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When Bruno Bettelheim emerged from almost one and a half years in the Buchenwald concentration camp, he found refuge at the University of Chicago. There he wrote about his experiences in the Nazi camp, but his article was rejected by psychoanalytic journals, always for one of two reasons. First, the journal editors did not believe him; they did not believe that Germans could do such things. Second, they claimed that since Bettelheim had been in the camp, his report was subjective, and hence not “scientific.” Only Gordon Allport's Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology accepted the paper, which was finally published in October 1943. Sixteen years later, Bettelheim was able to collect himself and publish this as one of his major works, The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age (Bettelheim 1960).
Now, some seventy-five years after the Nazi attempt to systematically wipe out all Jews, books on the Shoah proliferate, among them this most recent profound contribution, whose contributors include such luminaries as Ira Brenner, Salman Akhtar, Zvi Lothane, Anna Ornstein, Dori Laub, Vamik Volkan, Peter Loewenberg, Werner Bohleber, Yolanda Gampel, and Ilany Kogan. Such a list should be enough to elicit our attention. Perhaps the book will be read; but if it is, what difference will that make? There is a rise of anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe and the U.S. (let alone its festering in Middle East countries). Nevertheless, the chapters in this volume are compelling. They include painfully personal details of the writers' experience with the Shoah: Ornstein's recounting of her murdered mother's eyes, the death of all her husband's siblings and father; Loewenberg's narrow escape from Germany with a holdover in Shanghai; Ira Brenner's memory of his father's number tattoo from Auschwitz. Here we have psychoanalysts, who have pursued examined lives, speak from an informed heart. Let us listen.