6.05 Stages of Traumatisation

Stages of Traumatisation

A specific feature of traumatisation through the Nazi concentration camp system is the fact that the total social system – both state and society – took on the role of persecutor.¹See Quindeau 1995, p. 42. The persecution was not limited to just a few individuals, but was aimed at the whole group, in our case, at Jehovah’s Witnesses as a minority group.

This period of persecution must therefore be perceived as being the first traumatisation period.²Keilson’s ‘persecution and traumatising classification’ (1979) has been adopted in what follows. Removal of protection of rights signalled the beginning of the persecution, along with the increasingly strong measures taken against Jehovah’s Witnesses in the areas where the Nazi powers held influence. Thereby the victims experienced fear that was connected to the attack on the family’s integrity and its economic existence. The sudden disappearance of family members and friends and the increase in raids followed by deportation, invariably led to isolation from the familiar community. Familiar environments were dissolved.

Deportation first to the detention centre then to the concentration camp, was the start of the second stage. A loss of rights follows, resulting eventually in imminent life-threatening danger in the concentration camp.³See Quindeau 1995, p. 43.

Cohen and Ahearn explained their view of the various stages⁴Numerous investigations have been performed on the physical and mental consequences of calamities. The phase classification of Cohen and Ahearn from 1980 is represented here (see Zimbardo/Gerrig 1999, p. 378). of the reactions of persons to the traumatic situation in the concentration camp, which I will outline below.

The first stage is characterised by shock, confusion, and psychological desensitisation. It is impossible to understand the full extent of the traumatic experience. Frankl⁵Viktor E. Frankl was born on 26 March 1905 and he was a physician and psychologist in Vienna before being deported to various concentration camps by the Nazis. He survived Auschwitz and returned to his native city, where he obtained a chair in neurology and psychiatry at Vienna university. Frankl founded a psychotherapy – the logotherapy – in which his camp experiences are incorporated. So his camp imprisonment between 1942 and 1945 has influenced this existential therapy procedure, in which the client is supported so as to give sense and spiritual meaning to his existence by dealing with his own sufferings (see Comer 2001, p. 56; Frankl 2002, author’s remarks). describes this first stage in the concentration camp as Aufnahmeschock⁶shock of admission; Frankl 2002, p. 24. The acute psychophysiological reaction is characterised by a rise in nervous tension: the body reacts with a fight-or-flight response. This triggers a complex biochemical-electrical state of distress, that includes heart palpitations, raised blood pressure or trembling. The psychological state of those concerned is reflected in fits of crying and screaming as well as in sleeping disorders.⁷Horie 1997, p. 49. This increased activity of the sympathetic nervous system of the individual in a concentration camp, cannot be sufficiently reduced in a normal way, and therefore must find another outlet for subduing the state of acute anxiety.

In this stadium, an emotional bluntness leading to relative apathy will follow the psychophysiological state of acute anxiety. Besides which, the body will try to slow down activity of the parasympathetic nervous system.

A tonic immobility, powerlessness and dissociation are symptoms of total parasympathetic control.⁸Horie 1997, p. 49. Dissociation is a process-like event, in which certain thoughts or mental activities lose their normal relation to the rest of the personality. These are split off and function, so to speak, independently. Thus, logically irreconcilable thoughts and feelings and attitudes may be maintained together without leading to an intrapersonal conflict (see Arnold et al 1997, p. 383). More than a hundred years ago, the French psychiatrist Pierre Janet already pointed out that he found these phenomena in patients with so-called hysterical symptoms. The individuals had lost the capacity to integrate mentally overwhelming events in their memory. So, dissociation forms a further symptom of traumas (see Horie 1997, p. 64). The person incarcerated in a concentration camp is limited in not only his physical range, but also in his emotional range. A traumatic curbing of emotions can lead to a state of ‘emotional deafness’.⁹Horie 1997, p. 50 According to Frankl, that is the equivalent of an emotional death.

An emotional death of normal emotions is then progressive. At first the prisoner will avert his eyes when forced to line up to watch the punishment of any particular group. He cannot yet bear the sight of people […] being sadistically tormented. […] [The prisoner who had passed into the next stage of his psychological changes — author’s note] no longer averts his eyes. Apathetic, his feelings numbed, he can watch unmoved. […] The tortured, the sick, the dying, the dead — all of this becomes such a commonplace sight that, after a few weeks of life in the camp, it no longer causes him distress.’¹⁰Frankl 2002, p. 42 f.

The apathy, or becoming indifferent, is a necessary protection mechanism for the psyche, hiding reality in the emotional dimension. The individual has a feeling of emptiness, as if they are dead.

This phase is followed by ‘automatic action’ – the individual’s attempt to react to the event. Fixed behaviour patterns take place at a sub-conscious level. There may be no memory of the experiences undergone in this phase.¹¹Zimbardo/Gerrig 1999, p. 378. Under this continuous psychological strain marked by deprivation, hunger and sickness, the individual tries first and foremost to satisfy his so-called instinctive needs, such as hunger.

The survival issue leads to a radical lowering of the values of all else besides meeting these innate needs. Frankl calls this automatic behaviour, aimed at self-preservation and the related disappearance of higher interests, ‘the cultural hibernation of camp life’.¹²Frankl 2002, p. 60.

In the third phase, which is accompanied by the feeling of having mastered something, the trauma victim often feels he is running out of energy. This includes disillusionment, becoming emotionally aware of the terrible event.

Victor Frankl expresses this emotional disillusionment that camp prisoners experience, as follows:

‘One’s inner life in the concentration camp degenerates to […] a retrospective existence, because one must face a fate that cannot be changed. […] The tendency to return to the past […] contributes to the senselessness of the present with all its atrocities. […] Totally losing one’s sense of reality, which is consistent with the elementary way of life of the camp prisoner, one is tempted to let oneself go completely – because everything is meaningless anyway.’¹³Frankl 2002, p. 117.

In the last stage the victims try to deal with the changes caused by the traumatic occurrence, and they attempt to reorganise themselves and their lives.¹⁴Zimbardo/Gerrig 1999, p. 378. Although this is about the period after their liberation, it does not mean that traumatisation has ended. According to Keilson, many survivors refer to this stage as the harshest period in their life: you become acutely aware of the level of persecution and the traumatic experiences suffered. Staying in the Displaced Persons Camps led to further traumatisation. Only material care was given, and no one took the emotional needs of the victims into account.

The extreme hardship in the concentration camp is characterised by the fundamental denial of the basic needs of the person.¹⁵See Quindeau 1995, p. 44.

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