The On Coping With The Holocaust Experience

According to the texts and eyewitness accounts, the Holocaust had horrendous effects on the people who lived through it. During this time Jews were being rounded up and put into concentration camps by order of the German government. Writings and testimonies from survivors of the Holocaust are around even to this day. According to these sources, Holocaust survivors suffered tremendously since they were treated as less than human , they lost loved ones, and were constantly abused.

     Throughout history the Jewish people have been scapegoats; whenever something was not going right they were the ones to blame. From Biblical times through to the Shakespearean Era, all the way to the Middle East Crisis and the creation of Israel, the Jews have been persecuted and blamed for the problems of the world. The most horrifying account of Jewish persecution is the holocaust, which took place in Europe from 1933 to 1945 when Adolf Hitler tried to eliminate all the people that he thought were inferior to the Germans, namely the Jews, because he wanted a pure Aryan State.

The Holocaust which was one of many of the controversial events that have happened in the history of our world demonstrated a significant amount of cruelty and dehumanization. Because of such a controversial event, many have suffered through physical and unfortunately psychological upheaval and distress. With previous knowledge and novels’ read on the Holocaust, it came to be known that the event was triggered through obedience and conformity due to the not specifically the Germans’ beliefs of anti-Semitic and propaganda, but more of leader Adolf Hitler. The time of the Holocaust was used to dehumanize which enhanced the understanding of mental health and human psychology. During the Holocaust, many psychological principles affected individuals forever. The principles include groupthink and of course knowing the outcome of the event. Such principles sooner explain the reality of life because it stresses how individuals react due to their past experiences like the Holocaust and most importantly how traumatic events build them as who they are today.  Innocent Jews went through starvation, terrible working conditions, and the elimination of race through torture such as gas chambers. Furthermore, the history of this controversial event is now being used to be alert of the health and wellness of those who have gone through such events that sooner change their behavior and mentality for the better or even worse.

The Holocaust was a horrifying time period for the Jews. Nearly 2,700,000 Jews were sent to extermination camps, where they were immediately killed. Millions of others were sent to concentration camps, where they were either killed or used as slave labor. However throughout this hellish time period, there were still some people who managed to stay positive. Etty Hillesum said that “big things” helped people’s spirits survive. During the Holocaust, love laughter and nature were the things that helped many spirits triumph.

Sorscher and Cohen (1997) define a Holocaust survivor as a Jew born in Europe who experienced the Holocaust either in hiding, in under-ground resistance, as a refugee, or in concentration or forced labor camps. Survivors of Nazi Persecution, also known as SNPs, are well described under the broad heading of the Concentration Camp Syndrome, or CCS (Sigal, Silver, Rakoff & Ellin, 1973). After the war, survivors experienced an overwhelming amount of traumatic episodes, with some of the symptoms increasing, as they grew older. Survivors exhibited chronic depression with obsessional thoughts of past events, anxiety,

People that survived the Holocaust were optimistic and/or hid but today most are guilty. They have guilt in them because they survived while others were dying amongst them.Surviving World War II meant freedom but many did not get to that point, unfortunately. They were brutally murdered or died either from working too much , starvation, and/ or diseases that spread like wildfire. Unbelievably, smells from the gas chambers, where victims were poisoned with gasses, are still present at concentration camps locations . Many survivors have never been able to get over this horrific event that took place because of the terrifying memories from the camps. Memories of how ruthlessly people were being killed, disgusting food, and the hard work, haunt

After going through an event as traumatic as the Holocaust, I do not know how anyone could be the same. Viktor Frankl said that Holocaust survivors suffered “moral deformity” and “apathy”, meaning that they no longer had the same thought process as most people have and suffered from a lack of concern and enthusiasm. Even for Elie, the main character in the book Night by Elie Wiesel, began doing things he would have never thought and was not as empathetic after his experiences. I think it is safe to say that all survivors of the Holocaust went on to live their lives with a different mindset that others due to the horrible conditions they lived in.

Alena Synjova once stated, “ I’d like to go away alone where there are other, nicer people, somewhere into the far unknown, there, where no one kills another. Maybe more of us, a thousand strong, will reach this goal before too long” (Volavková, 1994, p. 50). During the Holocaust, people craved opportunity to escape to a place where there were polite people and no one killed each other. The Holocaust affected everyone, ranging from the elderly to the young children, who were faced with horrific situations. They witnessed the death of the people around them and were forced to live under unmentionable conditions. The holocaust altered non-Jewish and Jewish

During the Holocaust, about six million Jews died. Some were taken to concentration and execution camps, such as Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Chelmno. Others were kept in ghettos with terrible living conditions in order to segregate them from the rest of society. Regardless of the suffering, these people miraculously managed to keep their head up and look on the bright side. To some, it may be a mystery of how they stayed strong. However, it is clear that love, nature, and humor allowed human spirit to triumph during the Holocaust.

The Nazis killed over six million Jews and millions of other Polish and Soviet civilians in the Holocaust. They also killed gypsies, physically and mentally disabled people and homosexuals. The number of survivors today are quickly dwindling down. Clinical psychologist Natan Kellermann defines a Holocaust survivor as any Jew who lived under Nazi occupation and was threatened by the “final solution” (Kellermann 199). This definition can be applied to not only Jews, but to anyone in general whose life was threatened by the Nazis. When these survivors were liberated, they believed the suffering was over, but for many, this wasn’t the case. The trauma of the horrors they faced is still evident in their life. By analyzing the effects of post traumatic stress disorder after the Holocaust, readers can see that the aftermath of the Holocaust is still prevalent in the survivor’s everyday life; This is important to show that while the trauma may not be overcome, the survivor can be more at peace with the events.

The Holocaust is widely considered one of the darkest hours in world history. People of Jewish descent were imprisoned and confined to brutal conditions in concentration camps. Author Elie Wisel captures many of the atrocities of these detainments in his literary work, Night. Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs describes the needs and motivation of people (Boeree). In Night, Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs has a direct impact on the lives of the Jews and their relationships with each other.

Jewish Holocaust survivors enduring horrendous treatment of the Holocaust, and it impacted the aftermath of the event as well. Because of the emotional and physical trauma after liberation, Jewish Holocaust survivors struggled with rebuilding their lives and adapting to live a “normal life”.

The phrase "a lesson to be learned and a tragedy to behold" has been indelibly attached to the Holocaust that to think of it in any other way is thought to insult all those of the Jewish community who lost their lives to the attempted genocide of their race by the Nazi regime. Despite such brevity attached to learning lessons from the Holocaust one must wonder whether the lesson has actually been learned or if people will continue to repeat the mistakes of the past. Angela Merkel, the current German Chancellor, has stated that the German experiment towards multi-culturalism has failed, those who wish to migrate into the country must learn the German way whether it is the language they speak, the culture they have or the very religion they

Eighteen million Europeans went through the Nazi concentration camps. Eleven million of them died, almost half of them at Auschwitz alone.1 Concentration camps are a revolting and embarrassing part of the world’s history. There is no doubt that concentration camps are a dark and depressing topic. Despite this, it is a subject that needs to be brought out into the open. The world needs to be educated on the tragedies of the concentration camps to prevent the reoccurrence of the Holocaust. Hitler’s camps imprisoned, tortured, and killed millions of Jews for over five years. Life in the Nazi concentration camps was full of terror and death for its individual prisoners as well as the entire Jewish

Jewish people did not only suffer physically, but psychologically throughout the Holocaust. The Jewish prisoners were deprived of food and water, which resulted in a decline of morale, cruelty among fellow prisoners instead of unity, and crushed friendships. Some of the Jews did not have the desire of anything, including the desire to live because they endured such a great amount of pain and suffering (Jewish 3). Sometimes, best friends throughout life were cruel and threatening towards one another for one small piece of bread. When Jewish people were organized by gender, families were forced to split apart and never witnessed the presence of each other again.