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Alex Holder edited this volume by Hillel Klein (1923-1985), which incorporates the perspectives of a Holocaust survivor, psychodynamic clinician, and psychoanalytic theorist. The book as a whole documents the perpetual revealing and concealing that we find in so many stories of Holocaust survival, and in the experiences of listeners to this trauma as well.
Born in Krakow in 1923, Klein joined the resistance and went underground at the age of 16. In 1942 he was captured by the Germans, and eventually sent to Theresienstadt, where he was liberated at the age of 22. He subsequently studied medicine and became a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, practicing in Jerusalem. This collection of his thoughts on Holocaust survival addresses three groups: survivors, of which he is one; patients whom he has treated in his clinical practice, and the next generations.
Klein's psychodynamic studies of Holocaust survivors and their families in Israel and the Diaspora provide a simultaneously comprehensive and personal account of the historical facts of occupation, life in the ghetto, hiding, deportation, separation, and survival in the camps. The book's four parts are “Oppression and Survival,” “Society and the Survivor,” “Survivors and Their Families,” and “The Psychotherapeutic Treatment of Survivors and Their Families.”
The individual cases he cites are derived from his own patients as well as the survivors he interviewed in Israel and the United States. His accounts of the relationships between the “there and then” and the “here and now” emphasize the malleable nature of Holocaust remembrance. Not only do we learn of the struggles of these survivors to manage their lives in the ghettos and concentration camps, but we also hear how their previous lives and their subsequent attempts to start again are not separable. Memory, for Klein, remakes the past in the present moment.