A New ‘Stockholm Syndrome’: Physical Impairment and Hospital Confinement as Post-Holocaust Sequelae in Ilona Karmel’s Stephania

Ilona Karmel was a Holocaust victim. She endured diseases, Nazi ‘madness’, and imprisonment in the Krakow Ghetto and in concentration camps in Poland and Germany. At the end of World War II, she was abandoned to die by the retreating German enemy. Nevertheless, Victory Day in 1945 saw the beginning of another period of infirmity and confinement for Karmel, who was hospitalized in Sweden to treat leg injuries she had suffered by the Nazis. This essay, bringing together disability and Holocaust studies, explores harrowing post-Shoah sequelae in Karmel’s life, as reflected in Stephania (1953). To recover her sense of self after the bloodletting and to make visible physical impairment in her novel, Karmel creates the fictional Stephania: A Polish patient with spinal curvature worsened during wartime captivity who seeks medical treatment in Stockholm, all the while refusing to accept her body’s disfigurement. This article examines how disability and voluntary hospital confinement are portrayed in the novel Stephania and connected with Holocaust trauma. Despite memories of pain and incarceration invading their minds as survivors, Karmel and her creation Stephania inescapably must come to terms with their respective postwar impairments, heal from their emotional wounds, and cling to life during and beyond their convalescences.