It is exceedingly difficult to quantify the impact of any genocide on the survivors and the descendants of those who lived through any of these horrific experiences. But we have garnered some knowledge about short and long term impact, influences and consequences of these conflagrations.

This knowledge can be acquired from reading the Holocaust literature written by those who lived through it – like The Diary of Anne Frank, or those who survived it and later written their memories in story form, like the recent Wolf in the Attic, and The Uprooted. We can try to extrapolate what it must have been like by visiting the concentration/death camps and the various Holocaust museums, where photographs and artifacts found on them are displayed. The books containing graphic, gruesome drawings done by children in the camps also bear witness to what they saw and felt. If looking and reading produce myriad feelings of revulsion and disbelief in us, the observer who gets drawn into railing again the evil people inflict against those they designate as the enemy, one can only imagine how deep such feelings penetrate in those who were, or are, participants as perpetrators, victims, bystanders and descendants.

This is vividly depicted in Charny's already classic Encyclopedia of Genocide.

Some of us also have been immersed in another way of knowing, and that is from clinically treating or in other ways engaging with survivors and their offspring: in individual therapy, in group therapy, and in the Holocaust Dialogue Groups I have led between survivors of victims and perpetrators for the last 10 years, or even friends who have this experience as part of their personal history. In this presentation I will examine the themes evidenced in the behaviors of survivors of both the perpetrators and the victims. Some comments will be proffered as to why there is always a country preparing for war, engaged in civil or multinational war, or recuperating from armed conflict, when we all are aware of the terribly devastating consequences of genocide when it is occurring – and on the generations that are born after the overt strife is over. This plenary will be closed with the question – “What can we each do to prevent the perpetual recurrence of terrorism and warfare; that is, to see that this does not happen again?”