In the efforts to reintegrate Europe’s DP’s into the world’s society, it must not be forgotten that the return to normal involves much more for them than a place to live and work: the scars of the concentration-camp experience run deep, and their final rehabilitation requires a full understanding of the effects of the Nazi terror upon the minds and spirits of its victims. Paul Friedman, practicing psychoanalyst and associate in neuropsychiatry at the Beth Israel Hospital, has had a unique opportunity to study the Jewish DP’s in Europe, Cyprus, and Palestine. In 1946, under the auspices of the American Joint Distribution Committee, he made a survey of mental health among the Jewish DP’s in Europe, with special emphasis on the problems of children; in 1947, he headed a psychiatric team which surveyed the situation in the camps in Cyprus and helped establish a program of mental hygiene to be put into practice in Palestine. His present article embodies some of the more significant findings of these studies.

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It seems altogether incredible today that when the first plans for the rehabilitation of Europe’s surviving Jews were outlined, the psychiatric aspect of the problem was overlooked entirely. Everyone engaged in directing the relief work thought solely in terms of material assistance to the DP’s. It took months of first-hand practical experience before anyone would acknowledge a similar, equally pressing need for psychological assistance.

Perhaps this astonishing oversight can be better understood if one remembers the atmosphere of those anxious days before the liberation of Europe. None of us knew then what we might expect to find in the ruins of Europe, and it was all too easy, especially for the psychiatrist, to think of Europe as a huge, unattended hospital for neurotics, psychotics, and the hopelessly insane. How then explain the indifference and even often downright opposition on the part of many people to psychiatric aid for the survivors? It was not due—let me hasten to explain—to any lack of devotion or interest. It was rather that all of us—I do not by any means exclude myself—were filled with a sharp and pervasive feeling of guilt towards those very victims we were trying to help. As a defense against this omnipresent emotion, leaders in relief work tended to credit the optimistic stories about the survivors, while at the same time they discounted those describing psychological misery and disorder. We accepted the theory that the very fact of survival was evidence of physical and psychological superiority—without looking too closely at the implications of this statement, which dishonored millions of martyred dead.

Indeed, a number of observers who went to Europe in the early days of relief organization found the DP’s, especially those who had come out of the concentration camps, in a state of elation and enthusiasm bordering on euphoria. Uninformed in matters of psychology, these observers reported that the state of mind of the people in the DP camps was almost miraculously unaffected by their recent terrible experiences. But one could have anticipated that it would not take long for the first euphoric reaction—a reaction quite understandable after the terrors that had gone before—to vanish and be replaced by a deep depression. This happened.

There would be little point in recounting these past errors, especially since the record of the relief organizations has been, on the whole, so magnificent, were it not that the guilt feeling that occasioned the initial mistake still seems to exert an influence on our thinking. And though it is inevitable that this should be so—for we were safe in America while our brothers in Europe were undergoing the cruelest of martyrdoms—I must still insist that the only really helpful attitude toward the DP is to combine with the warmest sympathy the most clear-sighted objectivity. I do not think that one excludes the other. On the other hand, if we permit our unconscious feelings—be they guilt or whatever—to dominate our approach to the problem, then the greatest sufferers from our indulgence will be the DP’s themselves.

Those of us who have had a chance to work in the field with the concentration camp victims have learned that their demands are often not justified by physical necessity so much as by a fear of losing out, of being rejected, a fear that others might get more than they. Certainly these sufferers should be spared more frustration and disappointment whenever possible. But it is also essential, if only for their own sake, that they learn to come to practical terms with the world outside the barbed wire. Too many of the field workers who first came into contact with DP’s did not understand this. They either acceded to the demands or made promises that they were unable to carry out.

It is not possible, of course, in so brief an article as this, fully to describe the conditions of the DP’s, as I saw them, or to outline a complete program for handling their psychological problems. But I do believe we can indicate through example what these, problems are in broad outline and sketch out a more appropriate approach to deal with them.

It should be pointed out here that indiscriminate use of the term “displaced persons” has often been misleading. Not all DP’s are ex-inmates of the Nazi concentration camps, since only about one hundred thousand Jews survived these camps, of whom about four thousand are children under eighteen. The majority of the Jewish displaced persons consist of children who were kept in hiding, of Polish Jews who returned from Russia after the war, and great numbers of Jews from Rumania and Hungary. Obviously, those who went through the experience of the Nazi concentration camps present the most severe psychological problems—but even in their case it would be an error to assume that a majority, or even any substantial fraction, are in need of specific psychiatric treatment: this is something that can be determined only for each individual separately. However, the years of tension and anxiety have affected all the DP’s to a greater or lesser degree, and a sound program of mental hygiene—a term which includes everything from intensive psychiatric treatment of selected individuals down to the relatively simple matter of seeing to it that immigrants to Israel are quickly integrated into its economic and social life—is necessary for the group generally, whether in Germany, in Cyprus, or in Palestine.

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When I was appointed by the Joint Distribution Committee to undertake the task of making a psychological survey of the surviving adults and children, with a view to a program of therapy and guidance, I was filled with dread at what I might discover in Europe. But when I met the DP’s in their camps and the children in the camp centers and foster homes, I was delighted to find that my forebodings had been decidedly exaggerated. When I talked to the survivors—the adults and children who had been in the concentration camps or had hidden in the forests—I was amazed to see how quickly they had recovered. They all gave evidence of an incredible physical and psychological resilience. In the foster homes set up by the child-care organizations1 and subventioned by the American Joint Distribution Committee, in France, I found a situation that was well-nigh miraculous in view of the children’s past experiences. Here were no monsters, no savages, no psychotics.

But I soon discovered that these children had serious emotional problems, usually of a neurotic nature. They would have been distinctly abnormal not to have had them. To have lived, as these children had, in Hitler’s Europe, was to have inhabited a world where all the accepted modes of human intercourse had been destroyed and all moral standards subverted.

But the behavior patterns formed by these children during the years when they had struggled for sheer survival could not be lumped together in an over-all syndrome labeled “the DP mind.” The patterns were too diverse.

A very different psychological analysis was needed for each group—for those who came out of the concentration camps, those who had hidden in the forests during the Nazi occupation, those who had been taken into Gentile homes and had lived under the protection of foster parents, those who had been concealed in convents and monasteries. Nevertheless, there was one common denominator that, to a greater or lesser degree, existed for all DP’s, adults and children alike: emotional numbness or shallowness.

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I was especially impressed by this when I interviewed the children. Each one of them told me the most tragic and bloody stories in a tone of the utmost detachment, even nonchalance, as though they were telling me about some very unimportant event, something that had happened long ago and to someone they hardly knew. At first sight these children resembled schizophrenics, so completely did their capacity for emotional life seem to have vanished. But closer examination revealed that this emotional state was far different from schizophrenia. The French psychiatrist E. Minkowski has called this state “affective anesthesia,” and it is developed as a defense against the daily dangers and anxieties to which both those in the concentration camps and those in hiding were continuously exposed. This emotional anesthetization was not necessarily the result of long years of benumbing terror. In many cases it appeared instantaneously, as the result of a sharp and overpowering trauma.

In the case histories I accumulated in Europe and which were later augmented by our psychiatric team in Cyprus,2 this basic emotional configuration crops up again and again. I remember one case—I could cite hundreds—that dramatically expresses what is at work here. The child was about five years old when the persecution of Jews started in her region. Before her parents were taken away by the Nazis, they managed to place the child in the home of some friendly Ukrainian peasants. As the child told me: “I did not look like a Jewish girl, so my parents told me to go to some Ukrainian neighbors and make myself useful by minding their livestock for them.” Several days later, while she was in a field with the cattle, a Ukrainian boy passed and showed her a photograph of her father attached to an identity card. When she asked him where he had found it, he told her that the man whose picture this was had just been killed. The child said: “I wanted to cry, but I was afraid to cry because he would have known that I was a Jewish girl if I did. So I didn’t cry.” The Ukrainian boy then led her to a nearby wood and there she saw her parents, her brothers, and many other Jews lying dead in a freshly excavated pit. “There was so much blood around, I got frightened. I wanted to cry, but again I was afraid that they might kill me.” She hid in a cornfield in order to be alone and cry, but soon some people came by and she again had to stifle her tears. When I saw her four and a half years later in a foster home in France, she still could not cry—she had forgotten how.

Her story, unfortunately, is quite typical. Almost all the surviving children I saw had forgotten how to cry; they had lost the ability to respond with spontaneous emotion to life. Yet, and again I must emphasize this, one could scarcely call them psychotic. Indeed, their vitality in other areas and their eagerness for learning spoke against such a diagnosis. Of course, the repression of emotion is not new to psychopathology; psychiatrists observe it in their everyday practice. But what was new and unusual here was the state of utter apathy in which we found great numbers of children—apathy founded on the wholesale and deep suppression of anxiety. One youth leader aptly described the psychological state of the survivors: “Although the behavior of these children and their vitality seem normal in every respect, they carry deep inside them a cold panic.”

When such a long-harbored anxiety breaks through, because of some fresh shock or new traumatic situation, then it resembles somewhat the so-called combat fatigue cases that we saw in the recent war. In fact, in Cyprus I encountered several “nervous breakdowns” among the children who had just arrived from Europe, and in almost every case their condition paralleled the war-time psychiatric pattern. Like the combat soldiers who during the tension of battle seldom cracked, but held up until they were in the security of a rear-area bivouac, these children waited until the threat of death was gone, and then, at the end of their resources, permitted the long-repressed anxieties to break through in manifest symptoms.

But such analogies are only tangentially illuminating. They cannot fully describe the psychological traumata of the survivors. The familiar categories in psychopathology would be fallacious. A number of facts militate against any such comfortable assurance.

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The survivors of the concentration camps, and especially the Jews, had been subjected to a psychological terror unprecedented in world history. David Rousset, a French survivor of the concentration camps, has described in his book, Les Jours de Notre Mort, the special position assigned to the Jews in the concentration-camp system. Beneath everyone—the political prisoners, the misfits, the criminals, the degenerates—stood the Jews. They were the plebeians of the entire structure, despised and mistreated not only by the Nazis but by all the other prisoners. When a new shipment of Jews came to the camps, Rousset relates, the other prisoners were filled with relief, since they knew that it meant a brief respite for themselves; the Jews would absorb a major share of the blows—at least for a time.

One can epitomize the Jews’ experience in the concentration camps by a single statement: they were abandoned by the others, and then they abandoned themselves. Except for those deeply religious and mystical, the Jews had neither ideological support (as did the political prisoners) nor the comfort and sustenance of a group (as did the criminals). Freud has claimed that culture has been built on the ruins of the primitive instinctual drives. The concentration camp, that sadistic embodiment of all that is hostile to culture, was in its turn built upon the ruins of the social instinct; and it is no wonder that those people who went through the concentration camps were forced by a crushing set of circumstances to stifle and almost wholly destroy the cultural instinct—the instinct of sociability that binds together all community life with the ties of love and affection—in order to survive.

Human beings simply do not exist in such a situation without making profound internal readjustments. One cannot live for years in a world in which one man kills another for a cigarette, in which cannibalism is a reality, and then revert instantly on liberation to the man one was before. In view of all this, it is truly amazing that the DP’s whom we found in Europe were capable of any social expression at all. At the same time, it is impossible to understand the DP as he is now, whether he was an inmate of the camps or not, if one does not understand clearly the enormous dislocation of the spirit Nazi terror wrought in him. Any other evaluation of the DP is motivated more by sentimental considerations than by a forthright desire to face the facts; and unless one faces these uncomfortable and irksome facts, one cannot hope to help the DP’s with the proper sympathetic understanding.

To psychoanalysts, who are accustomed to think in terms of ego strength, that is, an ego able to establish more and more defenses so as not to disintegrate when confronted by overwhelming and extreme situations, the survivors of the concentration camps pose a certain problem. We know that the function of the ego is to mediate between the demands of our instincts and the prohibitions of our inculcated conscience. However, when, as in the concentration camps, the conscience—that social department of the ego, or what psychoanalysis calls the superego—was continually overruled and negated, the ego did not grow stronger. All that did grow stronger was the instinct for self-preservation, and that at the expense of every other drive.

It is well known that prisoners in concentration camps evidenced severe loss of sexual function from the moment of “initial shock” on entering the camps, a fact many writers, old inmates of concentration camps, have already described. Until liberation, when the death threat was finally lifted, most of the men were impotent. It has also been reported that even nocturnal emissions took place only on those days when the prisoner was transferred to the relative safety of the concentration camp’s hospital. For the majority of women menstruation was seriously disturbed or ceased; the normal menstrual cycle was resumed only after liberation. This sexual withdrawal of the organism was but one reflection of the deep psychic regression among the inmates of the concentration camps.

In Cyprus, where conditions harked back to the Nazi camps—as we will have an opportunity to discuss later—sexual dysfunctions similar to those in the concentration camps could also be observed. Many of the men we examined stated that they had become impotent soon after their arrival there. And the majority of adolescents even went so far as to lose all fantasies about sex; those who had begun to masturbate after liberation ceased to do so as soon as they reached Cyprus. True, the crowded conditions and the lack of privacy favored the avoidance of all open sexual activity, yet this was not sufficient to explain the lack of all fantasies and desires as well.

Rorschach tests taken among the Cyprus inmates showed in all cases a profound sexual repression, accompanied by underlying anxiety. Supervisors of the children reported that all the adolescents seemed curiously uninterested in sexual matters. It would appear that the children who came to the concentration camps before puberty or during the latency period all evidenced the marks of delayed psychosexual development. In many cases the girls did not start to menstruate until a year after they had left the concentration camps, sometimes at the age of 17 or even 18; and in a few instances married women of 18 or 19 had not yet menstruated. Interviews seem to confirm the assumption that the same regressive phenomena observed on Cyprus existed to a greater degree in the German concentration camps.

One may well wonder whether Ferenczi’s theory that the latency period of sexual development is a heritage of the rigors of the long and threatening glacial epoch, has not found an ironic and tragic confirmation in the emotional effects of the Hitler dictatorship, surely a modern “ice age.”

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One of many similar stories might be cited to demonstrate the distortion of the ego. In Cyprus I interviewed a twenty-three yearold girl who had been in Auschwitz. Her whole family had been killed. At first, she had been put to work in the kitchen, carrying food to the sick. Later, however, she was transferred to the crematorium staff. Her job was to hand towels to the women who were lined up naked every day “to go for a bath.” This was the Nazis’ version, and she accepted it. Women from her village passed through and never returned, yet she had so completely blocked off the dreadful reality that she refused to believe that they were actually going into a death chamber. When she told me this story, she could not understand how she could have been so “stupid.” And when, after a few conversations with me, she began to remember the cries and screams of the children who had been herded past her, her astonishment grew over her apparent inability to grasp and react to the true situation when it was taking place.

It is clear that the reality had been simply too horrible for the girl to contemplate. She had to deny it, not partially or by some small ruse, but totally and without leaving a shred or trace of it to disturb her halfsmothered conscience. Otherwise she could not survive. But when she appears before us as a DP in need of help, facing the need to readjust to life, then we must remember this crippling denial of reality and the profound distortion of the social sense that it inevitably entails.

This girl’s experience can stand as a kind of archetype for all. To one degree or another, they have all stifled their true feelings, they have all denied the dictates of conscience and social feeling in the hope of survival, and they have all been warped and distorted as a result.

So the therapeutic measures recommended for this particular case have a general application and significance. First of all, the girl must be made to remember the facts and not the fantasy of the situation in the anteroom of the death chamber. Although in everyday psychiatric practice this is a routine matter, the use of such methods for the victims of Hitler’s persecution may seem unnatural and cruel. Yet this is the only road back to psychological health. Such a feat of remembering is, in truth, both impossible and cruel except in an atmosphere of love and understanding that will bolster the patient’s weakened confidence and carry her through the first stages of the inevitable shock. The task is to bring her back into human society after her experience on its outermost edges—the concentration camps. To achieve this, she must be surrounded by people who understand and love her and sympathize with her difficulties. Above all, she must be given the feeling that a community of fellow human beings is ready to welcome her as an equal and comrade and will find her useful work to engage her full capacities as a human being.

In his brilliant analysis of modem civilization’s destructive drives, Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud described the profoundest and most frightening war of all, the war between the forces of Eros—the societal and libidinous instincts—and the forces of destructive sadism. But in his most apocalyptic moment Freud could never have imagined that his prophetic words would in the next few years be given such horrible actuality. Never before has the still, small voice of conscience been reduced to so spectral, so ineffectual a whisper—not only in the victimizers but in their victims. Psychoanalysis has always known that civilization was fighting a desperate action against overwhelmingly powerful forces, but we never believed that their “superiority” would be so terribly proven.

So the importance of rehabilitating the DP’s is much more than that of salvaging one small group of human beings who have suffered. It is a project that has significance for the whole world; it is, indeed, a reassertion of our belief that the civilizing forces in man may yet win to victory. We cannot expect this to happen quickly or easily. Inevitably, the survivors’ steps back to civilization will be faltering and confused, with many mistakes and setbacks. They are all a prey to anxiety, distrust, and hatred. They have all accumulated a great amount of repressed hostility and aggressiveness, for which they could find no outlet during the years of persecution.

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Against the background of such an analysis the problem of the rehabilitation of DP’s may become clearer; it also becomes more difficult. There is no half-measure that will answer. To attempt to revive the emotional life of people who continue to live in the precarious and threatening atmosph0ere of the DP camps of Europe or incarcerated on the purgatorial island of Cyprus, hemmed in by barbed wire and armed guards in an ominous reenactment of the German chapter of their torture, might appear an impossible undertaking. Yet there has been some good and effective work, which has resulted in amazing readjustments and recoveries.

On the other hand, those who were able to go immediately after liberation to Palestine or the United States or some other free environment have shown that they are capable of regaining their balance and health in a very short time. As opposed to these quick recoveries, most survivors who have had to remain in the camps under continuous regimentation have grown more anxious and aggressive. Despite all that continues to be done for them, they see themselves betrayed and abandoned a second time.

The camps on Cyprus are even worse in their effects. In contrast to the DP camps in Europe, inmates are not permitted outside the gates; and many other features are reminiscent of the German concentration camps. Situated on a strip of barren, sun-scorched earth where the scarcity of water is always a source of anxiety, the immigrants are confined in circumstances of overcrowding and restriction of the worst kind. As ought to have been expected, the barbed wire of Cyprus has cruelly resulted in bringing back to many of the immigrants, either by association or by the re-stimulation of ingrained, conditioned responses, some of the behavior patterns of the concentration camps.

Anxieties which were held in abeyance for many years now erupt to the surface. The majority of the complaints are of a psychosomatic nature, all of them accompanied by mild or acute anxiety states.

It was the cases of acute anxiety—the “breakdowns”—among the children, which enabled us, on our trip to Cyprus, to persuade the “leaders” of the young that we had a useful function and that these individual cases might help them to a greater understanding of the general problems.

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Leadership—as provided by the adults assigned by relief or other agencies to guide and take care of separate groups of children—is a crucial matter for the DP’s. As can be imagined, after the long years of persecution and confinement, with all instincts subservient to that of survival, the DP’s had developed habits of complete dependency and infantilism. When I first encountered DP children in France, I was told by the supervisors of the foster homes that the children formed tightly knit groups presenting a solid phalanx of hostility and suspicion to everyone outside their group. I soon discovered, however, that even within these groups, they had no ties of affection, no friends, no love for one another; they simply huddled together out of habit and extreme fear. In this situation, proper leadership was important, for one misstep could throw back a whole program for weeks.

In the children’s village in Cyprus (Kfar Hanoar)3 we were able to study closely the relations between the children and their adult leaders. These ranged in type from groups that were cohesive, disciplined, and well-organized to those that were disorderly and near disintegration. Invariably, after examining three or four children in a group, we could determine in advance what kind of leader was at the head of the group. The children unfailingly reflected the anxieties of their leaders.

One group of children we studied was outstanding for its excellent discipline—not the kind of unthinking, rigid discipline practiced by the Irgunists and other extremist groups, but a discipline based on understanding and affectionate relationships. Children in this group with artistic abilities were given free rein to develop them. Moreover, all of them answered our questions with a unique frankness and lack of suspicion. All this was due to their madrich or leader, a young man of twenty-seven who, though not a trained psychologist, had great intuitive understanding and insight. When he had first organized the group in Rumania, the children were wild and undisciplined. Then, as he himself put it, he had devised a scheme “by which the restlessness and aggressiveness of the children could find proper outlets.” He took them on hikes, went mountain-climbing with them, kept them on the move until they had calmed down. Only after this preliminary maneuver did he begin his educational program.

In contrast to this group which was so cohesive and well integrated, were many others whose leaders demanded blind obedience of each child, and the personal devotion and dependence of each child. If the group had any cohesion, it was only because of this; there was no affection among the children. One such leader told me she regarded herself as a mother substitute. Well, even mothers and fathers are known to be aggressive, and this leader certainly was.

From such practical work we learned that the role of the leader could be likened to that of a catalyst, activating a process of sympathy and group cohesion. If the leader was able to create affectionate attachments within the group and divert aggressive impulses into constructive outlets, his chief goal had been reached. The test of a leader’s effectiveness was not his indispensability, but, on the contrary, the ease with which he could be replaced.

There was another youth leader who had brought her group from Poland to Cyprus. At the beginning the children had offered great resistance to her and wanted to return to their Gentile foster-parents, though these no longer had a place for them. She told us that she was often compelled to lock the doors to prevent them from running away. She believed, however, that all the children’s conflicts had been solved and that she had been successful in bringing them back to a faith in Judaism. When I pointed out that the children still kept crosses and prayer books underneath their pillows, she brushed this aside as an innocuous addiction to souvenirs. Unfortunately, after having discussed this particular problem with many of these children, I found it impossible to be as optimistic. Many of them had deep conflicts concerning their Jewishness, which for years had been a secret whose betrayal might mean death—conflicts which would require long study and therapy before they could disappear.

In fact, as a result of the identification that had sprung up during the Hitler years between these children and their Christian foster-parents, a new secret Jew, a kind of Marrano in reverse, had appeared on the scene. Many of these children exhibited anti-Semitic behavior. The case history of a boy of ten in liberated Warsaw came to my attention. He was the greatest anti-Semite in his school, constantly declaring that Hitler should have killed all the Jews. So difficult a disciplinary problem was he that he was given a psychiatric examination. It was discovered that the boy was Jewish and that he had been hidden in a closet for three years by non-Jews. In the European camps I also met children who admitted that they had been maltreated by their foster-parents, yet still wished to return to them: in the world of the jungle that was Europe in the war years, the non-Jewishness of the foster-parents had been the children’s only security.

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The process of adjustment, of course, is by no means an easy one. For example, one boy of thirteen, when he first arrived at a kibbutz in Palestine, ran away again and again. When I asked him why he ran away, he could not tell me. But when I asked him why he had finally decided to stay, he pointed to the woman in charge of the children: a middle-aged woman who was one of the original founders of the kibbutz.

In another kibbutz I visited, I was particularly interested in a group of children I had met in Cyprus and who had been sheltered during the war by Gentile foster-parents. Earlier I had found many of them still attached to their foster-parents yet feeling at the same time a sense of guilt. It was a crucial difficulty for them, and I was impressed by the way their problems were handled by a kibbutz leader. This youth leader, who seemed to have a deep understanding of the children’s conflicts, asked them upon their arrival to write letters to their former fosterparents thanking them for their years of care, telling them about their present lives, and so re-establishing contact with them.

If this gifted woman and man represent the best leaders in Palestine, they also demonstrate, by contrast with other leaders—unfortunately too many—Palestine’s most urgent problem, that of the character of its leadership. It was Hans Beyth, one of the most gifted leaders of the Youth Aliyah—to the misfortune of all Palestine, he was recently killed by the Arabs after convoying a group of children to Haifa—who stressed this to me, and doubtless his appraisal of the situation is correct. We already know how easy it is for aggressive ideologies to gain a hold among frustrated and anxiety-ridden immigrants. Undoubtedly much of the attraction exerted by the Irgun and Stern groups and their pernicious effect on the Palestine community can be traced to psychological causes of the kind we have described. In times like ours, especially amid such a convulsive and precarious state of affairs as now exists in Palestine, it is not difficult for demagogues to divert the great load of suppressed aggression into anti-social channels. Some “realistic” people may indeed regard the war in Palestine as an excellent safety valve for the immigrants. And yet every psychiatrist knows that such a discharge of aggressive feelings never has a lasting and beneficial effect. The problem for Palestine, as for the world, is to find in peacetime a “moral equivalent of war.”

Much of the divisiveness and bitter hostility of the extremist groups in Palestine can only be explained in terms of deep psychological and irrational motivations. Time and again in the camps I came across outright expressions of hatred by one Jewish group of another, and many even expressed hatred of the relief organizations, whom they blamed for all their hardships and suffering. For years they had been subjected to the most terrible punishments at the hands of a seemingly omnipotent and invulnerable figure: the Nazi master. They had stored up great quantities of unexpressed hostility which had never been loosed on their real enemy. What then took place is what psychoanalysis calls displacement—the hostility which should have been directed at the Nazis was now poured forth on the very people endeavoring to help them. And the hostility was released all the more easily because the DP’s, like children who attack adults when they are sure they will not be punished for it, knew that there was little fear of retaliation.

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All these important points must await a further elaboration. But I trust that even in this all too cursory treatment I have succeeded in pointing up the need for planned education and psychological guidance in order to recreate in these thousands of people the ability to live free and mature lives. Unfortunately, conditions in Israel today dictate an intense preoccupation with the rifle. However, if the proper program of education and mental hygiene can be instituted in a peaceful Israel, we will have reason to hope that the accumulated aggressiveness of the remnant may be harnessed to productive activities and the cultivation of the arts of peace.

When I reported on our findings last year in Tel Aviv to a joint meeting of the Neuropsychiatric Association of Israel and all the welfare organizations concerned with the problems of adjustment and rehabilitation of immigrants, I met with profound understanding. The government of Israel has shown itself eager to establish an effective program of mental hygiene; the recent visits to the United States of delegates of the Israel government with the purpose of sponsoring this work is the best testimony to their comprehension of this vital project. A large committee has recently been set up in New York, consisting of psychiatrists, psychologists, and lay people, to assist in the task; in this as in so many other fields, close collaboration between American and Israeli specialists is essential to success.

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1 The main child-care organizations were: Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE); Oeuvre de Protection des Enfants Juifs (OPEJ); Union des Juifs pour la Résistance (UJRE); Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO).

2 On my mission to Cyprus I was accompanied by a psychologist and a psychiatric social worker from the United States. This team was matched by a similar team from Palestine with Dr. Franz Bruehl as psychiatrist.

3 At the time of my visit to Cyprus, the Youth Aliyah had segregated some two thousand children, mostly orphans between the ages of five and eighteen, in a camp of their own.

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