In Memoriam: Dr. Judith Kestenberg A Child of Non-Survivors of the Nazi Holocaust (memorial)

On January 16, 1999, Judith Silberpfennig Kestenberg, age 88, died after a prolonged illness. Dr. Kestenberg, a boundlessly energetic psychoanalyst, endowed the field of psychohistory with a rich legacy. She was devoted to the well-being of children, adults who were traumatized as youngsters, and the children of persecuted parents — the group known as the “second generation.”

Childhood encounters and a later traumatic family history were significant factors in molding Dr. Kestenberg’s professional drive and interests. In the aftermath of World War I, Judith Kestenberg’s mother convinced Judith’s father to establish a separate orphanage for the very young among the children in their city of Tarnov, Poland. A young, latency-age Judith accompanied her mother on frequent visits to the orphanage, and Judith was forever changed by these outings.

After studying neurology and psychiatry in Vienna in the 1930s, Judith Kestenberg immigrated to the United States in 1937 to continue her training at Bellevue, and to study child analysis at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. When Poland was invaded by Germany in 1939, Dr. Kestenberg began sending food packages to her parents. In this she was joined by husband Milton, whose family was also trapped in occupied Poland. The Kestenbergs appealed to the State Department, to no avail, to allow their parents to find refuge in America. Milton’s father and sister survived; Judith’s parents did not. The details of Judith’s parents’ ordeal would not be discovered until the mid-1980s when her own denial broke down, and she confronted her identity as that of a child of non-survivors. Her father was murdered in a mass killing prior to deportation and her mother was killed in Auschwitz.

Dr. Kestenberg was not only a theoretician and a clinician, but also an applied social scientist. Kestenberg’s early pioneering work focused on psychosexual stages and on the uniqueness of female sexual development. Among her contributions is the discovery of an inner genital stage. In the early 1970s, Dr. Kestenberg established Child Development Research, a parent-child center in Roslyn, Long Island, which served as a preventative mental health facility, and which was a laboratory for constructing the Kestenberg Movement Profile, a systematic method to measure parent-child interaction and to assess personality structure of infants through body language, which could be used to detect emotional problems. The parent-child center has been replicated in many places, and the Kestenberg Movement Profile is widely used.

In a different vein, in the late 1960s several members of the American Psychoanalytic Association started a study group on the psychological effects of the Nazi Holocaust on the children of survivors. Kestenberg became the secretary of the group and was instrumental in lobbying the American Psychoanalytic Association to include it as a formal study group of the Association. In addition, Dr. Kestenberg, along with Martin Bergmann and Milton Jucovy, organized a study group that met monthly to discuss psychoanalytic cases of children of Holocaust survivors. These monthly discussions resulted in the landmark book, Generations of the Holocaust (1992). Kestenberg coined the term “transposition” to explain how children of Holocaust survivors live in a time tunnel — in their own way they experience pain and suffering and in their own way relive their parents’ trauma. Most significantly, the group emphasized the importance of knowing the details of the family’s social trauma and of the collective history in order to make interpretations that are appropriate. Given what is known today, it is difficult to conceive that such a concept was revolutionary for its time.

In 1981, Judith Kestenberg embarked on a quest to interview as many child survivors of the Nazi Holocaust as was possible. With a shoestring

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budget and with a cadre of volunteers, she managed to interview 1,500 adults on four continents. Dr. Kestenberg and her late husband did not travel anywhere without arranging for a few interviews each day. In Eastern Europe, some of the interviewees acknowledged for the first time that they were Jewish. The Kestenbergs organized meetings, and more formal group sessions, for the child survivors, and led a long-term therapy group in New York. These meetings eventually developed into local, national, and international organizations that continue to meet regularly. Dr. Kestenberg helped child survivors of the Holocaust find an identity that was previously denied to them. Children had been told, “What do you remember?” and they would add, “Since you cannot remember, how can you be affected?” Dr. Kestenberg understood differently. She developed a kinesthetic way for child survivors to recount their past and encouraged her interviewees to express themselves artistically. She organized art exhibits, poetry readings, and lecture series. Dr. Kestenberg lectured, trained professionals, and was a prolific writer. Among her edited books are the German version of Generations of the Holocaust (with Martin Bergmann and Milton Jucovy), Children During the Nazi Reign: Psychological Perspective on the Interview Process (with Eva Fogelman, 1994 ), The Last Witness: The Child Survivor of the Holocaust (with Ira Brenner, 1996), and Children Surviving Persecution: An International Study of Trauma and Healing (with Charlotte Kahn, 1998). She wrote two Holocaust books for children in German and her early seminal work was published in Sexuality, Body Movement and the Rhythms of Development (1995).

Judith Kestenberg will forever be my inspiration that it is never too late, and one is never too old to embark on a new adventure or learn something new. In her eighties she learned how to lead psychotherapy groups, and how to sing. She improved her Hebrew, she went to synogogue, and she wrote children’s books. A dancer at heart, Judith Kestenberg was really a choreographer. Bringing together people, teaching them new steps, and giving them direction and guidance were what she was best at. And, always, she emphasized the need to “Practice, practice, practice.”

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