Skidmore News

Issue date: 4/24/09 Section: News

From left: Paul Ornstein, Mark Ludwig, and Anna Ornstein in Davis Auditorium on Tuesday. [Click to enlarge]

Paul Ornstein, this year's Jacob Perlow series lecturer, is a holocaust survivor. This past Sunday, he spoke on campus, not about his experience in a Nazi prison camp, but about his psychoanalytic work on evil.

Ornstein's lecture titled "Evil: A Psychoanalytic Perspective" was held for this year's Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust, Memorial Events. His wife, Anna Ornstein, who is also a survivor and a celebrated psychoanalyst, joined him. They are both professors' emeriti at the University of Cincinnati and lectures at Harvard University. Paul spoke before a capacity crowd in Gannett Auditorium.

The Jacob Perlow Lecutre Series in Judaic Studies and the Office of the Dean of Special Programs sponsored the lecture series.

He explained the circumstances before World War II that allowed the genocide of six million Jews, gypsies and homosexuals in Nazi Germany to occur.

"The German child rearing practices which enforce submission to authority before World War II may have made an important contribution to the Nazi mindset… This was reflected in [Adolph] Eichmann's response [at the Nuremberg trials], 'the doctors were just doing their jobs, it was expected of them'," Ornstein said.

Orstein related this desire for mass murder to a larger obligation Nazis felt to serve their country.

"Those who were actively engaged in this activity [murder] had to overcome ordinary empathic concerns to live up to the ideal that was set up by the German government," Ornstein said. "Once brutal experiments done in the name of science, or the assumed betterment of mankind, personal responses [to murder] failed."

Ornstein further explained that the Nazis could justify their mass killings by dehumanizing their victims. Through this process, the murderers could not empathize with a human victim, making killings relatively simple. The process of changing Jews, and other victims, from humans to things was done with much planning on the behalf of Nazi officials.

"They [the prisoners] were dressed in uniformed pajamas with their heads shaved, and most importantly, they starved the prisoners," Ornstein said.

Anna Ornstein spoke at various points throughout the lecture to further illustrate her husband's theories. She spoke in a panel discussion on Tuesday about the art and music Hitler used to distract the German public's attention to "Final Solution," or the outright killing off all the European Jewry.

Paul and Anna knew each other in Hungary before the Holocaust. After the Nazi occupation of Hungary in 1944, Paul was sent to a forced labor camp and Anna was transported to the infamous concentration camp Auschwitz. Paul escaped from the labor camp after a Russian bombardment and joined the Polish resistance until the end of the war. Anna was liberated from Auschwitz at the end of the war in 1945. The couple married and attained their degrees in medicine and immigrated to the United States shortly thereafter.

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