Dr. Hannah Kliger brings to the project her expertise in communication.

When Max W., a concentration camp survivor, did the endless, hard labor in the quarry, he managed through great focus to temporarily shut out the present and recall happier events in his life.

"I would work on musical passages, actually using the fingers of my left hand; and I would play ... sounds audible only to me. I developed a feeling of victory over my captors. I could even manage to smile to myself inwardly," he said.

For someone who has never experienced an extreme trauma like Max W.'s, it can be difficult to imagine how those who have been traumatized can go on with their lives. All over the world, there are victims of war, terror and oppression. How do they cope? What is their outlook on the future?

"During the Holocaust, and in its aftermath, people maintained a life-affirming attitude," points out Dr. Hannah Kliger, associate dean for academic affairs and professor of communication and Jewish studies at Penn State Abington, adding, "The experience of the concentration camps did not deter people from having children and building families after the war."

Perhaps there is no greater affirmation of life than having children. That positive outlook can be seen today in war zones, with reports of weddings being held in the middle of Baghdad. "People heal their psychic wounds with resilience tools. Trauma is a wound that can heal," said Kliger.

Kliger is a member of the Philadelphia-based Council for Relationships' Transcending Trauma Project, a research team studying how Holocaust survivors communicate the legacy of resilience and hope to their families as well as in their public lives. To date, the group has interviewed more than 300 Holocaust survivors, their spouses, children and grandchildren--helping the researchers explore how people adapt and rebuild after traumatic life experiences.

Project members have shared their results with clinicians and researchers in both the trauma and Holocaust fields, with the ultimate goal of publishing two works--one for professionals and another narrative-style book for laypeople.

The interviews themselves will eventually be deposited at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Team Delves Into the Human Experience
The project grew out of a talk presented by a group at a conference in the late '80s. Council for Relationships Psychologist Dr. Bea Hollander-Goldfein organized the group presentation, which Kliger joined. The group was committed to studying trauma, recovery and resilience in a broad way, said Hollander-Goldfein. "We were disappointed about how the trauma field was limited, especially in Holocaust studies. We felt the field was lacking a comprehensive understanding of the human experience of trauma," she said.

To fill that gap, the group decided to embark on the interview project. Most of the team is comprised of mental health professionals, with Kliger bringing her expertise in the field of communication. It includes both Jews and non-Jews.

	The Transcending Trauma Project research team has conducted hundreds of interviews with Holocaust survivors and their families.

Connecting Stories
The interviews are unique because of the depth and scope of the questions that are asked. "The life histories explore not only the events of a lifetime, but also the thoughts, feelings and beliefs that underlie responses to these events," said Hollander-Goldfein.

The researchers typically visit survivors or family members in their homes, limiting travel to mostly the northeastern United States. The interviews usually take two or three visits to complete. "As the interviewer, you are living through the trauma vicariously, bearing witness. Basically you've said to them, 'I will listen, I will share this pain,'" said Kliger.

The resulting body of information is enormous--strings of interviews where stories of rebuilding, lessons learned and coping can be tracked from generation to generation. The data show that early nurture, the impact of family dynamics and the nature of the trauma all have an impact on the trauma victim and contribute to post-trauma adaptation, said Kliger.

Participants in the project include Dr. Hannah Kliger's parents, who are Holocaust survivors. Here they are pictured on their wedding day in the Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons' Camp, Dec. 18, 1945.

One survivor's interview shows clearly the atmosphere of tolerance in his upbringing, which has helped him cope with what has happened to him. "I harbor no hate against anyone," he said. "I realize that people have behaved very cruelly toward the Jews, but I realize that it's not because each and every one of them is a cruel individual, it's because they were taught from childhood to hate Jews, and these are the effects of teaching hatred. … That's why I always try to emphasize [people] have to stop, even in their own families."

In the past, professionals in both the trauma and Holocaust fields have been trying to make sense of Holocaust survivors. "We are trying to bridge the two fields," said Kliger, presenting findings of the interviews at workshops and conferences for each of the fields. The team has worked to train others how to conduct interviews with Holocaust survivors, including staff members from Steven Spielberg's Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. The project's colleagues have also shared what they've learned with clinicians working with survivors of 9/11, in addition to providing therapy to those survivors themselves.

"Clinicians are responsive and impressed with the scope of what we have," said Hollander-Goldfein. "They are enlightened by ways in which we've taken experiences and made connections."

Margaret Shapiro, the assistant director at the Council for Relationships who also counsels torture survivors from Africa through the Philadelphia-based Liberty Center, welcomes the findings in her work. "I try to help people see that the trauma is [only] part of the whole person, that the core of who they are has not changed. The trauma has happened to them, but they are not that trauma," she said.

Kliger's own parents, who are Holocaust survivors, were interviewed for the project. "[Their experience] is a piece of who I am," she said. "I have benefited from the resilience tools [they gave me]. Survivors and their children often have a sense that despite all the horrors of the past, they feel an obligation to try to make the world a better place. I'm grateful for the chance to try to make a difference each day."

READ RELATED STORIES

» Experiences That Transform