Holocaust survivors: a clinical perspective.

At the end of World War II there was a conspicuous absence of response by the psychiatric profession to the challenge of rehabilitating the survivor and virtually no reference to the psychiatric consequences or treatment approaches in major psychiatric textbooks. Despite a growing literature, attention was not re-focussed on the Holocaust survivor until the advent of the DSM III with PTSD as a defined diagnostic category. In my nearly twenty years of psychiatric practice, there has been a steady stream of Holocaust survivors and their children presenting with various problems. In the last decade a number of "child survivors" (those under age 16 at the conclusion of the war) have also presented with first breakdowns, depressive or otherwise, and always with strong links to the Holocaust experience.