Me and Holocaust Survivors: Emotional Wounds That Never Heal

On October 29, 1991 I was terminated from my employment as a paralegal at the law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld.  I was a victim of subtle job harassment throughout my employment, which lasted for three-and-one-half years.  One of the recognized consequences of the type of harassment I suffered is post-traumatic stress disorder.

In September 1992 I entered out-patient psychotherapy at the George Washington University Medical Center Department of Psychiatry.  My doctors were silent as to the source of my distress. I had a basic need to share my traumatic experiences with others, my doctors, in order to regain my sense of living in a meaningful world. The response of silence, as was encountered for too many years, only strengthened my feeling of shame -- of being a stranger, again being rejected, but now by mental health professionals. For me to speak about my experiences invited humiliation, ridicule, and disbelief -- and the coercive recommendation that I take antipsychotic medication.  The psychiatrists I saw at GW were uniformly sympathetic to my former employer's designation of me as mentally ill and delusional.  I felt like a Holocaust survivor after the Second World War who found himself in treatment with German psychiatrists who had been sympathetic to the Nazi government.

My experiences, both as an employee who experienced job harassment and as a psychiatry patient after my termination, have paralleled those of the Holocaust survivor.  The returning survivor had a basic need to share his traumatic experiences with others, his community, in order to regain his sense of living in a meaningful world. The response of silence, as was encountered for too many years, only strengthened the feeling of shame -- of being a stranger, again being rejected, but now by his own fellow Jews. For a survivor to speak about his experiences in the 1950s and 1960s invited humiliation, ridicule, and disbelief.

The German government enacted compensatory legislation that paid for the psychiatric treatment of Holocaust survivors.  All too often, though, survivors' accounts of their experiences were dismissed by doctors whose fees were paid by the German state, who themselves were former Nazi Party members, or who were otherwise sympathetic to the Nazi regime.