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Foreword
In February 2014, David Mermelstein. Holocaust survivor and memory activist in the Jewish community of Miami, Florida, visited my class on Witness Literature. Mr. Mermelstein, who was a teenager during World War II, recalled episodes of endurance, struggle for life, and the role that chance played in surviving Nazi extermination camps. In his succinct introduction, my guest speaker described all categories of persecuted people, emphasizing how physically and mentally disabled individuals were the first to be eliminated by the Nazis due to their so-called parasitic nature. Before the construction of the concentration camps and the activation of the killing machine aimed at the Final Solution. German doctors were deputized to remove disabled children from their families and exterminate them. Parents were persuaded to relinquish their children by arguments that new medical treatments promised a cure. Mentally ill adults were the second victims of this so-called purification campaign, a sinister manifestation of the eugenic theories promulgated at the time.
As Mr. Mermelstein continued his talk, my students appeared engaged. With one glaring exception: sitting in the middle row, a young man could be observed comfortably switching his attention back and forth between Mr. Mermelstein's memories and the regular emissions generated by his iPhone. A Pandora's box of questions emerged: how can one pay half attention to a Holocaust survivor? If the presence and the voice of a survivor are not enough, in what ways can other forms of transmission (documentary archives, written texts, oral histories, and collection of images) make catastrophic events relevant to younger generations? The following essay attempts to address these questions as 1 consider two recent projects-Ausmerzen (2012) by Marco Paolini and Holocausto brasileiro (2013) by Daniela Arbex-both of which present archives of catastrophes aimed at instilling empathy in and demanding attention from its readers.
Introduction
In 1997, Italian eminent psychiatrist Eugenio Borgna remarked that a serious discussion among medical professionals on the theme of violence in psychiatry was still missing. Although congresses on ethics and psychiatry have multiplied in recent years (30), Borgna observed a general evasiveness in addressing the "nefaste conseguenze" (31) of violent practices and behaviors (especially doctors' indifference to the suffering of patients) in the profession (31-33). Providing compassionate care for mentally ill people remains an open challenge...