Secondary Guilt Syndrome May Have Led Nazi-persecuted Jewish Writers to Suicide

Abstract

Feelings of guilt have tormented Holocaust survivors, ranging from immediately after the liberation to later in life, for shorter or longer periods, and persisting for some throughout their entire post-war lives. Descriptions of the guilt experienced by survivors of the Nazi camps occupy an impressive amount of literature: “Why me?” was the question, when a younger and more able family member perished; “Why me?” when more productive members of the community perished; “Why me?” when a million and a half children were deprived of their lives. Many found the answer by retelling their stories, witnesses of what happened. This type of guilt is much different from the recently described phenomenon of survivor syndrome, namely the secondary guilt felt by Nazi-persecuted Jewish writers. Despite successes in all aspects of their life, these writers developed a self-incriminating guilt due to their perceived inadequacy of communicating, particularly in light of the resurging anti-Semitism worldwide. This paper deals with the survival and suicides of Nazi-persecuted Jewish writers and offers a possible explanation for their late self-destructive acts.

Analyzing suicide life stories on Wikipedia with Highway_star and other textual visualization tools

“…Another intriguing fact concerning the 1920s corpus is the absence of references to the First World War. As the second one is strongly linked to suicidal behavior, even decades after its end (Bedard and Deschênes 2006;Weisz 2015;Sandman et al 2017), no narrative seems to directly mention World War I as an important factor of death. An explanation could be that, more than the war itself, it is the persecutions of the WWII that caused suicidal ideation by making life unbearable for people of both sides.…”

Three Unresolved Issues in Human Morality

“…Some German Jews who escaped imprisonment in a concentration camp during the Second World War felt guilty because a relative or friend who was more virtuous than them had been killed. Their guilt was generated by the belief that they did not deserve to survive (Weisz, 2015).…”

Brain and Emotion

“…A similar state occurs when adults see or learn of someone who violated one of their ethical premises, or when their current life circumstances violate their understanding of fairness (Kagan, 2009). The survivors of Nazi concentration camps, massacres, fires, or natural catastrophes who ask privately, “Why me?” are prone to the emotion of guilt if they believe they did not deserve to be saved (Thoresen, Jensen, Wentzel-Larsen, & Dyb, 2016; Trappler, Cohen, & Tulloo, 2007; Trinh et al, 2014; Weisz, 2015; W. Zhang et al, 2015).…”