Holocaust Movies: Watching the Unwatchable

In the summer of 1939, my father-in-law, Noel Galen, was fourteen years old and spending his summer at camp in upstate New York. Noel and his fellow campers were acculturated, first generation, Jewish kids from New York City. Their parents, left-leaning and education-pushing, were unapologetic about their children's ignorance of their Jewish heritage. Meanwhile, back in Europe, Hitler had other plans for their relatives. It is a story we all know, unspeakably painful to remember, dangerous to forget. Now, in the summer of 2001, I am at Noel's farm on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, watching Holocaust movies with him and Sam, my fifteen year old son. I am working on a piece about movies of the Holocaust, and find I am baffled as to what to say about such a subject. What can psychoanalysis add to our understanding of something beyond our comprehension? With some vague notion that my sense of the Holocaust is connected to the idea of family, I suggest to Noel and Sam that we watch them together.

It is in the nature of trauma that it is done to us. It makes us respond, even if only to stupefy. So there are two ways we can respond to trauma: passively, in the ways that it makes us be part of it, and actively, in the ways that we attempt to make it part of our selves. As analysts, we try to help traumatized patients heal, drawing on our empathy and our own traumas to connect with them. Artists heal, too, by creating artistic experiences that engage us empathically and give us a circumscribed opportunity to be there and survive. Analysts and artists both try to create a relationship to the traumatic material that will be powerful and empowering. One of the problems with the Holocaust is that it is too big. It defies representation.

In Trauma: A Genealogy (The University of Chicago Press, ), Ruth Leys, Professor of Humanities at Johns Hopkins, examines the history of the concept of trauma, including its relationship to psychoanalysis. She describes