues all over New England. I received one reply. This individual, to whom I am forever indebted, gave me the names of five survivors in Long Island and suggested I contact the Holocaust Memorial and Educational Center of Nassau County. I called all five survivors multiple times, but achieved actual contact with only two of them. Because I was hesitant to make the trip to Long Island for only two interviews, I decided to call the Center. To my utter surprise, the secretary there informed me that they have a group of “docents,” Holocaust survivors who volunteer on a regular basis to lead tours around the Center and speak to schools and other audiences. These individuals, she told me, would be readily available and willing to be interviewed whenever I felt so inclined. Needless to say, I was inclined.
The assistant prepared a schedule for me with two interviews a day for five days, starting that next week. I also planned my interviews with the other two survivors with whom I had already spoken for one of the days, so that I could do everything at once. I figured that if I had to make the trip and rent the motel room and be “on vacation,” I might as well pack it all in. Somewhere in the back of my mind was a little voice whimpering that the schedule I had planned just might be difficult, but I ignored it vigorously. I dismissed the exhaustion I had felt earlier in the summer as some strange anomaly that could not possibly happen again. Even if it did, I argued with myself, I was now more than halfway through the summer with a mere three subjects under my belt—I needed interviews, and fast. So I drove down to New York, anxious but firmly convinced that I would be able to handle it one way or another.
So I conducted my interviews—each one longer, more emotional, and more exhausting than the one before. I had asked to have each day’s interviews scheduled at least four hours apart, assuming that this would give me substantial time in between to write some notes, relax, and have lunch. My first interview at the Center, however, lasted over three hours and only ended at that time because the interviewee had another appointment. The next subject had already arrived at that point, so I barely had time to scarf down some food and reload the tape recorders. My first interview of the next day ran so far over that I was late for the second interview. The scheduling system went downhill from there. The average length shot up from two hours to four; there were four subjects who required a second session, and one with whom I spent a total of over nine hours.
I spent more time in interviews that week than I did sleeping, with no breaks and no time, opportunity, or mental faculties to process what I was absorbing. I found that interviewing Holocaust survivors was decidedly not as effortless as I had thought or hoped. It is certainly never easy interviewing an individual on any subject, much less on such a tense and emotional topic. Judith Herman, a noted researcher in the field of trauma, has written:
To study
psychological trauma is to come face to face both with human vulnerability in
the natural world and with the capacity for evil in human nature. To study psychological trauma means bearing
witness to horrible events. When the
events are natural disasters or ‘acts of God,’ those who bear witness
sympathize readily with the victim. But
when the traumatic events are of human design, those who bear witness are
caught in the conflict between victim and perpetrator. It is morally impossible to remain neutral
in this conflict. The bystander is
forced to take sides.[8]
While I cannot get into a discussion here of which “side” I may have appeared to be on in each interview, and whether I was, in fact, perceived as a “bystander” by my subjects, I did constantly feel an obligation to appear “neutral” in all facets of my role as the interviewer. I often felt as if I were walking a tightrope for my participants. While I found it incredibly difficult to maintain the state of hyper-concentration necessary to forge the type of meaningful and empathic relationship necessary in an interviewing context such as this, I felt compelled to attempt to do so. Most of the time, I felt as if I were watching from outside myself, making sure I was saying the right thing, crossing my legs the right way, nodding not too much and not too little, keeping them on track but not interrupting, being encouraging but not putting words in their mouths. It was a constant and endless struggle to be the perfect interviewer, student, friend, resource, and audience.
Before each interview began, I gave the participant two copies of the informed consent form (as seen in Appendix D) and asked him or her to read the form thoroughly and then sign both copies. I always made sure to draw all of the subjects’ attentions to the statement on the use of aliases, as I knew this could be a potentially thorny issue. Because many of the survivors told me aliases weren’t necessary, and some even asked specifically for their real names to be used, I soon began to mention that if they were not comfortable with the use of aliases, they should write something to that effect on the consent form. It became clear to me that many of the participants very much wanted to be known; most have spoken extensively and publicly about their experiences, and some have even published memoirs. I began to realize that aliases could even be seen as disrespectful in this context. After all, telling their stories is an important part of their lives, and they all want to be recognized as survivors and as themselves. Later, when all the interviews had been conducted, I proposed a revision of this clause of my project to the Institutional Review Board, asking to be able to use the subjects’ real names. When this was approved, I sent out another set of consent forms (as seen in Appendix H) for this purpose and received seventeen signed forms within two weeks.
Along with the initial consent forms, I also gave each subject two biographical questionnaires (as seen in Appendices E and F) before each interview formally began, and asked them to either fill them out at that point or take them home and send them to me after they were completed. The main purpose of these two forms was simply to get some basic biographical information on the subjects as well as their spouses and children, along with information about their countries of origin, why they came to the United States, and their status as survivors today.
Finally, I gave the participants a blank piece of paper and a genogram guide (as seen in Appendix G), and asked them to spend some time in the near future making a family tree. I usually discussed with each subject the meanings of the symbols on the guide and how to go about making a genogram of his or her own. I also assured all of them that any information they could give would be helpful. My goal was to get some understanding of their pre-war family structures and of how many members of their families had been killed in the Holocaust. Because I was uncertain as to how emotional or difficult (memory-wise) the task might be for each individual, however, I did not insist that every subject complete the genogram. Nonetheless, the majority did do so, to the best of their abilities and memories.
After these initial procedures, I began each interview by asking the participant if he or she had any questions about what I was interested in and how my project was structured. Because the consent form was rather clear about the research questions driving the project, some of my subjects did not have any questions. Many, however, asked specifically about why I was doing what I was doing. It was clear to me that the implicit assumption before I even answered was that I was the child or grandchild of survivors. When I told those who asked that I was not, in fact, related directly to any survivors of the Holocaust, the participants often appeared visibly surprised and a little taken aback. Many would then ask how I could be interested in this topic without that personal connection. I would answer, as best I could, that I do not think that young people today need a personal connection to be interested in (or even fascinated by) the Holocaust. I also told them that as a budding psychologist, I believe that Holocaust survivors present a rather unique opportunity to look at the long-term effects of severe trauma.
Often, this was enough to answer their questions. This increasingly familiar exchange, which did not always come at the beginning but usually did appear at some point during the interview, however, had often-serious consequences. Directly after the discussion, I frequently got the sense that the relationship between the interviewee and myself had changed. It was as if I was no longer perceived as an “insider.” Indeed, I have no doubt that the interviews in which I disclosed this information about myself would have been quite different had the subjects still believed I was more “personally connected.” In fact, I remember a specific interview, halfway through which the subject made a reference to my “knowing what it is like” to be related to a survivor. At this point, when I told her that I was not related to any survivors, an expression of shock came across her face and she immediately crossed her arms over her chest and became just slightly less forthcoming with certain details and experiences. Although she never acted rudely or angrily toward me, I could tell that something had happened. The nature of the bond that we had built even in that short period of time had changed and her perception of me was not the same as it had been before.
It was after this interview that I began to hope that the question would not come up. After the (progressively) short(er) question-and-answer session, I would begin each formal interview by asking the subject to tell me his or her story. I often made sure to tell them there were no real time constraints, although I did start to mention that this section of the interview tended to take two or three hours, while my questions often took up about half that time. I deliberately made my inquiry open-ended, and emphasized that I was interested in everything they wanted to tell me, not just their “Holocaust story.” This segment of the interviews was generally unstructured; I let the participants tell me whatever they wanted to tell me. Of course, they knew what I was interested in, and I do believe that their narratives had to be influenced by this knowledge. However, I attempted to combat this early conditioning by not specifically directing their talk in one direction or another. I tended to ask only clarifying questions and I attempted to limit my talk as much as possible to simple encouraging verbalizations. Some individuals seemed to need much more encouragement than others, so my interviewing style was slightly different in each situation.
After I was relatively sure that the “Holocaust narrative” had been concluded, I generally felt it necessary to ask a question to the effect of, “And what happened after that?” Very rarely would the subjects end their narratives of their experiences during the war and then spontaneously continue with an account of their lives afterwards. More often than not, they would need prompting to enter this next narrative, and frequently, they would seem to require even more strenuous persuasion. There was a clear tendency on the parts of the participants to assume that anything after liberation or the end of the war was not interesting and thus, not worth telling me. When I would ask them to continue, I would most often be greeted with expressions of surprise and comments like, “Why do you want to hear about that?” or “I just told you the most interesting part.” Even though I took pains to assure each survivor that I was (especially) interested in his or her life after the war and that I did want to hear about it, very few of them ever gave me a cohesive narrative of this part of their lives.
Although the war encompassed only a very small segment of each individual’s life, it generally was the subject of at least three-fourths of his or her life narrative. The entire fifty years after the Holocaust was often condensed into less than twenty minutes of the interview, while the war story could take up as much as three hours. And as much as I pushed and questioned and encouraged, it was rare to be presented with post-war narratives of the scope and length that characterized the Holocaust narratives of the participants. While I had expected some amount of hesitance in response to my questioning about post-Holocaust experiences, I was continually surprised at the consistent brevity and almost total lack of detail that typified these responses. Often, we would reach what I have called a “brick wall,” when my questions would become increasingly frequent and even frantic while the answers would become shorter and even less elaborated. It was at that point that I usually turned to my interview guide.
It generally took from 45 minutes to two hours to run through most of the questions, as this segment of the interview was, again, only semi-structured. I encouraged the subjects to respond however they wanted, rarely attempting to direct their answers and interrupting only if I felt their comments were wholly tangential. I was, and am now even more adamantly of the opinion that—as I mentioned in the preface—they told me the stories they told me for a reason. Thus, it was only when they did not seem to understand the question or when I was looking for a more specific response that I would ask again, or more directly. I would often follow up with questions that were not on the guide if I felt it was necessary, and thus, each interview frequently tended to take on a shape and structure of its own. It is in this sense that I see my interviews as more semi-structured conversations than strict “stimulus-response” interactions. Each interview, therefore, involved discussions that were in many ways unique to its context. Similarly, each conversation was different and marked by a distinct relationship between the participant and myself, and between both of us and the environment in which we were placed.
Finally, the interviews concluded with my asking if there was anything else the survivor wanted to ask of me. I made sure to ask how he or she was feeling after what was often a long and emotional process, and I often asked what he or she was planning to do afterwards and whether a short reflection time was possible. Most of the interviewees were pleased with the interview, and many mentioned, as Ray did, that they had had to really think about issues on which they had never reflected before. I always saw this as positive, and as a sign that much of the material from the interviews was, in that sense, “organic” and not completely scripted or pre-organized.
Statistically, this group of survivors seems to be a surprisingly accurate representation of the general Holocaust survivor population. Thirteen of the subjects were male; seven female. Eight of them were originally from Poland; six from Germany; two from Austria; and one each from Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Lithuania. There is a near-perfect bell curve as far as ages of the subject pool, with a range from 65 to 83 and the highest concentration of ages between 70 and 74. Two of the subjects were interviewed in Jewish community centers in Providence; five were interviewed in their homes; eleven interviews took place at the Center in Long Island; and two were conducted at Queensborough Community College.
The environment in which the interviews were conducted did not seem to matter as much as the relationships between the participants and myself. I found that because I did so many interviews in such a short time period, those that came at the end received a little less of my patience, a little less of my “objectivity,” and a little less of my whole-hearted emotional investment. Although I threw most of my energies at that point into hiding these perceived deficits, I have no doubt that the data has been influenced, if only slightly, by my disposition in each interview.
Soon after conducting the fifth interview, I began to feel emotionally overwhelmed, as if I had been “filled up” by the vast amount of information that was coming in but not going back out. Because I was feeling so disturbed by the experience, I avoided writing “field” notes or a journal about either the interviewing process or the subjects themselves. As a result, I never really provided myself with an outlet through which to separate myself from the thoughts and feelings and reactions that were swirling relentlessly in my mind. I had no concept of the damage I was doing to myself, and no real understanding of what was happening to me. From the first night, I began to have Holocaust-related dreams. I remembered very little of them (which is unusual for me), but consistently woke up unsettled, nauseous, and unhappy. I went back home after that week shaken and emotionally drained.
I wanted nothing more than to put it all out of my head, think mindless, meaningless things, and try to heal and fortify myself enough to go through it all again. I found, however, that this was not possible. I can see now that it will never really be possible to separate myself from what I have heard and done through this experience. Soon after arriving home from that first week of interviews, I began to notice that my emotional responses to daily life were out of control. Little things were having huge effects on me, I was snapping at my roommate, I felt listless and anxious at the same time. I was still having vague and disturbing dreams about the Holocaust at least two times a night, and was also sleeping extremely restlessly. I was beginning to dread more interviews. The thought of quitting the interviewing phase, or even not doing a thesis, however, never entered into my mind. I believe I felt that I was going through “a rough patch,” and that it would pass.
I planned to take two weeks off and then go back to New York for another whirlwind interviewing frenzy. I knew it was taking its toll on me, but my funding was running out and the thought of cleaning out my bank account just to conduct one interview a day and sit around for the rest of it was a luxury in which I simply couldn’t indulge. At that point, I needed to conduct seven new interviews and finish interviewing three of the subjects whose first sessions had proved too short. I was feeling overwhelmed both by the emotionality of the experience and by the sheer work that was piling up before my eyes. As much as I wanted to spend some time “unwinding,” some special circumstances surrounding one of the proposed subjects required that I return almost immediately to Long Island. So less than a week later, I booked the same motel room, packed my bags once again, and headed back to New York. Because I had spent the entire time at home contacting survivors and finalizing the scheduling and planning another trip, I felt like I had not had a moment’s peace. Whereas on the first trip down, I had felt confident (for the most part) that I would be able to “get through,” this time I was not nearly as secure.
I managed to stay on the same type of schedule for the first few days of the second trip, but I tried to lighten the load as best I could. I attempted to combine a “finish-up” interview with a full one on those days, so that I would only have to take in one new story a day. I had found, from the beginning, that listening to the participants’ answers to my questions was a drastically different experience than listening to their Holocaust stories. In fact, I found the former rather uplifting and inspiring, as most of the interviewees had surprisingly positive outlooks on their lives and experiences. Nonetheless, this second trip was much more difficult for me in a variety of ways.
First, more of the interviews were conducted away from the Center and required more driving and preparation on my part. Second, I was already so drained from the first trip that it was difficult to enjoy any part of the interviewing after that. Although there were substantial periods of time during the initial set of interviews that I had felt a great deal of satisfaction and genuine pleasure at what I was learning and the relationships I was building, I definitely reached a point during the second trip at which I just wanted to be done. Finally, the scheduling was not as well-planned this time around, so I was left with more free time. While this was positive in that I was not as tired or as harried, it also created a lot more stress surrounding the finances of the trip and my growing desire to finish this phase of the project.
This extra time had one rather major impact on my psychological health and my perception of the project, however. Because I had three consecutive days during which I had only been able to schedule one interview, I decided to spend these afternoons at the movies in an attempt to “chill out” a little. I was aware that my psychic energy had been drained significantly, and I thus had a vague understanding that I should stick to “happy-go-lucky” types of films with little emotional content in order not to overwhelm my already-frazzled nerves. This seemed to work well in the beginning, as watching anything on a screen tends to calm me and keep me from thinking too much. Every time I returned to the theater, however, I was drawn toward “The Blair Witch Project.” There had been tremendous media hype about the film all summer, and I had been fascinated by it since before I had even begun the interviewing. Finally, on my last day at the theater, I decided to just peek in about five minutes after the movie had begun.
Needless to say, the movie absolutely terrified me. Set in a forest, it chronicled the experience of three young college students who had attempted to make a film documentary on a legend surrounding a supposed witch, ended up getting lost in the woods, and were subsequently terrorized and killed, apparently by the witch. It was the most primal and visceral display of fear I have ever seen, and the vision of these three young adults being utterly trapped and hunted just haunted me. I was glued to my chair even as I began to feel sick to my stomach, riveted to the screen even as I knew it was going to get to me.
I could not quite put my finger on what I was most afraid of—the possibility of a gory ending? Death? Horror? I had never had an experience like this; I had always loved suspenseful and scary movies, and had always had a particular interest in serial killers. So I was no stranger to fear and gore and blood and guts, and it had never concerned me in the slightest before this. At one point I wanted to leave, but I was more afraid of how I would feel if I did not get the “closure” of knowing how the story ended than if I did. Seeing the movie alone didn’t help. Buying into the marketing ploy and believing it was a true story made things worse. I left the theater shaken and anxious.
That night, I reached what I can only call my first epiphany about my project, which further precipitated Shift #2. When I arrived back at my motel room and began to prepare to go to bed (as I had an early interview scheduled for the following morning), I realized that I was trembling. The movie was simply not releasing its hold on me. I was thoroughly afraid of the images swirling around in my head, and I knew that getting into bed, lying down, and being totally alone with my thoughts would cause me greater anxiety. Every noise visibly startled me, and every little movement in my peripheral vision (as in the mirrors placed throughout the room) made my heart start to race. Complete darkness terrified me, and closing my eyes was worse. As soon I did so, I would see scenes from the movie in living color, as if the film reel was playing on the backs of my lowered eyelids. I was in a state of what psychologists would call “hyper-arousal,” which translated for me into a total inability to sleep, calm myself down, or stop thinking about what was frightening me so desperately.
I ended up staying awake the entire night, only drifting off for twenty minutes or so once the sun began to come up. I had to keep the television on all night, and I kept most of the lights on as well. My heart pounded constantly, and my body never relaxed. I was exhausted and terrified. When I came back to the motel after that morning’s interview, I was hit by what I can see now as my first real brush with the reality of my project and of the lived experience of my participants. Here I was, asking these people about their post-traumatic stress symptoms: “how often do you have night sweats? Intrusions of memory? Nightmares? Anxiety?” And I was dutifully jotting down their answers, using them to understand the “resilience” of the sufferers, never even thinking about what these symptoms might mean to these people in their daily lives. I’ll never forget a moment when one of my subjects told me he has a recurring nightmare in which he sees himself on a death march on which he had actually been, but walking next to (and unable to save) his present-day children. “How awful,” I thought, but I never really understood what that must be like for him.
Although I cannot blame the movie alone and must acknowledge the role that was played by the daily interviews, the emotional content of what I was hearing, and my general exhaustion across faculties, I suffered the effects of those two and a half weeks for over a month after returning to Providence. My roommate was away, so it was the first time I had lived alone in my apartment. I found the silence deafening, and every creak of the floor and every car driving by at night made me jump. I would lay in bed for hours every night, with my eyes wide open and my body stiff with anxiety. It was no less intense than that first night after seeing the movie. Closing my eyes would bring back the images with full force and vividness, and when I was finally able to get to sleep, I would just dream about either the movie or the Holocaust. I would wake up with the same images in my head that had been there when I had fallen asleep, and I felt as if I had not had a moment’s peace the entire night. I could remember every nightmare, and I began each day with the same anxiety I had had the night before. I will never forget the constant feeling I had that someone was in my apartment; every noise made me jump out of bed and peer out into the living room. For some reason, I was utterly convinced, every time, that I would see a man standing there.
At that point, I think it was the sense of violation that was affecting me the most. I felt that the thoughts were violating my mind, and I was sure that a man would violate my home in a similar manner. The fact that my car was broken into a few weeks later did not help matters at all. Needless to say, it was a difficult month for me. I know now that what I was experiencing was “secondary trauma,” or “vicarious traumatization.” Often an affliction of individuals who work with traumatized populations, such as Red Cross workers or clinicians who deal with trauma in their patients, this syndrome has symptoms similar to post-traumatic stress disorder.
Hyper-arousal, thought intrusions, difficulties sleeping, fear of being further traumatized—all of these were hallmarks of what I was suffering. I had no idea that this experience would affect me in this manner, and I still do not know exactly what precipitated such a strong reaction. Nevertheless, I still see signs of the lasting effects. I still look behind me at least every few minutes when I am walking outside, even in broad daylight. I still cannot watch scary movies, even some that I have seen countless times before. I switch the channel even when I hear a frightening voice or see a preview of what I think might be a horror movie. I still have nightmares, and I still have trouble sleeping from time to time.
Despite all of this, though, I am eternally grateful for the circumstances that conspired to have me watch that particular movie at that particular place and time in my life. My experience that night, and on successive nights, gave me a tiny glimpse into the real, lived experience of the survivors I interviewed, and most likely and to some degree, survivors everywhere. I understood what it is like to be afraid to close my eyes, afraid to go to sleep. I knew the feeling of not trusting my mind, of feeling betrayed by it and by the thoughts that entered me without my permission or control. I felt the anxiety when my body would not behave the way I wanted it to, and I felt the frustration at and exhaustion from not being able to “get away” from the emotions overwhelming me. I finally truly understood these feelings, and I found that this knowledge made its way into my interviews and my analysis of my subjects. At the time, it was actually more anxiety-provoking to be so much more emotionally connected to the survivors. But I have come to realize that it was at this moment in my life, and just for a moment, that I was able to become an “insider.” Although I was not able to articulate it then, and although the participants may not have even known it, this was the first time I felt I could truly empathize with them.
Shift #2, which began to dawn on me from that first night after the movie, was the growing realization that my conceptualization of the thesis at the time was not giving adequate voice to the lived experience of these individuals. Because I had now been able to achieve just that tiny piece of understanding of this experience, and because it had made such a tremendous impact on me, I felt sure that it needed more of a place in the written product. I began to feel that the thesis I had carved out was focused too much on psychological “expectations” and that resilience as a concept may not have been the best lens through which to view these people. I also began to have increasing doubts about the implications of using resilience as this lens at all. It seemed to require that I judge my subjects on some “objective” scale of adaptive functioning, and place them in opposition to other trauma survivors in the process. After having viewed my experience “through their eyes” for just one night, I made the unequivocal decision that I was unwilling to place psychological judgment on them (at least, not my own). I thus began to think about how I could present my subjects’ experiences without having to pigeonhole them into categories that would not reflect the complexities of their lives and functioning capacities.
The final segment of interviewing had been difficult and exhausting on multiple levels, above and beyond the psychological effects. I had run out of potential subjects at the Center after my seventeenth interview, which had thrown me into a panic and forced me to scramble around, looking for survivors through any avenue I could find. I was absolutely hell-bent on finishing the interviewing that week, as I didn’t have enough money or energy to go back to Long Island for a third session. I still do not know what kept me to the commitment to twenty subjects, except that bizarre little voice in the back of my head telling me that anything under twenty was not “methodologically sound.”
So I trudged on, getting the name of my eighteenth subject from Ray and finding my last two participants through the Holocaust Resource Center and Archives at Queensborough Community College. Needless to say, I had been ready to go home a long time before these last interviews. I also did a second interview with Ray, as my final interview. Because our first interview had been conducted before I had a standardized list of questions, and because it had been rushed, I decided to re-interview him after I had a clearer picture of what I was looking for and what I was interested in. I actually found it fascinating to have Ray as both my first and last subject.
So after all of this, and in the midst of my secondary trauma symptoms, I began to transcribe the seventy-plus hours of interviews I had amassed. I soon found that the task was becoming increasingly difficult for me. My concentration was ebbing, I was still basically an “open wound” from the interviewing process, and my desire to listen to each story a second time was not high. I finally came to the conclusion that, because of the array of background issues I was bringing into the process, the transcribing was probably much more difficult and time-consuming for me than it would be for anyone else. So I decided to pay a few individuals to transcribe for me, and I planned to check their work afterwards.
I did transcribe four full interviews myself, and I found that the process was extremely valuable to my vision of the project. In fact, the transcribing and subsequent involved analysis of the transcripts led to a series of shifts. Early on, as I mentioned above, I had begun to have doubts about the usefulness of the concept of resilience for describing these people. As I delved further into the transcripts, and began to understand the multi-faceted nature of the participants’ experiences, my doubts were confirmed.
As Shift #3 began to take form, I made a firm decision to move away from the current psychological conceptions of resilience and toward an emphasis on contextual adaptation. I realized that obsessively categorizing these individuals and judging them on reductive scales and measures would minimize their experiences and devalue their voices. So I began to look for a way to honor their contributions to the project and allow them a place in it, while still allowing for some analysis of their experiences.
It was around this time that I began to have more involved meetings with my three advisors—two psychologists and a historian—and with another professor who is a sociologist by trade. Because each of them comes from different backgrounds and schools of thought, they were able to offer very different perspectives to the project, which was helpful on a number of levels. However, one of the most difficult parts of this process for me has been attempting to integrate the often highly disparate views of my advisors. Bridging the gap between psychology—with its tendency toward a rigid, quantitative approach—and sociology—with its tendency toward constructionism and relativism—has been especially challenging. I was thus faced with one advisor, as well as a number of other mentors outside of Brown, encouraging me to find a way to “measure resilience” in my subjects, while another advisor was adamantly trying to convince me to throw the entire concept out.
Because my thesis is based in an interdisciplinary concentration, I felt an obligation to attempt to integrate these two approaches and to forge some connection between the often totally opposing opinions I was receiving. I also felt equally uncomfortable with both sides of the extreme. On one end, as I had realized already, I was not willing to act as a supposedly objective judge of what the psychological community has deemed as resilience or non-resilience in my interviewees; I felt this could be viewed as reductive and disrespectful. On the other end, I was just as displeased with the idea of turning my back on over three years of research and jumping into an area of study with which I was unfamiliar and about which I had just begun learning.
For months, I was unable to figure out how to bridge this gap, so I finally—and somewhat reluctantly—made Shift #4, turning my thesis into an investigation of the “disrupted narratives” of these survivors and disregarding the concept of resilience altogether. I began to feel increasingly ambivalent about this decision. I was frustrated that my thesis had been altered so drastically that it no longer represented the culmination of what would have been three years of intense study and research on a topic that was important to me. While I felt confident that looking at the lived experiences and constructed narratives of these survivors was, by far, the most insightful and respectful way to analyze them, I was unsure about the precise mechanisms of analysis.
I was in limbo; I had been pushed out of my “comfort area” and thrust into a body of research that was interesting but entirely new to me. I entered a period of time in the project that can only be described as an utter standstill. I was paralyzed by the prospect of having to throw out nearly one hundred pages that I had already written and embark on a journey of uncharted territory (for me). I began to feel as if the thesis had, somewhere along the way, been taken out of my hands. I wasn’t sure where it was at that point, but I knew that I had lost control of it.
Then, roughly seven months after I had conducted my first full interview and slightly over two months before the thesis was due to be submitted, I found out that one of my participants had died. Although I had grown fond of, and become attached to, all of the subjects in one way or another, this man had had a particularly powerful impact on me. Henry had stood out in my mind for a number of reasons. For one, the majority of the survivors who had spent time in camps had tended to be very sparing with the details they gave about their day-to-day experiences. The typical response was something like, “And then I went to Auschwitz, and you know what happened there, so I won’t bore you with the details.”
Henry, whether it was because his short-term memory was not as flawless as it had been before or whether he simply wanted to tell it all, did indeed tell me everything that seemed to enter his mind. In what was clearly my longest interview of the twenty—clocking in at over seven hours in two sessions—Henry presented a great number of very detailed and vivid stories about his daily experiences in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. Because of his willingness to tell these stories, coupled with the length and scope of his entire narrative, I felt from the beginning that I had a clearer and more complete picture of Henry than I had of the others.
Henry also struck me as unusually positive and optimistic in the face of unusually difficult circumstances. I should preface this by noting that this is not a statement about the other nineteen participants, and this is not a statement about the singularity of the death camp experience. This is simply a statement about my own emotional reactions to our interview. From the very beginning, Henry had brought up some thorny issues for me. When I had first spoken to him on the phone and approached him about doing an interview, he had immediately agreed, with the stipulation that we schedule it around his chemotherapy sessions. Henry had been diagnosed with lung cancer within the year.
At that point, I had grave misgivings about interviewing someone who I had perceived at the time as a dying man. I was concerned that I would not have the emotional or psychological faculties to handle the interview, and I was concerned that he would not have the physical ability to sit through so many hours of talking. I also had vague doubts about his motives for wanting to be interviewed at such a late, and precarious, stage of his life. I didn’t think I was ready or emotionally able to listen to any “confessions.” In truth, I really agonized over this decision. I wondered whether it was fair to ask Henry to pour out his life story at this particular juncture, and whether it was right to ask him to relive his Holocaust experiences while he was going through an entirely new trauma.
But Henry assured me that he was willing and able to talk. I went against my gut instinct and received a tremendous gift in the time that we spent together. I will never forget one moment we shared while he was describing the living conditions in the barracks at Theresienstadt, retelling an anecdote from his published memoirs that I had read the night before. This particular passage had brought tears to my eyes—something that had truly shocked me, as I had not been moved to tears since visiting Auschwitz in 1994. And as he began to tell this story, I braced myself for a potentially emotional and difficult moment. But as I watched him closely, I noticed his eyes beginning to twinkle, his mouth uncontrollably contorting into a grin. He began to chuckle as he spoke about the floor of the barracks becoming submerged in diarrhea and vomit every night, the groans and gurgles and flatulence as the prisoners’ stomachs would try in vain to digest the watery, rancid “soup” they were rationed.
He had to suspend his narrative twice because of the giggles that he could not, and did not want to suppress. I did not know what to do. Should I join in and laugh, although I had no idea what he was laughing about and was near tears myself? Should I sit politely now but grill him afterwards about defense mechanisms and denial? And then I realized that it was funny. It was tragic, and pathetic, and unimaginable—but it was also absurdly amusing, and undeniably human. I laughed; we laughed together. I saw, firsthand, how Henry must have coped with the years he spent in persecution and incarceration. And I saw and understood how he coped every day up until the one on which he died. His hair was sparse, and his constant coughing kept him so exhausted that he was unable to talk for very long, and he was, at the time, not expecting to live for more than a year. But every time I called and asked how he was, he would tell me, “Wonderful, considering!”
Needless to say, Henry’s death affected me profoundly. I went through another period of writing paralysis, which had already been exacerbated by my growing doubts that I was being pushed to write something that I was not capable of or invested in writing. I spent a week or so attempting to push his death out of my consciousness, telling myself that I did not have time, that I would “deal with it later.” It kept coming back. Every time I sat down to write, I got a gnawing feeling that something was not working (besides myself).
It was around this time that Henry posthumously caused and created the most personally fulfilling shift in my thesis. Shift #5 came when I realized two things. First, I decided that I needed to write my thesis about something that was meaningful and that the thesis itself, as an end result, needed to be significant to me. Second, I recognized that Henry’s voice was meaningful to me, and that it (along with the voices of the nineteen others) had gotten so lost in the prior conceptualizations of the project that the thesis had lost its power and value for me. I realized that my paralysis had come from my declining investment in the project, and this deterioration had been caused by my sense of loss of control over its direction. I had always wanted the thesis to empower the subjects, to be a vehicle for their voices. It was only after I lost one of these voices that I realized I had lost sight of this goal.
So I marched into the offices of my advisors, one after another, and announced that I was “taking my thesis back!” It wasn’t that any of them had taken it away from me; it was that I had allowed it to get out of my hands somehow, at some point. I decided that the only way to salvage the meaning that I needed to derive from the entire process was to allow Henry’s impact on me to show through, and to allow my emotions, at least in part, to drive my vision for the thesis. I resolved to fit resilience back into the foundation of the project, but to allow the concept to be shaped and changed by the narratives of the subjects. I wanted to discuss their inherent strengths and weaknesses, but I also wanted to honor the voices of their stories and of their lives in a judgment-free context. The final decision, which characterized Shift #6, regarded how to treat the words of the twenty participants, and this arose when I realized that there was no way to do full justice to each of them in an undergraduate thesis.
In light of my emotional connections to them all and my increasing need to be respectful of them, I decided to choose two individuals on which to focus. I believe Ruth and Henry illustrate the two extremes of a continuum that was exhibited in living color in all twenty participants. I find it more meaningful, and more considerate, to present in-depth and multi-faceted portraits of two of them than to give incomplete and simplified glimpses of all of them.
Initially, I had attempted a “grounded theory” type of approach, which involved collecting and coding data across a broad collection of themes. I quickly realized the inadequacies of the method. Grouping mere quotes together to illustrate a point is certainly a useful method for building a theory, but its effectiveness in this realm depends on its ability to decontextualize the data. The only way to use this method is to take the words of the respondents out of the sequence of their overall narrative and out of their context, in order to categorize them into the larger framework of the theory. I was not willing to do this. The life narratives of Holocaust survivors are especially context-dependent, and I felt that this method depersonalized and disembodied the voices of my subjects in a manner that was unacceptable to me. I thus found that the case study approach, and the methods of narrative analysis within this approach, was the only way to bring forth the power and meaning of the survivors’ voices and words in their wholeness.
Evaluation
and Meaning of the Process
In the end, I have found that this experience was both positive and negative, both exhilarating and exhausting, both insurmountably difficult to handle and more life-affirming than anything I’ve ever done. I now possess the tapes and the memories of over twenty interviews that have never been conducted before me and will never be conducted after me (and in a way, could never have been conducted without me). I hold a piece of history, and I have made a small but indelible mark on it. I have snuck in under the wire, I have been able to take advantage of a narrow but vital window of opportunity during which these survivors were still alive. I have made twenty friends, and I only hope that I have impacted their lives as they have impacted mine. It was never easy, but I have never regretted a moment of any of it.
While I questioned all of my subjects as to what message they believe is the most important for students today to learn, one particular response made by one particular participant has continued to stick with me. Stan told me that when he speaks publicly about his experiences, he always tells his audiences: “In twenty or thirty years, the Holocaust will be just another paragraph in the history books. You are the last generation that will be able to see me and hear my story. So listen carefully, because you must listen for all the generations that come after you, and because your memory of my story will soon be all that is left.” I do believe this has been the most life-altering, most rewarding, and most enlightening process in which I have ever been involved. I also hope that this thesis will continue to stand as a testament to all of the memories and all of the stories that these individuals so inspiringly gave to me.