Jewish Holocaust Survivors Suffering from Trauma and Mental Illness: Approaches in Post War Sydney

Abstract

Between 1938 and 1960, over 31,000 Jewish refugees found a new home in Australia, at no cost to government for a period of five years after arrival. After surviving the Holocaust, some few arrived with extreme trauma. PTSD was only recognised as a diagnosis in 1980, and the study of Holocaust trauma only matured in the last 30 years. The lives of these survivors and those who helped them has not been explored although in 1955 over ninety were mental hospital patients. In 1938 the government did not have a genuine refugee policy and Rutland confirmed that responsibility for survivors was delegated to the Australian Jewish Welfare Society (AJWS) for five years. Case studies of these survivors are reviewed to help understand and explain what happened to this group by studying the role of the AJWS and a number of doctors. Jewish refugees embodied the dominant narrative of successful migration, but this is not true for all arrivals. This thesis aims to show that understanding those who suffered extreme trauma is important as evidence of how genocide affects survivors and how they were treated in Sydney in the 1950s