When meeting Holocaust survivors today, we tend to learn only about their experiences during that period. It is easy to assume that once the Holocaust was over, and survivors began rebuilding their lives, their pain would disappear. However, as echoed in the interviews here, Holocaust survivors had – and still experience difficulties on a day to day basis. The complexity of the survivors lives should not and can never be understated. In the years following the Holocaust, they constantly battled with private and painful memories while attempting and mostly succeeding to rebuild their lives in a new and lonely environment. The experiences of survivors who arrived immediately after the Holocaust were significantly different to those who arrived many years later. In a sense, this latter group had their new identities shaped before they arrived in Israel. Their absorption problems may have been easier they had already rebuilt their lives in another country, married there, and started young families but the pain of their Holocaust experiences remained.
In contrast, survivors who came to Palestine directly after World War II had no family members, few possessions, and had generally come from a different background. Often they came alone and had to cope with the reality of rebuilding their lives and identities yet