Witnessed Improvised Diaspora Journey Enactments: an experiential method for exploring refugee history

Beyond words: the legacy of the Shoah

As psychotherapists we work with individuals and with groups, exploring personal, familial, and community stories. Many clients come with Shoah-related histories. These days there is increasing interest in and understanding of transgenerational trauma – wounds passed down from parents to children usually, and to subsequent generations. This can include the impact of collective trauma – horrific events on a large scale affecting a wide group. As Kai Erickson put it: “By collective trauma . . . I mean a blow to the basic tissues of life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality”. ³

The devastating events leading up to and including the Holocaust had a major impact on family life during the Nazi era. Hundreds of thousands of families could no longer function as before, that is, living at home maintaining their traditions, income, and status. Families were forcefully evacuated by the Nazis, interned, or put to death; others were subjected to harsh conditions such as hunger, disease, and hard labour. The events seriously impaired the capacity of the persecuted survivor parents to care emotionally and economically for their young. ⁴

Key psychobiological effects of traumatic experience are hyperarousal and dissociation and, over the long term, depression and chronic anxiety. ⁵ Dissociation is an automatic protective response to trauma, which separates off unassimilable experience, leaving it “frozen . . . shrouded . . . by an anaesthesia”. ⁶ Many among the survivors developed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the years after the war, due to the prolonged duration of their trauma.

Parenting after the Holocaust was affected by survivors’ strong desire to normalize life. Many quickly married and procreated, seeking to continue the Jewish race and thereby deny a posthumous victory to Hitler. Some of these relationships suffered, however, as spouses affected by trauma encountered difficulties with intimate relations. Constraining effects of neighbour hostility and pervasive antisemitism also led to social alienation and distancing, prompting many parents to conceal their Jewishness. Many survivors experienced apathy, emotional distance, aversion to change, intense anxiety, and paranoia. These processes created what is known as the “conspiracy of silence” or the “double wall” phenomenon. ⁷ The children of Holocaust survivors could not understand what lay behind this wall of silence. Nonetheless, they could pick up unvoiced familial tensions and pain related to missing relatives who were unaccounted for. Instead what was transmitted to subsequent generations was an experiential void. ⁸

In a major piece of research entitled “Trauma and the Continuity of Self: A Multidimensional, Multidisciplinary Integrative Framework” (1998), Yael Danieli interviewed a sample of 422 adult children of survivors with a three-part inventory assessing multigenerational legacies of trauma. ⁹ What emerged from the survivors’ adult children were reports of the intensities of parents’ adaptational styles that were then classified as “victim”, “numb”, and “fighter” post-traumatic responses. Nanette Auerhahn and Dori Laub theorized that the parents would displace their own repressed grief onto their children. ¹⁰ These children have often absorbed their parents’ emotions and cannot differentiate these from their own feelings. This is experienced in adulthood as “unexplainable grief”. ¹¹ The word trauma has its roots in the early Greek “titrosko” meaning “to wound”. There is an associated word, “rubido”, which carries two meanings: to “rub in” to the wound and to “rub out” or erase. ¹² So trauma is experienced as being both pierced and erased by the enemy. Those in flight also take part in the erasing process themselves to avoid being conspicuous and therefore in danger. In a diaspora situation, culture is often maintained secretly under difficult circumstances through worship, food, and music.

In her book Memorial Candles (1992) Dina Wardi talks about her experience of children of Holocaust survivors. ¹³ Often one child in the family is designated to memorialize dead relatives and carry on the family legacy. This transmission is unconscious, rarely spoken of; being named after a murdered relative often carries with it a heavy psychic burden. “Memorial candle” children often take the role of scapegoats for the family, assuming the burden of their parents’ unmourned losses. At the same time this unconscious endowment serves as a link to the trauma their parents endured. The search to uncover the root of the suffering and to whom it belongs often brings people to therapy.

Psychotherapy and collective transgenerational trauma

Common to many diaspora experiences are occurrences for which words do not seem adequate. Clients may come to psychotherapy with uncertainties about their identity, feeling something is wrong but not being able to articulate what it is. When children of displaced immigrants grow up in a different culture from that of their parents, tensions and loyalty conflicts arise. There is often both a push to assimilate and a contrary pressure to maintain past traditions of the family of origin. When in, addition, families have endured trauma and/or severe hardship, the stories of this pain go into silos. Accordingly, psychotherapists need to be able to work sensitively with a client who may be suffering from what happened before they were born. Clients may not have directly experienced trauma but they may nevertheless be “haunted” by their forebears’ experiences, both known and unknown. ¹⁴ Research by Danieli and others further reveals that the “conspiracy of silence” applies also to therapists, who for many reasons may not pick up on references to collective and/or transgenerational trauma. ¹⁵

As psychotherapists we understand that trauma is held in the body, in collective memory, in rituals and in objects, icons and artistic representation. ¹⁶ These create multiple access points to memory, to imagined scenarios, to stories recounted, and fragments of history. People often ask how we can work with transgenerational themes when there may be little actual known detail of parents’, grandparents’, and great-grandparents’ lives. In fact there are a variety of ways of invoking, inviting, and feeling into stories of our relatives’ lives. ¹⁷ The arts can play a pivotal role in this because they carry multilayered symbolic meanings and speak to unformulated “knowing in the bones”. For example, there are moments in anyone’s life when history breaks through: a chance encounter, a sudden connection with a film or a novel, or a piece of art, gives a new perspective. It is a change in perception – a detail or memory which had a hollow or indefinable meaning suddenly finds a resonance and is now redolent with meaning and/or feeling.

Others ask how we know the true nature of what our forebears encountered. In a factual sense that is hard to answer. Yet our emotional responses to shards of information about our histories, imperfect and incomplete though this knowledge may be, nonetheless carry validity. The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, reflecting on the experiences of those who know little of their past, advocated “trying on” different narratives of events. This is similar to the way that an actor tries on clothes or shoes to feel into a character. Phillips called this process “cloaking”. As he observed, who could say that what appeared to “fit” was not in some way a “truth” for that person? ¹⁸

What brings us to this work?

In contemporary relational psychotherapy, the therapist’s own history and subjectivity is considered to be always implicitly present, whether directly acknowledged or not. As therapists and authors with our own histories of refugee and diaspora backgrounds, we have a particular interest in intergenerational and transcultural stories.

Jon’s mother Martha Blend was a Jewish refugee from Austria who came to the UK via the Kindertransport route in 1938. The full significance of her experience was concealed throughout his childhood. However, following the fiftieth anniversary in 1988 and the first Reunion of Kindertransports in 1989, Martha wrote a book about her experiences. ¹⁹ At the same time, Jon began exploring his heritage during sabbatical travels in Borneo. In 1989 an indigenous Christian woman in Sarawak introduced him to the writings of Victor Frankl. ²⁰ Jon was moved to visit the JEATH War Museum, formerly a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. This commemorates Allied POWs who in 1942–43 laboured under the direction of the Japanese constructing the Thai–Burma ‘Death Railway Bridge’ over the River Kwai (JEATH standing for Japan, England, Australia, America, Holland). Here he learnt about the diaspora experiences of the camp’s survivors. On returning to England he joined other Jewish social workers with continental origins researching their heritage, later contributing to a social work manual on Jewish issues. ²¹ At this period the publication of much eyewitness and survivor testimony began to take place in response to genocides from across the globe, breaking the “conspiracy of silence” among survivors, their families, and wider society. ²² Jon later attended conferences concerning the Holocaust and participated in a group exploring “asymmetric dialogue” between Germans and Jews. ²³

Roz Carroll grew up with an awareness of being the daughter of an Irish immigrant and feeling a strong affinity for the culture and literature of Ireland. Over the years she has recognized the split between her inner identification with Irishness and her embeddedness within, and assimilation to, British life. Her father’s book about his Irish diaspora experience also challenged the unacknowledged impact of evacuation, a second diaspora, on children sent out of London during the Second World War. ²⁴

Roz’s interest in the Holocaust started while working on a kibbutz in the 1980s. Later she trained at the Chiron Centre for Body Psychotherapy which was started by the German psychotherapists Bernd Eiden, Jochen Lude, and Rainer Pervoltz. She was profoundly influenced by the way Germans and Jews came together as trainees and trainers in emotional encounters and deep dialogue to seek connection and understanding of their mutual histories.

Evolution of the format

We met in 2003 and started teaching together in 2007 at Terapia, a child psychotherapy training organization in London. In 2015 we ran an experiential weekend workshop for therapists called “Naming the Beast: Addressing Collective Trauma and its Aftermath” at the Minster Centre, an adult psychotherapy training organization in London. Using arts-based exercises we supported participants to explore aspects of identity relating to their transgenerational history. We developed a safe space for them to connect to and understand themes of shame and anxiety within a context that drew on the concepts of piercing and erasure. What followed was a movement-based exercise to help participants explore their internalized “perpetrator” as well as their identification with helplessness in a “victim” position. After time to process, we ended with a commemorative ritual involving the placing of stones.

The next event was another workshop in 2015, “The Legacy of the Shoah”, for a psychotherapy and politics conference, The Body Politic. ²⁵ Our biggest concern in preparation for the workshop was the risk of dissipating intensity through too much generalized “talking about”. We had only ninety minutes, which was not enough time for each person to tell their story as a narrative. We decided it was important to keep the focus on what was felt in the body, to help participants gather elusive fragments of buried experience or find embodied association to this powerful historical event. Our workshop was accordingly tightly structured and, in the first half, mostly non-verbal. We opened with listening to the song “A Hill of Little Shoes” which reflects on seeing the painful image of a mound of children’s shoes at Auschwitz and what this symbolizes. ²⁶ We used a movement exercise to help participants orient to the themes.

Then we invited participants to take two pieces of paper from a child’s leather satchel, which contained many slips with evocative fragments of prose. The task was to resonate and respond, adding words of their own. Each person in a group of three contributed a short phrase to make a simple haiku. Each group performed their haiku to the circle. Our aim in using this “cut-up” method was to introduce the element of chance and to allow something to be created that was not solely personal. What emerged from this process was a feeling that was intimate, disturbing, and profound.

It is interesting to reflect on who was drawn to our workshop. Many of the participants were Jews, often with a continental history that included their forebears escaping from terror. We also noticed a number of non-Jewish therapists resonating deeply, bearing in mind their clients’ and their own histories of displacement, war, and fear.

Diaspora journeys

At this time, in 2015, the media was frequently focusing on harrowing scenes of displaced refugees in flight pouring across borders in search of safety. We started to think about diaspora journeys involving flight from terror and how we might develop this into an enactive and reflective process for groups. We drew on our interest in previous major diaspora journeys, for example those undertaken by displaced people in the aftermath of the First World War. Data from different countries suggest that at least ten million people were displaced either internally or as a result of fleeing across an international frontier. European literature of the post-1918 period is redolent with images of fear, loss, dislocation, yearning, betrayal, decadence, anomie, and spiritual suffering. The Second World War also led to major upheaval, relocation, and exile; many Jews including the Kinder have described their journeys in books and personal testimony (1,818 sound recordings to date in the British Library alone). The Reunion of Kindertransports organized by Bertha Leverton in 1989 provided one such focal point encouraging voices who had hitherto remained silent to speak out their diaspora experiences. In addition, around this time Associations of Jewish Refugees (AJR) sprang up around the globe; in some places their second-generation counterparts (Associations of Children of Jewish Refugees, ACJR) came into being too for the “Kind of the Kind” and their descendants, so to speak.

Many of the original Kinder’s journeys from home to station to boat to arrival followed a clearly marked route to safety. We had a particular interest in the less-told stories of others whose refugee journeys were of a different nature – journeys involving, for example, fleeing across mountains and rivers, navigating hazardous border crossings which presented challenges to body and soul for people of all ages and capacities. We wanted to include journeys of flight made by previous generations who had fled from pogroms and other genocidal threats. We planned to keep the journey generic in order to include refugee stories from global diasporas. Diaspora triggered by danger – as opposed to economic migration – has always been and continues to be a global phenomenon. In our work we are mindful of other diasporas including those from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere. ²⁷

Witnessed Improvised Diaspora Journey Enactments

In 2016 we offered the opportunity to explore refugee experience through enactment to three groups of counsellors and therapists: the Association of Jungian Analysts (26 July), participants at a conference, The Psychic Impact of War and Terrorism (9–10 December), and a group of male Haredi counsellors-in-training. ²⁸ We deliberately chose groups of professionals with their own personal support structures. We were aware that the material explored experientially in this way carried a charge that might trigger buried memories or overwhelm people through their identification with the trauma.

Our aim in these evenings was to invite participants to feel into the experience of being displaced, becoming a refugee, and travelling with uncertainty. As therapists experienced in working with trauma, we paid close attention to building safety in order to contain the evocative material we were exploring. One aspect of this involved inviting approximately a third of those present to act as silent witnesses (about which more later). As facilitators we prepared in great detail our directions to the group so that the structure itself was part of the containment. This included having people speak minimally and in character and “de-roling” when the journey finished. At some points we participated in the enactment, at other times we gave explicit instructions as directors of the process. Each evening concluded with a group process to share and listen to others’ experience. What follows is a composite of the three different events.

Synchronicity, liminality and the right hemisphere of the brain

The key elements of WIDJE – improvisation, entrainment through music, close attention to body sensation, images, and movement, witnessing, ritual, and dramatization – are largely non-verbal. This is crucial for shifting to a right-hemisphere dominant state, which enables “a greater capacity for openness, curiosity, associated thinking, making links, making whole.” ⁵² As psychotherapists we know that talking can actually get in the way of deeper connection to one’s story. The psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist has argued, drawing on current neuroscience, that “activation of the right hemisphere broadens our field of perception, enabling us to experience . . . something other than what we already know”, and further, “virtually all aspects of the appreciation of time, in the sense of something lived through, with a past, present and future, are dependent on the right hemisphere”. ⁵³

This right-brain activation also enhances awareness of and sensitivity to the Field, enabling participants to experience resonance in certain moments, a heightened feeling of recognition, akin to Jung’s idea of synchronicity. ⁵⁴ Chance elements – the drawing of lots, the use of “cut-up technique”, the inclusion of objects (satchel, identity papers, old cooking utensils) and music – become prompts for free association, creating meaning that is synchronous with that which is implicitly known of a person’s story.

“Every crossing is a pilgrimage”

From a trauma perspective, for the Kinder and other refugees, it is not just the sudden loss of a home, community, and country that leaves a long-term and transgenerational wound. The journey shakes the survivor community to the core, disrupting family networks, identities, and bonds. Harsh choices have been made and have to be lived with. The experience can feel like an assault on the senses and the soul. There is a suspension of all known boundaries and ways of being, often for long periods. ⁵⁵ While refugees may outwardly appear to have adapted, outsiders “paid no heed to the canker within”. ⁵⁶

So is what is needed for healing a “relational home” in which dissociated experience can be recognized and/or transmuted and processed? As Francesetti puts it: “A pain that does not find a relational home will be transferred from generation to generation in different but always faithful ways, until it finally finds a clearing it can inhabit in a relationship”. ⁵⁷

The WIDJE method recognizes that revisiting a story or an archetypal journey does not always involve new factual information. However, the experience may lead to new awareness of the impact of a personal transgenerational story. What is different about doing this in a group context is the opportunity to explore this with others who are similarly affected. People come together in a common space where they can risk feeling vulnerable yet also experience feeling understood, with minimal need for words. What was apparent for many participants following these enactments was an opening up of psychic spaces they had formerly been unaware of or unable to articulate. These related to losses, shame, loyalty binds, and gaps in the family narrative. ⁵⁸ In liminal moments of heightened “communitas” ⁵⁹ it felt as though we were relating to each other on a profound, even soulful level.

To recapitulate: we paid particular attention to creating safety, aiming this work at those who had already worked with their histories in psychotherapy. We were especially keen to broaden psychotherapists’ understanding of the impact of collective trauma. As we get further away from the direct history of the Holocaust it behoves us as a society to take good care of those carrying collective trauma, of whatever generation and refugee descent.

We concluded each evening with the reading of a poem, “To Speak of Distance” by Ruth Padel. ⁶⁰ Her evocative lines seem to sum up the archetypal nature of the diaspora journey:

To speak of distance and the sanctuary lamp,

something you have to do or find

and a darkness to escape. Never mind

rumours of an immigration gate. Revamp

the passport. Speak of hope, that anchor bird,

born on the site of loss, with a thousand

resistance strategies frosting her wings

like mica charms or ancient pilgrim songs

embossed in the Book of Psalms. The task

is to assimilate, to move between languages –

in your case Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek –

and map your journey to the shrine.

Every crossing is a pilgrimage. The hard thing

is to pass: harder still to fold those wings

and drop the mask. Just do it. Translate old words

into new. Through cliffs of fall

and fields of black basaltic lava, take

fresh bearings for the crossing-place.

This is the exodus. Here are the moon and sun

appearing upside down or double. Here are stars

in satellite positions never seen before

struggling for their music to be heard.