Studies on the Holocaust have mushroomed since the 1960s, thanks to growing public awareness of the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime in Europe, and a more receptive atmosphere for Holocaust survivors who wish to talk about their experiences. Today, universities, too, offer hundreds of courses on genocide, and several support genocide-study centers. A journal devoted entirely to the topic, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, is now in its 28th year of publication.
However, psychological studies of the traumatic experiences of Holocaust survivors lag behind public interest. Many publications on genocides include theoretical explanations, case studies and autobiographical accounts, but little psychological research. Even by 1990, as reported in an article in the Journal of Traumatic Stress, only about 6 percent of trauma-related research included psychological studies on prisoners of war including Holocaust survivors.
But there is one researcher whose work is becoming more prominent: David Pablo Boder (1886–1961), a Russian-born psychologist who conducted the first oral history of the Holocaust by interviewing 109 victims shortly after the end of World War II. At the time, Boder's work was largely ignored. Even today, many investigators are unaware of his efforts because much of his research remains unpublished.
Real-life testimonies
David Pablo Boder was born in Latvia, Russia, in 1886. He studied a semester of psychology in 1905–06 with Wilhelm Wundt at Leipzig University and trained in neuropsychology from 1908 to 1913 at the Psycho-Neurological Institute at St. Petersburg with noted Russian neurophysiologist V.M. Bekhterev. Unfortunately, he failed to receive a diploma for his studies because of long-term non-payment of fees.
In 1919, Boder fled Russia for Mexico, where he enrolled at the School of Higher Studies of the National University of Mexico in 1920 and, the next year, in Enrique O. Aragón's psychology courses. In 1926, he moved to Chicago and during the next 20 years Boder obtained master's and doctoral degrees in psychology and started a teaching career at the Lewis Institute, now the Illinois Institute of Technology. He also founded and managed the first psychological museum in the world (Benjamin, 2009).
Boder began his research on the victims of the Holocaust when Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, then supreme commander of the Allied Forces, invited journalists to "come and see for yourselves" the atrocities that the Allied forces were uncovering in the Nazi death camps. Boder brought with him a magnetic wire recorder that had been developed at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he was heading the psychology department. The idea was to record the experiences of displaced persons in their own languages — something Boder hoped he could accomplish without interpreters since he spoke several languages. After a year of preparation and with limited financial support, he made his way to Europe in July 1946.
Boder interviewed 109 men and women, and three children, most of them Jews, while he traveled through camps of displaced persons in France, Germany, Italy and Switzerland. He asked each person to tell the story of what happened to them during the war. Boder sat giving his back to the interviewees so that they wouldn't be affected by his facial reactions to their stories.
When he returned to the United States two months later, Boder transcribed his interviews and translated them into English, thanks to grants from the National Health Service, but he had trouble getting them published because most editors believed the public wasn't interested in Nazi atrocities and the books covering them didn't sell. Eventually, Boder scored a book deal in 1949, but only after deleting a lengthy content analysis of the interviews and limiting himself to a brief introduction and eight interviews.
Boder's work was ignored for many years, even at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he was a professor. It wasn't until 1998 — 37 years after his death — that the institute library staff uncovered his 16-volume set of typescripts. They transcribed and translated all the interviews into English and made them available for researchers in 2009.
Since then, other authors have taken note: Donald Niewyk edited 36 of Boder's interviews in his 1998 book "Fresh Wounds: Early Narratives of Holocaust Survival," for example, and Boder's 1949 book was translated into French in 2008. In 2010, Alan Rosen published a book devoted to Boder's work, "The Wonder of Their Voices: The 1946 Holocaust Interviews of David Boder." More recently, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum started a search for survivors Boder interviewed.
Influenced by Gordon Allport, Boder also wanted to investigate the impact of war and suffering on personality. Thus, in addition to the interviews he began administering the Thematic Apperception Test, although he discontinued this practice after about a dozen interviews. Reportedly, when planning his expedition to Europe, he intended to interview both Jews and non-Jews, including also perpetrators and German people who lived close to the concentration camps. For his psychology colleagues, he was planning to develop and use measures of the effects of trauma on the victims' personalities. Unfortunately, he was discouraged from including his psychological analysis of the interviews and chose to publish only a small number of interviews to shorten the manuscript and get it published.
Late recognition
Why did psychologists neglect Boder's research for so long? One reason is that he did not complete the work he intended. While he developed a scoring system based on content analysis that he called the Traumatic Index, he did not use it to analyze the interviews because it would make his book too long to publish.
He later applied his method in a paper (Boder, 1954) calling it the Traumatic Inventory, analyzing 10 interviews of displaced persons, seven of which had been included in his 1949 book.
Five of the interviewees — the FER, or Friendly Eastern Refugees, group — had been evacuated from their homes but "enjoyed reasonable freedom of movement and relatively tolerable conditions of existence." The other five suffered incredible hardship either in concentration camps (four people) or as a refugee in Paris (one woman) — Boder called them the KZ group. The TI consisted of 46 traumatic themes that Boder called "traumata" and that were derived from more than 70 original recordings of the interviews. The people in the KZ group demonstrated higher scores, both in the Personal and in the Milieu Traumata, in Boder's Traumatic Inventory than those in the FER group. Boder did not publish any more papers after that.
Another reason why his work was ignored is that his Traumatic Inventory involves the subjective evaluation of the scorer and is therefore subject to experimenter bias, although he only applied his technique to 10 interviews. Nevertheless, it is unfortunate that Boder's measurement technique did not arouse interest among traumatic stress researchers and psychologists in general.
Boder left a few marks in his path through psychology. His brief sojourn at the University of Mexico and other Mexican government institutions helped create the psychometric movement and contributed to the creation of a Youth Tribunal, a juvenile court that included a psychologist. In Chicago, his efforts to build a psychology museum increased psychology's presence in science fairs and exhibits at least throughout the decade of the 1940s and part of the 1950s, and the remnants of his museum have become part of the David P. Boder Collection of the Archives of the History of American Psychology at the University of Akron. His audio recordings of Holocaust victims have led to a renewed interest in psychological studies of war victims and traumatic effects on personality.
Victor A. Colotla works as psychologist in Vancouver, Canada. Samuel Jurado is a psychology professor at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.
