Once They Had a Country: Two Teenage Refugees in the Second World War

10. Post- Traumatic Stress

10 Post-Traumatic Stress The Contracting States shall as far as possible facilitate the assimilation and naturalization of refugees.They shall in particular make every effort to expedite naturalization proceedings and to reduce as far as possible the charges and costs of such proceedings. —Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, Article 34, 1951 A week after pleading with the authorities to release him from the work camp, Hans woke up to find that he could not get out of bed. He was unable to walk.The camp staff carried Hans down the mountain on a stretcher to the town of brig. no trains or buses traveled to the camp and evidently no one had a truck available. In town, he was taken to a community hospital where the young intern on duty pronounced solemnly that Hans had an enlarged heart, which he attributed to “excess sports activity.” Though a more senior physician examined Hans the next day and concluded there was nothing wrong with his heart, it was too late. Hans would remain convinced— emotionally if not intellectually—that he had heart disease. Whenever he had one of his anxiety attacks, and he would have them regularly over the years, he would get palpitations. And whenever his heart began to race, he would be convinced he was having a heart attack. Hans stayed in the hospital for two days. When he could walk again, he was sent back to the work camp, which then discharged him for medical reasons . He returned to his room in bern, but he had terrifying nightmares from which he woke up crying out loud, his heart pounding, convinced the nazis would burst into the room any moment. He took to locking the door from the inside and putting the key under his pillow, a routine that allowed him to sleep. Hans discovered that he could be walking down a peaceful bern street and suddenly feel faint and dizzy. He often developed a tightness in his chest and found himself screaming, asking complete strangers for help. They did not know how to help him. A math professor at the University of bern who had taken an interest in the young refugee student arranged for him to see a physician at the university health clinic. In a letter addressed to the Department of Justice and Police on november 12, 1945, the physician asserted: “I diagnosed a severe anxiety neurosis. Psychoanalytic care is urgently indicated and has a good prognosis.” Hans appealed for assistance to the Swiss Jewish Refugee Help, Post-Traumatic Stress / 149 which urged the police to facilitate a referral for treatment,asserting that they needed to “address this case promptly” if a “catastrophe” was to be avoided. Hans saw a psychiatrist on november 27 who concurred that he had severe anxiety and also “suffered from the feeling his heart would stop.” The physician continued,“The case is one of psychically induced anxiety in an arrogant young man who is prone to intellectualization.” Hypnosis was tried unsuccessfully .The psychiatrist concluded that “because of the severity of his condition ,” Hans could not be treated as an outpatient. He sent him to another psychiatrist who hospitalized him in his clinic the following day. At the psychiatric facility in Muri, about fifteen miles outside bern, Hans received state-of-the-art psychiatric therapy, which in 1945 began with insulin shock treatment. In this now-discredited treatment, a nondiabetic patient is given insulin to drive down his blood sugar so low that he falls into a coma. He is sustained by intravenous fluids while his sugar is allowed to return to normal; then he wakes up.The treatment was widely used for depression, but it had no proven benefit. It certainly did nothing for Hans. While at the clinic in Muri, Hans wrote to his Cousin bessie. The penmanship is shaky, the lines not absolutely parallel as in his earlier letters, but he was coherent and quickly launched into his usual talk about immigration: “first of all I wish you a very happy and good new year 1946! Then I have to thank you a lot for the money you sent me a short time ago which I was only handed over these last few days and then I specially thank you for all the trouble you take to draw up new papers.” He continued, “I hope at last it will be successful now and it won’t take a long time any more until I can go off...