What I Learned From the Nazi Holocaust

Man’s inhumanity to humankind has no limits. With so many recent and current genocides claiming our attention, the generations after the Holocaust have become immune to genocidal destruction. We are anesthetized to the ongoing mass killing we watch on the nightly television news or the pop-ups on our computer screens. The passive bystanders of past and present genocides are powerless to change the course of history. So where do we look for some sense of hope to create a better world?

The Nazi Holocaust has sparked an almost infinite number of ideas about human behavior. For the past thirty years I have engaged in social psychological research on human behavior of the rescuers, resisters, and bystanders, and primarily on the Jewish victims of the Third Reich. Additionally, I have studied the psychological impact of massive psychic historical trauma on rescuers and survivors and their heirs in the United States, Israel, and various Eastern and Western European countries, from a psychoanalytic as well as social psychological perspective. Thus, my understanding of the destruction of European Jewry, and of its aftermath, is influenced by my academic disciplines as well as my specific psychological inquiries. As a child of Holocaust survivors myself, this inquiry is personal.

In 1981 I embarked on a journey to find out why some non-Jews resisted, at great risk to themselves and their families, the malevolent authority and rescued Jews from an imminent death. The motivations of such people are complicated and are not static over time. In order to avoid subjectivity, I followed the criteria set up by Yad Vashem of Israel’s National Holocaust Museum and Archives. A Righteous Among the Nations of the World (Hasid U’mot Ha’Olam in Hebrew) is a non-Jewish person who risked his or her life to save a Jew during the Third Reich without any rewards in the present or a promise of rewards in the future. The reason motivations are complicated is that sometimes one started saving

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a Jew for money; when the money ran out he or she protected the person for the duration of the war. At other times, one started to protect a Jewish child out of compassion; when the war ended, the person wanted to keep the child as his or her own. It is therefore up to the survivor to decide who is worthy of recognition.

After conducting semi-structured interviews with more than 300 rescuers of Jews and 150 Jews who were aided by non-Jews to survive in the German-occupied countries during World War II, I developed a qualitative analysis of the interviews. (I had two coders for each interview.) The most important finding was that the overwhelming majority of rescuers (90 percent) grew up with parents who taught them tolerance and acceptance of people who were different from them. Of course, here and there one found anti-Semites who rescued Jews despite their intolerance. But such individuals were an aberration rather than the norm. The parental value of “we are all one people under God” was echoed, along with love and a discipline devoid of physical punishment. When rescuers were children their parents explained wrongdoing, rather than exert physical chastisement. This parent-child interaction fostered a sense of independence and not a fear of authority. Hence, when Nazi propaganda against the Jews became pervasive, future rescuers were not gullible; nor did they fear the malevolent authority. They were able to continue to see the Jews as people just like themselves, not as “vermin” or disease spreaders or as a people responsible for all the economic ills of Germany. The ability to think independently, to feel competent, and to have courage to withstand fear all coalesced at a moment of desperate need for the Jews whose imminent murder became routine.

The bystanders who were transformed to rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust were not just resisters of the Nazi regime they got involved in altruistic behavior. Again, in reviewing the childhood of rescuers, one cannot help but notice that a majority had a parent or other caretaker who was involved in helping others. As children the rescuers were often involved in helping their parents in such tasks as taking food to sick people, working in the soup kitchen in a church, and caring for women with small children, whose husbands were away fighting in World War I. In many cases the rescuers had lost a dear one during their toddler years, or they were ill, and a caring adult nurtured them during this critical period. Becoming a rescuer was sometimes a way to identify with caring role models from childhood. But again, emphasis on the value of tolerance and acceptance of people who are different was at the forefront of not going along with the norm of persecuting the Jews.

The evidence that exists on individuals who opted to become persecutors during the Nazi regime highlights the punitive nature of their upbringing. Thus, such people feared authority from childhood and could not think independently. Because they were in awe of authority, they were more gullible to Nazi propaganda about the Jews. To question authority, even when it is malevolent, would have been too threatening. Nazi perpetrators did not question their own morality when they immersed themselves in the killing of Jews. They thought they were doing the right thing. Doctors who took the Hippocratic Oath were led to believe that by getting rid of the Jews they were preventing the spread of diseases that came from the imagined filth of the Jews.

After liberation, the Nazi persecutors did not feel any guilt for killing six million Jews, mentally and physically disabled people, gypsies, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, blacks, political dissidents, communists, and socialists. This finding was blatant when psychohistorian Robert Jay Tifton interviewed the Nazi doctors. He did not meet one doctor who felt guilty for his barbaric acts of murder. How ironic: when I interviewed the rescuers they felt guilty for not having saved more lives, for having to turn certain people away because it might endanger the lives of those they were already saving.

As for the passive bystanders, they blamed the victims. This is no different than the phenomenon of blaming the victim in any victim group. No matter what the Jews did they were blamed. The psychologist Bruno Bettelheim (who himself was incarcerated in Buchenwald in the late 1930s), Hannah Arendt, and Raul Hilberg each in his or her own way attributed the destruction of European Jews to Jewish passivity, to the evil Jewish leadership in the ghettos, and to Jews’ inability to fight back. Bettelheim could not understand why Otto Frank did not shoot the Gestapo who found their hiding place. Hannah Arendt blamed the Judenrat, the Jewish councils who cooperated with the Nazis in the hope of limiting their demands or saving themselves, for the demise of the Jewish communities in German occupied Europe.

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The victims were scrutinized for surviving. Insensitive comments filled the popular press, such as the Saturday Evening Post, of the late 1940s. Reporters noted that the best Jews were murdered; whoever survived must have done something immoral to make it out alive. Women, especially pretty women who survived concentration camps, were suspected of giving sexual favors to Nazis in order to survive. Young men who fought in the partisans or revolted were criticized for having left their families behind. Those youngsters who escaped were also ostracized for leaving their loved ones to be deported and killed. Those who did not fight back were accused of being passive.

The behavior of the survivors during the Holocaust was not the only criticism they had to endure. When survivors interacted with others who did not experience dehumanization and persecution, they were often stereotyped as “crazy.” How can anyone who experienced the concentration camps ever be normal again? While the question is legitimate, an “us and them” society was created in North America, in Israel, and in other countries that gave survivors entry-visas.

Similarly, in 1946 when a group of psychiatrists had a meeting in a Displaced Persons camp in Landsburg, Germany, they were apprehensive about an overwhelming number of requests for treatment. What they found instead was people asking for jobs. Not being equipped for such requests, they called for social workers to take over the job. This response was similar to when Ben Gurion sent envoys from the Yishuv (pre-state Israel) to the displaced persons camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy. He was afraid that the survivors would all be crazy and that the Yishuv would become one big mental hospital. Most in fact were eager for jobs.

This overwhelming outer resilience did not mean that the grief was not enormous. But there was no time to mourn. To complicate matters, many survivors were living with the hope of finding relatives; hence it was impossible to grieve at this point. The surreal world that Jews experienced could not easily be explained to anyone who was not there, and for many silence ensued for two generations. For some that silence has still not broken.

Psychologically, the Holocaust survivors as a group have adjusted well. Most surprisingly, those who suffered as children have for the most part succeeded in developing productive lives. Despite being persecuted as children they did not become persecutors. What most attributes to this adaptation is that they had experienced love and affection in their early critical years.

The consequences of massive psychohistorical trauma did not end with the survivor generation. The social reality of the second generation is as diverse as the lives of the heterogeneous survivor generation. But for many in the second and third generation of Holocaust survivors, a psychological dynamic of mourning is experienced knowingly and unknowingly. These stages are not static and can differ with changing external events; from shock to denial, from confrontation to feelings of helplessness, survivors’ guilt, grieving, undoing, rage, depression, and identification with victimization, and ultimately to a search for meaning. Three generations after the liberation we are witnessing the search for meaning in many forms of consciousness-raising about the Holocaust and other genocides through commemorations, education, fighting for human rights, creative projects, and continuity of the Jewish life that was destroyed.

The image held by society of the Jewish Holocaust survivor has been transformed from that of a person who was shunned to that of one who commands indeed demands moral authority. This process came about because of external validation of the suffering of the Jews. But a dialectic between why the victim did not fight back and how the victim resisted under such conditions remains. The immediacy of viewing current-day victims of genocide on television and computer screens emotionally numbs us to their plight. But we know that the answers do not lie in survivors, but in all of us. We are the passive bystanders.

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