The paper illustrates the research on post-traumatic disorders conducted in Kraków at the Department of Psychotherapy and the Department of Psychiatry of the Jagiellonian University Medical College after 1989. The political changes that occurred in Poland after 1989 allowed the research to be extended with new groups of survivors. Having conducted the research of the former concentration camp p...

Living conditions in Nazi concentration camps were harsh and inhumane, leading many prisoners to commit suicide. Sachsenhausen (Oranienburg, Germany) was a concentration camp that operated from 1936 to 1945. More than 200,000 people were detained there under Nazi rule. This study analyzes deaths classified as suicides by inmates in this camp, classified as homosexuals, both according to the sur...

In The BMJ this week, two experts debate whether doctors should boycott working in Australia's immigration detention centres. Dr David Berger at Broome Hospital in Western Australia, argues that however compassionate their intentions, " doctors who treat people who have been tortured and then acquiesce in the continuation of torture themselves are supporting torture. " On the other hand, Profes...

This paper explores neurotic and religious components of conversion and psychophysiological sequelae of Holocaust trauma in a child of concentration camp inmates. The patient is a 26-year-old married woman of orthodox Jewish faith, whose presenting symptom was noncyclic uterine bleeding. The uniqueness of the symptom is emphasized within the defensive use it represents of the ritual menstrual c...

UNLABELLED This work presents the results of research into the life and work of Dr. Stanko Sielski, related to his professional, scientific and humanitarian work. He was born in Gračanica, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BH) in 1891, to a family of Polish origins. He attended high school in Travnik and completed his studies of medicine in Vienna in 1919. During the First World War he served on the fron...

December 7, 1941 is regarded by the United States as a day of infamy. On this day Japanese Air forces launched a surprise attack against Pearl Harbor and crippled the US Navy. After this day America officially declared war on Japan and entered World War II. However, in public opinion the war was viewed as a war against the Japanese and not against the nation of Japan. These sentiments led to th...

We examined to what extent dissociative phenomena in concentration camp survivors are related to post-traumatic stress symptoms. Self-reports of amnesia for traumatic war events and other dissociative experiences were studied in a sample of 31 Dutch survivors of World War II (WWII) Japanese concentration camps. Seventeen survivors treated for war-related psychiatric symptoms were compared to 14...

BRUNO BETTELHEIM WAS born in Vienna to uppermiddle-class assimilated Jewish parents, Pauline and Anton Bettelheim, on 28 August 1903. Though born when the Hapsburgs still ruled the Austro-Hungarian empire, Bettelheim grew up during the age of Freud. By age fourteen he was already voraciously reading in psychoanalysis, an angle of vision that was to inform his later writings on survivorship and ...

This article describes the relationship between Polish geneticist Stanisław Skowron's views on eugenics during the interwar period, his experiences in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, and his response to Trofim D. Lysenko's ban on genetic research in Soviet-allied states after 1948. Skowron was educated at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and received funding from the Rockefel...