Survivors of atrocity can feel crushing guilt over acts they were coerced into.

Evidence

After about fifteen minutes of bitter sobbing, the sixteen-year-old suddenly looked at me and asked whether I could teach him how to do teshuvah [repent]. I was taken aback by his question and tried to comfort him. “After the stretch in hell you’ve been through, you don’t have to worry about doing teshuvah. Your slate is clean. You’re alive, and you have to get hold of yourself and stop worrying about doing teshuvah,” I told him. But my words had no effect. I could not convince him. He kept insisting: “Ich vill tuhn teshuvah—I want to do teshuvah. Ich muz tuhn teshuvah—I must do teshuvah.” — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide, 637

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why does reassurance of innocence fail to relieve this boy’s compulsion to repent? Worth chasing against frameworks of moral injury versus legal culpability.
• DEEPTHINKING: Opens the gap between external absolution and internal moral accounting — the survivor rejects the verdict his rescuer offers him.
• XREF: connects to: Survivors carry exile as an unshakeable embodied mark of guilt and trauma. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 652; Extreme circumstances can force survivors to abandon their former morals

Broader Connections

• Extreme circumstances can force survivors to abandon their former morals #expands (0.88)
• Survivors carry exile as an unshakeable embodied mark of guilt and trauma. #expands (0.85) — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 652