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Maus

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GUILT is an emotion one gets when he/she believes or discovers that he/she did a wrong deed and valuated his/her standard social, moral or penal code ( Chaplin, 1975). The intensity of guilt varies from one person to another. When some individuals survive a horrific event, they get this overwhelming feeling of guilt and blame themselves for surviving the abominable situation that others did not survive. This state of mind is a mental condition and is sometimes termed as imagined guilt. It may be found in survivors of holocausts, natural disasters, mass murder and pandemics e.g. the 9/11 Oklahoma City bombings. While this guilt might not be experienced by everyone, it a research based phenomenon and has been proved to be real. The expression and amount of guilt varies from individual to individual. This condition was grouped as a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV, 2000). The survivors may or may not be consciously aware that they are feeling guilty.
The holocaust was the carnage that took place where the Nazi, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, killed over six million Jews. Most of the Jews who survived suffered post-traumatic stress disorders. Symptoms include reverent memories of the traumatic event that took place, flashbacks of the event, physical and emotional stress due to something that is a reminder of the event and horrific dreams about the event. When a person sees those close to him die, it is normal to feel pain. It is also normal to even feel some guilt if the event happened and you feel like you contributed to it in a way. What is not normal is the prolonged feeling of deep guilt. This feeling can even lead to long term depression. According to Mayo Clinic, one can try to avoid falling into post-traumatic stress disorder by: “trying to

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