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In thinking about the foregoing articles, we now ask: How is the Holocaust known? The answer appears to be: in fragments. That is, trauma is both registered and manifested in fragments.
Regarding trauma's manner of registration: Trauma bombards and fragments the mind, which can neither symbolize nor integrate the experience.
Regarding trauma's manner of manifestation: Trauma is remembered and reappears in fragments. What the researcher sees is neither universal themes nor syndromes but particular startling phenomena, which in a given individual have a unique stamp. That is, trauma does not appear as a major organizer of personality alone, but in addition shows itself in discrete ways, whether these be symptoms, daydreams, poems, fantasies, or characteristic traits. It permeates life in fragments, in circumscribed phenomena that are usually overlooked by those searching for trends and generalizations.
If the survivor is to know the Holocaust, he must reassemble his fragmentary perceptions. Only then can he mourn, for “one cannot grieve what one does not know” (Reeves, 1973, p. 26).
Likewise, if researchers are to know the Holocaust, they must attend to the details wherein the threads of trauma appear. We must take the details and form a narrative from them, one interwoven with personality factors, in order to understand trauma's impact and arrive at something more central and cohesive than the fragments but not a substitute for them. Too often researchers have lumped survivors together into groups (e.g., Danieli, 1979) and have done the equivalent of dream translation rather than dream interpretation, deriving an overriding theory that has superseded and replaced the text, the details. Symptom description and positing