Reporting from Canada, #3: A Holocaust Survivor Story

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PSYCHIATRIC VIEWS ON THE DAILY NEWS

Holocaust survivor stories are still emerging 80 years later, even if the survivors are dying out. They almost always have psychiatric implications, including prolonged grief, acute posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), delayed PTSD, intergenerational transmission of some increased sensitivity to related trauma triggers, and why some escaped to become mentally healthy, resilient, and successful. Usually, lasting recovery and resilience occurs more often after extreme trauma with a history of little or the overcoming of prior trauma; prior development of adequate enough resilience; ventilation about the experience; a renewed vision for the future; and essential community support. Occasionally, there comes some unconscious identification of victims with aggressors to try to reduce future vulnerability.

One new story was carried in the July 19 Ottawa Citizen, titled “How One Ottawa Man Came to Terms with His Father’s Holocaust Secrets.”¹ It was the story of what Ottawa’s Phil Emberley found out about his father Dennis Emberley. Phil had recently gone to the installation of a memorial stone to mark where his father and grandfather lived before the Holocaust. The father had served in the British and Canadian Armed Forces. The family was devoutly Catholic.

As the story goes, 2 days before 13-year-old Dieter Eger was to have his Jewish Bar Mitzvah, Kristallnacht, a Nazi pogrom against Jews, was unleashed in Germany. That elicited an increased desire of Jews to emigrate, but that was becoming increasingly difficult as most Western countries became unwilling to accept Jewish immigrants. Canada only accepted 5000 Jewish refugees over 1933-1945. Relatively speaking, this seemed to be even worse than that in the United States.

As a partial alternative, Britain established what was called Kindertransport, in which children were sent to Britain without their parents. About 100,000 were sent, Dieter Eger included. His grieving began.

Some years later, Dieter’s German fluency made him valuable to the military right after the war ended. He then also searched for his parents in occupied Germany, but found out that they had been murdered by the Nazis, along with the rest of his family, save 1 member. His traumatic impact intensified.

Dieter then decided to become a British citizen, joined the Anglican Church, and in 1947 changed his name to Dennis Walter Emberley. Yes, that is Phil Emberley’s father. He would rarely speak of the Holocaust.

Dennis met and married a German woman in 1953, who only found out that he was a Jewish Holocaust survivor when Dennis’s foster father mentioned it on their wedding day.

When he was 52, he had a major untreated psychiatric breakdown, which sounds like delayed PTSD. It remained untreated. It was only then that his children learned of their father’s traumatic past, and thereby their own Jewish heritage. Phil came to mark each anniversary of Kristallnacht every year with his own grief. His father seemed to live a doubling dissociative life of withdrawal at home and upbeat in public, sort of like the doubling that the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, MD, discovered among the Nazi elite. Currently, Phil now volunteers for Ottawa’s Center for Holocaust Education and Scholarship, along with sharing his own story, as in the newspaper story.

Like the United States, anti-Semitism has been rising in Canada. The B’nai British Canada Report for 2024 found record levels of anti-Semitic incidents since initiation of such audits in 1982.² This is an example of a widespread worsening social psychopathology that opens the door to the scapegoating of other social groups. We and psychiatry’s expertise have an ethical priority to try to reduce such public mental risks.

Dr Moffic is an award-winning psychiatrist who specialized in the cultural and ethical aspects of psychiatry and is now in retirement and retirement as a private pro bono community psychiatrist. A prolific writer and speaker, he has done a weekday column titled “Psychiatric Views on the Daily News” and a weekly video, “Psychiatry & Society,” since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. He was chosen to receive the 2024 Abraham Halpern Humanitarian Award from the American Association for Social Psychiatry. Previously, he received the Administrative Award in 2016 from the American Psychiatric Association, the one-time designation of being a Hero of Public Psychiatry from the Speaker of the Assembly of the APA in 2002, and the Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in 1991. He presented the third Rabbi Jeffrey B. Stiffman lecture at Congregation Shaare Emeth in St. Louis on Sunday, May 19, 2024. He is an advocate and activist for mental health issues related to climate instability, physician burnout, and xenophobia. He is now editing the final book in a 4-volume series on religions and psychiatry for Springer: Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Christianity, and now The Eastern Religions, and Spirituality. He serves on the Editorial Board of Psychiatric Times.

References

1. Duffy A. How one Ottawa man came to terms with his father’s Holocaust secrets. Ottawa Citizen. July 14, 2025. Accessed July 24, 2025. https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/fathers-holocaust-secrets

2. B’nai Brith Canada Report: Antisemitism reaches record levels. B’Nai Brith Canada. April 7, 2025. Accessed July 24, 2025. https://www.bnaibrith.ca/bnai-brith-canada-report-antisemitism-reaches-record-levels/