The last witness: The child survivor of the holocaust, by J.S. Kestenberg and I. Brenner. Washington DC, American Psychiatric Press, 1996, xv + 238 pp.
✍ Scribed by Paul I. Frankel
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1998
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 10 KB
- Volume
- 24
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0096-140X
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
This book's title is particularly apt because survivors who as children experienced the Jewish Holocaust are truly its last living legacy. However, in the interest of truth in advertising, the subtitle "A Psychodynamic Analysis" should probably have been added, since The Last Witness analyzes the effect of early cataclysmic trauma on subsequent development exclusively from a classical Freudian perspective. The volume is actually one of several published recently dealing with the current survivors-victims, perpetrators, and bystanders-of the era of Nazi aggression.
The authors begin with an encounter at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Miami, Florida, between a Hispanic family and a Holocaust survivor. The Hispanic father approaches a survivor and asks incredulously, "You were there? You really were there? Did you know Elie Wiesel? You have the numbers?" The former death camp inmate's identifying tattoo revealed, the Hispanic father leaves with gasps of "Dios Mio!" Unlike Hass' recent volume [1995] on the same theme, The Aftermath, the remainder of The Last Witness does not generally include such fine-grained accounts of verbal exchanges and consists more of interpretative discussion of survivors and their families from a psychoanalytic point of view.
As did Ervin Staub in The Roots of Evil [1989], the authors early on draw parallels between the Jewish Holocaust and examples of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, Israel, and Rwanda. It also is noted, somewhat in passing, that the volume is based on preliminary findings of the International Study of Organized Persecution of Children. The first chapter, "Children in Concentration Camps," consists of the experiences and subsequent development of six survivors who were in hiding or in labor camps at very early ages. In the rich prose of a clinical case study, each child's family background, early developmental history, and the Holocaust experience and its effect on subsequent development are framed psychoanalytically. Emphasis in discussing post-trauma development is on dreams of persecution and latent symbolic material. From this reader's point of view it would have been revealing to devote more attention to the child's later interpersonal relationships and personality development. Nevertheless, I found the narratives of individual tragedies throughout the chapter as moving as Keneally's descriptions of suffering and heroism in Schindler's List [1982].
In the second chapter, "Hidden children: Early childhood and latency" the authors describe experiences of children in hiding and comment upon these children's difficulties as adults. These include considerations of double identity and a fascinating analysis