Life After Trauma...

Why should trauma survivors speak out - thoughts from Elie Wiesel
Excerpt:
In Conversations With Elie Wiesel, by Elie Wiesel and Richard Heffner, Wiesel talks about why trauma survivors should tell their stories. Elie Wiesel, a world-famous author and peace activist who survived the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, gives several reasons. The first, not surprisingly, is to prevent genocide. Sadly, as we are only too aware after Rwanda and Darfur, this hasn't happened. Still, it is a large part of the reason why Wiesel began to write about the Holocaust. 

"We tell the tale of our nightmare and of our darkness in order to prevent other people from entering that nightmare," Wiesel told journalist Heffner. Speaking out, however, is never easy, even for someone who later became a prize-winning author. Immediately after the war, Wiesel found that people were not interested in hearing his story and few other Holocaust survivors were speaking out. Wiesel explains the impact that this response had. 

"The question is really not how we survived the war," Wiesel told Heffner, "but how we survived mentally afterwards, when we came out and we saw that life was business as usual and how few people cared." (Wiesel and Heffner, p. 151) My own experiences with trauma have been similar. Not that my personal traumas can compare to the Holocaust. Of course not. However, my experience has been that people don't want to hear about what has happened to me...