In 1945 my mother's younger brother was liberated from the Auschwitz death camp. He was a tall, vigorous, very handsome man though extremely emaciated. Reunited with his wife and nine-year-old son it took him several months to recover and re-acclimatize to civil life. He spent weeks sleeping on a hardwood floor feeling unfit, unentitled for a bed. By the next year he and his family moved to North America.I first met him when I was seven years old. It was the summer we all drove to Miami Beach. With his sleeves rolled up I saw the concentration camp numbers tattooed on his left arm. I knew what it meant but I was hard-pressed, even at that young age, to associate the terrible stories I had heard about Auschwitz with my uncle who always manifested an extremely sunny personality. He was the exemplar of a man who loved life. He was jocular, humorous, at ease with strangers, and very loving toward everyone in the family. To me Uncle Milo appeared almost like an angel born out of the millions burned into ash. How, I still wonder, did he survive all that? When he died in his nineties he had never lost his golden outlook, his happiness at having a life restored and renewed.Dr. Viktor Frankl, a renowned psychologist, had also survived Auschwitz and wrote his famous book, Man's Search for Meaning based on that experience. He also analyzed it and developed a system of therapy, Logotherapy,  derived from his experience and reflections. Primo Levi, a Jewish Italian chemist, was also a survivor of Auschwitz and wrote about his experience in his best-selling If This Is a Man. He became famous for his resilience expressed by irony and equanimity. He also went on to write stories, essays, novels and poetry. His book, The Periodic Table, was shortlisted in the UK in 2006 for the best book on science ever written..

"We reel and shudder at the ever-breaking news; we feed on an unqualified belief in rescue and re-stabilization, and sustain ourselves with the hope that all such things will be righted."

.Both Frankl and Levi attribute their survival, that is, their ability to tolerate the terrors, tortures, dehumanization, and the intimate proximity of imminent death by undergoing what Frankl described as the three stages of survival: The first stage is shock — horror, disbelief, and terror are all tied with the blind hope that rescue is still possible. The second stage is one in which disgust, horror, pity, and hope fall under a total blunting of emotions, a state of absolute apathy. The third stage follows liberation and, according to Frankl, is characterized initially by depersonalization and derealization. I think Uncle Milo emerged from his version of stage three as a rebirth. With his wife and child restored to him, his identity re-instated, he became a child in a new world with only joy and happiness to follow him through the rest of his days.How does this instruct us now, today?We seem to be in Frankl's first stage—shock. Each day new scandals, new firings and resignations from senior government positions and especially the White House, new threats of war and nuclear attacks, new losses of environmental protections, new cuts to health care programs and health insurance, new cuts to education, new threats of a trade war, new madness on Wall Street, and ever more attacks on the free press. We reel and shudder at the continually breaking news; we feed on an unqualified belief in rescue and re-stabilization, and sustain ourselves with the hope that all such things will be righted.Meanwhile, our brains suffer the early stages of trauma. Our collective brain endures stresses that are being compounded daily. Our brain begins to shift away from its ability to grasp and process news events. The "fight-or-flight" mechanism of the central nervous system will shut down when neither fight nor flight is possible. Then the ability to record and evaluate experience adequately will begin to break down. If unchecked we might enter Frankl's second stage of apathy and numbness. Then all hope is lost.In our current shock stage we are now witnessing efforts to engage the brain's ability to keep focused and keep pursuing paths toward ameliorative action. Witness the many mass demonstrations and vast social media campaigns against attacks on our freedoms, on racial equality, on women's rights, and against sexual harassment and for gun control. These civilian mobilizations express the inherent psychological and neurobiological efforts to ward off the surrender and submission to trauma, to not fall face to the ground. Our democracy grants us the will to resist, re-activate and revive.That is what will truly make America great again.