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On vacation in Iceland, ten years ago, a concentration camp survivor was disturbed in his sleep at 3:00 A.M. by slightly inebriated German youths, shouting and singing war songs. They occupied the tent pitched about five yards away from his own. Twice he asked them politely in English to quiet down. To no avail. The third time he screamed at them in German that they should behave themselves as guests in a foreign country, that the world is not theirs, and that people are fed up with bellowing Germans.
The following morning as the participants in this internationally organized camping tour lined up at the chow line, a dialogue began that continued over the course of the remaining six days of the trip. With the assistance of a German history professor, the persecuted and the children of the persecutors confronted each other. Before the parting of their ways, they had achieved a broadened understanding and considerable empathy for each other.
Although the outcome of that interlude was beneficial, at least for the few people directly involved, the momentary emotional upheaval was searing. Thus, one admires the courage, the self-discipline, the fortitude of the investigators, who in their devotion “to achieve understanding out of living memory as seen through a prism of psychoanalytic discipline …” (p. 3), cooperated with German colleagues and included five chapters on Persecutors' Children in their report on Generations of the Holocaust.
Recognizing that the authors' conclusions are drawn from limited data, the reports and observations of a special patient population, the study of the Generations of the Holocaust nonetheless makes several important, more generally