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Dr. Hoppe has given a succinct summary of the more salient problems concerning the victims of the Nazi concentration camps.
Despite the many studies conducted in the past twenty years, we still have a great deal to learn about the psychopathology of the people who lived under the Nazi death threat for years on end. More than two decades have passed since the collapse of the Third Reich and the liberation of the concentration camp survivors, and yet the ineffaceable characteristics of their deep traumatizations can be detected almost as easily today as when we first encountered them. They still continue to display the typical apathy, the so-called “affective anesthesia,” the same detachment and distrust toward the world as I was able to observe when I met with them on my surveys of D. P camps in Europe in 1946, and in Cyprus in 1947.
Dr. Hoppe correctly refers to the fact that the processes of repression were so powerful and all-embracing that they entirely distorted the structure of the ego and its synthetic function, but in many instances, this repression also made survival possible.
In a paper written in 1948,1 I attempted to show how the reality had to be denied, not partially but totally in order to survive, and also how profound a distortion of the social sense this denial inevitably entailed. This was particularly typified in a case history of a young girl whom I interviewed in Cyprus in 1947. The sole survivor of her family, she had been assigned to the crematorium staff at Auschwitz. She accepted the Nazi version that the women to whom she handed towels were '“going for a bath.” The cries and screams of the children who had been herded past her came back to her later in a psychotic episode that she developed during the Cyprus detention. When she told me her story after she had recovered from her acute hallucinatory episode, she could not understand how she could have been so “stupid” as not to grasp the reality and the true situation when it was taking place.
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