Worlds of Hurt presents a coherent rendering of the relationships between individual trauma and cultural interpretation, using as its focus the Holocaust, the Vietnam War, and the phenomenon of sexualized violence against women. Survivors of these traumas constitute themselves as unique communities and bear witness to their traumatic experiences both privately and publicly. The survivors themselves write a "literature of trauma"—born of the need to tell and retell the story of the traumatic experience, to make it "real" to the victim, the community and to the larger pyblic.