Peter Suedfeld was admitted to the Order of Canada by Governor-General Julie Payette on November 21, 2019 for his 55 years of research into how people respond to extreme environments.

As the son of assimilated Jewish parents, Peter Suedfeld was born in Hungary on August 30, 1935. His father worked as a musician and his mother, a secretary, was from a wealthy family. In 1944, his mother attempted to stop a Gestapo raid at the business where she worked and she was arrested. She would perish in a concentration camp, likely Auschwitz. When his father was sent to Germany to work as a forced labourer, Peter lived temporarily with an aunt. He was lucky. With blond hair and blue eyes, he escaped incarceration with falsified Christian papers while hiding within a Red Cross orphanage.

At nine years old, when the Soviet army liberated Budapest, he was reunited with his aunt and uncle. He subsequently lived with his father in Vienna as a displaced person until the Joint Distribution Committee (a Jewish charity) facilitated their immigration to the U.S. He attended school in Harlem, and then at Stuyvesant High School, won a scholarship to Queens College of the City University, but dropped out and served in the US Army for three years. With a B.A. from Queens College, he earned his M.A. and Ph.D in experimental psychology from Princeton University. He taught at the University of Illinois and at Rutgers University prior to joining the University of British Columbia in 1972 where he became head of the Department of Psychology and later Dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies.

As a professor emeritus in UBC's psychology department, Peter Suedfeld told Ubyssey reporter Sabine Villorakin, in an interview, that people, including psychologists, tend to under-estimate or overlook human adaptability, resilience, human strength and psychological stability. "They tend to think we are more vulnerable and weak than we really are," he says. "I did research with survivors of genocide ... many of them put together normal lives and live happily."

More specifically, among his seven books, Suedfeld edited Light from the Ashes: Social Science Careers of Young Holocaust Refugees and Survivors (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), a project that originated from a session at the 1996 meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology. Specifically, Light from the Ashes examines the effects of Holocaust trauma on child and adolescent survivors of the Holocaust such as himself. He contends that "very many child survivors and refugees are psychologically well-adjusted, socially integrated, emotionally warm and healthy, professionally successful and, in general, productive and valuable citizens."

Seventeen other social scientists, all of whom were profoundly affected by the Holocaust as children, contributed autobiographical essays and examined how their values, personalities and careers were influenced by being targets of Nazi persecution. Four of the seventeen contributors are women. Two (Karl W. Butzer and Siegfried Steufert) were non-Jews from Germany who suffered persecution from Nazis due to their families' political activities.

Suedfeld asserts that arguments as to who should merit true survivor status are "unproductive and demeaning." Each chapter explores the perceived connections between early years of survival and their subsequent adult attitudes, political orientations, ethics, family lives and religion. One contributor suggests that "risk taking," a craving for "curiosity," and humour as a "defence mechanism" are key personality characteristics of members of this group culture. It is notable that all seventeen contributors had already attained a degree of professional success that enabled them to validate Suedfeld's hypothesis, crudely encapsulated by the aphorism 'when the going gets tough, the tough get going.'

In a review of the book, Shirley Cohn summarized Suedfeld's main psychological findings about the effects of the Holocaust. Child survivors demonstrate a desire to make the most of every moment. Jews in Europe had been told they were worthless. Work is a way of disproving that; there is a heightened awareness of death, leaving to the desire to leave traces of one's existence; the indignities of the Holocaust can generate a search for status.

In a separate research paper, Homo Invictus: The Indomitable Species (Canadian Psychology #38, 1998) Suedfeld had examined human toughness and the ability to benefit from stressful experiences.

Suedfeld is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Canadian Psychological Association, the American Psychological Association, and the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research. He is a full member of the International Academy of Astronautics, a Fellow International of the Explorers Club, and the only psychologist elected as an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. He was also awarded the Lawrence J. Burpee Gold Medal by the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. He has received the Canadian Psychological Society's Donald O. Hebb Award, its highest award for distinguished scientific contributions, as well as the Society's Gold Medal for distinguished and enduring lifetime contributions to Canadian psychology and its Award for Distinguished Contributions to the International Advancement of Psychology. His awards also include the Canadian Polar Medal, Queen Elizabeth II's Diamond Jubilee Medal, the highest award for scientific contributions from the International Society of Political Psychology, the Antarctica Service Medal of the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the Zachor Award for contributions by Holocaust survivors to Canadian society. Among his many articles is 'Life after the ashes: The postwar pain, and resilience, of young Holocaust survivors' published by United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Center for Advanced Studies (pp. 1-24) in 2002.

BOOKS:

The Behaviorial Basis of Design : proceedings of the seventh international conference of the Environmental Design Research Association, Vancouver, British Columbia (McGraw Hill, 1977) -- co-editor

Restricted Environmental Stimulation. Research and Clinical Applications (Wiley 1980) -- co-editor

Psychology and Social Policy (Hemisphere Publishing 1992) -- co-editor

Personality Theory and Information Processing (Ronald Press Company, 1971) -- co-editor

Psychology and Torture (Taylor & Francis, 1990) -- editor

Restricted Environmental Stimulation: Theoretical and Empirical Developments in Flotation REST (Springer 1990) -- co-editor

Light from the Ashes: Social Science Careers of Young Holocaust Survivors and Refugees (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001) -- editor

Attitude Change: The Competing Views (Routledge, 2007) -- editor

ARTICLES:

Suedfeld, P. (1997). Homo Invictus: The indomitable species. Canadian Psychology, 38, 164-173.

Suedfeld, P. (2002). Life after the ashes: The postwar pain, and resilience, of young Holocaust survivors. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Center for Advanced Studies (pp. 1-24). Washington, D. C.

Suedfeld, P. (in press). Racism in the brain; or is it racism on the brain? Psychological Inquiry.

Suedfeld, P. (2003). Reclaiming Heimat: Trauma and mourning in memoirs by Jewish Austrian emigres, Jacqueline Vansant (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001). Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 17(2), 366-368.

Bar-On, D., Eland, J., Kleber, R., Krell, R., Moore, Y., Sagi, A., Soriano, E., Suedfeld, P., van der Velden, P., & van Ijzendoorn, M. (1998). Multigenerational perspectives on coping with the Holocaust experience: An attachment perspective for understanding the developmental sequelae of trauma across generations. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 22, 315-338.

Suedfeld, P. (1997). Reactions to societal trauma: Distress and/or Eustress. Political Psychology, 18, 849-861.

Suedfeld, P., & Steel, G.D. (2000). The environmental psychology of capsule habitats. Annual Review of Psychology, 51, 227-253.

Suedfeld, P. (2001). Applying positive psychology in the study of extreme environments. Journal of Human Performance in Extreme Environments, 6, 21-25.

Suedfeld, P., Ramirez, C., Deaton, J., & Baker-Brown, G. (1982). Reactions and attributes of prisoners in solitary confinement. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 9, 303-340.

QUOTE:

"I think the world will forget about Auschwitz. The world has already forgotten about 'never again.' We've had a fair number of genocides since 1945, in which the world did not intervene. A recent poll that I saw ... apparently, the proportion of people who remember anything about how many Jews were killed in the Holocaust, what Auschwitz was, what the Holocaust was and so on, is not all that much above 50%.

"This is going to go on generation after generation. The survivors won't be here to push the story any further. Their children will for awhile, but they have other things to do and other things to be concerned about and their children even more so.

"In a few more generations, it will be in the history books and people will say, yeah, I read about that or thought about that in grade whatever but, in terms of remembering it as something in your gut, something that arouses an emotion, something that has a personal connection to you, I don't think it's going to last all that much longer. I'm sorry to say that, but that's what I think."

-- Dr. Peter Suedfeld (at Hillel House, UBC campus, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jan. 27, 2020, part of a panel of four survivors sharing reflections 75 years after WW II)

[BCBW 2021] Alan Twigg / HolocaustLit





Suedfeld, Payette, November 21, 2019