A Rage Too Great for Vengeance

September 03rd, 2024

Introduction by Alan Twigg

As one of North America’s leading educators about the Holocaust, the Holland-born psychiatrist Robert Krell has been the driving force behind the creation of the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre.

Krell’s 2021 autobiography Sounds from Silence: Reflections of a Child Holocaust Survivor, Psychiatrist and Teacher (Amsterdam Publishers, 2021) has now been followed by a collection of riveting speeches made since 1989, Emerging from the Shadows (Behind the Book $18), to be launched at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver on Thursday, September 19 at 7 pm. The ISBN is 978-0-9949151-2-2. The book will be available via Amazon, Barnes and Noble and booksellers worldwide as of September 19^th — available as an e-book, paperback and print on demand.

As an admirer, from mostly afar, I have known Robert Krell for about six years and once had the opportunity to interview him. Here is a link to some interview segments: https://rudolfvrba.com/robert-krell/

The focus of the new book is appropriately described in its subtitle, Child Holocaust Survivors, Their Children and Their Grandchildren, and necessarily Krell must reference his own survival-in-hiding in the care of a Dutch Christian family until he was re-united with his birth mother in May of 1945, but it is the overriding depth and clarity of Krell’s understanding of the human condition that keeps the so-called average reader enthralled.

The citation for his Order of Canada (in 2021) states that Krell has “made ground-breaking contributions to the research and memorialization of the Holocaust by recording testimonies of survivors and their families.” True enough. But I find there is a great deal more to Krell’s leadership than his dutiful and constructive diligence and organization. As a writer and public speaker, Krell brilliantly dignifies anger. This is not at all an easy thing to do!

Vancouver’s Robert Krell with the world’s foremost Nazi hunter, Simon Wiesenthal, at Kibbutz Lohamei HaGeta’ot, 1981

Krell was a child in hiding from age two to five (1942-1945). An elderly aunt took him to see the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961. Ever since, he has been striving to not only find ways to address and unravel the enormous burdens of survivors and their progeny, but also to countenance and address the necessity for social awareness. Few people are more articulate when it comes to revealing and explaining how the Holocaust has impacted the human condition.

Bluntly put, you don’t need to be a Jew to appreciate this man’s dignity and depth. There is an overriding sanity and courage in Emerging from the Shadows that is as much literary as it is educational. This struck me like a bonk on the head when I can across his phrase, “A rage too great for vengeance.” This is not the language of a diligent organizer. It is the language of an explorer who has unstintingly kept learning from the likes of Elie Wiesel, Simon Wiesenthal and Rudolf Vrba—and the hundreds of survivors and their offspring he has helped to countenance the continuous reverberations of the Holocaust.

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HERE IS A SAMPLE CHAPTER FROM EMERGING FROM THE SHADOWS.

Survival after Surviving— Forty-Five Years Later
(To Mental Health Professionals)
Robert Krell, San Fransisco (1989)

ONE COULD SAY THAT I have led a Jewish life, for it happens to encompass certain events of this century that shaped my existence, for better or worse.

I am told that the hospital in which I was born on August 5, 1940, already had a wing with Nazi headquarters. Holland had been invaded May 10, 1940. We were three months into the war.

My memory begins at age two and a half, by which time I was in hiding with my Dutch Christian family, Mr. and Mrs. Albert Munnik—Moeder and Vader and my new twelve-year old sister, Nora. What do I remember from age two and a half? I recall learning to address my real father as an uncle in the familiar Dutch sense of a family’s good friend and not implying a blood relationship. I recall huddling close to his chest and feeling the gun in his inside jacket pocket. My real mother I do not recall from that time. Perhaps because it was she who gave me away, never mind the circumstances.

A memory. Nora, my sister, dresses me, puts me in the carriage, and we go out. We come to a viaduct. It is flooded, and we must get to the other side. A German soldier comes to help carry me in the buggy through the water. I pull the blanket over my head. Forty years later I ask Nora “Why were we there?” She is visibly upset and explains that “I was twelve years old and thought you should see your mother. I was taking you there.” “Did we get there?” I ask. For I cannot remember. “No.” She claims to have returned home.

Nora called me a few weeks later to tell me that actually we had made it to my mother’s apartment. The Gestapo had knocked on the door to search for Jews. My mother, hiding under an assumed name, on a false Swiss passport, turned them away while Nora and I hid under the bed. At home, she was severely reprimanded. No wonder she buried that memory.

And I did not go out again for three years. After my birth, we lived for two years under increasingly strict regulations against Jews. That summer of 1942 we were sent papers to report for “resettlement.” The date: August 19, 1942. My parents decided not to go. Without knowledge of the existence of Auschwitz or Sobibor, neither had seen or heard of the return of any friends or family who had gone before.

Circa 2012. Robert Krell with Elie Wiesel, a teacher who they separately befriended as a colleague and who became a dear friend and mentor to Krell.

I was given first to neighbours for several days. My father hid at the home of Christian friends in an attic where he continued to work as a furrier. My mother found an apartment elsewhere and lived on false papers in constant fear of discovery. Moeder had come to visit our neighbours, which she did twice a year. She offered to take me for two weeks and kept me for three years. Vader read to me. Nora taught me to read by age three. I was never sick. I colluded with Moeder, who told me that the tulip bulbs we ate were indeed tulip bulbs, except for mine, which were potatoes. The mealy taste is with me still. Occasionally Vader butchered a rabbit for meat. I think he got them from one of his brothers who raised them. We decorated the Christmas tree together. And I was not betrayed by the neighbours.

In the summer of 1961, on my first visit back to Holland, a neighbour spotted me. “Robbie?” he asked. “Yes, I am. How are you, Mr. de Vries?” “Fine, Robbie. Aren’t you glad we never told on you?” “Thank you, Mr. de Vries, it had not occurred to me that you would have betrayed us.” On May 10, 1945, Holland was liberated. My parents survived, miraculously, for they were nearly discovered many times. Even prior to 1942 my father had been ordered to Gestapo headquarters in Amsterdam three times and released each time, which was uncommon. He also carried false identification papers that happened to be of a resistance fighter on the most wanted list. We only found that out years later in Canada when he contacted us from Australia to have his name cleared as an alleged Nazi collaborator.

My mother suffered terribly, all alone most of the time and at the mercy of frightening incidents daily. In May 1945, we were reunited. Sobbing with anger and grief, I demanded proof that I was theirs. They showed me baby pictures, and I returned, wailing, on my father’s motorcycle to our new home. The war was over. Then the nightmare began in earnest. My days in hiding were the best that any hidden child could have had. From where, then, derived my feeling that something enormous and hideous had occurred? From where came this unsettled feeling of whatever it is that haunts me still? Perhaps from the separation. Perhaps from the fear of discovery or the anxieties of the adults around me. Perhaps from my silence, the absence of ordinary play, the wish not to be disturbing or noticed. The only thing that I can recall doing wrong was accidentally breaking a Christmas tree ornament. A pretty good reason, in retrospect, to get rid of a Jew.

Not my foster family’s intent, of course, just my possible feeling or intuition. I think that my rage flourished first when the victims returned or when I became aware of who did not return. My mother’s first cousin came back from Switzerland with his wife and daughter, Milly. Milly (three years older) and I became inseparable. We were five and eight and listened to the tales of horror told in Yiddish so that we would not understand. We learned Yiddish in two weeks, and Milly explained and elaborated what I could not yet grasp.

People from Auschwitz returned to our living room. They looked up the Krells. One such returnee, Simon, in his mid-twenties, took me and Milly to the beach. When he removed his shirt, the lashes still looked fresh. Probably they were permanent scars. My dad’s friend David wept for his family in our living room. He had escaped Holland and via Spain went to England, where he joined the British forces. Upon his return, he found his son, Albert, hidden in Amsterdam. His wife was gone. One day on one of his frequent visits to our home, there was a knock. She was at the door, crazed. She had returned from Auschwitz.

From my bed, set up in the dining room next to the living room, I heard that in 1942 babies my age were not gassed but burned alive in open pits or swung by the legs against rocks or walls. I heard this in Yiddish, the language that I cannot speak. No one told me that it was not German, so I refused to speak it. The other language that I could not master was Hebrew. My kindergarten was at a Catholic school. There were no Jewish schools left. There were hardly any Jews. Of The Hague’s 20,000 Jews, perhaps 1,500 returned. Of Holland’s 130,000 Jews, only one in ten survived.

My Hebrew lessons were from Mr. Krakauer. I could not remember a word that he told me. In school, straight A’s from math through French. I performed a piano recital by age eight. Yet I could not learn to ask the four questions in Hebrew for Passover. Perhaps it was difficult to have as a teacher a survivor of the camps, preoccupied with his losses, and a little boy, preoccupied with his.

My parents remained good friends with the Munniks. In fact, they shared me. I was the loved son of two families. How could things be better? But every second Sunday my first cousin, Nallie, would visit, my only surviving close relative. His parents did not return, so Nallie remained with his Dutch foster parents. Although offered, he chose not to live with us. Why did I not understand? What kept me from seeing the obvious? Not until my forties did I realize that in 1945 my parents were orphans, that no one else returned. Just five years earlier my father had parents and two sisters, one married with a little boy named Nallie. My mother had her parents in Poland and a sister and two brothers. Her father had twelve brothers and sisters, some of whom escaped to South America, Mexico, and Australia. In Europe, we were all that was left. My parents had belonged to youth organizations, with dozens of friends, all murdered. Every street in The Hague was a reminder of death: young men, women, young families, grandparents. We had to get out.

Robert Krell with the World War II historian Sir Martin Gilbert and arguably the greatest Jewish hero of World War II, Rudolf Vrba.

In 1951, we left for Canada. I wept for leaving Moeder and Vader and Nora, knew I would miss Milly and Nallie, but otherwise was the most eager immigrant ever.

That ended the first decade of my life. The second decade was one of becoming Canadian. We were not well off financially. I had good friends, Jews and non-Jews, held a variety of jobs, went into a third decade of being a medical student and resident in psychiatry training. Moeder had always said to me that I was meant to be a doctor of children since so many children had perished. She had in mind pediatrics, I suppose. Child psychiatry is probably close enough.

In May 1965, I was twenty-four, and my Moeder and Vader were flown in from Holland to attend my graduation from medical school. In 1971, they were at my wedding in Vancouver, to Marilyn. Three sets of parents attended. Allow me two more autobiographical remarks.

In 1961, I was in Israel. An elderly aunt took me to the Eichmann trial. In 1969, I was on my way to Israel when Flight TWA 840 out of Rome was hijacked by the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine). The hijacking was harrowing. We spent several days in Damascus. The details I won’t share with you now. Be assured that it adds to the feeling of victimization and powerlessness. Upon our return to Athens, I flew on to Israel to close my thirtieth year. So, by age thirty, I was a Jew who had survived two deadly enemies.

Let me tell you a little bit about survivors, victimization, and therapy. First, a subject not often broached with survivors and frequently skirted is rage. If you know of the survivor’s rage, maybe even my rage, then perhaps you will deal differently with victims of any kind of severe human-inflicted trauma. Holocaust survivors know that they have been damaged and often feel powerless to act on their rage. It is too overwhelming. In the days following liberation, acts of Jewish vengeance were relatively few. Holocaust survivors did not indulge in a rampage of wanton killing.

A patient of mine spotted in Montreal, shortly after the war, the kapo who had murdered his brother. Overcome with blinding rage (he had lost eight brothers and sisters and his parents), he was briefly paralyzed. Then he fled. A patient who was a survivor of a Japanese concentration camp had rages triggered by any article on or incident of contemporary Japanese injustice. Granted the power, he would erase Japan off the Earth. Given that he could not, he felt powerless to do anything, even write a letter of protest.

How do I know how great is my rage? Sometimes it is so great that I am able to break my silence. We children were silenced. While hiding, we had to remain silent. After the war, foreign languages also led to silence. In Canada, silence was prized by non-survivors; no one wanted to hear from us. Shssh! “The war was difficult for us too; there was no butter or sugar.”

I became quite comfortable with silence and developed some skills to enable it. For example, I became the president of Grade 8, with about 300 children, and ten years later president of my senior medical class without giving a single campaign speech. I was good one on one and had my votes lined up and simply took what was mine. On the UBC Student Council, I was too shy or reticent to speak. Then a plan to bring in neoNazi George Lincoln Rockwell to our campus broke my silence. Council members of that day probably have not forgotten that evening.

Mostly I work alone. For me to do this with you is not easy. Silence was enforced even in the most sophisticated settings. At Temple University Hospital, where I was a psychiatry resident, group therapy was a voluntary offering for residents, but everyone signed up. It was my first experience with therapy, and I took it seriously. I was twenty-six, basically alone in Philadelphia, halfway between two sets of parents in different worlds, and working hard. I was also relatively easygoing, made friends quickly, and learned well. Perhaps I was a bit elderly and worldly on the inside; just the same, I was naive and innocent in my new surroundings.

As it happened, the group therapist, a well-known, respected analyst, turned to me to start with a few minutes about myself. “Well, I was born in Holland just after the German occupation. My parents gave me away when I was two to avoid deportation to Westerbork [Transit Camp]. Some wonderful Christians saved my life by hiding me for three years. My parents survived, but no one else did except for one cousin.”

The resident whom I’d only just met and who sat next to me shouted “Stop! We are not here to deal with things like that. It’s the first session, for Chrissake!” He obviously had therapy before. Over the year, the group leader never returned to the war years or Holland. “Therapy” revolved around conflicts that residents had with their supervisors, with their girlfriends and boyfriends, and with their drug use. I did not speak.

He was smart, my resident-colleague. He had known what was coming. Eight psychiatry residents and an analyst would not have been able to contain a baby on fire. I think psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers have known this all along. Make the incision in the survivor, and where will the scalpel stop? Therapists were good at protecting themselves. Sexual abuse was once rare. It wasn’t asked about. So it was rare. So long as a web of silence was spun around the Vietnam veterans, there was no post-traumatic stress disorder.

All this was well learned and practised in the 1940s and 1950s, save a very few courageous souls. The therapist was safe so long as the survivor was either kept silent or held responsible for the failure of his therapy. The survivor was accused of denial, suffering overwhelming guilt, of chronic self-hate. The therapist was okay. My rediscovery of the Holocaust was delayed until 1970 and the origins of my rage uncovered. In my synagogue, in the row in front of me, stood Anshel, whom I loved. When I was thirteen, he must have been about forty. For thirty years, I stood behind him as he prayed, a rock-solid, broad-shouldered man. He would turn with a big grin, crush my hand, and wish me well in the new year. At about the same time each Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, his shoulders shook with sobs as I watched silently. When I was older, I cried with him, for he had told me only when I began to bring my own children of the murder of his. Anshel’s wife, his three-year-old, and his five-year-old were murdered in Poland. For this, he allowed himself five minutes of incomprehensible grief. And I allowed myself five minutes of incomprehensible rage.

Had he become clinically depressed, what would you have done for him? What questions do you ask the man who witnessed the killing of his children? Where would you allow his grief to take you? My awareness of that rage led to the notion that this was a rage too great for vengeance. The anger of survivors can only be diminished with acts of justice. The pursuit of Nazi war criminals is not an act of revenge. When I was at the Eichmann trial, I tried to imagine the privilege of strangling him. The unimaginable horrors for which he was responsible obliterated such a thought. Although the trial might have been an event, his death was not.

You will note that, when you see victims of various kinds, the precipitating circumstances revolved around the unfairness of what happened, the injustice of the victimization. Immediately behind that lies the rage. Since the early 1970s, I have formed committees to educate students about the Holocaust. We have taught tens of thousands of British Columbia high school students. I have organized about thirty survivors to act as educators by bearing witness. My team and I have audio visually taped eighty accounts of local Vancouver survivors and assisted with approximately eighty more on a national level. All those who have participated felt better for having done it. They have transformed their preoccupations with the unforgettable to provide unforgettable images to future generations who must know what happened. The warm responses from students provided the healing for survivors.

In 1984, I founded a survivors’ society that built a memorial. What do these activities have to do with rage, being a psychiatrist, or learning from victims? Simply this: victims of extreme situations are generally immobilized. It is the paralysis of rage. Its antidote is the constructive expression of that bottomless and chronic anger in education and remembrance. There is controversy over what Holocaust memorials should be. Intellectuals debate it. Survivors debate it. The facts are actually as straightforward as they are in our community. The survivor has no gravesite to visit, not even accurate dates of the deaths of our lost loved ones. We built a memorial at the cemetery with over 1,000 names inscribed. Vancouver’s survivors visit there annually on at least two occasions, Yom HaShoah and between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. It is therapeutic. Nothing that I have done in therapy with survivors has helped as much as initiating the construction of a symbolic gravesite of their own. Nothing that I can offer as a therapist for a few can accomplish what a class of high school students can do for a survivor who has taught them. Nothing that I have done as a therapist of second-generation children has worked as well as organizing them into a group and involving them with survivors in joint educational and memorial activities.

Assisting other survivors and their children to teach their lessons, recount their experiences, warn the innocent—by this process, too, I have been able to emerge from silence (to a small extent) and to siphon off some of my bitterness. But I cannot get rid of it entirely. The world conspires to keep us enraged. In 1975, the United Nations equated Zionism with racism. Every survivor asked theoretically “Should an Israel exist?” would reply not only in the affirmative but also add the fervent belief that, had it existed before the war, the slaughter might have been less. All survivors who express their support for Israel’s existence are Zionists. Therefore, the United Nations has managed to brand as racist the victims of the most pernicious racism ever visited on humankind, Nazism. It is enough to drive one insane.

When, after a twenty-year struggle for its existence, Israel defended itself in 1967, many of the world’s nations severed or changed relations with it. That in itself is perhaps not a cause for rage, just disappointment. The cause for rage is to see which nations participated. France, where Frenchmen had rounded up Jews before the German orders arrived. Poland, its soil soaked with blood, where even the absence of Jews cannot halt anti-Semitism. China, which without the presence of Jews or connections with Israel has determined that it is its mortal enemy. We who survived live with such madness. On August 17, 1989, a Vancouver suburban synagogue was smeared with paint “6 million Jews were not enough” and “Zionist pigs, get out.

But living with madness is no excuse for it to continue. Allow me to share some thoughts about the treatment of survivors and perhaps how to diminish the suffering and the rage. I will leave it to you to extrapolate to survivors and victims of other kinds.

1. Each and every survivor who comes for therapy brings with him or her that world. I have seen depression in a wide variety of such patients. Depression in a survivor has an added dimension that must be taken into account.
2. Survivors often ask for relief from their painful memories. Usually this means they would like to be better understood. They do not really wish to forget since even the most painful memories are entangled with precious ones also. If, for example, the last separation from one’s mother was the most painful event experienced, it is nevertheless also the last precious memory of one’s mother.
3. Every survivor wants you to understand that, except for the war, they too might have been a physician or a rabbi. The therapist must remember that the survivor’s prewar life remains the foundation of their existence. For the child survivor, it is the postwar period that is the most important.
4. I talk with every survivor about their anger and rage. It is there. What a relief for both of us to acknowledge it.
5. I encourage them to tell the story in sequence, to piece together even the fragments and then a coherent account for their children. Few survivors can tell the story without breaking down. Nor can their children encourage a parent to continue. The account is best captured on paper or by a non-related interviewer, preferably on audiovisual tapes. Then the Holocaust survivor can show the interview.
6. The stimulus to obtain an account is an appeal to leave the story for the grandchildren. Few survivors refuse when they realize that, with their passing, the third generation might not know about the Holocaust.
7. In those later years, there are two special problems. For survivors in their sixties and older, whose work and security have been foremost in mind, retirement can cause an undue preoccupation with the past. Immersion in their work often provided a healing environment and a barrier to intrusive memories. For survivors under sixty, the natural period of nostalgic reflection on life and accomplishments carries that person back to those unsettling and shattering beginnings. In either situation, an understanding of that person’s life in context becomes a crucial undertaking. The bottom line is the extent to which life’s accomplishments are able to diminish the malignancy of victimization.

The common denominator of victimization is helplessness in a situation in which rage cannot be expressed. The child sexually abused by a normally trusted adult has been betrayed to his or her very foundation. The woman raped has been violated to the core of her being. The concentration camp survivor tormented beyond belief in an irrational world has suffered the destruction of faith in humanity and reason.

Healing can be accomplished only by empowering the victim to find a voice for the common good. The victim of rape is capable of empathy with a fellow victim and perhaps can protect others by speaking about the experience. The sexually abused child needs assistance to understand the betrayal and subsequently find a means to discourage such activity in others. It is the unenviable task of survivors of the Holocaust to warn of the ever-present possibility of genocide.

There is now a word for what once was inconceivable.

The impossible has become possible.

The unbelievable can be believed.

We survivors vouch for its truth.

And we need your help to emerge from silence.

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