Holocaust Trauma offers a comprehensive overview of the long-term psychological effects of Holocaust trauma. It covers not only the direct effects on the actual survivors and the transmission effects upon the offspring, but also the collective effects upon other affected populations, including the Israeli Jewish and the societies in Germany and Austria. It also suggests various possible intervention approaches to deal with such long-term effects of major trauma upon individuals, groups and societies that can be generalized to other similar traumatic events. The material presented is based on the clinical experience gathered from hundreds of clients of the National Israeli Center for Psychosocial Support of Holocaust Survivors and the Second Generation (AMCHA), an Israeli treatment center for this population, and from facilitating groups of Austrian/German participants in Yad Vashem and Europe; as well as an upon an extensive review of the vast literature in the field. "...a long awaited text from one of the most experienced and knowledgeable psychologists in the world. The text is groundbreaking in its sensitivity, historical grounding, insight and scholarship." Michael A. Grodin, M.D.

Written by a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, this moving and important book examines the massive psychic trauma suffered by a generation of Holocaust survivors. It not only provides both an intimate and personal reflection on these harrowing events, but also offers an in-depth, clinical perspective on an often-misunderstood phenomenon. As a child during this period, the book begins by examining the author’s own experience as a refugee in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the psycho- logical impact of displacement after such traumatic events, and his attempt to flee its damage through medical and psychoanalytic training. But the second half of the book broadens the perspective to offer a clinical exploration of the psychic effects of surviving the Holocaust. A range of concepts are addressed and explored, from powerlessness and survivor guilt, to psychic security and recovered memories. The book concludes by examining how psychic trauma is processed, and the clinical implications for when disorders emerge and dysfunction results. An insightful and honest account of massive psychic trauma, this remarkable book will resonate not only with those affected by or interested in the experiences of Holocaust survivors, but also any clinical practitioner working with clients who have experienced this type of intense trauma.

A philosopher addresses conceptual and ethical questions that arise from historical accounts of the Holocaust.

A book that looks at both the traditional and the unconventional ways in which the holocaust has been visually represented. The purpose of this volume is to enhance our understanding of the visual representation of the Holocaust - in films, television, photographs, art and museum installations and cultural artifacts - and to examine the ways in which these have shaped our consciousness. The areas covered include the Eichman Trial as covered on American television, the impact of Schindler's List, the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the Isreali Heritage Museums, Women and Holocaust Photography, Internet Holocaust sites and tattoos and shrunken heads, the bodies of the dead and of the survivors.>

Women's Holocaust Writing, the first book of literary criticism devoted to American Holocaust writing by and about women, extends Holocaust and literary studies by examining women's artistic representations of female Holocaust experiences. Beyond racial persecution, women suffered gender-related oppression and coped with the concentration camp universe in ways consistent with their prewar gender socialization. Through close, insightful reading of fiction S. Lillian Kremer explores Holocaust representations in works distinguished by the power of their literary expression and attention to women's diverse experiences.

This bold intervention into the debate over the memory and 'post-memory' of the Holocaust both scrutinizes recent academic theories of post-Holocaust trauma and provides a new reading of literary and architectural memory texts related to the Holocaust.

This book discusses the issues underlying contemporary Holocaust fiction. Using Gillian Rose’s theory of Holocaust piety, it argues that, rather than enhancing our understanding of the Holocaust, contemporary fiction has instead become overly focused on gratuitous representations of bodies in pain. The book begins by discussing the locations and imagery which have come to define our understanding of the Holocaust, before then highlighting how this gradual simplification has led to an increasing sense of emotional distance from the historical past. Holocaust fiction, the book argues, attempts to close this emotional and temporal distance by creating an emotional connection to bodies in pain. Using different concepts relating to embodied experience – from Sonia Kruks’ notion of feeling-with to Alison Landsberg’s prosthetic memory – the book analyses several key examples of Holocaust literature and film to establish whether fiction still possesses the capacity to approach the Holocaust impiously.

Based on a unique research study, this volume examines the later life development of Holocaust survivors from Israel and the US. Through systematic interviews, the authors – noted researchers and clinicians – collected data about the lives of these survivors and how they compared to peers who did not share this experience. The orientation of the book synthesizes several conceptual approaches – gerontological and life span development, stress research, and traumatology, and also reflects the varied disciplines of the authors, spanning psychology, social work, and sociology. The result is a multi-faceted view of their subject with an understanding of the individual, society, and the interaction of the two, tempered by the authors’ own Holocaust experiences. Chapters cover a range of areas including stress and coping of these survivors, reviews of their heath and mental health, an examination of their social integration, as well as a review of the multiple predictors of psychological well-being and adaptation to aging. This book will be of interest to psychologists, social workers, sociologists, psychiatrists, and all those who study both trauma and aging.

According to most historians, the Holocaust in Hungary represented a unique chapter in the singular history of what the Nazis termed as the ?Final Solution? of the ?Jewish question? in Europe. More than seventy years after the Shoah, the origins and prehistory as well as the implementation and aftermath of the genocide still provide ample ground for scholarship. In fact, Hungarian historians began to seriously deal with these questions only after the 1980s. Since then, however, a consistently active and productive debate has been waged about the history and interpretation of the Holocaust in Hungary and with the passage of time, more and more questions have been raised in connection with its memorialization. This volume includes twelve selected scholarly papers thematically organized under four headings: 1. The newest trends in the study of the Holocaust in Hungary. 2. The anti-Jewish policies of Hungary during the interwar period 3. The Holocaust era in Hungary 4. National and international aspects of Holocaust remembrance. The studies reflect on the anti-Jewish atmosphere in Hungary during the interwar period; analyze the decision-making process that led to the deportations, and the options left open to the Hungarian government. They also provide a detailed presentation of the Holocaust in Transylvania and describe the experience of Hungarian Jewish refugees in Austria after the end of the war. ÿ

Combining cultural history and literary analysis, this study proposes a new and thought-provoking reading of the changing relationship between Germans and Jews following the Holocaust. Two Holocaust survivors whose work became uniquely successful in the Germany of the 1980s and 1990s, Grete Weil and Ruth Kluger, emerge as exemplary in their contributions to a postwar German discussion about the Nazi legacy that had largely excluded living Jews. While acknowledging that the German audience for the works of Holocaust survivors began to change in the 1980s, this study disputes the common tendency to interpret this as a sign of greater willingness to confront the Holocaust, arguing instead that it resulted from a continued German misreading of Jews' criticisms. By tracing the particular cultural-political impact that Weil's and Kluger's works had on their German audience, it investigates the paradox of Germany's confronting the Holocaust without necessarily confronting the Jews as Germans. Furthermore, for the authors this literature also had a psychological impact: their 'return' to the German language and to Germany is read not as an act of mourning or nostalgia, but rather as a public call to Germans for a dialogue about the Nazi past, as a way to move into the public realm the private emotional and psychological battles resulting from German Jews' exclusion from and persecution by their own national community.