I worked to the north of Tel Aviv at Shalvata Mental Health Center: a psychiatric clinic with approximately 120 beds and a number of outpatient clinics. During my time at Shalvatta, which means "stay calm," I had two weeks of clinical training in the youth psychiatric ward and four weeks in the psycho-geriatric ward. The treatment rooms of the senior physician, Dr. Abramavici, and her team, which consisted of several psychologists and social workers, were located in a small pavilion, surrounded by a very beautiful garden. I spent the greater part of my medical training working with Dr. Abramovici, whose consulting hours were attended by about ten to fifteen patients a day. I sat with the psychiatrist in the consulting room and helped conduct the anamneses and treatment talks with the patients. At first, I it took me some time to get used to the setting of the treatment room. Dr. Abramovici sat behind a large desk, whilst I sat next to it. Although this gave us a feeling of security and symbolized medical competence, it also had the air of a consultant's room. Finding myself in this situation, I was grateful to Dr. Abramovici for introducing to me each patient individually over the four weeks I was there. Furthermore, in view of my poor knowledge of Hebrew, she asked every patient if they were prepared to conduct the talks in a language that I knew. I never took for granted her efforts to allow me to participate in the talks with patients as frequently as possible. It was an incredible gesture. Most of the people who attended the psychogeriatric ward were above the age of sixty. Hardly any of them had been born in Israel, and they could hardly have been more different with respect to their cultural identity and personal history. There was one thing they did all have in common, however: they were traumatized by their experience of the holocaust.

During my first few days at the psycho-geriatric ward I noted with a mixture of horror and astonishment that there were times when more than half of the patients who attended the ward each day had originally come from Germany. This direct encounter with people who had been born and had grown up in the same country as I, and had, in some cases, worked in Berlin – my current place of residence – left me feeling paralysed at first. I was directly confronted with the questions of how I should respond these people: and I wondered how they would feel when they met me, even if it only meant hearing me speak my mother tongue. To my great surprise, most of the patients were interested in me, and full of curiosity, too. They often wanted to know what had prompted me to travel to Israel and spend time with holocaust survivors. They frequently asked me questions about the current political situation in Germany. Often, the talks with the patients would induce them to start talking in a very personal way about their own fate and that of their family. 

However, I do not wish to hide the fact that a surprisingly small number of patients reacted very emotionally to my presence there as a German. I remember one man addressing me in a loud voice when I was introduced to him as a medical student from Berlin. He began a long speech with the question: do you know what a special detachment is? For this man, who had survived a number of concentration camps and worked in the crematorium at Auschwitz, it was understandably exceedingly difficult to enter into an exchange let alone come closer. I think we both felt a sense of relief after he had finished his speech. I also recall an old lady who agreed to talk in German. However, only a few words in German evoked so many memories that she said, through her tears, that she was unable to continue communicating with me in this language. 

Looking back, the part of my work in Israel that made the most powerful and vivid impression on me were the private visits to holocaust survivors. While the social project was an integral part of the other projects in the "clinical training and social commitment" program, this was not the case in Israel. In line with my personal interests, my 'social project' involved meeting privately holocaust survivors who had been in concentration camps, as well as exiles from Germany who had been traumatized by flight and persecution. I did not visit any of these people as a medical student or as an intern in the psychiatric clinic. I was primarily interested in their lives and pasts. I also felt that it was very important that I did not hold these talks under pressure of time. 

Not one of these visits was restricted to having only one cup of coffee together. I generally spent an entire afternoon and evening with the survivors, and I visited some of them twice or even three times. This part of my visit was, I must admit, the part I experienced most intensely. At the beginning, in particular, I had very mixed feelings about visiting holocaust survivors. I felt that my questions would awaken memories of events and phases of people's lives in which unbelievable things had happened, things that one couldn't really understand, or where it would be impossible imagine the things that had really taken place. I inevitably found myself asking whether it was really good to delve so deeply into other people's lives. This was tied to a second question: what did I have to offer these people in return? Sometimes, when I visited survivors, I would ask them why they spoke so openly with someone like me, who they hardly knew at all. Some replied by saying that they were glad to be able to pass on their memories so that nothing would be forgotten. Almost all of the others said that it had done them good to see that a new generation of Germans were interested in their lives and their fate. I have to add that the great majority of survivors I visited came from Berlin, which was in no way intentional. These people still often spoke and thought in German, despite the fact that some of them hadn't set foot on German soil for sixty years. And although they had grown accustomed to living in Israel, they were still molded by German culture, which sometimes led to seemingly paradoxical statements when they went into raptures about Berlin, the metropolis of the Twenties, and the beauty of the German countryside.

To sum up, I should like to say that the project gave and offered us very much, if one was prepared to give a lot too. For me, the most important thing was having a chance to show an interest in other people, in their life histories. And I could not avoid thinking and talking about myself, my own family, Germany, politics, and so on.