CHAPTER THREE

RESILIENCE AND HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS:

THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTEXT

It should now be clear that resilience as a general concept eludes precise definition and a uniform operational approach of any kind. I will argue here that it is not by coincidence that this phenomenon does not lend itself to a general definition; it is by its very nature that resilience not only cannot, but should not, be defined in generalized terms. Resilience, whether it is conceptualized as a static attribute or a process or a continuum or a bounded category, does not, and cannot, exist without a context. The term “resilience” is, in many ways, useless without an acknowledgment of the trauma in which it is being studied. As I argued in the previous chapter, one simply cannot compare what might be construed as resilience in a rape victim to a supposedly similar set of characteristics or behaviors in a war veteran. Indeed, what may be resilient for one may not be for the other; what is adaptive in one situation could be maladaptive in another. Thus, “resilience in rape victims” and “resilience in war veterans” cannot be compared and certainly cannot be combined into one general category. Thus, I assert, there is no universal “resilience.” There is only resilience in context, such as “resilience in rape victims,” “resilience in war veterans,” “resilience in adult children of alcoholics,” “resilience in survivors of the Holocaust.”

Perhaps the most common, and most general, definition of resilience—and one that shows the essential problem with the concept most clearly—is “the ability to function psychologically at a level far greater than expected given a person’s earlier developmental experiences.”[1] This conception shows the utter impossibility of operationalizing a general view of resilience. Indeed, what can be “expected” of, say, a woman who spent her first fifteen years being severely physically and sexually abused by multiple members of her nuclear family? What can we “expect” from a man who was detained in a prisoner of war camp for twenty years? Thirty years? Forty? This generalized statement seems to rest on an unwritten assumption that someone, somewhere, knows what can and should be expected of each individual person, given that the victim has experienced a particular trauma in a particular environment. Further, and far more dangerous, is the assumption that this person not only has the ability to arrive at such a conclusion, but is also accurate in the expectations he or she derives.

Beardslee has asserted that the fundamental problem underlying the idea of resilience is that “the researcher or clinician must define health or adaptation as a prerequisite to examining it and there is no agreement on a definition.”[2] Indeed, the use of the generalized concept of resilience is predicated on the belief that some “we” out there knows how an individual should be behaving at a given point. Even if “we” look at resilient “processes,” an individual is still being appraised as to how he is behaving and whether or not he is dealing with his trauma adaptively or maladaptively, given standards that have been created out of context and with no respect to individual difference. This presents an unfortunate image of the semi-silent, semi-objective, seemingly omniscient third party who sits back and decides whether a given individual is “doing well” or not. The fact that in recent years it has been stressed that this decision should be made “in context” is simply not enough.

An Illustration of the Necessity of Context

Rape as a trauma and rape victims as survivors can be discussed to illuminate this problematic concept. Much research has been done over the years on the psychology of rape victims—it is a far too common occurrence with far too many victims. Nonetheless, because of this research, a great deal of information has now been gathered regarding the survival techniques, coping processes, and psychopathological issues that tend to exhibit themselves in any given survivor of rape. Judith Herman describes an eerily meticulous picture of the “average” rape victim:

Initially, intrusive reliving of the traumatic event predominates, and the victim remains in a highly agitated state, on the alert for new threats. Intrusive symptoms emerge most prominently in the first few days or weeks following the traumatic event, abate to some degree within three to six months, and then attenuate slowly over time. For example, in a large-scale community study of crime victims, rape survivors generally reported that their most severe intrusive symptoms diminished after three to six months, but they were still fearful and anxious one year following the rape.[3]

Because of the sheer volume of subjects available for study in this domain, psychologists have developed an extremely precise set of expectations regarding the coping abilities and symptomatology of rape victims. These can be viewed as “statutes of limitations” in a sense; they revolve around the general theory that there is a distinct period of time in which certain behaviors are “acceptable” for a rape victim. The accompanying assumption is that there is a cut-off point beyond which the same behaviors become increasingly maladaptive and indicative of potential psychopathology. Thus, in Herman’s discussion above, having intrusive memories of the trauma and even being “highly” agitated is viewed as predictable, and probable, initially. It is expected, however, that these most intense symptoms will subside after a relatively short period of time.

The implicit message here is that if symptoms such as these do not diminish after a year, at most, then there is something wrong. It is “acceptable” for a rape victim to still feel “fearful and anxious” after a year, but it is unacceptable for him or her to be “overly” agitated or have intrusive thoughts at this point. Why is one set of symptoms “normal” and another set psychopathological? Herman might contend that it is because that is what everyone else looks like. If a large-scale study shows that these are the types of behaviors the “average” rape victim exhibits, then these are the standards to which every rape victim is held. There is little research done on, or attention paid to, differences in context such as the age of the victim, the age of the perpetrator, the relation of the perpetrator to the victim, the social support system accessible to the victim, and other crucial aspects of the trauma and the circumstances surrounding it.

Although I believe that this conceptualization leaves a lot to be desired, it must be acknowledged that it has some value in some domains. It does not assume that traumatic symptomatology is universal. Similarly, it allows for resilience to be contextualized (within traumas, but not within individuals) and relativized. Because the research on rape victims has generated more specific information regarding the trauma itself and the coping processes involved, it has led to the realization that rape is a unique trauma (as is any other trauma) and thus, deserves its own context and its own scale. This has made possible a passage such as the one above, in which Herman is delineating the expectations for a rape victim, not a trauma victim.

Indeed, the author is clearly differentiating the effects of one particular trauma from the effects of trauma in general. She also acknowledges the difference between a trauma victim and an individual who has not experienced any trauma. Thus, it is not assumed that a rape victim should not have any intrusive memories or should be devoid of all agitation at all points in time. This type of framework has indirectly led to an acknowledgment that different traumas lead to different effects and cause different individuals to behave in different ways. Thus, one must admit that the present viewpoint does have significant value: it recognizes the power of context.

However, the assumption that there can be any logical expectations of what any given trauma survivor should experience and when he or she should experience it is over-simplified, at best. There is no formula for the variables “trauma” and “recovery.” The most one can do is take note of what has occurred in the past or what generally tends to occur. To assume from this information that one can know definitively what to expect in the future, or what should occur, however, is just too rash. Perhaps ninety percent of rape victims in this particular study did indeed report symptom abatement after six months, but does that require that all rape victims follow similar patterns? Or must they only fill this requirement to be considered “normal” or “healthy”? It is far too reductive to set a general standard of coping for all survivors of a given trauma, regardless of physical, social, and emotional context.

Even if the psychological community agreed that this framework was useful, one must remember that there is a great deal of variability as far as the amount of research that has been conducted on specific traumas. There is certainly more information regarding children from multiple-risk families than there is on, say, individuals who have been mugged. When there have been no large-scale, longitudinal studies on people who have experienced a mugging, who is to say what psychologists can expect of them? Is it “acceptable” to have intrusive memories of a mugging after six months, or a year?

Or perhaps the process of deriving appropriate psychological “expectations” of this type of survivor might involve placing this particular trauma on a scale of traumas, and seeing where it falls in relation to traumas on which more research has been done. In this case, would the expectations of an individual who has been mugged fall somewhere between what to expect of a person who has been sexually harassed and what to expect of a rape victim? As one can see, the concept of psychological “expectations” such as these is simply not useful or helpful, and is dangerously reductive in its continual attempt to categorize and thus, minimize lived experience.

The Psychology of Holocaust Survivors

In the context of the Holocaust, a generalized definition of resilience becomes even more problematic. What might be considered definite signs of maladaptation—even psychopathology—in nearly all other types of trauma survivors, often cannot be assumed to be so in Holocaust survivors. Again, I am arguing that they must be analyzed on their own scale, in their own context, and with an eye to their own unique traumas. Just as it is nearly impossible to place a rape victim on the same scale as a war veteran, Holocaust survivors require their own dimensions as well.

I am not suggesting that the Holocaust is specifically unique as a trauma or historical event or otherwise; that is a political debate that goes far beyond the scope of what is being discussed here. What I am suggesting is that all traumas are unique in and of themselves and cannot be compared to other traumas. Indeed, not only do Holocaust survivors as a group need to be placed away from survivors of other traumas, Holocaust survivors as individuals could benefit from their own scales as well. Aaron Hass places special emphasis on this variety of Holocaust experiences, noting, “Survivors of the Holocaust, particularly Jewish survivors, are often seen as a unitary phenomenon by both mental health professionals and lay-persons. And yet the experiences of individual Jews during World War II varied markedly.”[4]

Indeed, as Hass writes, some individuals survived incarceration in concentration and death camps, but others spent their time in hiding, in ghettos, as slave laborers in work camps, trying to pass as non-Jews, or as members of partisan groups in the forests. Some even managed to escape Nazi Europe before the circumstances escalated. In the face of these disparate experiences, even the application of the term “Holocaust survivor” to all of these cases has been the source of much debate. Nonetheless, it is this very diversity that presents unique concerns when attempting to understand the “resilience” of a “Holocaust survivor.” Hass asserts, “Survivors were not only differentially affected by the diverse circumstances into which they were forced, but by the details of those circumstances.”[5] Thus, how can the objective “judge” of resilience apply this concept to such a “differentially affected” group of individuals with any real accuracy or usefulness?

There is a harsh dichotomy of opinions on the psychology of Holocaust survivors, one side presented by the lay community and one side presented by the psychological and clinical community. Lawrence Langer argues that the general public has a tendency to idealize and shape Holocaust testimonies into stories of heroism and the strength of the “human spirit.” There is a need to interpret these often-tragic tales as narratives of transcendence and growth through suffering. He writes, “I was already suspicious of commentaries and memoirs that celebrated the resourceful human spirit in the face of the Holocaust disaster. As I continued to watch [the videotaped testimonies], I felt that my suspicions were confirmed. A heritage of heroism encountered the awful facts of this particular catastrophe and found that the only honest judgment was to declare the confrontation ‘no combat.’ ”[6] Langer goes further to assert that the lay audience is incapable of hearing these testimonies as they are, and cannot avoid every attempt to imbue them with qualities of resourcefulness and heroic survivorship.

Shamai Davidson, in his edited work Holding on to Humanity, reiterates this perspective, offering a possible explanation:

In our culture, people are uncomfortable in the presence of survivors of man-made disasters. In the personal encounter with survivors, images arise of victimization and confrontation with death, humiliation and horror, helplessness, abandonment and loss, and the dreadfulness and misery of the struggle to survive in extremity. These images arouse feelings of anger, anxiety, shame, guilt, and blame in us, emotions that we prefer to avoid, although we also want to know what really happened.[7]

Indeed, there seems to be a fundamental and deeply driven need for us to perceive Holocaust survivors as heroes, fighters, and possessors of a powerful human spirit. We simply cannot face the alternative. Davidson goes further to contend that the difficulties inherent in interactions between American Jews and survivors after the Holocaust caused a highly fragmented social attitude toward survivors. He writes, “Referring to survivors as heroes (ghetto or concentration camp fighters or partisans), or to the dead as holy [martyrs] represents their glorification by ‘splitting off’ the shameful, vulnerable, and helpless aspects of the Holocaust experience.”[8] Thus, he argues, there was, and generally still is, no room in the public’s view of survivors for the “tragedy story.” Between the poles of heroic survivors and holy martyrs, the “average” Holocaust survivor becomes neglected, avoided, and representative of weakness and pain.

This is reiterated by the other side of the coin, the perspective on Holocaust survivors taken by the psychological community. For a substantial period of time after the Holocaust, survivors were subtly encouraged not to tell their stories; especially, as noted above, if they did not involve heroism or transcendence tales. Davidson contends that when survivors persisted and talked about their experiences against the social rules of the time, both the content and the emotionality of their stories were “converted into psychiatric symptoms to be dealt with by an expert.”[9] Thus, there was a clear dichotomy between the need to see these individuals either as heroes or as psychopathological. The “heroes” supposedly emerged unscathed from, or even more invincible because of, their horrifying experiences. The others absorbed all the communal guilt and discomfort at their presence, were blamed for their lack of hardiness and perceived weakness both during the Holocaust and afterwards, and relegated to the clinician’s office to be “treated” for their problems.

In 1964, the psychiatrist William Niederland asserted that many Holocaust survivors were suffering from a “survivor syndrome.”[10] The cluster of symptoms under this diagnosis included depression, withdrawal, high levels of anxiety, social seclusion, and severe apathy, as well as “a hostile and mistrustful attitude toward the world” and “a profound alteration of personal identity.”[11] The syndrome also encompassed the characteristic symptomatology of what is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder, such as hyper-arousal, sleep disturbances, and intrusions of thoughts related to the trauma. It was further theorized by Leo Eitinger, another psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, that these individuals suffered from “deep changes in personality, a mental disability which affects every side of the personality’s psychic life, both the intellectual functions, and especially, emotional life and the life of the will… in short, the inability to live in a normal way.”[12]

Davidson defines the “long-term psychological effects of massive psychological trauma in the Holocaust” as “an overwhelming of defenses that leads to impairment of the regenerative capacity of the psyche, which results in permanent psychological effects.” He delineates the clinical manifestations of these effects as follows: 1) Traumatogenic Anxiety Syndrome, a “reexperiencing of traumatic events triggered by memory associations;” 2) anxiety phenomena; 3) psychosomatic symptomatology; 4) persecutory experiences and fears; 5) “Prolonged-Interminable Mourning Syndrome,” which is characterized by a “loss and suppression of mourning for massive losses of loved ones and community” and includes “depression and preoccupation,” “grief over life and death,” “guilt at survival (active and passive),” and an “inability to enjoy pleasure;” 6) difficulty creating new relationships, characterized by a fear of separation and “psychic numbing,” which often carries with it a lack of or bleak affect and denial; 7) “blocking of aggression,” which includes “suppressed rage, irritability and free-floating rage, an inability to deal with aggression in one’s family;” 8) “Ontological insecurity: Insecurity resulting from a massive constellation of uprooting, loss of community, dehumanization, undermining of basic trust and identity in the face of relentless persecution, and in many cases even a further (‘double’) uprooting after the Holocaust;” and 9) “Difficulties in aging: Aging in itself is further traumatic for the survivor: the shift from doing to thinking and from preoccupation with everyday events and long-range planning to reviewing and thinking over one’s life make old age specifically more difficult for survivors if they haven’t come to terms with the past.”[13]

All of these descriptions of survivors carried with them the implicit supposition of chronic and permanent damage. Once these reports became known, further assumptions about the scope and scale of the effects of surviving the Holocaust were made. Additional publications made wide, sweeping statements about the incapacities of survivors, summarized in the following statement:

Survivors…would forever have difficulty establishing close relationships. They had lost a basic trust in people because of their own persecution and because they had witnessed the physical and mental deterioration of their parents. Unconsciously, they maintained a fierce anger because their parents had been unable to protect them from such devastation. Furthermore, it was hypothesized, survivors had difficulty ‘reinvesting in life’ and were deeply ambivalent about founding new families.”[14]

There was also a great deal of attention paid to the “pervasive” sense of guilt and shame that was theorized to be an eternal effect of surviving the Holocaust. Many psychoanalysts wrote about a “perpetual need to atone for cowardice or other ‘failures,’ ” a shame that can be both individual and collective.[15] The term “survivor guilt” became a popular one, coined to refer to the feelings of many survivors that they should have died, or that they did not deserve to survive when so many others died. Clearly, the picture of Holocaust survivors initially presented by psychological and psychiatric clinicians was of shattered, tortured souls, perpetually burdened and devastated by the trauma they endured.

Only very recently has it been proposed that these early hypotheses about Holocaust survivors may have been problematic. Hass notes that they “presented a very skewed picture of survivors.” The most fundamental problem is that the majority of these early reports were vast generalizations made on the basis of a very small number of survivors. To compound the methodological limitations, these generalizations began with individuals who were already concerned enough about their health to seek psychiatric or medical help.[16] In reality, very few Holocaust survivors tend to approach psychiatric or psychological professionals, whether they are suffering from symptoms of post-traumatic stress or not.

Perhaps the “most widespread distortions in the composite picture of survivors,” Hass argues, was a byproduct of the fact that “almost all mental health professionals conducting their psychotherapy operated from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, notorious for its emphasis on and assumptions of psychopathology.”[17] Indeed, as I have mentioned previously, the overriding view in psychology even today derives from the deficit model of psychopathology, the assumption that clinicians must look immediately for what is wrong in a client, diagnose the problem, and move on to treatment. The alternative perspective that emphasizes strengths and potential capacities for recovery has only just begun to come into view, and is clearly based on the concept of resilience.

One of the most perplexing facets of these negative perceptions of Holocaust survivors, for me, is that I actually saw very few indications of these seemingly debilitating symptoms in the twenty individuals whom I interviewed. In fact, there was only one participant whom I could even potentially characterize as suffering from the “survivor syndrome.” Hass found similar results in the group of survivors he interviewed, noting that he saw many more reflections of “their significant success at coping with a traumatic past.” He also attests to a clear oversight in the reports of clinicians who have written about the effects of the Holocaust on survivors, contending that they “rarely assess the strengths or the triumphs of survivors over their emotional difficulties. There is little mention of the survivor’s flexibility, assertiveness, and tenacity which have allowed her to adapt to a new life.” Indeed, Hass writes, this over-emphasis on psychopathological symptomatology tends to obscure, and often completely lose, a much-needed focus on the “everyday perceptions, thoughts, and feelings” of survivors, one that could very well evince a markedly different set of effects.[18]

Here, Langer’s theory becomes relevant once again. When Hass argues that we should look at the “strengths” and “triumphs” of survivors, is he simply supporting Langer’s theory that we all have a basic need—perhaps driven by guilt—to create a triumphant and heroic spirit even in individuals who are clearly traumatized? Did I not see pathology in my subjects merely because I did not want to, or could not, see it? Although I cannot deny my fundamental belief in focusing on the positive aspects of survival, I will certainly admit that not all of my subjects looked perfect, by any means. In reality, however, I have found that Langer’s vision of Holocaust survivors is disturbingly dismal. Although I certainly have a less substantial subject pool on which to base my claims, I simply did not see any evidence of his troubling assertion that individuals who lived through the Holocaust are existing only in a state of “life after ‘death’ called survival.”[19]

Perhaps the most frustrating issue in Langer’s argument, though, is that its very nature makes it impossible to challenge. By asserting that we all have a basic desire to view these individuals in a heroic light, “collecting triumphant moments exhibiting the resiliency of the human spirit, the resourceful will, the intrepid mind, the resolve to survive Nazi oppression,”[20] he summarily discounts as naïve any analyses of these individuals that place emphasis on any of these qualities. If we do not focus, or place more emphasis, on the damage that the Holocaust has done, we are simply not presenting the reality, according to Langer.

In reality, Langer only shows here how easy (and even simplistic) it is to adopt a deficit model for Holocaust survivors—really, for all trauma survivors. It is not difficult, and certainly not unprecedented, to discuss how pained they are, and how traumatized they are, and how horrendous their experiences were and are. I certainly do not want to discount any of this, because it is all true to a point and I do not wish to minimize the survivors’ pain. The bottom line, however, is that this is the obvious answer; perhaps an over-obvious one. What Langer brings to the discussion of Holocaust survivors is powerful, in that he clearly understands the tremendous difficulties with which they are faced as a result of their experiences and memories.

But what happens when we look at how these individuals attempt to negotiate their lives alongside, or in spite of, these problems? One clear conclusion is that the clinical methods of analysis that produced such bleak pictures of these survivors may not be adequate to describe and examine such a multi-faceted experience. Davidson argues exactly this:

Many mental health professionals have been driven to study survivors… they make the error of using accepted everyday conceptualizations, models, and terms from medicine, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis, but the Holocaust and its aftermath cannot be reduced to conceptual clinical terminology. Some have been able to contribute important conclusions connected with clinical observations, but many of the studies are limited. After making their contributions, many students of the Holocaust become even more aware of the insurmountable nature of the Holocaust, and some give up the task as the subject retreats in the face of the methodological difficulties involved.[21]

Thus, it appears that “everyday conceptualizations” and standard “clinical terminology” may simply not work in this context. At the time that much of the clinical research cited above was conducted, the Holocaust survivors who were examined represented the first of their kind in terms of the scope of experienced trauma and the pervasive, debilitating effects that they suffered. And yet, clinicians still attempted to fit these survivors into the prevailing model of the time. Clearly, the creation of a new “syndrome” was the only agreeable solution, because the alternative was changing the framework entirely. We have now reached the time, place, and context within which to change this framework. The necessity of this change will be made apparent below.

Testing Decontextualized Resilience on Holocaust Survivors

I have already attempted to make problematic the assumption that there can be an objective measure of resilience across individuals and traumas. Survivors of the Holocaust are perhaps the most powerful example of the inadequacy of these types of general expectations of coping and recovery. We have seen the conclusions that are reached when a deficit model of psychopathology is used. I will now illustrate further how the current decontextualized definitions of resilience appear painfully lacking when applied to Holocaust survivors. As I have discussed before, “general” resilience is most commonly synonymous with a lack of negative effects after a trauma. Indeed, as Grossman notes, “The research literature has generally considered individuals resilient if they do not develop signs of psychopathology or marked distress following disastrous experiences.”[22] This assumption is quite possibly at the root of the clinical perception of Holocaust survivors as decidedly unhealthy and non-resilient.

The essential problem is that a general definition of resilience leads to a general definition of recovery. I would argue, however, that “recovery” from being mugged is different and carries with it different processes than “recovery” from, say, a five-year incarceration as a prisoner of war. Some might even argue that there is no such thing as total recovery or “healing,” but only varying degrees of adaptive negotiation of life events. Judith Herman asserts, nonetheless, “The fundamental stages of recovery are establishing safety, reconstructing the trauma story, and restoring the connection between survivors and their community.”[23] Similarly, Mary Harvey declares:

The recovered survivor is able to negotiate and maintain physical and emotional safety in relationships and views the possibility of intimate connectedness with some degree of optimism. The process may require a complicated renegotiation or an intense and final grieving of significant relationships. It almost always involves a self-directed expansion of the trauma survivor’s social support network.[24]

Harvey goes further to describe the meaning-making process, noting that it is “deeply personal and highly idiosyncratic,” but still endeavoring to illustrate the process for what I would call her vision of the “average recovered survivor.” Some will “discard the sense of a damaged self…embrac[ing] the belief that misfortune endured has yielded new found strength and compassion.” Some tend to “transform their experience into creative pursuit or determined social action,” such as “embracing a survivor mission.” Some, she contends, might even attempt to answer or “find spiritual answers” to the existential questions such as “why?” and “why me?” Regardless of the specific process or development of recovery, Harvey argues, “the recovered survivor will have named and mourned the traumatic past and imbued it somehow with meaning that is both life-affirming and self-affirming.”[25]

A variety of clinicians and researchers in this area also assert that one of the fundamental obstacles to successful recovery is the use of “maladaptive” coping strategies. These can be processes or behaviors that are believed to be generally maladaptive (in all contexts), or strategies that were adaptive at one time (often, during or directly after the trauma) but become maladaptive when they are utilized for too long or arbitrarily. Grossman uses the example of abused children, writing that any type of coping can be seen as a positive force during abuse, because it can increase the child’s confidence in their coping abilities as well as their “future coping resources.” However, Grossman notes, “strategies that children use to cope with abuse can become maladaptive if not transformed later in life. These factors can be particularly problematic if they become fixated and are used inappropriately or indiscriminately later in life.”[26] Thus, she contends, “What might appear at the time to be good adaptation, such as freedom from extreme emotional distress, may not be helpful or even desirable in the long run. Early resilience may be bought at the cost of later spontaneity or flexibility.”[27] Herman agrees, reiterating that maladaptive coping strategies tend to hinder the survivor’s ability to take advantage of new opportunities that may involve some risk. Thus, this “constrictive” state, in which an individual is essentially stagnating in old patterns that may or may not have been effective in the past but have nonetheless become obstructive, can “narrow and deplete the quality of life and ultimately perpetuate the effects of the traumatic event.”[28]

Seen through the eyes of Holocaust survivors, all of the theories about successful recovery and positive survivorship that have been delineated above can be extremely problematic. Herman’s three stages of recovery are virtually impossible for these survivors; even if “establishing safety” were successfully achieved, a restoration of the “connection between survivors and their community” is, for obvious reasons, unattainable. Indeed, Neil Kressel contends that genocide victims in general are:

deprived of the two qualities essential to being perceived as fully human and included in the moral compact that governs human relationships: identity—standing as independent, distinctive individuals, capable of making choices and entitled to live their own lives—and community—fellow membership in an interconnected network of individuals who care for each other and respect each other’s individuality and rights.[29]

One of the most essential difficulties for Holocaust survivors is in Herman’s second stage, which calls for a reconstruction of the trauma story. While this will be discussed in further detail in successive chapters, it suffices to say here that the “trauma stories” of Holocaust survivors are often characterized by disruption and a lack of global cohesion. Langer articulates this powerfully in his discussion of the spoken narratives of survivors:

oral Holocaust testimonies are doomed on one level to remain disrupted narratives, not only by the vicissitudes of technology but by the quintessence of the experiences they record. Instead of leading to further chapters in the autobiography of the witnesses, they exhaust themselves in the telling. They do not function in time like other narratives, since the losses they record raise few expectations of renewal or hopes of reconciliation.[30]

Herman even reiterates this herself, noting, “The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner.”[31] In this sense, Herman’s assumption that “recovery” cannot occur without the creation of a coherent narrative of the experienced trauma immediately renders the majority of Holocaust survivors fundamentally incapable of recovery under her definition. In light of the fact that nearly all survivors left their countries of origin, had most (if not all) of their familial connections severed by death, and had to start “new lives” in new countries and new communities, the requirement that recovery rests in re-connection is also left sorely unmet. Clearly, Herman’s generalized, universal definition of the rules of recovery is either inadequate for Holocaust survivors, or leads to the assumption that they are not, and will never be, capable of recovery.

Harvey’s criteria are similarly unreachable for survivors of a trauma of this nature. An “intense and final grieving of significant relationships” is difficult to accomplish when these significant relationships can number up to twenty, or thirty, or fifty. “Intimate connectedness” can carry with it heavy consequences after having lost a spouse, and children, and parents, and siblings. Even in the face of these deficits, Holocaust survivors do constantly attempt to make meaning out of their experiences and lives. Indeed, some would argue that it is a fundamentally human drive to create meaning in our lives and understand our experiences in relation to our identities and to the world. Yet, Harvey’s requirements for this process again seem set too high for these survivors. Although many survivors follow a “mission” to speak about their experiences, the ability to discard the “damaged self” that has resulted from such a trauma may simply be impossible.

Answering the “why” questions is an especially thorny issue, as Hass notes in his description of the “Just World Hypothesis,” the tendency for humans to generally believe that we get what we deserve (and we deserve what we get).[32] He asserts that Holocaust survivors clearly cannot submit to this explanation of the Holocaust, because of its implications for the deaths of so many. Hass writes, “because most Holocaust survivors do not necessarily attribute survival to their intelligence, their wits, or their unusual fortitude, they are denied this comforting hypothetical illusion… It is not surprising, therefore, that most survivors have been unable to rebuild their trust in the workings of the world, or, for that matter, in their fellow human beings.”[33] Thus, survivors are left with a sense of uneasiness, uncertainty, and a firm belief in the capriciousness of the world.

Because of the sense of unpredictability that is often inherent in survivors’ belief structures, the prolonged and patterned use of coping strategies that were successful during the Holocaust and even directly afterwards, but have become maladaptive, can be common. Many of my subjects expressed sentiments to the effect of, “If it got me through the war, it can’t be bad (or it can get me through now).” Thus, the numbing and denial and repression that effectively allowed survivors to concentrate on the life-and-death circumstances confronting them during their Holocaust experiences are often strategies that they continue to use when under stress or anxiety in their current lives. Bar-On goes even further with his assertion that most survivors had a basic drive for “normalization” after the war, which was most often achieved by a pushing away of the trauma and an attempt to focus completely on building “new” lives and getting settled in new countries. He argues that this drive, however, could be viewed as:

simultaneously functional and dysfunctional. It did help the survivors return to ‘normal’ life, avoiding the burdens and frightful memories of the past by performing regular, everyday tasks in the present. But the same normalization could at some point become dysfunctional, since survivors thus avoided a necessary psychological mourning process and thereby became committed to the past…[34]

In a number of senses, then, Holocaust survivors do tend to “hang on” to strategies for coping with and negotiating their lives that may not always be as adaptive as possible. They may stagnate in processes that were effective forty years ago, which now present a minimal risk of anxiety and psychic upset. Clearly, this is often seen as maladaptive for Harvey’s picture of the “average” survivor. The question is, however, can this be considered maladaptive for Holocaust survivors? Can the psychological expectations of these individuals include an ability to take psychic risks and engage in the same processes of adaptation and change as would any other “average” person? Again, the focus on generalized expectations appears sorely insufficient here.

A New Question, a New Answer

The current conceptualizations of resilience exclude Holocaust survivors from ever being described as such. Having to display absolutely no signs of “marked distress” after experiencing a trauma in order to be deemed “resilient” is most certainly beyond the capabilities of survivors of the Holocaust. I would venture to say that this requirement probably remains unfulfilled in the majority of trauma survivors. Trauma affects people—there is no way around this fact.

If one accepts this, the term “recovery” becomes equally problematic. It implies that a traumatized individual should be able to return to the level and manner of functioning, thinking, and feeling at which he or she existed before the trauma ever occurred. This is, again, clearly impossible for survivors of nearly any trauma. The best one can hope for is to be able to re-negotiate one’s life around the trauma, to reconstruct a life narrative that includes the trauma, and to be able to function and participate in activities that were engaged in before the trauma. However, one never functions and participates in life in the same manner as before. The goal should not be to pretend the trauma never occurred; it should be to cope with it and learn how to adaptively negotiate a meaningful life in spite of it.

Thus, the fact that Holocaust survivors do not fit the criteria for resilient recovery set up by Herman and Harvey is not surprising. Very few trauma survivors are, in fact, able to achieve a level of “recovery” that can be seen as equivalent to the life that was lived before the trauma. This is, in fact, one of the over-simplified assumptions out of which the conception of resilient individuals as superhuman originates. It is now necessary to fashion a new conceptualization of resilience that will allow for all facets of individual difference and contextual experience. How can we do this? Grossman and her colleagues have asserted:

any definition of resiliency must be multidimensional. Simple, single definitions work only in a limited way. For example, the question, Is this individual resilient?, is devoid of context. To be meaningful, it must be made much more specific and relate to events and standards. Is this person resilient with respect to this event, this context, or to that standard?[35]

First of all, the concept of a “standard” has already proven difficult to operationalize, at best. Secondly, I would argue that not only are the event and the context crucial, but that the question, “Is this individual resilient?,” whether it is modified or not, is simply not enough.

One cannot merely conceptually place an individual in a context and then ask if he or she is resilient. The phrase, “resilient with respect to this event,” is essentially inadequate. We must ask, “How is this individual behaving in a resilient fashion, given the context of the trauma and the life events surrounding it?” Indeed, what does resilience look like in the context of a given trauma and a particular individual? As I have argued throughout, each context and each trauma must be evaluated on its own scale and with respect to its own unique issues. Resilience, therefore, must be re-defined as it relates to each particular trauma under study.

At the risk of over-relativizing the concept, I would, however, argue for the possibility that in each context, resilience could potentially be perceived as such an extended continuum as to allow every trauma survivor to be seen as behaving resiliently in some dimension or in some domain. The emphasis then turns from a definitive conception of resilience to a focus on describing how each individual is being resilient, in which aspect or aspects he or she is behaving adaptively, and what constitutes resilience in each particular case. Higgins agrees, writing, “Since so many forms of distress originate in assault, we need to refocus on what is disruptive to people rather than obsessively categorizing those who are disrupted. Perhaps this would reorient clinical treatment to how and why people become organized (or disorganized) around past experiences.”[36]

To individualize the conception of this phenomenon is to allow for it to be described in all its colors and in all its facets. Beardslee similarly believes that “the place to begin in studying resilient individuals is with what they themselves report about their own lives, especially about what has sustained them.”[37] The key, therefore, is to listen to the survivors. The true experience and understanding of resilience does not come from a psychologist, or a team of psychologists, or some perfect, omnipotent judge of psychological health; it comes from the survivors themselves. It cannot be viewed only through the eyes of a clinician, or the eyes of an individual who has not experienced what the survivor has. Resilience, therefore, lies in the eyes of the survivor. We must look at how these survivors have negotiated their lives around the trauma they have experienced. We must look at the strengths they bring to the task, in addition to the weaknesses. Rather than automatically turning to the deficit model and emphasizing the limitations of the individual, and the symptoms, and the potential psychopathology, the answer is to focus on what is meaningful for the individual, whether it is positive or negative.

In a traditional clinical examination, the first task for the psychologist or psychiatrist is to assess the client, to find out what is going wrong for him or her. Often, this is done by administering a questionnaire or self-report measure, the ultimate goal of which is to aid in diagnosis. It is thus the client’s job to tell the clinician why he or she has sought psychiatric assistance, and what problems he or she is having. The clinician’s job is to listen to the client, to note the list of symptoms that are reported, and to then decide on a mode of treatment. The symptoms are not questioned, and the client is most often believed. Very rarely, however, is the individual ever asked what is going well for him or her. This focus on pathology rejects, or at the very least, ignores the strengths a client may bring into the clinical setting. Resilience, therefore, has become a quality that the individual has to prove—at the extreme, it is only proven by the absence of all psychopathology. Why are there such strict criteria for resilience and “recovery”? Why must an individual show no “marked distress,” have a full recovery, and essentially pretend the trauma never occurred in order to be deemed resilient?

I would argue that the current definitions of resilience stem from this decontextualized use of the deficit model in order to categorize individuals and arrive at diagnoses. I would also argue that in the context of Holocaust survivors, these reductive definitions do only harm. If clinicians believe clients when they report symptoms, why can’t (or won’t) they believe that their clients are doing well? Holocaust survivors never showed, and probably never will show, a complete absence of symptomatology. The scope and scale of the trauma they endured was simply too large and too devastating.

They do, however, continue to negotiate meaningful and subjectively successful lives. Many of my subjects lost substantial parts of their families, were expelled from their countries of origin, and came to a new country whose language and customs were unfamiliar and often frightening. Some finished their educations, some started businesses. All married, all had children, and all pride themselves on having created affirming lives for themselves. Many have prospered, and many consider themselves blessed and happy to be alive. And yet, they continue to be unable to fulfill the requirements for resilient recovery, according to many of the researchers I have cited here. There is clearly a discrepancy somewhere.

I will concede that if the word “recovery” continues to be used in the context that Herman and Harvey have set forth, Holocaust survivors have not “recovered.” But what I assert is that this cannot be expected of individuals who have endured such a trauma. Perhaps they continue to have nightmares; perhaps they cry at the memories of their deceased loved ones; perhaps they still use coping strategies that are less than adaptive. But what if they believe that they are doing well? What category do they fit into then? Many of my subjects told me they believe they have adapted to and coped well with their post-Holocaust lives; one might even say they have “normalized” their lives. Why must the psychological community step in, refute what these people say about themselves, and label them as pathological? Why is it not enough that they believe they are successfully negotiating their own lives?

The following excerpts from my interviews with Ray and Irving, respectively, illustrate a dialectical tension between how the “average” clinician might see them and how they see themselves. There is also a clear separation between what they view as recovery and what they view as resilience, two decidedly different concepts for them. Ray was steadfast in his opinion that a “normal life” does not necessitate what Herman and Harvey, and indeed many clinicians, would probably label as “recovery”:

I make peace with myself. And I am able to live a normal life. But to accept it, what is that? I don’t think anyone could go through it [and accept it]. I imagine that no one could. Because it’s something that had to leave so many scars. If there is a wedding, if there is any kind of religious holiday ever, it always can play in my mind. You just cannot—you cannot. It’s in me.[38]

Later, Ray told me, “I learned to deal with the trauma. I knew it was there. I knew I had to cope with it if I wanted to succeed and survive. And I lived with it. I didn’t go around every day and think of giving up.”[39] Irving made a similar distinction between “understanding” and “acceptance” when he told me, “I understand how it happened. I even understand why it happened. I understand why there was no help. I even understand why American Jews didn’t do a hell of a lot. But that does not mean that I accept it.”[40] He went further to create his own definition of resilience:

The ability to live through an experience and be able to put that experience in perspective such that we could use whether it’s a good experience or bad experience, [but] not to totally change. That actually should not stop you from continuing your quest of life. It will have an effect. It will have an effect. But [it shouldn’t] destroy… [Resilience is] the ability not to be totally destroyed by an experience. And let that be just a notch along the way of learning…on the process of learning. Integrating to the greater long-term [experience]. Resilience is not to spring back to the same place. It’s no rubber band. Even there, the rubber band does not come back to exactly the same place. There is a different consciousness but integrated into the overall, rather than it becoming the singular driving force.[41]

Clearly, Ray and Irving see themselves as healthy, thriving, “normal” individuals. This does not mean that they are not scarred by their experiences, and this does not mean that they do not suffer from occasional symptoms of post-traumatic stress. But do these symptoms disrupt the successful negotiation of a “peaceful” (to use Ray’s word) life? Do these individuals deserve to be labeled as psychopathological, or non-resilient? These types of labels seem to lose their meanings when confronted with such eloquent and adamant testimony of adaptive living.

Thus, I would argue that we must begin with the words of the survivors. We must ask how they feel, what they think, and who they are. We must allow them to judge themselves, rather than overriding their opinions and judging them for them. Given the tremendous disruption that the Holocaust caused in the lives of survivors, it is simply not possible to know how these people should or should not be behaving at this point. Therefore, they cannot be judged according to some “objective” definition or measure. The survivors themselves are the only people who know their capabilities and how successfully they are living their own lives, on their own terms. Hence, resilience will be found in their narratives and their words; not in a psychology textbook or standardized questionnaire.