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Perel Wilgowicz explores the tragic legacy of the Shoah and its effects on survivors and descendants. It seems an apposite time to consider the issues raised by this paper. In the first month of the new century Robin Cook, the British Foreign Secretary, announced the establishment of a Holocaust Memorial Day to fall on the 27 January, the date of the liberation of Auschwitz. The controversial libel case brought by the revisionist historian David Irving - who refutes and minimizes survivors’ experiences and documentary evidence in the death camps with a master propagandist's sleight of hand - brings to the courts and the public arena the debate concerning the importance of memory and history, not only to the survivors but to society as a whole. The reconstruction of history (both personal and collective) in memory helps us to reconnect to our past, and gives us the opportunity to learn from experience; we then have the potential to free ourselves from an unconscious and conscious pathological tendency to repeat our mistakes.
The paper raises important issues about the impact of unspeakable and unthinkable experiences and how these (understandably) undigested experiences are transmitted from one generation to the next, leaving the two bound together unconsciously by this traumatic experience, blighting the possibility of separation and individuation. In the theoretical introduction to her paper, Wilgowicz describes the process, which she sees in the descendants of survivors in terms of a concept she calls ‘vampiric’ identification. I quote:
Unconscious vampiric identifications … make it difficult to separate two beings who are nevertheless distinct. It is necessary not only to work through the incestuous and