War Trauma in Contemporary Realities | Aleksandra Kvitko

Here is the recording of Aleksandra Kvitko’s lecture „“War Trauma in Contemporary Realities: Comments From a Practicing Psychologist” which was presented at the webinar “Around the Trauma of the Holocaust” on November 19, 2022.

Aleksandra Kvitko is a psychologist and a psychoterapist. Since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, she has been working with victims of sexual violence under the program of the Ombudsman of Ukraine. She was aslo the chief of a group of UNICEF psychologists and psychotherapists.

In her lecture, Aleksandra Kvitko talks about the situation of Ukrainian citizens against whom Russian soldiers are commiting unprecedented crimes – while underlining that under current statistics, we only know of 2% of cases. She characterizes the agresor’s use of sexual violence as genocide of Ukrainian people.

The webinar „Around the Trauma of the Holocaust” was organized by the Warsaw Ghetto Museum and the Institute of the Social Sciences of SWPS University. Speakers from Denmark, Israel, Burundi, Ukraine and Poland discussed trauma in the context of their own research and the experience of work with people experiencing trauma. We had a possibility to listen to psychologists, pedagogues and historians working with this topic professionally, as well as to find similarities between the consequences of war trauma, regardless of where and when it occurred.