ABSTRACT
In a world where genocides and wars are constant reality, understanding the long-term psychological impact of massive trauma on survivors, as well as identifying ways to promote resilience among them are crucial. Research has repeatedly demonstrated Holocaust survivors’ remarkable capacity to live with horrible memories and still function well; however, the exact nature of defensive and coping processes that allowed this have remained mostly unclear. The present study aims to address this question by identifying Coping Action Patterns in survivors’ Holocaust (HN) versus other, pre- and post-Holocaust (ON) narratives. We analyzed 169 thematic units in 20 in-depth interviews with Holocaust survivors using a sequential explanatory mixed-method approach. We found that the proportion of adaptive coping patterns was higher in HN compared to ON, and that the coping category Relatedness, as well as specific individual coping strategies: Self-Reliance, Escape, and Information Seeking occurred more frequently in HN compared to ON, although none of these differences reached statistical significance. A modified interpretative phenomenological approach was used to identify common themes within each coping strategy. The results implicate that maintaining a dual representation of trauma versus regular, non-traumatic autobiographic memories may play a crucial role in the resilience of massive trauma survivors.
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank the Centropa Hungary Jewish Family History Research Centre for conducting the interviews with Holocaust survivors and making them accessible for researchers and the broader public.
Disclosure of Interest
The authors declare that they have no conflicts to report.
Ethical Standards and Informed Consent
The present study used publicly available data and no identifiable information was included in the study.