Since escaping from a wartime ghetto and making her way to Israel, Yochevet Mark had often been hospitalized for schizophrenia and depression — but the doctors could never do anything for her. This time, her condition was so bad that she thought her son, in his army fatigues, was one of the uniformed Nazis who had terrorized her. "It gives me goose bumps to think of the awful look on her face," Mark says. He and a few other young psychiatrists soon discovered a disproportionate number of Holocaust survivors in Israel's mental hospitals, where they had been neglected for decades. The doctors have been campaigning to have survivors treated for Holocaust trauma, instead of psychotic conditions that have resisted treatment for five decades.
Mark's campaign was a key element in a broader process that has changed Israel's handling of Holocaust survivors profoundly. The survivors' tale is one of neglect, penny-pinching and shame. Finally, Israel is being forced to accept responsibility for its 300,000 Holocaust victims — not just for their mental health but also their overall wellbeing. A parliamentary commission last April ordered Israeli banks to audit dormant accounts that may belong to Holocaust victims. Ministry of Justice officials tell Time they're hiring a group of former police investigators to locate heirs to abandoned properties whose European owners died in the camps. And Health Minister Nissim Dahan announced last week that he had visited a hostel for mentally ill survivors to "apologize that we did not treat you in the past as we should have."
At a time when Swiss banks and German industrial companies are making amends for their conduct during World War II, dozens of senior Israeli politicians, bureaucrats and mental health professionals acknowledge that the Jewish state must own up to its abuse of Holocaust survivors. A documentary that had its Israeli premiere at a film festival in Jerusalem last month is one of the first media examinations of Holocaust survivors' plight. The film, Last Journey Into Silence, directed by Shosh Shlam, has saddened and shocked audiences, but it is contributing to a growing debate about the problem. "It's the last chapter in the Holocaust," says Henry Szor, a psychiatrist who treats survivors at Abarbanel Mental Health Center in Bat Yam, Israel's biggest mental facility. "The conspiracy of silence is being broken."
yoram barak brushes past some purple bougainvillea and unlocks the heavy door to one of the psychogeriatric wards at Abarbanel. It's a hut built by the British army to handle mentally disturbed World War II soldiers. "If you'd been stuck in this place for 50 years, you wouldn't be doing very well, believe me," Barak says. Inside, old people in thin hospital smocks sprawl on the floor tiles to keep cool in the seaside humidity. Until they moved out last year, this was how the hospital's Holocaust survivors had lived for half a century. That move was the climax of the campaign by Barak, Szor and Mark to have survivors treated as victims of trauma rather than as hopeless schizophrenics who should simply be drugged.
When Barak came to Abarbanel four years ago, he found 67% of his patients were Holocaust survivors — compared to barely a third of Israel's over-60s generally. A similar imbalance was found in the country's other mental hospitals. Decades of using antipsychotic drugs like haloperidol and Thorazine hadn't worked. In the lobby of the survivors' ward, patients still shake uncontrollably and grind their jaws grotesquely from the side effects of such drugs. Barak changed the diagnosis of schizophrenia attached to most of the 120 survivors in his ward to "long-term post-traumatic psychosis." With Szor, he treated the patients using animal therapy, allowing people previously unable to communicate to build relationships with dogs and cats that reminded them of their childhood pets. Ultimately, they responded to people too. "Testimony therapy" also helped exorcise some of the ghosts as doctors listened for the first time to the inmates recounting the horrors of the camps. Within a year, Barak had been able to send 26 of his patients to a new hostel at Shaar Menashe, built to specialize in these kinds of socializing therapies. Last year, two more hostels opened, clearing almost 250 Holocaust survivors out of the mental hospitals.
Psychiatrists like Barak had to fight more than just a bad diagnosis made decades ago. They were up against a Zionist ideology that saw Holocaust victims as weaklings who had gone "like sheep to the slaughter" — unlike the strong "new Jew" Israel's founders hoped to create. Holocaust survivors were treated with contempt in their new country. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion struck a reparations deal with West Germany in 1953 for DM 3 billion, then worth around $700 million. Israel agreed to give the money to survivors already in Israel; Germany would pay for those who arrived in the Jewish state after the deal was done. But Israel soon found there were more disabled survivors than anticipated, and the 1953 grant ran out. So until recently, the 40,000 survivors getting payments from Israel received much less than those who arrived later and were paid directly by Germany. In any case, most of the money Ben-Gurion got from the Germans didn't go to the survivors but to roads, agricultural projects and weapons for the new state.
That kept cash tight at the Finance Ministry office set up to handle claims. Until the 1980s, a survivor's first contact with the office was with a team of former police detectives whose mission was to root out cheats, not to process legitimate claims. When Rafi Pinto took over the department six years ago, his predecessor told him, "Your job is to save the state's money." Only in 1997 did Pinto publish details of survivors' entitlements that had been on the books since the 1950s. "There was a problem," he says. "People really didn't know what they were due." The number of survivors making claims quadrupled.
But the Finance Ministry did not change of its own accord. Likud Party lawmaker Avraham Hirshson and his aide Michael Handelsman went to Israel's Supreme Court to force the government to pay survivors the same amount as Germany. The court ordered a 24% hike in payments. "They've always treated survivors as nothing more than a nuisance," says Handelsman. Even now, getting money can be expensive. Pinto insists that people don't need a lawyer to make a claim, but many hire one to cut through the bureaucracy. The lawyers typically take a commission equal to six months of compensation payments. Since 1995, lawyers' fees have swallowed $25 million intended for survivors.
The government, too, takes commissions. When survivors or their descendants locate properties bought before the Holocaust in what was then Palestine, the government charges them a 5% "administration fee" for managing these abandoned assets through the years. Yet officials acknowledge they never looked for heirs to the property, which is now worth $35 million. Aharon Shindler heads the Ministry of Justice department newly charged with sifting through abandoned properties and bank accounts to find which owners may have died in the Holocaust. Shindler's list will be expected to be completed in the spring. A new squad of investigators being hired by the ministry will use it to track down heirs to the properties. "People say we gave them trouble when they made their claims," says Shindler, "and they're right."
Ministry officials say it looked bad for Israel to do so little to investigate Holocaust funds at a time when Swiss banks are under pressure from Jewish groups to unearth dormant accounts. A recent book by Bar-Ilan University professor Yossi Katz asserts that institutions like the Jewish National Fund, which was set up to purchase land for Jews in what was then Palestine, and Bank Leumi, one of Israel's biggest banks, failed to examine land records and abandoned accounts for Holocaust money. Last April, a Knesset committee finally pushed Israel's banks to audit these accounts.
If the Justice Ministry doesn't locate heirs, the Finance Ministry wants to take the property for the state and use it for the general budget. Advocates for survivors say it should be used to build more hostels like Shaar Menashe to replace private hospitals. The government was forced to close three private mental institutions after a commission of inquiry two years ago reported on appalling conditions there. Former nurses say patients were routinely beaten and strapped to their beds. Untrained, low-paid staff administered injections and doled out medications. When the hospitals closed, some of the patients were moved to Shaar Menashe. They had been kept heavily drugged and often in solitary confinement for decades. Many had lost the power of speech. "If they'd been treated right by Israel, about half of them could have lived normal lives," says Jeff Starrfield, Shaar Menashe's chief social worker. "Now it's too late."
A 67-year-old patient named Dov spent the war in Bergen-Belsen and came to Shaar Menashe after 40 years of treatment for depression in a private hospital, where he was given as many as 30 pills a day. "They used to take all my energy with their medicines," he says. "Why did they give me all those drugs?" Heath Minister Dahan said last week that he'd been to Shaar Menashe, apologizing to the survivors "in the name of the state of Israel and the Jewish people."
As survivors get older, it's not just the long-term mentally ill who suffer. At Abarbanel, 70 Holocaust survivors with no history of psychological disorder were brought in last year, mostly for depression. New research by Abarbanel psychiatrists finds that Holocaust survivors are 40% more likely to commit suicide than other old people. Though 1,200 survivors die in Israel each year, the Finance Ministry estimates it will still be making payments to the rest for another 30 years. The final chapter will be long, but perhaps easier than those that went before. At least some of the survivors with their minds still trapped in the camps may finally be liberated.