|
 |
 |
What Do Holocaust Survivors Feel Today Toward Their Perpetrators? Shalom Robinson, M.D., and Sara Metzer, M.S.W.
Josef
He tells: "It was impossible to go alone to the toilet in Bergen Belsen. The toilets were outside the barracks and the corpses were scattered around." He would go to the toilets with his mother, and it was very frightening.
He worked in Bergen Belsen every day. He remembers the trucks that carried bodies of the dead camp prisoners, and wonders today how he did not shout or cry at these scenes. He also remembers the previous camp in Austria, where they were incarcerated for only a few days. He remembers the cruel Ukrainian guards; when he wanted to go to the toilets a Ukrainian guard with a whip tried to beat him and he fled.
Until recent years he thought that these experiences had not affected him and tried not to think about them, but in the last three years he has become much more involved with the subject of the Holocaust. He wants to know more about what happened and how it happened. He reads a lot about this period, watches television programs about the Holocaust, goes to films and lectures about it. He has never visited Germany. He suspects every older German of having been a Nazi during the war, and does not like to hear the German language. He is, however, able to meet young Germans who come to Israel as volunteers to help here. At the end of the war, he felt hatred toward Germans, associating them with the Nazi Germans who persecuted him in the camps. Later, when he grew up, he understood that in fact the Hungarians who had betrayed them and handed them over to the Germans were no less guilty for his suffering. He has traveled to Hungary a few times, and had some feelings of revenge at the idea that he now lived in his own free country that was more prosperous than Hungary. The region where he lived before the war belonged to Yugoslavia. A large part of the population in this area were Hungarians, and the Hungarians occupied it in 1941. His parents felt themselves to be Hungarian patriots. He is angry at the Hungarians who betrayed the Jews, but his attitude toward them is different than toward the Germans. He felt that the Germans were not human, as if creatures from another world. The anger he feels toward the Hungarians is in the context of interhuman feelings, with which he can cope. As for the Serbians, he has warm feelings of gratitude toward them since they helped him rebuild his life, and also gave him compensation for his property when he emigrated from Yugoslavia to Israel.
Discussion
This change in attitude can be understood in the framework of the change that the whole of Israeli society has undergone in regard to the expression of feelings. It has become legitimate to express negative as well as positive feelings more freely. Holocaust survivors are also now able to express a larger range of feelings.
In the postwar years, Holocaust survivors who came to Palestine (later Israel) received a clear message that Israeli society did not want them to tell about their suffering or to express the feelings associated with it.
The attitude of Jews who had come to Palestine before the war toward the survivors who came to the country after the Holocaust was complex. Much of it involved the guilt feelings of bystanders who had not helped their brothers during this terrible period. Their feelings toward the survivors were a mixture of pity, reluctance, and even some feelings of contempt.
The Jewish society in Palestine, which was still busy with preparations for the War of Independence and later with the war itself, was not ready to open up emotionally to the survivors. There was even an unconscious fear of becoming infected with something terrible, some terrible weakness. In this period, the Yishuv - the Israeli society that settled in Israel before the War - avoided and, like the survivors themselves, tried to distance itself from the subject of the Shoah. Both categories of people continued to behave in this way during the period of state-building after the War of Independence, the survivors continuing to suppress their feelings connected with the Shoah.
The Eichmann trial marked a turning point, when the horrors of the Holocaust and terrible accounts of the genocide of European Jewry broke into the Israeli reality. Even then the feelings of Holocaust survivors were still suppressed. They had repressed their feelings toward their persecutors since the period of persecution, when the expression of such feelings could be dangerous. Although they did not express wishes for revenge, they expressed hope that justice would be done by the legal system. (3) (5)
The Yom Kippur War, in which Israel was suddenly attacked, was a further impetus toward changing the attitude of Israeli society toward the Holocaust and Holocaust survivors. Following this war, Israeli leaders revealed their feelings that it could have led to a Shoah-like situation for the state of Israel.
All this brought greater readiness to try and understand what the Holocaust survivors had gone through.
In recent years, the theme of the Shoah has often arisen in the Israeli media. Israeli youth travel to the death camps in what is known as the March of the Living. All this has given greater legitimacy to expressing feelings.
In addition, most of the Holocaust survivors alive today were children during the Second World War, and in regard to the expression of feelings associated with the Holocaust and of feelings toward the perpetrators they are more like the second and third generation - children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors - than like their parents' generation. Like the second and third generation, they have grown up in a free country where feelings may be expressed. Children and grandchildren of survivors often express negative feelings toward the persecutors of their parents or grandparents. (9) In many respects, child survivors in Israel are similar to Israeli-born Jews. (10)
The attitudes of Holocaust survivors toward the people of the countries where they lived before the war were found in this study to be basically more positive than their attitudes toward Germans. This is probably partly influenced by the fact that many of the interviewees were hidden by non-Jews and feel gratitude toward their saviors.
The issue of victims' attitudes and feelings toward their persecutors deserves further study.
References
|
