SOME OF OUR PROTAGONISTS

Johewet Rosendahl: Born 1943 in Sosnowitz (Poland). When Sosnowitz ghetto was to be liquidated, and just before the deportation into the unknown, Johewet's father decided to hand baby Johewet into the hands of their Christian Polish neighbours.......

Johewet Rosendahl with her husband Gideon

At Café Zelig.

Miram Acoca-Pres: head of the social worker team at Café Zelig, is responsible for the varied cultural programme and psychosocial care of Café Zelig's visitors..s

Henry Rotmensch. Born 1925 in Bedzin (Poland). With great emphasis he says that he never wanted to go to one of the many DP camps in Bavaria: "After liberation I had enough of camps, I went straight to Munich. I wanted to live, build something up for myself. Munich offered many possibilities, hundreds of possibilities. What was I supposed to do in America... and wait and wait...?".

Natan Grossmann. Born 1927 in Zgierz (Poland). With Natan Grossmann we visit a Munich hospital, for example, where at the end of the 50's he was lying on a ward and in a hall next to former Wehrmacht soldiers, who, like him, were suffering from life-threatening illnesses and damage due to frostbite. The former Wehrmacht soldiers had contracted it during the Russian campaign, Natan Grossmann as a child and adolescent in the Lodz/Litzmannstadt ghetto.

Doctors in Israel had advised him to go to Germany for treatment - to save his life - because over the years Germans would have gathered the world's greatest medical expertise (through the thousands of Wehrmacht soldiers returning from Russia). Grossmann set off for Germany despite greatest inner resistance. He would never had imagined having to share a room with former German soldiers for weeks – with the "beasts who had on their conscience my mother, my father, my brother and so many other of my people".

But Grossmann, a Polish Jew, did indeed settle down in Munich, Germany, where he still lives to this day.

Dr. Joram Ronel, clinical-scientific director of Café Zelig, specialist in psychosomatic medicine and psychoanalyst, who founded Café Zelig in 2016, helps us approach the world of trauma from a scientific, medical point of view.