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Holding on to Humanity: The Message of Holocaust Survivors

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Shamai Davidson, who died unfortunately at too young an age, was one of the premier experts on PTSD in holocaust survivors, and its intergenerational effect on their children. This Israeli analyst, who is not well known in the United States, combined a brilliant intellect with a tremendous empathic response to survivors, him being as it were, an unaffected offspring raised by a family in Scotland who lost many relatives in the Shoah. To say that Shammai(Sammy) was unaffected is not totally correct. He himself suffered guilt feelings as a child for being allowed to "survive" in the benign safety of Scotland, even as he knew his relatives perished to the East. Thus he suffered second-generation effects of the Holocaust (intrusive thoughts etc), even though his parents were not survivors. This childhood steered him into his chosen field. Thus the book is a testimony to his analytic wisdom in dealing with this patient population, realizing, as William Niederland M.D. did, that the "survivor syndrome" is a distinct nosological entity, transmissible to the next generation. Sammy's brilliance was that, even accepting this fact, he was still able to hold on to his humanity and the dignity of those who survived massive psychic trauma.

Max Mulberg, Ph.D.