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This article explores critical complexes relating to the construction of historical captivity in deportation train journeys by examining fictional and testimonial accounts of that experience. Using Thane Rosenbaum’s short story "Cattle Car Complex," the author shows that fiction is a prism through which to view victims’ experiences of deportation-experiences that tend to be overlooked in interpretive literature about the Holocaust. Historians have examined deportations above all as a perpetrator narrative, utilizing contemporaneous documents and sources. Their treatment neglects the numerous testimonies about the debilitating effects of deportation travel, as well as the evocation of that traumatic transit in post-Holocaust texts and contexts such as fiction, film, art, and museological and commemorative practice. The author argues that sensory witness is a compelling paradigm that can reveal the silences and elisions in representations of historical captivity.

In "re-membering" the atrocities inflicted on her body and those of her comrades in the Nazi concentration camps, the French memoirist Charlotte Delbo avoids the linear time scheme and the metaphors for self that have traditionally defined autobiography as a genre. Instead, her depiction of time is circular, and the depiction of self and other is that of dismembered bodies and fragmented psyches. As conditions for the French political prisoners improved late in the war, numbed emotions thawed and Delbo's group began to recapture their pre-Auschwitz identity by reviving their pre-Auschwitz language. In recording testimonies garnered more than twenty years after the war, Delbo demonstrates that although the women were forever frozen in the time-space continuum of Auschwitz, they were also bonded into something larger than the sum of their once "dismembered selves."

This article examines the frayed relationship between psychology and Holocaust history and its consequences for scholarship, arguing the need for a reconciliation between the fields. The causes for the split are traced in part to a reductionist approach to methodological, conceptual, and moral issues common in psychology, an approach particularly misleading in work on the Holocaust. On the other hand, historians continue to make the subjective motivations of both perpetrators and victims a central concern-an implicitly psychological question. Consequently, implicit (mis)conceptions of psychology affect-distort-long-standing historical debates. Zuckier argues that a misconception of psychological intentionality (unwittingly shared by both opposing sides) has set a wrong historical agenda and led to "fluke-and-freak" accounts of the Holocaust in which the protagonists are alternately said to act out their essential dispositions or to be the victims of their own psychological compulsions and accidental history. The article explores the effects of such conceptions in the study not only of perpetrators and victims, but also rescuers, witnesses, survivors, and their children. It concludes with an appeal for a more differentiated interactional approach.

The overwhelming majority of psychological research on Holocaust survivors follows an idiographic model, which is concerned with studying and understanding individual personalities and how they have been affected by their experiences. Most such publications emphasize pathological characteristics, use psychodynamic theoretical formulations, and ignore criteria of rigorous behavioral science such as reliability, replicability, statistical significance, and safeguards against researcher and subject bias. This article describes a set of alternative research methods in which survivor narratives are randomly sampled and then analyzed according to established protocols. They thus provide quantitative data through means of acceptable scientific rigor. Such approaches can identify reliable, lawful patterns applicable to groups of individuals, and provide a suitable alternative to (not a replacement for) qualitative case or small-group methodology.

Despite the dire circumstances of Jews under Nazi occupation, individuals continued to persevere in their efforts to maintain patterns of everyday life. An understanding of daily routines may help us comprehend the reality of the Holocaust, but it may also contribute to the trivialization and banalization of the topic. To counter this danger, the methodology proposed in this article asserts that the individual's struggle reveals another perspective on the state of mind and the social order of various strata of Jewish society under Nazi occupation. Invoking the concepts of Berger and Luckmann in their analysis of understanding the knowledge of everyday life, this article examines the perception of reality of intellectuals in the ghetto.

The article discusses the social and cultural life among the Jewish prisoners at the Skarzysko-Kamienna forced labor camp in central Poland. The activities included organized observances of religious and national customs and creative arts and performances of many kinds. The activities served several functions for the artists and audiences. Whether as a source of income in the struggle for physical survival, or as a psychological escape from the terrible reality of daily life in the camp, or as a unifying element for the fragmented prisoner population, or as a from of political resistance, these social and cultural activities in the camp constitute a singular phenomenon in the history of the Holocaust.

This study examines whether the area of settlement of Jewish concentration camp survivors has an impact on their mental health. Using the Langner mental health index, survivors in Israel are compared with an earlier study of survivors in Montreal. Survivors in Israel score higher than their Montreal counterparts, indicating a greater degree of mental impairment. The suggestion is raised that the numerous memorials and ceremonies commemorating the Holocaust in Israel increase the salience of the survivors' remembrance of the past. These persons may, therefore, be more sensitive to the perpetually tense military situation prevalent in the country, and this may have a deleterious effect on their mental health.