Holocaust Survivors and Survivors of the Cambodian Tragedy: Similarities and Differences Dan Savin, M.D. and Shalom Robinson, M.D. Paul Paul is a 34-year-old man who lives with his wife and their six surviving children in a small village in western Cambodia (one child died of Dengue fever). He makes his living by harvesting sugar palm fruit from the trees, making sugar out of it, and selling the sugar at the market. He also serves in the government army and is frequently assigned guard duty at a small bridge near their village. Paul was born in Phnom Penh and went to school there until the fifth grade. When Pol Pot came to power, he remembers his family being ordered to leave the city with the rest of the population. They walked for several weeks and finally arrived at the village they were assigned to. The last time Paul saw his father was when he was ordered onto a truck and driven away. He later learned that his father had been executed for having been a soldier in the Lon Nol army. Paul was separated from his mother and two siblings and sent to work farming rice. He also helped take care of cows with a group of adolescent boys and girls. There was never enough food and many of his peers died of starvation. From the field where he worked he saw people being executed in the distance, one of whom he later learned was his brother. He was not allowed to see his mother, but on one occasion he stole away from the group to try to find her. He was caught and severely beaten by Khmer Rouge soldiers until he was bleeding from his ears; he was then locked in a cow shed for three days without food or water. Later, he was chained to a rock and forced to walk around in circles for three days. After this, he never again tried to visit his mother. After the Vietnamese took power, Paul was reunited with his mother and sister. Because they were starving, they went to a refugee camp where they stayed four months. They did not like the camp, and returned to Cambodia. Paul was drafted into the army and participated in many battles against the Khmer Rouge. Because he could not hear well, however, he was dismissed from regular duty and assigned to guarding the bridge in the village where he lives today. Paul has recurrent nightmares of his father being led off to be executed, though he says these are less frequent than several years ago. He often has difficulty sleeping at night and is restless and anxious during the day. He worries about Pol Pot gaining power again, but does not think it very likely. Paul is easily upset when he hears or sees anything that reminds him of Pol Pot times and is frequently startled by loud noises. He tries to avoid thinking about the traumas he has endured and is usually able to do so while he is working. Paul says that life for him and his family has gradually improved over the past few years, though there are times when they don't have as much to eat as they would like. He occasionally feels sad but is able to enjoy socializing with friends and relatives. His appetite and energy level are good and he has no difficulty concentrating. He denies feeling guilty about anything that has happened to him or his family and hopes that things will continue to get better for them. He has never lost the will to live. Discussion The Holocaust and the Cambodian tragedy each have their own history. The events leading up to the trauma, the ideology of the persecutors, the methods of extermination, and the number of victims are very different. Similarly, the Jewish and Cambodian cultures are different, as are the ways in which each culture has so far managed to adapt to the trauma. Nevertheless, there are similarities between victims of the Holocaust and victims of the Cambodian tragedy which we believe relate to a universal human response to overwhelming trauma. In the unique case of the Cambodian genocide, the perpetrators were of the same racial and ethnic background as the victims. Terror was generated from within, rather than by an outside enemy. The ideology which stood at the basis of the atrocities was a utopian plan to radically change Cambodian society into a communist agrarian one. (6) Leaders of the Khmer Rouge, headed by Pol Pot, carried out mass killings on the way to their utopian aim. Their goal was not the annihilation of their own nation. Yet, though the rich, the educated, and those connected with the previous regime were targeted, the entire nation suffered. The Holocaust was a war waged against the Jewish people by Nazi Germany. In a systematic fashion, six million Jews were murdered, one-third of the whole Jewish nation. Most of European Jewry was annihilated. The whole Jewish culture in Poland, Lithuania, and other countries was destroyed. The final aim of the Nazis was to annihilate the entire Jewish nation, and they carried this out wherever they could. At the Wannsee Conference in Berlin on January 20, 1942, plans for exterminating the Jewish people were coordinated by high-ranking Nazi officials. The Final Solution, a code name for the total destruction of the Jewish people, was of highest priority for Hitler and the Nazi German government. For the purpose of killing every Jew, death camps such as Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, and many more were built. Most of the Holocaust victims were murdered in these camps. In Auschwitz alone, 1.5 million Jews were poisoned with Zyklon-B gas. In Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, approximately 2 million Jews were poisoned with carbon monoxide gas. (8) The mass killings of Jews began even before the death camps were built, with the German invasion of the USSR (June 22, 1941). These mass killings were carried out by special units of the SS (Einsatzgruppen), which shot hundreds of thousands of Jews to death. Later, hundreds of thousands of Jews died from starvation in the ghettoes, hard labor, torture, or epidemics. Holocaust survivors still suffer from the effects of Nazi persecution. In a study carried out in 1989, it was found that a large percentage of elderly Holocaust survivors still suffer from symptoms of the survivor syndrome: 86% of them from hypermnesia for Holocaust events, 50% from anhedonia, 42% from depression, and 38% of them, still, from guilt feelings. Some 75% consider themselves as still suffering from the Holocaust. (17) In a later study of people who survived the Holocaust as children, it was found that most of them still suffer from symptoms of the survivor syndrome. Their suffering today shows a positive correlation to the trauma endured during the Holocaust. Death-camp survivors suffer more from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptom than survivors of other forms of persecution. (19) [Page 5 of 7] Bibliography 6. Chandler, D.P. A History of Cambodia. Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1996. 8. Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Gutman, Y., ed. New York: Macmillan, New York, 1990. 17. Robinson, S., Rapaport, J., Durst, R., et al. The Late Effects of Nazi Persecution Among Elderly Holocaust Survivors. Acta Psychiatr. Scand. 82: 311-315, 1990. 19. Robinson, S., Rapaport-Bar-Sever, M., Rapaport, J. The Present State of People Who Survived the Holocaust as Children. Acta Psychiatr. Scand. 89: 242-245, 1994.