When I was choosing the topic for my doctoral dissertation, I was guided by what my parents had taught me, by European ideals. Despite the Holocaust, despite having lost everyone who stayed behind in Europe, my parents also shared with me what they loved about that world, what it had given them, the good, solid values they had carried with them. And one of those values was the importance of knowledge, of scholarship, of meaningful intellectual work.
When it came time to choose my dissertation, I knew it had to matter. I drove myself crazy over it — sleepless nights, truly. I kept asking: what is the most meaningful thing I can study? I remember thinking, in light of such horrific history, why do people stay alive? And the only answer I could come up with was: hope.
So I decided to focus on the psychology, or really the phenomenology — of hope. Even back then, I was already working in a multidisciplinary way, and I was teaching at the time. My students were also involved — we looked at what challenges hope, how people respond when it is threatened.
Some students observed people who had just missed their bus — which sounds minor, but it taught them that even something small can hold deeper emotional weight. Back then we didn’t have iPhones. Missing a bus might mean missing a job interview, or missing the one person you love. It wasn’t just about being late — it could be a rupture in a life path.
My students interviewed each other — divorced students interviewed divorced students, disabled students interviewed disabled students. And I took on what I believed to be the greatest challenge to hope: I began working with concentration camp survivors, blockade survivors, people terminally diagnosed, prisoners of war, and their families. I learned an extraordinary amount.
My doctoral committee warned me: “They won’t talk to you. Holocaust survivors don’t talk to anyone.” It was the same conspiracy of silence I would later study in depth. But I’ve always believed in meeting people where they are — not in some lab, not in a setting that’s only convenient for the researcher. So, for example, I worked with cancer patients directly in the wards. I would speak with one, and soon more would come. It was the first time someone had come to listen — truly listen. We even placed a big glass jar in the middle of the ward where patients could leave their thoughts, anonymously, at any time — even in the middle of the night. And so, group therapy for cancer survivors was born.
And then I began to work more deeply with Holocaust survivors. I would visit them in their homes — and they would put me in the kitchen. And I rarely left before morning. These people who supposedly “wouldn’t talk to anyone”? They spoke. All of them. And not just survivors — also their children, their neighbors, their extended families. Everyone gathered. It was as if they had been waiting for someone who would truly listen.
And what they told me, every single one of them — and I know this sounds scientifically impossible, but it’s true — was that no one believed them, no one really heard them. They said only another survivor could understand — that even a Nazi might understand them better than someone who hadn’t lived through what they had. They said therapists didn’t listen, judges didn’t understand, lawyers didn’t care…
I was a very idealistic graduate student. I was shattered by what I heard. But it became immediately clear to me that the conspiracy of silence was not just a theme — it was a central obstacle to healing, and one that had to be understood. So I made the decision to shift the focus of my dissertation. I still wrote about hope, but I began to focus much more on investigating how silence functions after trauma.
The only profession in the world trained not only to listen to others, but also to be aware of their own internal reactions to listening, is psychoanalysis. So I decided to study psychoanalysts who knew they were treating Holocaust survivors. Because let’s be honest — if you don’t ask, if you don’t truly listen, you don’t know who you’re treating. You don’t even know what’s in the room with you. And what I found — and this became a core part of my work — were 49 ways of not listening.
Why was it so crucial to focus on psychoanalysts? Because while society has a moral obligation to listen to survivors, professionals — therapists, clinicians — have a contractual obligation. If they don’t listen, they can’t understand. If they don’t understand, they can’t help. And yet many of them, knowingly or not, failed to truly hear.
That study taught me a great deal. And it confirmed what I would later find in broader research: that the conspiracy of silence after trauma — particularly after massive trauma, but really after any trauma — plays a decisive role in determining whether healing is even possible. I say “possible,” not “likely,” and not “ability,” because I want to be clear: this is not about blaming the survivor. It’s not about capacity. It’s about whether society creates a space where healing can occur. We’ve all heard it — the damaging logic of “What did you wear?” when a woman is raped. It’s the same dynamic — blaming the victim instead of challenging the structure that enabled the violence.
That was one of the first things that emerged from my early interviews. And from there, I moved on to create the group project Holocaust Survivors and Their Children. At the time, no one was trained to work with survivors — not in psychology, not in social work, not in law, not in medicine. So I thought: the survivors themselves are the only experts who can teach us. And they did.
We formed groups, and while we as professionals could facilitate the process, they taught us who they were. They told us what mattered — in their past, in their present, in their fears and hopes for the future. We listened. We learned.
So my initial work on hope, and then my findings on the conspiracy of silence, led me down two parallel but connected paths: one, researching silence itself, and two, studying adaptation to trauma and how that trauma is transmitted across generations. The deeper I went, the more I saw how much injustice survivors had endured — not only through the original trauma, but through what followed, or didn’t follow. That sensitised me to the absolute necessity of ensuring victims’ rights — not just in the therapeutic space, but in law, in society, and in policy. That realisation was foundational. It shaped who I became as a researcher, as a clinician, as an advocate, as a teacher, and as a writer. Because I always believed: each book should do a job. It should serve a purpose.
When the World Federation for Mental Health asked me to represent them at the United Nations, I wrote my first book to teach the UN about the importance of mental health, and to remind them — just as I said earlier about institutions — that the UN itself was born from trauma. The Charter begins with that trauma language: “to save succeeding generations…” That’s not a political phrase. That’s a trauma-informed mission statement.
My second book was about the impact of helping — not just on the victims, but on those who serve them: peacekeepers, humanitarian workers, justice professionals. Their wounds matter too.
And then came the book many people know: The International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma. That took me 25 years to complete. It includes 30 populations around the world, including children of perpetrators — because they are affected too. No one is untouched.
And after 9/11, I wrote two more books — this time on victims of terrorism. Because again, while the world focused on counterterrorism, almost no one paid attention to the victims. And that silence, once again, was devastating. This work is never done.
No, it’s never done. But at least now... we know what we need to do.
Dr Yael Danieli (www.dryaeldanieli.com) is a clinical psychologist, traumatologist, victimologist and psychohistorian. Having developed the first program to help Nazi Holocaust Survivors and their Children in the 1970s, she has devoted much of her career to studying, treating, writing about, and preventing lifelong and multigenerational impacts of massive trauma worldwide, to ensuring victims’ rights, the rights of future generations, and to reparative justice.
In the last two decades Dr Danieli created the Danieli Inventory – the gold measure to (comparatively) assessing intergenerational legacies of Trauma and founded the International Center for MultiGenerational Legacies of Trauma (www.ICMGLT.org).
As a victimologist, she has spent over four decades participating in drafting, adopting, implementing victims' rights, and ensuring that victims’ rights reach the victims.