NEW YORK —On a freezing January day, Anna Ornstein was one of a few visitors on the memorial plaza at Ground Zero as she ran her hands along the massive bronze tablets into which thousands of names of the dead are carved. The tiny grandmother swaddled in black down has an eye trained for horror.
“We have what I call a ‘memorial space,’ when we touch something or hear something from our trauma,” said Ornstein, 87, in her Hungarian accent. As a psychoanalyst renowned for her work on the self, she is considered an expert on how humans make meaning. As a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp, she knows when there is none to be found.
And this day, nearly 70 years after then-18-year-old Anna Brunn and her mother were freed after losing her father and grandmother to the gas chambers, Ornstein wasn’t yet sold on memorials. They seem, she said, to imply punctuation, the end of something, as though everything possible has been learned.
“We like to think: ‘This is it! Now we’ll know better,’ ” she said as she came out of the cold and descended into the subterranean National September 11 Memorial Museum.
But despite being what she calls “the most researched horror story in the world,” Ornstein said the Holocaust “was just the beginning of the century of genocide. Armenians, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda. . . . Now some Muslims say ‘Give me respect and maybe I’ll stop killing you.’ I only know we did not learn from the Holocaust that we should stop killing, because we did not.”
Ornstein, who lives outside Boston, had taken a taxi with a friend on a frigid morning to Ground Zero for the first time, to learn more about how a modern-day horror is memorialized.
When World War II ended, thousands of victims of the Nazis emigrated to the United States, a country historians say was largely uninterested in hearing their stories – like the time Ornstein watched the diseased body of her young friend expire, as a family of mice waited patiently nearby to partake. Or when she risked being shot by a camp guard for darting away momentarily from a forced line-up to touch her parched tongue to a puddle of filthy water on the ground.
It’s common to hear of Holocaust survivors who emigrated and almost never spoke of their experiences again. Ornstein and her husband, Paul, who survived a forced labor battalion, became prominent psychoanalysts and raised three children, all now psychiatrists.
In a field that had been heavily focused on the power of the subconscious, the Ornsteins became stars for arguing that people’s actual experiences – not only their unseen, buried conflicts – are essential in order to understand them. Anna specialized in children, and spent her life focused on the importance of the self, of empathy, of the ways relationships you have when you’re young can hurt or can cure you.
A day earlier, 90 analysts had packed into a tiny room at the William Alanson White Institute on Manhattan’s Upper West Side to hear her deliver a paper about “the importance of the empathic listening perspective, the need to be attentive,” and about trauma – one of her specialties. She wears elegant black suits, pearls and a tiny pin that says “zachor,” the Hebrew word for “remember.”
That Ornstein is a survivor is well-known. She speaks to groups around the world, and published a book of essays a decade ago called “My Mother’s Eyes.” She believes having her mother and childhood friends in the camp with her saved her sense of self, her ability not to disappear into the number tattooed on her arm.
Not that this analyst always freely analyzed. The analyst she saw while she was in training, she said, wasn’t equipped to deal with her experiences in Auschwitz, and she decided not to speak with him about them. While she studied and saw patients who survived many kinds of trauma — from poverty and hunger to physical pain — she chose not to see Holocaust survivors, fearing she’d confuse her experience with theirs.
Indeed, her kind voice takes on a slight edge when she’s asked about “survivors.”
“That’s almost like another crime,” she said of generalizations. “We were reduced to a race. . . . This is my name, I had parents who raised me a certain way, and that was not washed away.”
Her own field, she said, was among the worst for this crime of wiping away the self. Analysts had theories, including one that said survivors were empty shells. Look at us, she has been saying for decades. How is it that so many of us thrived?
Holding tight to her friend’s arm, Ornstein wove down the ramps, deeper into the museum. She paused for a question. Is she, as a Holocaust survivor, an esteemed analyst, more equipped to understand the meaning of the Sept. 11 attacks?
“Meaning?” she says in a confused voice. “What meaning?”
