Institutional scripts are organizational behaviors that naturally occur as an inseparable part of the army's coping with an event. Any deviation from these scripts is perceived as a crisis and often as betrayal of the institution's ethos and myth. The study follows 'loss scripts' in a military unit from the retrospective viewpoint of army commanders –those who had been 'operated' as part of these institutional scripts. These commanders, even years after the fatal events have taken place (in some of which their soldiers or closest comrades have lost their lives), continue to 'obey' the epistemic expectations that they ascribed to those scripts. Specifically, the study examines the dramaturgic context of these scripts – the commander as an agent committed to a performative role, who is operated to fulfill a range of functions on behalf of the army and the entire security system. these functions may include acting as representative in communicating with bereaved families, as well as taking on additional roles such as protector of the ethos and myth of the military system through a commitment towards bereaved families and being legitimized by them; protector of the "leadership capital" of the 'military commander' (including its emotional context and the level of hegemonic masculinity) in Israeli society; the agent in charge of the military unit activity etc. None of these functions, however, incorporates the emotional condition of the commander or his ability to process his grief and undergo a suitable bereavement process. Ultimately, these scripts take their toll on these commanders, some of whom (in late stage in life) reach antagonistic emotional states in their approach towards bereaved families on the one side, and towards the military system on the other, as they feel that their loss remains unrecognized, transparent, and they experience a syndrome of betrayal trauma.  

The work of Antoni Kępiński (1918-1972) in the fields of memory, trauma, and therapy is little known outside the Polish-speaking world. Yet his work published after the Second World War and after his death has been and remained very influential in a wide range of subject areas. His experiences as a prisoner in a Spanish concentration camp, his experiences of exile, and his work with trauma victims in post-war Poland provided fruitful if sombre material for his approach to memory, trauma, and therapy. 
Though some aspects of his work may be paralleled with R.D. Laing's anti-psychiatric rereading of therapeutic practices, the positioning of Kępiński's ideas between the communist East and the liberal West offers an opportunity for looking at encounters of ideas from a topographical perspective, one in which sameness and difference, normality and "madness", cease to be universally objective categories which put in motion various practices of exclusion. Kępiński was highly critical of the authoritarianism of the traditional patient-doctor relationship, seeing in it some affinities with the systemic oppression of concentration camp prisoners, which he experienced in Franco's Spain in 1940 and which, after the war, he described and analysed as the "KZ-syndrom" (Concentration Camp Syndrome), supplementing his own experience with that related to him in his therapeutic encounters with survivors of Auschwitz-Birkenau. In his psychiatric work he attempted to reconcile pure objectivity with an ethical dimension, demanding an understanding of the unique character of each patient's experience in an I-You relationship in which both the patient and the doctor are put in the positions of precariousness and uncertainty. Understanding was for him a form of psychotherapy and was the most relevant task of his therapeutic and clinical work, to which he devoted his life, becoming able to write most of his books only when he himself became terminally ill. His therapy was a kind of work with the memory of both the patient and the doctor, and the memory of his having been a camp prisoner – first in Hungary and then in Spain – was a crucial element of his dialogical therapeutic method.
Our paper will set out some of the main ideas of Kępiński's innovative work relating to memory, trauma, and therapy. It is based on translations of material never presented hitherto in English.

As will be shown, in Spain the concept of "forgiveness" is understood in a completely different way depending on whether it is about the relationship between perpetrators and victims of the dictatorship and the Civil War or ETA terrorism. While the forgiveness demanded of the victims of the dictatorship does not require the perpetrators to confess their guilt, it is a wide spread assumption with regard to the ETA conflict that there can be no forgiveness without a sense of guilt on the part of the terrorists. These very different conceptions of forgiveness coexisted for years without being perceived a contradictory. The aim of this presentation is to bring out these contradictions and to point out some changes that are taking place nowadays. In relation to the latter, I will briefly touch on two films based on the true story of a victim of terrorism: the film Maixabel directed by Iziar Bollarín (2021) and the documentary Zubiak (2019) protagonized by Maixabel Lasa and the man who was part of the commando who killed her husband, Ibon Etzezarreta.

This presentation is framed within the context of the study of the exhumation processes of those called by the Spanish dictatorship "Fallen for God and Spain". This presentation will delve into the judicial practices carried out by the primary post-war judicial process named "Causa General" for the narrative and ideological construction as victims. Through the extensive analysis of this judicial process, it has been possible to identify the explicit actions of the judicial agents as perpetrators, which allows us to understand the mechanisms of coercion and state violence applied to the "suspects" and "detainees" but also to those they recognised as their victims. In this way, we analyse, from the inside of the process, how the martyr narrative was constructed through mechanisms of violence and how the dictatorship constructed its image of "fallen and martyrs". One of the primary sources of information for the construction of lists of "victims" and "guilty individuals", but also for the location of burials and the exhumations of "martyr" bodies, will be the "witness declarations". This presentation aims to reflect on how the dictatorial regime imposed its order through coercion and state and judicial violence, including the investigation and physical management of the bodies of its victims. I was demonstrating that the GC was not only a process to generate repression but that its construction and development are markedly repressive. It is more common to study the consequences of the perpetrators' violence on their direct victims but less common to analyse the procedures of violence exercised on the perpetrator entity's allies. The study of "declarations" allows us to analyse them as the GC's principal tools to obtain the legitimising narrative and its construction as a victim. 

This paper analyzes how the breakup of Yugoslavia, the Troubles, and the Spanish-Basque Conflict hardened ethnic identities and how the memorialization of these conflicts maintains social division between ethnic groups through an examination of Vukovar, Croatia, Prijedor, Bosnia, Derry/Londonderry, Northern Ireland, and Gernika/Guernica, Spain. All these locations were among the first locations of violence in their respective conflicts and the dynamics of the inter-communal violence, setting a precedent and profoundly changing how the communities interacted. The inter-ethnic conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland, and the Basque Country made exclusivist perceptions of ethnicity more salient and turned ethnic identities into both the primary lens through which society is viewed and into directly oppositional forces, developments that have been reinforced by the memorial cultures for these events and in these cities.
The 1991 siege and fall of Vukovar, the operation of concentration camps around Prijedor in 1992, Derry/Londonderry's 1972 Bloody Sunday, and the bombing of Gernika/Guernica play central roles in Croat, Bosniak, Catholic, and Basque narratives of martyrdom at the hands of Serbs, Bosnian Serbs, Protestants, and Spaniards. My paper will examine how these narratives of martyrdom began during the conflicts, how they have been maintained in the post-conflict era, and how each oppositional group has responded to them with a martyrdom narrative of their own. It will also discuss the larger implications of these narratives of martyrdom on politics and social life and how the creation and maintenance of completely divergent histories has driven social division in both communities.