Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 6, 1994 TAG: 9404060095
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MARA LEE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Time heals all wounds? Wounds such as 74 of your relatives murdered, and you're the last survivor? Even if you could mourn them all, what of the rest of the 6 million dead?
Cliches wither in the face of genocide.
For nearly 20 years, psychologist Yael Danieli, founder of the Group Project for Holocaust Survivors and Their Children, has been trying to answer the unanswerable. Danieli, who will speak at Radford University on Thursday about the longterm effects of the Holocaust, provides therapy for survivors and their children in New York. She also heads the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, an organization allied with the United Nations.
She insists that you remember that each of the thousands she's treated has different histories, memories and ways of coping. "The Holocaust was not a uniform phenomenon," Danieli says.
"I don't write very obtuse things," she said in a recent phone interview from New York. "I write about people's lives."
She writes about, and wrestles with death. Every day. This day began earlier than most when a patient, on the brink of suicide, called her at 4 a.m.
Healing sometimes seems unreachable, she says, because of "the general inability to mourn the Holocaust - both for the survivor and for the world."
The suffering didn't stop with the survivor. Many survivors married other survivors they met in the displaced persons camps, sometimes after days or a week. Courtship? Romance? Barracks and tents stood in for honeymoon resorts, and there usually was no father to bring the bride to the chuppah, or wedding canopy.
Danieli has called these unions "marriages of despair" in her articles.
"When people go into marriages in general, all their hopes go into that marriage," she said. "Survivors cannot compensate for what they have lost, what they have been through. That does not mean that was not much love in these families, there was."
The survivors had children, tried to rebuild in a new country, a new language, a new profession, with a culture gap often much wider than two decades, more like two centuries. The inhabitants of rural shtetls, or Jewish ghetto hamlets, tried to pick up the pieces in America of the 1950s.
No grandparents, aunts, cousins, landseit, or people from their hometowns, could help these immigrants. "The small family is responsible for all of the intensity of feelings," Danieli said. The children, often named for dead relatives - even sometimes for murdered half-siblings - guided their parents through this strange new world.
"The children are called on to be confidants, to protect them," Danieli said.
One tool Danieli has used in her therapy is to have patients draw the uprooted family trees. "At first I used it quite spontaneously to try to organize the history of the family. Because there are such horrible losses, you see that, there's something very immediate about the drawing of it.
"It makes their own life picture coherent in some ways. Creates a sense of continuity, continuous living with roots, even though the roots were torn. Even though it's extremely painful, ultimately it's very helpful."
Danieli said that with the opening of the Holocaust Museum and the film ``Schindler's List'' perhaps the world is finally starting to attempt to address the systematic murder of millions of civilians.
"For the survivors, [the museum] is a statement that other people share not only in their pain, but people do want to know. Also it's done in such an excellent way. I was extremely moved to see so many kids of all colors . . . read . . . and look and question, and they stayed there for hours."
Such monuments can counter Holocaust revisionists' theories that Hitler did not plan to murder Jews, that the death camps were work camps, and deaths - fewer than claimed, they say - came from diseases. Such revisionists have gained publicity, not only in Germany, but in college newspapers across the U.S. in recent years.
Danieli said that the film's popularity and success at the Academy Awards have given her encouragement that there's an "almost yearning to see something that people can relate to and not feel so overwhelmed and so speechless, and so unable to fathom.
"I hope that it won't be just one happening and [that] people will go back to their normal. . . . I hope that it can't happen, that people are really ready to confront more."
Danieli quickly corrects any assertion that with one movie or one museum, Americans "understand" the murder of 6 million Jews and 5 million other civilians.
"Maybe the world is beginning to not even grasp but catch a glimpse. What about humanity brings humanity's need to destroy itself rather than to build and nurture?"
Yael Danieli will speak about "The Aftermath of Violence: Private and Public Terrors" in Radford University's Heth Hall Ballroom at 8 p.m. Thursday. Admission is free.
by CNB