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EmailHealing Components: The Right to Reparation for Victims of Gross Violations of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law
Yael Danieli, Ph.D.
New York, U.S.A.
reprinted from Pollefeyt, G.J.Colijn, & M.Sachs Littell (Eds.) Hearing the Voices:Teaching the Holocaust to Future Generations (pp. 219-233). Merion Westfield Press International, Merion Station, Pennsylvania.
"The sun made a desperate effort to shine on the last day of May in 1944. The sun is warm in May. It heals. But even the heavens were helpless on that day. A force so evil ruled heaven and earth that it altered the natural order of the universe, and the heart of my mother was floating in the smoke-filled sky of Auschwitz. I have tried to rub the smoke out of my vision for forty years now, but my eyes are still burning, Mother." [Leitner, 1985, p. vii]
Later, in America, Isabella Leitner tells,
I search the sky...in desperate sorrow but can discern no human form...There is not a trace. No grave. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. My mother lived for just a while - Potyo for less than fourteen years. In a way they didn't really die. They simply became smoke. How does one bury smoke? How does one place headstones in the sky? How does one bring flowers to the clouds? Mother, Potyo...I am trying to say good-bye to you. I am trying to say good-bye [Leitner, 1985, p. 77; emphasis added]
Her questions articulate but a few of the numerous obstacles confronting survivors and children of survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, as they do other victims of gross violations of human rights, in their attempts at mourning, reintegration and healing. They also poignantly convey the enormity of the task facing us in designing meaningful measures for redressing such horrific losses and their life-long and intergenerational effects for the victims, their families and societies. This task was partly addressed by the measures recommended in the United Nations Declaration of Basic Principles of Justice for Victims of Crime and Abuse of Power(A/RES 40/34) to improve access to justice and fair treatment, restitution, compensation and necessary material, medical, psychological and social assistance and support for such victims.
In this brief report I will attempt to convey how victims and professionals who have worked with them view some of the psychological aspects of these measures and what the victims themselves feel is helpful or not. To gain a long-term perspective, I interviewed victim/survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, Japanese Americans and victims from Argentina and Chile, and professionals working with them, both in and outside their countries. This paper will examine some of the psychological meanings of compensation. It will also draw attention to the often neglected aspect of commemoration.
I. The Experience of the Victim
A. The aftermath of the experience
After liberation, as during the war, survivors were victims of a pervasive societal reaction comprised of obtuseness, indifference, avoidance, repression and denial of their Holocaust experiences. Like other victims, survivors' war accounts were too horrifying for most people to listen to or believe. Similar to other victims who are blamed for their victimization ["You are stupid to live near the Bhopal plant"], survivors were faced with the pervasively held myth that they had actively or passively participated in their own destiny by "going like sheep to the slaughter." Additionally, bystander's guilt led many to regard the survivors as pointing an accusing finger at them and projecting onto the survivors the suspicion that they had performed immoral acts in order to survive. Like other victims, they were also told to "let bygones be bygones" and get on with their lives.
Such reactions have ensured the survivors' silence about their Holocaust experiences. They were forced to conclude that nobody cared to listen and that "nobody could really understand" unless they had gone through the same experiences. The resulting conspiracy of silence between Holocaust survivors and society in general, and survivors and mental health and other professionals in particular, has proven detrimental to the survivors' familial and socio-cultural reintegration by intensifying their already profound sense of isolation, loneliness, and mistrust of society. This has further impeded the possibility of their intrapsychic integration and healing, and made their task of mourning their massive losses impossible.
The psychiatric literature extensively describes the long-term effects of the massive traumata experienced by the survivors, as well as the intergenerational transmission of the psychological effects of the Holocaust to the survivors' offspring (born after the war) and to their own children.
Children of survivors seem to have consciously and unconsciously absorbed their parents' Holocaust experiences into their lives. As Bettelheim (1984) observed, "What cannot be talked about can also not be put to rest; and if it is not, the wounds continue to fester from generation to generation" (p. 166). Families of survivors are extremely small. The Holocaust deprived them of the normal cycle of the generations and ages, and of natural death (Eitinger, 1980) Survivors of the Holocaust age early and have higher than average rates of early death from all causes. Old age, in itself, is a trauma for them (Danieli, 1981b). Each survivor's family tree is steeped in murder, death and losses; yet its offspring are expected to reroot that tree and reestablish the extended family and to start anew a healthy generational cycle. Edelman (1992) similarly reports that in Argentina "a remarkably high number of fathers of missing people had major physical disorders and substantial increase of deaths, whereas mothers did not present the same symptoms" (pp. 1-2), and provides related speculations.
B. The conceptualization of the experience
An individual's identity involves a complex interplay of multiple spheres or systems. Among these are the biological and intrapsychic; the interpersonal-- familial, social, communal; the ethnic, cultural, religious, spiritual, natural; the educational/professional/occupational; the material/economic, environmental, political, national, and international. These systems dynamically coexist along the time dimension to create a continuous conception of his or her life from past through present to the future. Ideally the individual should simultaneously have free psychological access and be able to move freely within all these identity dimensions.
Victimization causes a rupture, a possible regression, and a state of being "stuck" or "frozen" in this free flow, which I have called fixity. The time, duration, extent, and meaning of the victimization for the individual as well as post-victimization traumata and the conspiracy of silence or "second wound" (Symonds, 1980), will determine the elements and degree of the rupture, the disruption, disorganization, disorientation, and the severity of the fixity. An essential aspect of the establishment of such perspective is that when we speak of integration for severely victimized people we speak of integrating a rupture and the extraordinary into one's life. That is, confronting and incorporating aspects of human experiences that are not normally encountered in ordinary everyday life.
Although elsewhere (Danieli, 1981b) I questioned in principle the possibility of full integration of the Holocaust by its survivors and their offspring alone, and while Western culture and humanity in general have not yet done so, the Group Project for Holocaust Survivors and their Children (a comprehensive program for psycho-social assistance to them)(Danieli, 1988, 1989) still maintains that the attempt to reestablish the sense of continuity, belongingness and rootedness, and to effect perspective and integration through awareness, are our optimal vehicles in possibly achieving our reparative and preventive goals of psychological liberation from the traumata (see also Lifton, 1973, 1979).
Especially with these individuals, repairing the rupture and thereby freeing the flow rarely has the meaning of "going back to normal." This is true both in terms of (re)adapting to "normal society" or returning to pre-victimization ways of being and functioning, as if one could resurrect one's previous (destroyed) fabric of life. In fact, the latter hope in particular is not only unrealizable but clinging to it possibly attests to attempted denial of their Holocaust experiences and thereby to fixity (Danieli, 1981a).
C. The healing process
Cognitive recovery involves the ability to develop a realistic perspective of what happened, by whom, to whom, and accepting the reality that it had happened the way it did. For example, what was and was not under the victim's control, what could not be, and why. Accepting the impersonality of the events also removes the need to attribute personal causality and consequently guilt and false responsibility. An educated and contained image of the events of victimization is potentially freeing from constructing one's view of oneself and of humanity solely on the basis of those events. For example, having been helpless does not mean that one is a helpless person; having witnessed or experienced evil does not mean that the world as a whole is evil; having been betrayed does not mean that betrayal is an overriding human behavior; having been victimized does not necessarily mean that one has to live one's life in constant readiness for its reenactment; having been treated as dispensable vermin does not mean that one is worthless; and, taking the painful risk of bearing witness does not mean that the world will listen, learn, change, and become a better place (Danieli, 1988).
The Latin American Institute of Mental Health and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile stated that "The victims know that individual therapeutic intervention is not enough. They need to know that their society as a whole acknowledges what has happened to them...Truth means the end of denial and silence...Truth will be achieved only when literally everyone knows and acknowledges what happened during the military regime. ... [They concluded:] Social reparation is thus... simultaneously a sociopolitical and a psychological process. It aims to establish the truth of political repression and demands justice for the victims...both through the judicial process and through the availability of health and mental health services...The new democracy that now offers the possibility of reparation will deteriorate into a frail bureaucratic system if the process of social mourning is not realized fully" (Becker et. al, 1990, pp. 147-148)(For related programs see Kordon, et.al., 1988; Genefke, 1992) Thus, you need to heal the sociopolitical context for the full healing of the individuals and their families, as you need to heal the individuals to heal the sociopolitical context. This is a mutually reinforcing context of shared mourning, shared memory, a sense that the memory is preserved, that the nation transformed it into a part of its global consciousness. The nation shares the horrible pain. The survivors are not lonely in their pain.
II. What Victims tell Us About Reparation
In order to understand more fully the experience of receiving reparation, compensation, and how it can be helpful to individuals and to their society, I first, for a long-term perspective, interviewed Nazi Holocaust survivors and then newer populations, such as Japanese-Americans, Argentineans and Chileans. I also spoke with professionals working with these populations. Following a description of the process of claiming redress, are some quotations of statements, discussions and conclusions from these interviews.
A. Claiming redress
The process of applying for German "Wiedergutmachung" [literally means to make something good again, to make amends for their suffering during the Nazi regime] was experienced by survivors as yet an additional series of hardships. The Allied Powers after World War II issued laws restricted to restoring to the original owners property confiscated by the Nazis. The laws did not take into account personal damage to victims of Nazi persecution--those who had suffered in mind and body, or had been deprived unjustly of their freedom, or whose professional or economic prospects had been summarily cut short. Nor did these laws consider assistance to the widows and orphans of those who had died as a result of Hitler's policies. The Western Allies placed the responsibility for the reparation of such damages in the hands of the newly-constituted German Federal States. Following a few stages, the Federal Republic of Germany enacted the "Final Federal Compensation Law" on September 14, 1965. Thus, indemnification for persecution of persons was differentiated from restitution for lost property. The implementation of the compensation law was traumatic in itself.
Kestenberg (1980), a reparation lawyer, states:
Even when most German officials showed concern and willingness to compensate Jews for the wrong done to them, their so-called "Wiedergutmachung"...was only concerned with monetary matters. A moral "Wiedergutmachung" was not planned and did not exist. No one bothered to restore the survivor's dignity. On the contrary, the procedures inherent in some of the paragraphs of the Restitution Laws, inflict indignities upon the claimants while at the same time German authorities are elevated to the status of superior beings who adjudge the claimants' veracity and honesty and classify them in accordance with the degree of their damage. (pp. 2-3)...[Even if] the applicant had indeed been confined in a concentration camp...they behaved as if he were trying to extort money from the German government under false pretenses (p. 4) The survivors had to prove that they had been damaged. Their attempts at self-cure were destroyed once they had to admit that their damage was permanent, sealed and signed by the authorities. To receive payments, often sorely needed, the applicants had to subject themselves to the most humiliating and degrading, seemingly very correct legal type of investigation. (p. 5)
Bureaucratic deadlines are used for the unfair and prejudicial practice of rejecting claims...The German treasury enriches itself when a claimant dies before his case is concluded. At this time 50% of claims are denied, 25% are still pending and only 25% have been resolved in favor of the claimants. A case in the highest court alone takes eight years for determination, while many of the elderly claimants are not only humiliated, but suffer from lack of economic necessities and moneys for treatment of ailments which exacerbate in old age. (p. 9) The victimization of the once persecuted continues. (p. 12)
Crucial to having a claim processed was undergoing a psychiatric examination. To be an examiner, the only requirement was that the psychiatrist be able to speak and write German, not Yiddish or Polish, which were the languages spoken by many survivors. The psychiatric examiner had to determine, and try to express in numbers, how much, or what fraction of the patient's emotional illness is, in his opinion, due to the persecution he suffered. The law required a minimum of 25% damage in order for the applicant to receive pension.
Examiners had intense emotional and moral reactions to this process. These reactions motivated much of their writings and were poignantly expressed in most of them (Danieli, 1982). Eissler (1967) speculates that one major reason for the experts' (and the courts') "open or concealed hostility against those who have had to bear great sufferings" has to do with the "universal," archaic, pagan "contempt that man still tends to feel for the [weak and] humiliated, for those who have had to submit to physical punishment, suffering, and torture" (p. 1357).
He concludes:
The minimum one may demand, under such circumstances, is that the responsible authorities recognize those who cannot control this archaic feeling and exclude them from the position of experts in matters of compensation for suffering. When a physician refers to concentration camp experiences as "disagreeable" he has given away his secret contempt.... He has thrown away the right to be called an "expert"; if he continues to avail himself of that privilege, he must share the blame with those who continue to use his services (p. 1358).
Krystal and Niederland (1968) add, "Even the hearing of the tales of the concentration camp survivors is so disturbing and traumatic, so abusive to the examiner that some are compelled to avoid obtaining the details of the traumatization. They then arrive at a meaninglessly brief summary of the experiences" (p. 341), and Hocking (1965) reports cases "where patients have been told not to describe their experiences, only their symptoms" (p. 481). FT, a Czech Jew of Viennese origins and the sole survivor of a well-to-do family, whose total possessions in Prague were taken over by the Germans, and then by the Communists...left, via France to the United States...and began pursuing compensation in the 50s. He describes his ordeal as follows,
The fact that I was three and a half years in concentration camps didn't count. At that time unless you were literally disabled -- such as missing a hand -- they recognized nothing. I always found it distasteful to spend days fighting a bureaucracy that tried to tell me that I am not entitled to that money, providing documents, writing letters, having to prove that I was indeed worthy of compensation. When I tried to get payment for some medical bills they wanted copies of the bills from 1946 to 1956. I had no way of finding them so they figured out an "average" and offered me $200 if I waive claims against medical bills and I said that that is an insult and told them to keep the money and leave me alone. Fighting for these things absorbs so much emotional energy...It is bad enough that I have to live with memories, but to have to stir them up and to also face one's persecutors. I don't have to face Nazis anymore, but I still have to deal with German bureaucracy. I got disgusted and wanted to quit. But I knew that if I didn't claim it, the money will remain in Germany. They won't give more to someone else.
B. Restitution and compensation
Of course everybody says that money is not enough. There is a disagreement whether we should take money or not. Some people don't need it at all financially yet insist on getting reparations; for others the check is practically necessary, especially the elderly. Compensation is a symbolic act because you can never be compensated. It is minor in amount but major in significance. Many people are desperate and need the support; they are living on a pension and $200 a month is critical. For a family in Bhopal even $15 a month may make a difference even though its a pittance. How does one compensate for three and a half years in concentration camps? For the loss of a child? It is impossible. How do you pay for a dead person? For a Korean woman sexually abused by the Japanese in WW II? It's not the money but what the money signifies - vindication. It signifies the governments' own admission of guilt, and an apology. The actual value, especially in cases of loss of life is, of course, merely symbolic, and should be acknowledged as such. The money concretizes for the victim the confirmation of responsibility, wrongfulness, he is not guilty, and somebody cares about it. It is at least a token. It does have a meaning. Just a letter of apology doesn't have the same meaning and even if it is a token it adds. In our system of justice, of government, when damage occurred money is paid.
We have demonstrated that people can be damaged. There must be an acknowledgement that wrong was done. Then those who were damaged are entitled to compensation for their damages and a program of rehabilitation. The acknowledgement is necessary because without an admission of guilt people are still angry. Rehabilitation programs must be available on a long-term basis. In Israel idealists fought against [taking money]: "I refused. Today I am sorry, because I concluded that I did not succeed to change anything by refusing and the truth is that here and in Israel there are aging survivors who don't have an extended family. The steady sum enables them to go on. The fact that I gave up only left the money in the hands of the Germans. We were wrong."
Should there be one payment? No. The monthly check in some ways weakens the trauma. When it becomes routine, it transforms into something permanent that somehow enables overcoming survivor guilt. The routine swallows the guilt. The Argentinean and Chilean parents: that the State will admit that a horrible crime was done to them and that it was done without any justification or reason and was purely an expression of political harm and abuse of power and violation of their freedoms and human lives. Not only was there a crime of taking lives - suddenly they are without their children. They were also robbed of the chance of their children helping and supporting them and standing by them in their old age. Thus at least they should have compensation for the rest of their lives, not a single lump-sum. There is no place for a single payment. A house is a house, but when it is human life you compensate for something that could have accompanied them throughout their lives. Therefore there is logic in receiving regular compensation. This should be legalized.
In Argentina, responses of different victim groups seem to vary. The Madres de Plaza de Mayo organization officially refused economic reparations as the government's attempt to buy their silence and in the absence of social and historical recognition that their children had been political or social opponents and not criminals. The former political prisoners, especially if they had been in prison for along time, consider economic compensation as their rightful reparation. Mostly young people, their imprisonment deprived them of finishing their studies, progressing in a job, or establishing their own home and families. In married cases, the long period in jail caused great economic difficulties to their families. Many of them feel that this is a partial moral recognition of the damage they had suffered and that, albeit in a small way, they can at least win something from the State. For people who are ambivalent, their ambivalence increases when compensation is experienced as an offense, yet is very necessary economically.
Perhaps the most crucial aspect is that of "impunidad": that traitors, collaborators, torturers are not punished. As long as persons who have violated human rights or exerted torture can go free, there can never be a true democracy in a society. A democratic constitution is no guarantee against torture. Impunity under a democratic constitution is a continuous repression. Impunity stops democratic processes. Torturers for example should have absolute maximum punishment. To practice torture is equal to committing murder.
Most Japanese-Americans felt finally vindicated after 50 years, having spent 10 years fighting the system, not as a Japanese-American issue, but as an American constitutional one. So many of our people could now talk about it and express deep-seated feelings for the first time in 50 years. That was the positive, therapeutic side. It was only a token compensation. $20,000 won't cover what was lost: jobs, names, all properties, horrible living conditions, dignity, citizenship. It's not the money but what the money signifies. Psychologically it lifted a big burden off the Japanese-Americans who always feel that the system couldn't trust us but viewed us as potential enemies, as second-class citizens. At least we now feel not accepted but vindicated for what happened 50 years ago. The apology was more important than the amount of money. After 50 years of maintaining that they were right, the government did acknowledge that they were constitutionally wrong.
Economic compensation given to torture victims should be very substantial. The torturers should compensate for their crime by having confiscated all of their property in order to pay back to those they have tortured. Whether members of governments, police officers, and doctors who have participated in torture - all property should be confiscated from them -- this is the most important aspect of restitution -- and used for compensation to the victim. Furthermore, there should be general awareness in the whole population about this aspect and the situation as such. It might be very effective preventively if this principle was generally known.
Before anything else the victim wants an acknowledgement of a debt that somehow, sometime a government writes laws and one of them is "Mr. deserves the praise of the country." The first step of a government such as Argentina is "the state of Argentina has woefully wronged those people who were persecuted by the military and we feel contrite and wish to apologize". The full sense of it is that it should be a law, nothing else. And put it on the books. We have done wrong, we acknowledge it. It is very important. As a political matter I would absolutely have the books open...open the files and let the facts speak for themselves.
Let us find a way and make a general statement. Clearly victims of governmental wrong should be compensated and this is the way we should go about it. As we had established norms of international minimal behaviors, crimes against humanity, we need parallel legislation for compensation for the victims.
Legal procedures against the victimizers and financial arrangements compensating the victims are necessary steps in the aftermath of man-made calamities. However, they are not sufficient steps for societies to recover. In societies which moved out of totalitarian regimes, into quasi-democratic ones (Argentina, Chile, Eastern Europe), victims and victimizers of the former regime go on living in the same society. As they do not have any social and psychological mechanisms to repair these past relations, these may just penetrate deeper inside, and thereby be transmitted to the next generations. Therefore, along legal and financial steps, in each of these countries, a socio-psychological institute should be established to work on the after-effects of the traumata with both children of victims and victimizers. The end result of this process should be to try to bring them together, to think about the overall social responsibility: What can they do together so that detrimental tensions will not burst out again and again within those societies.
I am still concerned that it makes it easier to just assign monetary value, and not address the profound emotional and moral breach. Because of the long-term and/or intergenerational transmission of victimization there should be no statute of limitation. If the victim, for moral reasons, refuses the meaning of the reparation payment, the money should, nonetheless, not remain in the hands of the perpetrators or the silently acquiescing proceeding socio/political system, but it or its equivalent sum should be put in a special long-term fund whose purpose should be future-oriented, both in terms of education, prevention, and later care as provisions for the future --for themselves and/or their offspring's care, if needed and necessary.
C.Commemoration and education.
The need for commemoration is for the victims and for society. Rituals are very important; there is no organized society, religion or culture that does not have rituals of memory. Commemorations can fill the vacuum with creative responses and may help heal the rupture not only internally but also the rupture the victimization created between the survivors and their society. It is a shared context, shared mourning, shared memory. The memory is preserved; the nation has transformed it into part of its consciousness. The nation shares the horrible pain. What may be an obligatory one-day-a-year ritual to others the victims experience as a gesture of support, of sharing the pain. They are not lonely in their pain.
There should be general awareness on a high level...information and education about the situation, how it arose, what are the consequences. Statues of heroes/martyrs, paintings. Streets should be named after them, as could rooms in colleges and museums. There should be memorial services, scholarship funds, concerts and theatre performances, and educational books. Commemoration should be done with great dignity, and with a feeling that while it honors those who suffered, those who have died, it is also done for preventive purposes, in the spirit of the knowledge that compensation for loss of lives, health, hopes can never be fulfilled. Yet maintain the commitment to NEVER AGAIN! and the possibility for intergenerational dialogue, which may include dialogues between children of survivors and of perpetrators.
In Elie Wiesel's (1985) words, "they have no cemetery; we are their cemetery." Building monuments serves some important functions in the reestablishment of a sense of continuity for the survivors, and for the world. Much of the chronic grief, the holding on to the guilt, shame, and pain of the past have to do with these internally carried graveyards. Survivors fear that successful mourning may lead to letting go, thereby to forgetting the dead and committing them to oblivion. The attempt to make these graveyards external creates the need for building monuments so that the survivors might have a place to go to remember and mourn in a somewhat traditional way. Visiting Yad Vashem and other Holocuast museums seems to provide such an opportunity for some survivors. Building monuments also has the significant functions of commemoration, documentation and education -- an extension of bearing witness -- and of leaving a legacy so that the victims, the survivors, and the Holocaust will not be forgotten. The latter are comforting to some of the essential components of the aging survivor's preoccupation: "Who cares if I live?," "Who loves me?," "Who will remember me?," "Will the memory of my people and of the Holocaust perish?" and, "Did/Will the world learn anything from it?"
II. Goals and Recommendations
In the following I briefly list the goals and recommendations that emerged from the above interviews; space limitations dictated the inclusion of the narrated recommendations only in the text of II-B and II-C.
A. Reestablishment of the victims' equality of value, power, esteem (dignity), the basis of reparation in the society or nation. This is accomplished by, a. compensation, both real and symbolic; b. restitution; c. rehabilitation; d. commemoration.
B. Relieving the victim's stigmatization and separation from society. This is accomplished by, a. commemoration; b. memorials to heroism; c. empowerment; d. education.
C. Repairing the nations' ability to provide and maintain equal value under law and the provisions of justice. This is accomplished by, a. prosecution; b. apology; c. securing public records; d. education; e. creating mechanisms for monitoring, conflict resolution and preventive interventions (E/AC57/1990/22).
CLEARLY THIS WHOLE AREA CALLS FOR FURTHER COMPREHENSIVE, SYSTEMATIC CROSS-CULTURAL, AND INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH.
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