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War Trauma: Lessons from Israel

Author(s) : Nathan Moses Szajnberg

Reviews and Endorsements

‘This new book by Nathan Szajnberg , a child psychiatrist, researcher, says “this is a personal book” It retells tales of his many returns to Israel to study children and families at the Israeli - Gaza border following the October 7th terrorist attack - and displaced children from Ethiopia and IDF soldiers. His tale is likened to a “descent into hell “The author is our Virgil asking us to attend with a Solomonic “listening heart” to the pain and terror described -that also references his personal story of his father’s miraculous rescue from death at Auschwitz and his own birth at a Displaced Persons camp. As, in the Inferno, the descent is a necessary mid-life trial—preceding repair and transformation. For Szajnberg it is a calling to listen at the side the victims as they “grieve and hope”, or long for hostage’s return . It documents children’s synthetic capacities to inject hope while assimilating trauma. In short Szajnberg’s felt “call” is part of a transformative participation - reminding the reader to remember- before we are fully fit to move forward constructively.
Theodore Shapiro MD. Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry Weill Cornell Medicine Editor Journal of Psychoanalytic Association 1982-1993

A much needed perspective with moving appeals of human suffering.
How to recover from being in Hell, especially when many of your beloveds were slaughtered there?
This book explores this question after meeting with evacuated children, parents, those whose friends and relatives were murdered or are being held hostage. The book also addresses the acute stress disorder of soldiers and how to treat them in a war zone. We hear from physicians and nurses who must carry on their clinical responsibilities even as their sons and daughters are in combat, even as they themselves are under bombardment.
The author, born in an American Displaced Persons Camp in Germany, felt a responsibility to the Jewish people and State, given that his father was in Auschwitz and was ultimately saved by Allied troops. When sitting with IDF physician-officers, he knew that they were risking their lives to rescue Israeli hostages. His obligation was to help them as much as he could and bring the stories of the children, parents and soldiers to us. The author seeks and calls for the rebuilding of wounded lives and communities.
Michael Eigen, author of The Psychotic Core, Faith, Emotional Storm, and Bits of Psyche

This extraordinary book, an unusual integration of historical analysis, subjective experience and interpreted myth, represents the authors shock over the hell of October 7th savage assault on Israel, its willful repetition of the structure of the Holocaust, and its enactment of hell as a human reality, starting from his father’s experience of Auschwitz, Szajnberg explores the descent into hell by the heroes of the three great myths of Dante’s Inferno, Odyssey’s descent to the underworld, and Anaeus drive through hell. The satanic features of hell, the sadistic rapes and murder of women, the cruel torture and murder of infants and children, the joyful, savage sadistic attacks of the Hamas assailants of October 7th merge nationally with the mythic hells.
Szajnberg connects October 7th developments with his father’s multiple experiences of dread for his life, the anxious despair of father trying to survive, and generalized this effort to the task of survivor in contemporary sadistically authoritarian regimes.
These observations of horror lead into the problem of witness: how to listen without contamination by despair and hatred? Again, the author links the answer to this question to his personal efforts, travel to Israel to support the victims, witnesses and all those affected by the Hamas assault with the general action of the country to protect children and families from the assault on their personality and self-esteem. Szajnberg describes the massive efforts to provide opportunities by multiple organizations supporting a broad spectrum of children and affected population groups, visitors and others and the Israeli solders’ contribution to treating post- traumatic stress disorders. The illustrations of the healing potential of traumatized children’s psychotherapy is a meaningful concluding subject of this book.
In this volume, full of information about hell on earth and how to deal with its consequences effectively, an underlying theme is the very fact of the permanent risk of outbreak of hell underneath the apparently dominant surface of good will and understanding, love and human kindness. Freud’s “Civilization and its Discontents,” his basic drive theory of libido and aggression, emerge as a fundamental condition of human existence. And the need to combat hell and heal the survivors are basic human task. This volume focuses on the healing process, but reminds us of the inevitable recurrence of hell, even in its relatively localized threat by Hamas.
Otto F. Kernberg, M.D., Professor Emeritus, Weill Cornell Medical College, Training and Supervising Analyst, Columbia University Psychoanalytic Center for Training and Research