Year: 2012
Type: article
Abstract: It is now well known that six million Jews, 220,000 Roma, 250,000 disabled persons, and thousands of Homosexuals and Jehovah's witnesses were murdered in the Holocaust.It is less understood that due to their ethnic identity that approximately, 1. 9 million Polish Catholic citizens were murdered during the Holocaust and that 1.7 million Polish non-Jews were imprisoned in concentration camps in Siberia, 2.0 million were deported as forced laborers for the German Reich and 100,000 were killed in Auschwitz.To date, there are no studies within Western psychology that address the effects of the Holocaust for this population and/or their descendants.Given the known after-effects of Holocaust-related trauma for Jewish Holocaust survivors and their families, the trauma response observed in other genocide survivors, and the lack of psychological research aimed at exploring the experience of non-Jewish Holocaust survivors, there is a need to study the lived experience and effects of Holocaust-related trauma with Polish Catholic survivors and their families.This is an interpretative study that explores the lived experience of six Polish Catholic survivors and their descendants.The sample included 12 participants comprised of six survivors, four second generation and two third generation participants.Semi-structured interviews were used to examine participants' perception of how Holocaust related trauma influenced their lives.
Author: Kristen M. Montague
Institution: Antioch University
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2275599803