The Holocaust: A Never-Ending Agony

Abstract

How long does a severe traumatic experience remain in the memory and affect behavior? Many years later, in interviewing American soldiers who encountered Nazi con centration camps during World War II, we quickly learned that their responses in at least 40 percent of these interviews revealed severe emotional stress as they described the tragic details that they had seen as eyewitnesses. They frequently had kept the photographs taken during these experiences and also shared official army booklets, films, and military orders all pertaining to the concentration camps and those victims. From an original goal of 10 oral histories, our project titled "Witness to the Holocaust" has expanded to almost 400 known GI witnesses and has completed interviews with 80. The truths which these men and some women nurses, Red Cross workers, and United Nations Refugee Relief Agency (UNRRA) workers have shared verify beyond question the terrible nature of the concentration camp system and its impact on Jews and non- Jews during World War II. Now sociologists, psychiatrists, and historians are analyzing the interview data confirming, among other things, that many of these witnesses still suffer from the awful experience of liberating or even seeing a camp after liberation. This agony seems never to end.