They observed and analyzed over a thousand Holocaust patients and were able to come up with ten common symptoms that were shown by all of them: Survivor's guilt; sleep disturbances such as nightmares; isolation, lack of trust, being suspicious of their surroundings; emotional numbing; the memories they witnessed; controlling anger and arousal; depression, being suicidal, or questioning identity; always having to be prepared for survival; stress; anxieties and expecting a catastrophe to occur
They identified these symptoms as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and for some Survivor Syndrome.
PTSD is shown to inflict aging survivors the most because they tend to keep themselves busy with work and their new lives to not have to think about their past, but end up facing that brick wall in the road later on. For example, a lady in her 70's named Sonia Reich, was struggling to tell between her past and present all bringing back the Jewish persecution. At just 11 years, Sonia, an orphan at the time, was being hunted by the Nazis while she was seeking refuge in Poland. Almost 60 years later, it would be her second time. She lived in the Chicago suburbs of Skokie. "I received a call at midnight saying that my mother had run out of her house and been picked up by the Skokie police", said her son Howard Reich. Sonia had been hollering that somebody wanted to kill her. His son's words were "I couldn't even comprehend thatI thought it was a dream" (Chicago Tribune, "Prisoner of Her Past"). Like the many survivors of the Holocaust, Sonia had not seeked medical help nor was offered one after the war. She decided to keep silence about her experiences like many made vows so they could start a new life. Initially, Sonia had lost her partner in her early 60s, and that is when her family started to see strange survival behaviors. One being she would sleep with an ax under her pillow and having a habit of bringing her own water when going out to eat.
