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Hillel Klein, an analyst who survived life in the ghetto and in concentration camps and who died in 1985 at the age of sixty-two, wrote and published many important papers. At the time of his death he was preparing this book, Überleben und Versuche der Wiederbelebung, which two German editors, Christoph Biermann and Carl Nedelmann,
have only recently brought out.1 The work is remarkable because of Klein's understanding of the circumstances of the lives of the survivors, before, during, and after the attempt by the Nazis to exterminate the Jews. Giving the individuals he describes a label, however, runs counter to the spirit of Klein's writings. Nowhere in these pages does one have the impression that he is describing a group whose characteristics can be grasped in general terms, and unlike most of the literature on trauma, Klein does not focus on the deficits without bringing out the characteristics that enabled Jews to survive and to create new lives for themselves and their descendants.
A large part of the work approaches the trauma of the Holocaust from the perspective of those who reintegrated themselves into the various groups among whom they lived after the war. Not that the book is silent on the trauma of the extermination of millions of Jews. The editors selected a number of essays, about half of the book, devoted to the description of the various conditions under which Jews lived during the persecutions, such as life in the ghetto, in hiding, and in the camps themselves. From these pages it is clear that the author either had firsthand experience with these conditions and the emotional consequences of living under these circumstances, or he treated survivors after the war who familiarized him with conditions he had not known personally. Further, he examines the impact of the postwar silence about their experiences, forced upon the survivors for internal as well as external reasons, which varied according to the individuals and according to the culture into