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learning English, solidarized them. They all perceived lying to land a job as a
necessity. Refugee advice to recent arrivals went something like this:
if
you
don't understand what a prospective employer tells you, just say yes; if you
have never done whatever chore he wants you to do, say you've had experi–
ence and watch what the worker next to you is doing; and even
if
you're fired
at the end of the day, you 'll have learned something and will be ahead by a
few dollars. Just keep improvising. Since former credentials could not easily
be verified due to the Nazis' rule and the war, Bettelheim could claim that
his Doctorate in Humanities was in psychology.
I'm sure that Bettelheim could not have escaped receiving such advice
since, unlike his cousin, Edith Buxbaum, who was a doctor and a psychoan–
alyst, and could pursue her profession after passing the State Boards, he had
to construct his own variant of this "advice to refugees." Bettelheim's release
from the camps at Dachau and Buchenwald had been arranged with the help
of the Emergency Relief Committee. Buxbaum had enlisted the distin–
guished psychoanalyst Lawrence Kubie to intervene with the American State
Department on his behalf. This stroke of luck allowed him to parlay what he
had gleaned from books, and from his fairly short personal psychoanalysis
with Richard Sterba, one of Freud's disciples, into a psychoanalytic back–
ground. At the end of 1939, few persons had been able to escape almost
directly from the camps to the U.S., and psychoanalytic theory was still most
unsophisticated. Thus Bettelheim's psychoanalyzing of camp inmates was
taken at face value.
Essentially, he claimed to have been released because he had asserted
him–
self against his jailers who, in turn, came to respect him for his courage.
However, as many of us knew long ago, as Ernst Federn, his best friend at the
Buchenwald camp reported, and as Pollak further documents, he was as mis–
erable there as everyone else but had the luck to receive money from his
mother which allowed him to bribe some of the guards. Thereby, he first
managed to get out of the most onerous tasks, then to be freed, and ultimately
to avail himself of the Emergency Committee's affidavit. Had he, like the few
others who had been let go, ascribed being rescued to inordinate luck, no one
would have taken offense. However, he transformed his privileged flight into
a pseudo-Freudian psychological theory, holding that if only Jews had been
more assertive, and had actively fought their oppressors, they might have got–
ten the Nazis to treat them more humanely.
As
we know, when he advanced this preposterous claim in print, it
attracted the wrath of a large part of the refugee community, since he over–
looked the fact that in 1939 the machinery of death was not yet in place. But
because his focus was on the individual, the Harvard psychologist Gordon W
Allport accepted "Individual and Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations"
(1943) for publication-which by then had been rejected by other editors
