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Studies have been undertaken in several centers in Poland to evaluate the psychological effects of the Second World War on people, especially on the youth. The bulk of the work has been performed at the Institute of Educational Psychology of the University in Warsaw. Two methods were employed: the direct method, which consisted in asking subjects their impressions and subjective feelings about the events of the last War, and methods of free association—either Jung's or by means of asking children to write their biographies spontaneously.
Even three years after the war the effects of its brutal experiences are marked. For example, the factory sirens still seem to arouse anxiety in people, apparently reminding them of the signals of approaching enemy airplanes and bombers. People have actually become so frightened as to look for a shelter in the neighborhood, only realizing the groundlessness of their panic after a while. The Polish mother still cautions her children in the morning when they leave for school to have all their documents ready in case of arrest by the Germans.
Among other acquired habits is the well-known one of people who returned from concentration camps and are still afraid of taking showers, associating them with the showers of the gas chambers in the crematoria in Auschwitz. Some still go around collecting odds and ends, like cigarette butts, wherever they find them, not realizing that they do it out of an unconscious motivation.
One of the most striking observations made on the survivors of concentration camps is that they have a strong tendency to remain among themselves, they talk of their tragic past only to each other and not to people who did not go through the same experiences. In many instances, no information at all can be obtained