Surviving the Holocaust and Working for a World without Genocide

“A world without genocide” is what Isaac Z. Zieman has devoted most of his life to achieving. In concluding the January 27, 2007 Psychohistory Forum meeting he stated this lofty idea as a goal. Achieving this requires that all people strive for self-awareness and recognize that they, and not simply others, are capable of evil.

The meeting was organized around the life of Isaac Zieman, a longtime Forum member and first time presenter, and his paper, “Jewish and Universal Lessons from the Holocaust,” that was sent out to the membership. There were two other presenters and a moderator. Flora Hogman, today a psychologist/ psychotherapist and a hidden child in France during the Nazi occupation, presented on the subjects of the Holocaust and genocide. Her focus was on the Holocaust’s human toll, especially on hidden children’s struggles with issues of attachment, dependency, guilt, helplessness, identity, loss, memory, and shame, and the cost to their emotional development. She discussed the survivor’s resilience and the need to integrate the Holocaust experience into life to help others as she does in her course, “Holocaust: An Evolving Memory,” and in her work with survivors of other traumas at the United Nations.

Eva Fogelman, a social psychologist and psychoanalyst, spoke about her collaboration with the late Judith Kestenberg (1911-1999) in interviewing 1,500 child survivors of the Holocaust, as well as her research leading to the psychohistorical book, Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust (1995). Her interest in this subject followed from her situation as a child born in a Displaced Persons (DP) camp to a survivor who lived because of the kindness of strangers. Jacques Szaluta, a historian, psychoanalyst, and professor at the Merchant Marine Academy, moderated the session.

In certain respects, the meeting was a tribute to Isaac Zieman who, in his eighty-sixth year, is battling anemia, heart disease, and pancreatic cancer. He had been hospitalized for the four days prior to the meeting (and most of the following week as well), only convincing the hospital to release him late in the evening before his presentation. Five of the visiting participants were from the One by One group, which seeks through dialogue between Jews and Christians to bring reconciliation after the Holocaust and which has extended its work to include Palestinians and Israelis, that Zieman has participated in for the last two or three years.

Isaac was asked how he was able to survive upon discovering that his entire family his parents,

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sisters (after sixty-six years there is still no definitive proof of the death or survival of one sister), and brother were killed by Nazi collaborators in Latvia while Isaac was off starving as a coal miner in a Stalinist Siberian forced-labor camp. He gave two answers: a “hundred years” of psychotherapy of all sorts and “love helps.” In response to questions he rather reluctantly told a part of his story that was not included in the article he sent out prior to the meeting. In May of 1942 he was defending Stalingrad as a soldier who had volunteered for the Russian army, when orders came that anyone born in a capitalist country should be sent to forced-labor camps in Siberia. Everyone in the coal mine was on a near starvation diet and Isaac’s rations were cut after he became too weak to work, but he successfully begged food from others to survive. After waiting for two months, he got permission from Moscow to go to the Central Asian Soviet Republic of Kyrgyzstan to work on a collective farm and then he was mobilized to work in a military factory in Russia. In 1944 Isaac told the Soviet authorities he was Polish and was accepted to join the Communist Polish Army. Once in Poland he was able to escape to join his Zionist youth group to build kibbutzim first in Hungary, then in Austria, and finally in Germany. Though he worked many years for Zionism and visited Israel on numerous occasions, he never lived there.

The Nazi assault was on what Isaac referred to as the Jewish values of caring, critical/independent thinking, respect for all people, responsibility, and self-awareness. One participant pointed out, with general agreement, that these are the values of democracy. In this regard, many of Zieman’s ideas come from Ruth Cohn’s Theme Centered Interaction (TCI) that was developed to help people overcome differences and achieve these values.

The question of the reality and strength of anti-Semitism was discussed at some length. Eva Fogelman pointed out that in France in 2002 there were 193 acts of anti-Semitic violence without any prosecutions. Renee Roth-Hano, who lived as a hidden child in a religious residence run by the Sisters of Charity during the war, expressed great concern about the danger of anti-Semitism. She raised the intriguing issue of her changed relationship to her Judaism in the U.S. and in her homeland of France. Upon arriving here as an au pair she marveled at signs in Yiddish and people openly speaking about Seder plans. Her sister who remained in France is very quiet about her Judaism and minimizes anti-Jewish behavior while Renee and her other sister who immigrated to America speak quite openly about these issues.

Isaac Zieman pointed out that while there is anti-Semitism in the U.S., there is also great success among American Jews, disproportionate to their small number as only two percent of the population. Jews are welcomed as marriage partners and are, perhaps, the most prosperous and admired ethnic group. In fact, in many parts of the country where there are hardly any Jews they are still elected to the House or Senate: currently thirteen of 100 senators are Jewish. He made the point that some Jews focus on anti-Semitism as a way of asserting their Jewishness. Some Jewish organizations, like all groups needing to raise money, use manifestations of bigotry to support their fundraising, thus exaggerating its importance. I supported the point of anti-Semitism and identity by recalling an identity crisis when, as the thirteen-year-old son of secular, anti-religious Jewish parents, my reaction to being taunted and beaten up for being Jewish was to think that I would be Jewish until the last anti-Semite was dead. (This identity resolution before long gave way to considerable pride in being a secular Jew.)

Present at the meeting were twenty-one colleagues of whom at least six were Jews born in Europe in the shadow or the midst of the Nazi era, and four were survivors of the Holocaust. Over half are active or retired psychotherapists (mostly psychoanalysts), two historian/psychoanalysts, two physicians (one of whom is a psychiatrist), several professors, and all with an intense interest in the subject. Also, as mentioned above, there were several individuals who have worked with Isaac Zieman in the One by One program aimed at reconciliation between groups in conflict, with the current primary emphasis being on dialogue among Palestinians, Israelis, Christians, and Jews. This is work that the main speaker has devoted himself to quite extensively in recent years. Other Forum members who could not be present in person were there in spirit. Sander Breiner, a psychiatrist in Michigan, sent a short article he wanted to share with the participants. Connalee Levine-Shneidman, who tragically died early in the week of the meeting, had sent a note, read before

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the presentation, suggesting that the last four paragraphs of Isaac’s paper could be the basis of another whole meeting and emphasizing that we need traditional education as well as education that will help prevent genocide.

Flora Hogman’s discussion of her changing perspective on the Holocaust and genocide was quite moving. She described her experience as a hidden child suffering from repressed memories and identity confusion following the murder of her mother in Auschwitz and the prior death of her father. The denial of her past and Jewishness as a girl growing up in postwar France left her confused. After the death of her adoptive parents and her relocating to New York City to find relatives and earn her doctorate in psychology, she realized that she was Jewish. In recent decades repressed memory and its recovery has been a central issue in psychology, and much of Flora’s research and writing probes it.

At the meeting I discussed how the loss of memory often is related to some subjects being taboo in society. As a child I grew up amidst many Holocaust survivors, but we were not allowed to talk about the subject of tattooed numbers on the arms of frightened storekeepers who sold newspapers or the zombie-like man in his twenties from the “camps” who my father had “working” for him in our small store for a year as a condition of gaining entry into the U.S. At first I resented him as the cause of the loss of my unpaid job of sweeping and being a gofer since I felt proud to be helping as my older brother had before me. My resentment as a ten-year-old soon turned to puzzlement, curiosity, and pity when my family realized that this troubled Holocaust survivor seemed all but incapable of following directions or of humor. My parents did not want me talking or thinking about him anymore than they wanted me to speak about people who were deformed or “crazy” (mentally ill). Seeing but not talking about what I saw, knowing but being discouraged from acknowledging what I knew, and remembering but suppressing what I remembered were all confusing parts of my childhood. They helped lead me to studying and teaching the Holocaust.

I raised the issue of mass killing, what R.J. Rummel calls “democide,” by governments of their people, and then a problem of getting students to focus on the suffering of more than one people at a time that I have in teaching my course, “Hitler, the Holocaust, and Genocide.” Margerie Quackenbush and Mary Lambert made several valuable suggestions for how to overcome this narrow focus on suffering. I also referred to the “Victim Olympics” among groups suffering genocide, with Armenians and others feeling great pain regarding their failure to receive recognition, or equal recognition with Jews, of their suffering.

In the letter of invitation to our meeting it was pointed out to attendees that much of the development of Holocaust studies and psychohistory has been simultaneous, with psychoanalysis, psychology, and history making important contributions to both fields. Various Forum members and Clio’s Psyche authors have been a part of this process, working on different elements as reflected in articles and special issues we have had through the years on Begnini’s humor of the Holocaust, comparative genocide, the Goldhagen controversy, groupthink, the Holocaust in film, mechanisms of psychic defense, memory, obedience to authority, post-traumatic stress disorder, the psychobiography of participants, survivor’s guilt, “Victim Olympics,” and so forth.

The cost of fleeing one’s native land was an interesting sidebar to the main analysis. Mary Lambert, an Austrian-born psychoanalyst and our gracious hostess in her beautiful apartment/office, noted that it came at a high price to many she has known, keeping them from feeling totally at home in America and achieving their full potential. Walter D’ull, who also fled from Austria at a young age, reported that he has prospered greatly in his adoptive country but feels that it came at a cost. Mary pointed out that there were also some refugees fleeing the Nazis who had a sense of entitlement and superiority.

In conclusion, there were mixed feelings about Zieman’s theme of probing the lessons of the Holocaust to make a better world. In the light of terrorism, nuclear threats, and well-publicized genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, and elsewhere there was muted optimism regarding preventing future suffering. However, there was great determination within the room to decrease hatred and violence and to work for a world without genocide. The example of Isaac’s devoting his life to this cause was and is inspiring to the participants and virtually all who have had contact with him.

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