Therapeutic Value of Documenting Child Survivors

For the great majority of survivors who have participated, the taping proved a therapeutic experience through integration of traumatic fragments into a “whole” with a purpose, that of leaving a legacy for history and education.

Abstract

As a child survivor/psychiatrist who is preoccupied with the implications of the Holocaust, the author has been involved in documentation projects to secure eyewitness accounts of that time. For the great majority of survivors who have participated, the taping proved a therapeutic experience through integration of traumatic fragments into a “whole” with a purpose, that of leaving a legacy for history and education. The child survivors particularly have not related their stories and, as a consequence, continue to bear a great psychologic burden. Documentation affords the opportunity to integrate, as adults, the complex childhood events which helped shape their personalities and lives.