Week 5

This week we met with Dr. Julie Oxenberg, a Boston therapist that has worked extensively on the process of healing between Germans and Jews. Dr. Oxenberg showed us a video of seminars she had hosted where people from different conflicting racial backgrounds came together and expressed their feelings. The unique aspect of these meetings was that participants were asked to identify their feelings as separate of themselves. And each aspect of their specific emotional feelings took on different attributes. I found this technique to have interesting affects during the video. At one point the participants got very emotional and were asked to target their feelings and express their emotions as a separate entity. I was rather surprised by how tense things got between certain people and their feelings for those they had never even known.

In the readings about second generation perpetrators I was also surprised to find how little emotion some of these children had about their parents being involved in the Holocaust. I find it interesting how as people become more distantly related to the Holocaust their views change. They become more compassionate about those lost whether they are related to survivors or perpetrators. The nieces and nephews of perpetrators nowadays seem to be more compassionate and sympathetic to the Jews than second generation survivors decades ago. Perhaps there is a renewed curiosity among the modern age in regards to the horrible historical event.