“Never shall I forget those moments that murdered my God and my soul and turned my dreams to ashes” (Wiesel 34). This was the case for most Holocaust survivors, their dreams of life and happiness were gone, and in its place, outright fear. Their lives were crashing down on them, like waves in the ocean, the life they had known was ripped from them forever. The Holocaust was one of the twentieth century’s greatest tragedies that caused survivors to have higher stress levels, dissatisfaction in life, and dissociative symptomatology in old age.
During the Holocaust; Jews, Gypsies, and numerous other groups were targeted based on racial and political reasons. These people were murdered by starvation, gas chambers, and furnaces. Throughout the Holocaust, almost 6 million Jews were killed, and only about 3 million survived. As a result of the trauma that Holocaust survivors went through, they, “developed posttraumatic symptoms of stress after extreme experiences” (Fridman, et al). These posttraumatic symptoms are still occurring nearly 70 years after the trauma was inflicted. Women Holocaust survivors depicted their life events as more stressful due to the significant trauma that they went through. This helps build the evidence that due
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Elie suffered from nightmares, high-stress levels, and dissatisfaction in life. Elie stated, “Did I write it so not to go mad, or on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness itself”(Wiesel vii). This helps suggest the theory that Holocaust survivors were slowly going mad, losing hope and satisfaction in life as they age. Elie still faces the problem most survivors face, the nightmares. For as Elie Wiesel said, “The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me” (Wiesel 115). This suggests that Elie has been the facing nightmares that most Holocaust survivors suffer