Religion, Age, and Identity after the Holocaust

In the past Holocaust scholars and psychoanalysts have assumed that most survivors of wartime trauma would permanently suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome. For some victims the pain is still palpable.1 Jewish and Christian religious scholars have also suffered from an assault on their faith. They have sought to reconcile their trust in a just and good God with the horrors that were inflicted on innocent people, merely because they were Jewish. At the heart of this struggle is the question of evil, a problem for which there are no satisfactory answers. Why was it possible for Hitler to convince so many people to attempt to exterminate Jews in so many different countries? Why did otherwise decent people join in the task or at least keep silent when they saw evidence of atrocities? If God had specially chosen the Jews to be his people, many wondered if He had been trying to punish them for some reason.2 Needless to say if rabbis and clerics found the task daunting, the rank and file of the Jewish community have also, as well as thoughtful members of the Christian laity. Rather than attempt to explain the inexplicable, it has been far easier to agree with Elie Wiesel’s reaction to the horror of seeing small children burned in the crematoria. In Night, published in 1958 when he was thirty-years-old, he asserted, “Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever ” (p. 32)