Zajde, N. (1994). Treating the ‘Unthinkable’: The Psychological Care of Victims of the Shoah and Their Descendants. In 7th Conference on the Tutsi Genocide and Other Crimes against Humanity Committed in Rwanda in 1994, organized by the IBUKA Association in Brussels on the 24th of March 2001.

Abstract

Allow me first of all to present myself. I was born in France in the sixties of parents born in Paris, before the war, themselves children of Polish Jewish refugees, my grandparents. My family comes from a community which numbered more or less 3,400,000 people before the war: the Jews of Poland, the Yiddishland. Anti-Semitism during the Second World War exterminated 3 million Jews (Hilberg, 1985). Until the war, Jews in Poland lived mostly in Jewish districts and villages where they spoke their language—Yiddish (a mixture of German and Hebrew)-, they had their own Jewish schools where Hebrew, Jewish prayers and thought were taught, they lived by the Jewish calendar, the Sabbath and other festivals, ate strictly kosher food prepared according to Jewish law, had their own places of worship, their ritual slaughterers, their courts of law, their authorities, their judges who judged according to Jewish law, their doctors and healers and of course their cemeteries. They lived in communities, they married or divorced under the control of or with the aid of the family in accordance with Jewish norms, and they gave birth to Jewish children, this too in accordance with specific conditions and respecting their own rituals. Inspired by Tobie Nathan’s thinking (Nathan 1994), I would like to bring to your attention the fact that the notion of human remains an abstract notion, an ideological notion. Indeed, in the same manner that the Bambara people do not consider that they give birth to simple human beings, but rather to Bambara children, or that the Lari give birth to other Laris and not to “universal” humans, the Polish Jews, in their time, gave birth to Polish Jews, provided ways of doing things and, above all, their divinity were respected.