Hilde O. Bluhm: “How Did They Survive? Mechanisms of Defense in Nazi Concentration Camps”

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In fifty years since Hilde Bluhm wrote her article on survival in concentration camps, literally hundreds of books, articles, oral testimonies, photographs, and even some authentic film clips have been made available to us. All survivors had to wait for right moment to tell story. We have, therefore, become all too painfully familiar with torments and agonies of life in those camps, and learned to distinguish extermination camps from labor-starvation camps and one labor from some other that have been described as worse than Auschwitz. But some survivors were immediately ready to bear witness to their experiences. They wrote twelve books published between 1935 and 1947 that author draws on for her analysis. She poses an important question: How does one survive in extremity? It is a question that I assume we have all asked ourselves. These books are, by author's own account, written from different perspectives, about different camps and, most importantly, at different stages of Jewish solution. This was brought home to me when I read about harassments regarding a perfectly made bed or polishing boots (p.18) when other accounts had made very idea of sheets or boots preposterous. Then I realized, report must have been about early days at Dachau. Or, even more disconcerting, is statement that the prisoner's life expectation rose rapidly after he had survived half-a-year in camp (p.8) until we notice that it had been drawn from a book written in 1942, before gas ovens went into full production. In spite of these limitations variety of reports also had advantage of alerting author to some features of camps that have only been fully highlighted in recent years. I refer here to careful hierarchical structure of population groups Nazis had introduced as one more insidious divisive element among prisoners. It is, of course, well known that they went to point of setting up some prisoners as guards (Kapos) who could be counted on to torment lower classes. Indeed, it becomes obvious from these books that survival depended to some extent on one's place in hierarchy and population group to which one belonged. The author is quick to acknowledge other physical factors, such as one's health, and actual conditions of camp, but her interest is in emotional survival. Still, her first answer is that survival was through anarchic power of accident (p.5). Accidents, meaning unpredictability, senselessness, unexpectedness were an integral purposeful part of enemy's plans of total demoralization. The fact that no one was meant to survive is confirmed over and over, in every autobiography I have read. Individual survivals were accidental oversights, they were miracles. For further answers, Bluhm then turns to trauma theory, a pioneering move, at a time when diagnosis of PTSD had not been clearly formulated. She points to a process of depersonalization, a deliberate killing of one's capacity to feel, replacing it with detached observation of self and other, or else absorption in some extraneous task or fantasy. She also comments on possible lasting after-effects of unintegrated split-off feelings that might then erupt against wrong person at wrong moment. Eventually, Bluhm draws on a more traditional ego-psychology framework to answer her question, an approach which, in my eyes, is not only unfortunate in this context but actually demonstrates general weakness of that theory. …