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‘I had no family, but I made family’. Immediate post-war coping strategies of adolescent survivors of the Holocaust
Abstract
Increasingly, mental health professionals are confronted with survivors of ethnic conflict and genocide, many of whom were adolescents when they experienced such extreme, prolonged trauma. Holocaust survivor interviews provide an important window into the process of post-traumatic coping and adaptation by adolescent survivors of genocide. The immediate post-genocide years have been a particularly neglected field of inquiry among trauma researchers. This study of the immediate coping strategies used by adolescent survivors of the Holocaust is part of a larger secondary analysis of the long-term coping and adaptation of 18 adolescent survivors – 14 women and four men – who were between the ages of 12 and 18 at the start of World War II. It found that the major coping strategies used in the immediate post-war period were social support, community with other survivors, revenge and the pursuit of justice. These findings have important implications for the treatment of survivors of ethnic conflict seeking asylum in countries in the West.
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Details
- Available online: 19 Feb 2009
Author affiliations
- a Transcending Trauma Project, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Author biographies
Jennifer Goldenberg, PhD., LCSW, is a clinical social worker in private practice, specialising in adult survivors of traumatic stress. She is a senior researcher for the Transcending Trauma Project (TTP), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a qualitative research study of Holocaust survivors, their children and grandchildren, their coping and adaptation and the intergenerational transmission of both trauma and resilience. Her research focuses on cognitive frameworks of trauma, the development of resilience theory and the long-term developmental impacts of genocidal war on adolescent survivors and their coping responses. She has published articles on vicarious traumatisation of interviewers of Holocaust survivors, and attributions of survival for Holocaust survivors, and has presented her research in the US, Israel and the UK. She is an editor and major contributor of a forthcoming book on the Transcending Trauma Project, and teaches in the School of Social Work, University of Maine.
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