PERSONAL REFLECTIONS

ON THE HOLOCAUST AND HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS

Ellis Mischel

"1 still believe." Anne Frank

"Our belief is that constructive possibilities stem from man's essential nature, from the core of his being . . . We believe that man turns unconstructive and destructive only if he cannot fulfill himself."

Karen Homey

How similar is Karen Horney's statement of belief to Anne Frank's, who, in July 1944, a few days before her arrest, wrote, "It is really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals because they si~em so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart." These words came out of the hidden existence of her short (15 years), tragic life, when she, along with millions of Jews, gypsies, non-Aryans and other "undesirables," were led away to their ultimate destruction through disease or slaughter. These words became once again the agonized outcry of the human soul, echoed from the beginnings cf recorded history. Similarily, in the fifteenth century, when Maimonides, the physician and philosopher, formulated his "thirteen principles" of Jewish faith, he opened each statement with two words that reflected the deepest of all human experience, the experience of faith--the Hebrew Ani me'amin, "1 believe."

In reading Jack Rubins' sensitive and warmly written biography Karen Homey: Gentle Rebel of Psychoanalysis, "'t I was struck by other similarities. Both Karen and Anne were quite private people---somewhat shy and retiring. Karen also had a secret diary, recently discovered. Both used their diaries as secret confidants. They also both had family roots both in Germany and Amsterdam. But Anne died with her mother and older sister in the Bergen- Belsen concentration camp. Karen, fortunately, left Germany in 1932, already well-recognized in the field of psychoanalysis. Although she, Karen, was not

Ellis Mischel, M.D., Member of the Faculty, American Institute for Psychoanalysis of the Karen Homey Institute and Center.

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis (~ 1979 Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis

Vol. 39, No. 4, 1979 0002-0958/79/040369-08501.00

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Jewish, most of her friends and colleagues were. Psychoanalysis, founded by Freud, was considered a "Jewish psychology" by the Nazis. Therefore everyone connected with it was considered suspect. The situation in Berlin and all of Germany was rapidly deteriorating when Karen Homey decided to leave and come to Chicago at the invitation of Franz Alexander to work in the Chicago Psychoanalytical Institute. I feel that she was a refugee from Nazi Germany in view of her belief, her Ani me'amin. She could not live and work in an atmosphere that sought the degradation, the humiliation, the destruction of the human soul, and ultimately of life itself, "the final solution."

The Twentieth International Conference of the World Union for Progressive Judaism was held in Amsterdam, July 6- I0, 1978. It took as its theme Anne Frank's Ani me'amin: "In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart." My wife, Judith, and I attended as delegates. Although this might be considered a "Jewish conference," the conference was really anything but Jewish, since the theme is so universal. I would therefore like to share but a few of my deeply moving experiences and feelings with you.

The drama of this, an unforgettable trip, began when I found myself stand- ing barefoot in the huge Schipol Airport identifying with the thousands of back-packing youths who travel the world over to Amsterdam, "the Jerusalem of the West." Actually I had given my shoes to my son Adam, age 9, because his feet had swollen so that his no longer fit. I was enjoying the feeling, however, and thought it a fit beginning for an "Amsterdam good time." Not so--but what an enriching experience all in all! And now, back home in the United States, hundreds--no, thousands---of experiences, memories, and feelings crowd my mind, just a few of which, highlights, am I able to translate into thoughts.

Allow me to jump around. The last day of the conference was packed so full of events, each more emotional than the next, such as that heart-rending speech by Rabbi Weiler, who lost two of his sons in the Israeli-Arab wars, and a demonstration protesting the Soviet Trials of Scharansky and Ginsberg. The latter was held at the site marking the bombed-out Jewish Theatre of Amster- dam, the place where thousands of Jews from the Netherlands were deported to the Westerbork work camp and on to Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and other concentration and death camps. Judith, my wife, so thoroughly drained by these experiences, mused, "Why is it so with other conventions--the Ameri- can Legion, the Democratic and Republican conventions---that everyone seems to be having so much funwthey laugh, they party, and they drink, but not with us Jews; why is it so different?" There is no answer, Judith, that's the way it is with us Jews. When we get together we cry a lot and--we also laugh and sing and dance, as well.

I had the good fortune to meet Anne Frank's father, Otto Frank, the sole survivor of the family. He is 89 and alive and well and living in Basel. I seized

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the opportunity and arranged an appointment with him for the very next day. He is the living embodiment of all that Anne believed. He is a person of rare qualities and with a spirit that is ageless. His deep blue eyes twinkle with youth and humor and radiate the "Frank"-ness of "in spite of everything I still believe." He spoke quietly but with a strength that comes from the core of his being. What interested me the most were the anecdotes given freely and in abundance. His voice quivered when he said, "Anne was the quiet one--I never really knew her--I never realized she had such deep thoughts until I read her diary." Tears flowed, yet I wonder. He gave her the diary on her thirteenth birthday, shortly before th e family went into hiding. And, later on, he gave her his attach~ case when she was I ooki ng for a place to lock it away. I cannot help but feel that he intuitively knew that his daughter had many deep inner thoughts that demanded expression. He spoke at length of his present work with the Anne Frank Foundation, especially in the area of human rights and discrimination against all people regardless of race, religion or na- tionality. He receives countless numbers of letters, primarily from young people the world over. One, Unna, a Japanese girl, lost her father when she was three years old. "Will you be my letter father?" They have corre- sponded over the past twenty years, and finally she visited him a year ago. "1 must respond to all the Annes in the world--Anne would have wanted it so and I can't let her down. She has given me a reason for living." I refrained from asking him about life in the concentration camp, Auschwitz, since he indi- cated that these memories were still too painful. Yet my son Adam, in youthful innocence and on another occasion asked, "How did you survive the Holocaust?" 1 could feel Otto Frank's compassion and understanding toward children in his answer, which was direct, concise, and unfaltering; "The Russians liberated the concentration camp, Auschwitz. They ordered us to march eastward, but I was too sick to move. I, along with others, was left behind in the infirmary to die. Actual ly most of those who left never su wived. I was then found by more Russian soldiers who transported me to Odessa, where I regained my health." At that point Mrs. Frank (his second wife) showed Adam her number tattooed on her forearm. She had had a similar experience at Bergen-Belsen, where she knew Anne and Anne's mother and sister. She and Otto met after liberation and subsequently married. My visit with Otto Frank was well worth the trip. Dayenu (Hebrew for "For that alone we should have been grateful").

The Anne Frank House stands unpretentiously alongside the Princengracht, one of Amsterdam's many canals, and two or three doors from the Westerkirk, a tall historic church where Rembrandt is buried and Queen Juliana was married. It was Sunday morning, yet the church and churchyard were empty except for the scores of people who walked by on their pilgrimage to the House. Bare rooms, for the most part, stand in silent testimony to the twenty-

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five months of hiding. The walls of Anne's room say it all, all too poignantly. Pictures of Hollywood movie stars of the day, cut from magazines--Rudy Vallee, Ginger Rogers, Deanna Durbin--and a print of a Leonardo da Vinci. She could have been a typical adolescent girl from America. We left, silent and numbed. And why were we silent in 1942, 1943, 1944--and still silent? And the holocausts still continue: Ireland, Viet Nam, South Africa, the Jews in the Soviet Union, Syria, and Argentina, the Neo-Nazi party, the Skokie march, civil rights--the list is interminable. And for the most part, we are still silent. "And yet, in spite of everything, I still believe."

I was on an emotional see-saw from the depths to the heights and back down again. I also recall feelings of childlike glee on trips to the miniature city of Madurodam, outside the Hague, and to the Music Museum in Utrecht. The latter contained unusual antique automated musical instruments such as music boxes, organs, calliopes, etc., playing all kinds of old tunes. One such was vaguely familiar, and I asked the guide if he could "name the tune." He could not, and all of a sudden I burst forth with "She's got eyes of blue, but I don't care for eyes of blue, but she's got eyes of blue, and that's my weakness now." We all laughed, and to this day on occasion I hear Adam humming the melody. All this provided the comic relief so much needed.

The Sabbath worship service at the Liberal Joodse Gemente, Amsterdam's rebuilt synagogue, left me on another one of those highs. The architectural beauty of the building with two stone tablets, The Ten Commandments, adorning the rooftop, for all the world to see. It was built with misshapen and broken bricks from the rubble of postwar Amsterdam. Each one of those bricks was a silent symbol for each soul or life broken, deformed, or destroyed by the Holocaust, the shoa, the great death, de Grote Dood. The service itself was an audiovisual feast.

The only response befitting the address of Rabbi Herman, a young Dutch rabbi, was awe and silence. He spoke on "Holocaust Survivors--Three Decades Later." He told the story of the Baal Shem Toy, "The Master of the Good Name," a famous mystic (ca. 1700) who went into the forest to meditate. In contrast, he spoke of the Baal Shem Ra, "The Master of the Bad Name,'! who went into the forest to destroy. There were roughly 75,000 witnesses to the slaughter of Jews and non-Jews, but few, if any, can tell the story of the horrors of the Holocaust. For example, Rabbi Herman mentioned a Dutch psychoanalyst; he and his patient, both Jewish, were sent to different concentration camps. They survived and continued analytic work after a three-year hiatus. His patient resumed analysis as if nothing had happened. The camp experience was so painful that he could not bring it into consciousness--he put it all "on ice." Robert Jay Lifton, in his books2'3----on the survivors of Hiroshima and "brainwashing" in China and Vietnam, refers to the process of "psychic numbing." Survivors dare not share their pain with

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anyone else for fear of losing control, for fear of madness and of " infect ing" the other one as well. Forgetting, then, is a common reaction, which sets up a vicious cycle of alienation, emptiness, and loss of meaning of the soul: Zielzenloosheid. In the face of death one meets the kind of God that is not experienced in any church or synagogue.

Rabbi Herman also spoke about recurrent dreams of survivors such as the following.

1. I'm going to the railroad station, whence thousands of Jews were transported to the concentration camps, but the station is empty.

2. I'm waiting in the station for the trains to return; they do,' but they are empty. 3. 1 am sitting in a cinema watching scenes from the concentration camp. I am

unable to get into any of it. 4. I go to an old age home looking for the familiar face of a grandparent but find

none.

The whole death experience is so horrible as to prevent usual work in mourning. He ended with the personal story of his 10-year-oid daughter, who recently came home from school very excited about a new game she had just learned. "In America they call it cowboys and Indians; here we call it Germans and Jews."

I felt compelled to seek Rabbi Herman out afterward. He told me that he was also a lay analyst, a graduate from the Jungian school in London. The marriage between Liberal Judaism and psychoanalysis is a good one, and it is no mere coincidence that many psychoanalysts are Jews. Indeed, the stories of the patriarchs, the prophets, and the biblical heroes are the tales of l iving people, not symbols, with all the human qualities and failings of people today. Elie Weisel, in his book, Messengers of God, states:

What is Isaac but the first survivor of a holocaust--from the Greek meaning "a whole burnt offering"--Cain and Abel but the first killer and the first victim? In Adam we see the first creature to discover both the attraction and the danger of secrets and knowledge... All the legends involve us . . . Somewhere a father and his son are heading toward an altar in flames; somewhere a dreamy boy knows that his father will die under the veiled gaze of God. . . In Jewish history all events are linked. Only today, after the whirlwind of fire and blood that was the Holocaust, do we grasp the full range of implications of the murder of one man by his brother, the deeper meanings of a father's questions and disconcerting silences. Only as we tell them now in the light of certain experiences of life and death, do we understand them. 4

Furthermore, the story of Exodus, of slavery followed by 40 years of wander- ing in the desert, is strikingly parallel to the story of the Holocaust and its

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aftermath. Man must struggle with his emptiness--the desert-- in order to release the creative spark within and thereby reach the "Promised Land."

Rabbi Herman and I exchanged views in a lively conversation which ranged far and wide--rel ig ion, psychoanalysis--Freud, Jung, Homey, Frankl, etc. He spoke further about the loss of meaning of the soul. In the Netherlands, an increasing number of young peopel born of survivors are breaking the silence imposed by their parents. He referred to an article entitled "Prospect and Retrospect" written by a colleague, Rabbi A. Soetendorp of the Hague:

At the latest commemoration of the war 4th of May 1978 I wrote a letter to my daughters, 8 and 9 years old. I felt the necessity to explain to them what it meant that their parents were in hiding during the war, and luckily escaped death.. . During the last decade I was confronted again and again by the paradox of Dutch Jewish existence, the struggle with the past and the fight for the future. The fact that people were increasingly suffering from the after-effects of the war had not always been recognized. I remember how I was reprimanded when I spoke about the nightmare of the past in 1965. It was regarded irresponsible to confront youth with open wounds, was it not self-indulgence, self-pity? The feeling expressed to me during 1967-1968 in the United States was even stronger. "Don't talk to our children about the war. We will only allow you to share your feelings about the darkest period in our history if you are able to give an answer to the question, 'why?' As you cannot give set answers, be silent; our youth should not be left with open questions. These remarks will surprise you now because so much has changed and attempts are made to give detailed information to balance the terrible denial of the "holocaust," unfortunately this realization has come painfully late . . . . "

Soetendorp ended his article with a poem by Berthold Brecht written in 1938:

To Posterity What an age it is When to speak of trees is almost a crime For it is a kind of silence about injustice! And he who walks calmly across the street, Is he not out of reach of his friends In trouble? They tell me: eat and drink. Be glad you have it! But how can I eat and drink When my food is snatched from the hungry And my glass of water belongs to the thirsty? And yet I eat and drink.

Here in the United States, silence still reigns over the Holocaust Kingdom. The television series early in 1978 broke the silence but briefly. The aborted march of the Neo-Nazi Party in Skokie, II1., defended by the American C iv -

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il Liberties Union and upheld by the Supreme Court, partially rekindled the flames, as well, but only to create more anxiety, distrust, and insecurity.

The walls Of silence and denial were temporarily broken only to be rebuilt higher and deeper. For example, books have been published denying the fact of the Holocaust, that it is a fantasy of the "Jewish imagination," a lie, a hoax, that only a few hundred thousand Jews died, of natural causes. What a desecration and profanation of the memory of the dead, far greater than any other designed by the Nazi mind to date. Shocking to the senses. People call these Neo-Nazis crazy and inhuman; but so was Hitler. Another denial, i know of no animal that has been able to design and fashion a "final solution" to equal the one made by the human animal to destroy himselfmvia concen- tration and death camps, and the atomic bomb.

Other forms of denial and silence are still operative. With the exception of a few psychiatrists and psychoanalysts (Robert Jay Lifton 3 and Viktor Frankl s have written books on the Holocaust) the majority remain silent. I know of psychoanalysts who are still unable to relate to the Holocaust experience because of their own personal tragedies, which have left emotional wounds that refuse to heal. But the silence must be broken now after 40 years in the desert.

Karen Homey placed great emphasis upon the influence of culture and values in the development of personality. When she published her first book, The Neurotic Personality of Our Time,6 she achieved world-wide recognition. I feel that if she were alive today she would have broken the silence. We, especially, who devote our lives to the study of human behavior, must address ourselves publicly to the arena of human violence and destructiveness, in- cluding the Holocaust. For the most part, to date, we have left these human issues to the "social psychologists," contrary to the spirit and legacy of Karen Homey.

There is an inscription on the walls of a cellar in Cologne, Germany, where Jews hid from the Nazis:

I believe in the sun even when it is not shining, I believe in love even when feeling it not, I believe in God even when he is silent.

i end with "1 believe. ''~

References

1. Rubins, J. Karen Homey, Gentle Rebel of Psychoanalysis. New York: Dial Press, 1978.

2. Liften, R. J. Death in Life, Survivors ofHiroshima. New York: Random House, 1959. 3. Liffon, R. J. History and Human Survival. New York: Random House, 1961, pp.

114-207.

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4. Weisel, E. Messengers of God. New York: Random House, 1976. 5. Frankl, V. Man's Search for Meaning. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1959. 6. Homey, K. The Neurotic Personality of Our Time. New York: Norton, 1932, pp.

281-290. 7. Friedlander, A. Out of the Whirlwind, A Reader of Holocaust Literature. New York:

Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1968. 8. Eissler, K. R. The Psychiatrist and the Dying Patient. New York: International

Universities Press, 1955.

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