Überleben und Versuche der Wiederbelebung Psychoanalytische Studien mit Überlebenden der Shoah und mit ihren Familien in Israel und in der Diaspora [Survival and efforts at revival—Psychodynamic studies of Holocaust survivors and their families in Israel and the Diaspora] by Hillel Klein Stuttgart:  Frommann-Holzboog (Biermann C, Nedelmann C, editors. Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse, Supplement 20). 2003  319 p.

This book is unusual in many respects. Author Hillel Klein, the well-known Israeli psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, wrote it in the last few years of his life as the sum of his experiences over several decades in treating Holocaust survivors and their families. The book is also a moving personal record. As a Polish Jew who was the only member of his family to survive the exterminatory anti-Semitic hatred of the National Socialists, Klein describes his own experiences and the process of working them out in an impressive and deeply moving way.

The book opens with the account of a key incident from 1942: a young SS man was guarding a group of tired prisoners and asked the young Hillel, who was only just 19 years old, ‘Tell me the truth. Who will win the war?’ When this man evasively said, ‘There are no victors in war—only victims’, the soldier was furious and replied, ‘If you don't tell the truth, Jewish dog, I'll kill you on the spot!’ Hillel finally answered, ‘Germany will lose the war. You can't kill everyone’. After a brief pensive silence, the SS man left him. Hillel was then insulted and beaten by the other members of the group for his independence of mind (p. 11). This tremendously courageous reaction is in many ways characteristic of Klein's attempt at what he calls ‘revival’. In a situation constructed entirely for the purpose of his complete physical and psychic destruction, he asserted his right to answer as an individual; he thereby distanced himself from the group and removed the ‘false self’ that had been projected on to him by the Nazi aggressors.

An experience immediately following the Liberation in May 1945 illustrates a further remarkable attempt to banish terror and death from his self-image and to return to his self-representation that belonged to the pre-Shoah period. At this time, Klein was in the Theresienstadt concentration camp and was so emaciated that he weighed only 28 kg. He shouted over to his fellow prisoners who were attacking some German s