the only way to remain sane under such conditions." Shaul Chazan, another Sonderkommando from Greece, said that the only way to survive was "to cease being human. We reached the stage where we could eat and drink among the corpses, totally indifferent, utterly detached from our emotions. When I think about it today, I don't know how we survived." Dr. Natan Dorset, chief clinical psychologist of Amcha (an organization counseling Holocaust survivors and their families) says that "in extreme situations, humans are capable of shutting down their emotions in order to survive." Moshe Sternberg-Harel, a psychotherapist with Amcha, says there are no studies regarding how Sonderkommandos survived emotionally. "However it can be assumed that a process of emotional anesthesia took place, as happened with survivors in general. All energies and thoughts were concentrated solely on getting through another day, to the elimination of any other thoughts. The human mind is capable of minimizing and neutralizing its emotional elements in order to facilitate physical survival in extremely stressful situations." After the war surviving Sonderkommando attempted to return to normal lives, but it was even more difficult for them than for other survivors. The late Leon Cohen, who had the job of extracting gold teeth from corpses, recalled shortly before his death how, for over a year he would stare at peoples' teeth to see if they had gold teeth. "It took me over a year to escape that habit, to begin getting Auschwitz out of my system." Many Sonderkommandos never revealed