The Holocaust

10 Pages 2399 Words

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There are five main categories of Survivor syndrome, death imprint, guilt of death, psychological numbing, suspicion and paranoia, and the search for meaning. The first category, Death imprint, is the idea of not only death itself, but of all forms of torture and gruesome images of death is found in a lot of the survivors. For many survivors they can recall the smell of smoke and the voices of the tortured. Some survivors are trapped in time; mentally they are unable to escape the torture that they had witnessed. In other words, they are unable to move beyond the imagery and are stuck in time. The survivors are mentally scarred with images they can never escape or share. The inability to sleep or work is a direct consequence of what they endured in the death camps. The second category is where the guilt of death is found. Here is where the survivors feels remorse for the loved ones they had lost and ask "why them and not me". The survivor remembers feeling helpless at times of need, "why didn't I resist" or "how could I have saved someone." The survivor cannot escape the feeling of debt to the lost and feels guilty. In a few studies some survivors have been known to feel more guilt about the Holocaust then the actual soldiers that administered the killings. Guilt is the most common feeling among survivors and is passed to children each generation. To cope with this guilt there are many support groups that are opening doors wide for the Jewish people to come and be set free from the needless guilt. Yet many survivors have shut themselves out from the rest of the world and have lived lives of solitude because the guilt is too them. This guilt is a direct cause of the Holocaust and because of it; the Jewish people will never be the same. The third category is psychological numbing. Psychologists have determined this as a "necessary psychological defense against overwhelming images." This defense is only good for a short time because...