Justice Matters: Legacies of the Holocaust and World War II (review)

Weissmark is a psychologist and Director of the Institute for Social Justice at Roosevelt University in Chicago. Her study deals with the results of group encounters between children of Holocaust survivors and children of Nazi perpetrators she supervised over a ten-year period. The volume carries a slightly deceptive title, as the word justice is used in the context of post-Holocaust dialogue between these second generation groups. In this respect, justice means a process for dialogue and coming to terms with the past, which has resulted in many misconceptions by each side about the other, rather than issues connected with financial restitution.

The author's interest in the subject came from her own background as a child of Holocaust survivors, plus some of the disquieting conclusions drawn by Hannah Arendt from the trial of Adolf Eichmann about "the banality of evil" and the accusations of Jewish complicity through the Jewish councils (Judenräte). Weissmark also uses Stanley Milgram's well-known electrical shock experiment that focused on obedience to authority as a source for understanding the relationship between German antisemitism and the issue of how obedience played a role in the extermination of the Jews. Weissmark confesses that conclusions by both Arendt and Milgram established taboos about investigating attitudes among the second generations: Jewish actions that helped the Nazis might reduce the uniqueness of the Holocaust and implicate Jews in their own destruction, while Milgram's experiment might suggest that following orders rather than hatred was the dominant motive for German actions.

All of this might be a rehashing of well-known historical issues if the author had not asked the question of how the above issues were passed to subsequent generations on both sides. In this book, the bulk of the interesting and new material comes directly from clinical sessions between the two second-generation groups that met together. It is in this context that the issue of justice becomes intergenerational. The key answer which the author as psychologist seems to search for is how both children of survivors and children of Nazis have perceived both injustice and justice in their parents' experiences. The study ultimately was based on interviewing eleven children of Holocaust survivors and eleven children of Nazi perpetrators.

The survey and interview project seems to have revealed some interesting conclusions. First was "ethnic identification," meaning that both sides shared an identity that was rooted in the war experiences of the parents. Secondly, "double victimization" was identified as children of each victim group repeated the experiences of their parents as essential elements in their lives. The third issue was "feelings of indignation" that each side felt relating to the nature of the crime and justice or the nature of the guilt inflicted on the German side in the aftermath of the war. Weissmark indicates that institutionalization of resentment in the post-war era through reparations seems to have satisfied neither side. Survivors have felt short-changed and disturbed because of the massive alterations and trauma in their lives, while Germans had to deal with issues of collective guilt. The author notes that "[t]he program failed to remedy feelings of hatred and resentment; in fact, it perpetuated such feelings" (p. 69).

It is the conclusion about the failure of immediate post-war justice programs that led the author to conclude that redressing the injustices can only be solved through dialogue. The dialogue she refers to involves the next generation, to whom the guilt and sense of indignity was transferred. So, process here is perhaps as important as results, in that discussion in Weissmark's group led to each side facing the other, often for the first time, in an open setting. The result was complex, but one conclusion was that both groups felt themselves as victims of the past and that attitudes handed down from parents about this past were impediments to independent thinking about the subject. Weissmark notes in this regards, for example...