Survivors Of Nazi Concentration Camps Research Articles

La Littérature inouïe: témoigner des camps dans l’après-guerre. Par Ariane Santerre

Analysing linguistic techniques and literary resources in testimonies by survivors of Nazi concentration camps in the immediate post-war period (1945–47), Ariane Santerre nuances the claim that the Holocaust is ‘indicible’, arguing that testimony’s ‘impossibilité’ to communicate derives from being ‘inouï’: marginalized, ruptured, and ‘inentendu’ (pp. 275, 23). In the first years following the war, survivor accounts were met with incomprehension or a categorical refusal to listen. Of the hundred or so published in France and Italy during this time, only a few are known today. Focusing on the testimonies written in French or Italian of six men and four women — Robert Antelme, Suzanne Birnbaum, Aldo Bizzarri, Marcel Conversy, Denise Dufournier, Guy Kohen, Primo Levi, Liana Millu, David Rousset, and Giuliana Tedeschi — Santerre sets out to recuperate those forgotten and marginalized, yet also includes the canonical. In Part One, ‘Aspects linguistiques des témoignages’, Santerre argues that the fractured language the authors use to express the traumatic double experience of living through and writing, so soon after liberation, about the concentration camps forced them to rethink their relationship to language in a way that challenged the very foundations of literature. She examines three features of the authors’ language: their reflections on ‘les non-coïncidences du dire’ (p. 53), the unmooring of language, and the gulf between survivors and the public; their metalinguistic reflections, which reveal how, faced with the loss of their linguistic reference points, they reinvested words with new meanings; and a Bakhtinian reading of the dialogism of Lagerszpracha — a mixture of German jargon, prisoner slang, and camp lingua franca, which the testimonies commonly include. Part Two, ‘Ressources littéraires’, first argues that survivors tried to understand and represent their experience through intertextuality, thereby activating the reader’s imagination and understanding through shared cultural foundations, particularly of Dante. In this way, testimony ‘se révèle véridique tout en s’inscrivant […] dans un imaginaire littéraire’ (p. 229) — although not without limitations. Sitting somewhat tangentially in the volume, the final chapter examines ‘L’Intermédialité des témoignages’ — the connections and reciprocal influences between different media and the space where such connections occur. Santerre posits the view of some authors that a single medium is insufficient for communication, and analyses rare testimonies that include photographs to self-authenticate or contextualize the author, or which constitute testimonial theatre. She argues that both media problematize authenticity and objectivity, artifice, and illusion. Her conclusion highlights the way in which the reader is central to how survivor testimony is written, and determines that twenty-first-century readers are well placed to receive and respect testimonies from both the Holocaust and subsequent genocides and state-led atrocities. Particular strengths of this accessible, convincing, and engaging volume are its detailed linguistic analyses via many select extracts, new insights into familiar testimonies, introductions to unfamiliar ones, and useful paratexts including brief author biographies — although its bibliography in six categories complicates navigation. Complementing Annette Wieviorka’s analysis of French post-war testimonies (Déportation et génocide: entre la mémoire et l’oubli (Paris: Plon, 1992)), this volume is extremely valuable for scholars and students of Holocaust testimony and of marginalized testimonial writers.

An Unexpected Fraternity: An Approach to Holocaust Memoirs in English Through Animal Metaphorization

This paper examines autobiographical texts written by Nazi concentration camp survivors to explore the authors’ metaphorization of animals as a means of conveying their own suffering. The authors whose memoirs are analyzed migrated to America after the war, and significantly chose to pen their traumatic experience in English, which must have been a challenging endeavor for them as non-native speakers. Since academic discussion on the Holocaust is mainly conducted in an Anglophone framework, it is vital that we pay attention to English-language memoirs, and listen to the survivors’ genuine words, rather than merely relying on translations. I suggest that animal metaphorization allows them to overcome in some way the ineffability inherent to all Holocaust memoirs. Moreover, by exploring animal images it is possible to inquire about their personal attitudes regarding other species, as authors often sympathize with –and relate to– animal suffering. My main goal is thus to decide whether this rhetorical resource points at the emergence of an interspecies empathy, based on the shared ability to feel pain and, as sentient beings, to suffer.

The death of historical memory? Javier Cercas's El impostor versus the legacy of Spaniards deported to Nazi camps

ABSTRACTJavier Cercas criticizes what he calls “the so-called memory industry” in his 2014 book, El impostor. While delving into the life story of Enric Marco, who was unmasked in 2005 as a false survivor of the Nazi concentration camp Flossenbürg, Cercas pronounces historical memory dead in Spain. This article retraces Marco's rise to fame against the backdrop of Spain's relevance to the Holocaust as well as seven decades of narratives by actual Spanish survivors of Nazi concentration camps published inside the country. These narratives have given increased visibility to Spanish deportees, forming a core aspect of Spain's historical memory. Countering Cercas's claim of morbidity, this article demonstrates that the recuperation of historical memory has moved from a grassroots movement to a legislative initiative and back again in Spain, particularly as concerns the legacy of Spanish Republicans deported to Nazi camps. Cercas's misplaced glorification of a false survivor and his narrow focus on the recuperation of historical memory as a collective memory of the Spanish Civil War and Franco dictatorship governed by the Law of Historical Memory notwithstanding, the movement has had a trickle-down effect on the visibility of the history of Spaniards deported to Nazi camps during World War II.

Negative Hopes: Social Dynamics of Isolating and Passive Forms of Hope

This article critically questions the popular idea of hope as a motivating emotion as well as the more specific idea of hope as engendering solidary ties. Both notions can be found in social movement research and will be introduced in the first section. The idea that hope is such an activating force that binds people together is challenged by reports of some survivors of Nazi concentration camps. In the second part I will turn to a selection from the writings of Tadeusz Borowski and Ruth Klüger, both of whom survived Auschwitz. They emphasize that it was (besides other factors) the prisoners’ hope that isolated them from each other and which prevented them from undertaking acts of resistance against their tormentors. In the third and main section a close reading of Friedrich Torberg's novel Vengeance is Mine will help to identify particular features of such numbing forms of hope. Although fictitious, this novel broadens our understanding of hope by revealing two social dynamics encouraging hopes that have isolating effects and that induce passivity. I will close with reflections on how these negative accounts of hope can be integrated into a general conception of hope. I suggest differentiating between two meanings of hope: the one refers to ideas of a better future, the other one to the ways by which such futures may be achieved. It is useful to distinguish these two meanings analytically in order to understand the empirically different forms of hope.

초국적 이방인의 보호받지 못한 삶과 죽음: - 나치 수용소 유대인 생존자들의 글을 중심으로 = The Life and Death of Jews as Transnational Strangers: Comparative Textual Analyses of Nazi Concentration Camp Survivors

In this age of globalization, the meaning and power of the national, ethnic and cultural boundaries are getting blurred and trans-movements are becoming more popular. The new movements are evaluated positively from the perspective of freedom and emancipation. This paper, however, points to another aspect of these movements: the discontent and anxiety of a transmovement drawing upon the darkest historical examples, written by survivors of Nazi concentration camps. The history of European Jews can be regarded as a history of inclusion and exclusion. The national state in the spirit of humanism and enlightenment provided citizenship to Jews, who had previously lived either as wandering Jews or as ghetto dwellers, in both cases just as excluded strangers. After 150 years of assimilation and inclusion, to be considered transnational Jews, with the emphasis particularly upon “Jews,” the label applied by the Nazis, sounded for the Jews somewhat odd, even exclusionary, as was in fact intended. The actual exclusion process enforced by the Nazis had to be executed not only emotionally but also systematically and legally. The texts of survivors of Nazi concentration camps report on how the Jews reacted to this process of exclusion from human boundaries at that time and how they lived an unprotected life as homo sacer in the concentration camps. The texts show ex negatio, how risky transnational movements could be without a corresponding respect for human rights. We see that this lesson is still valid when we look at the new shadow zones of globalization, such as refugee villages. The dangers confronting transnational movements are analyzed in the following texts: La Nuit (Elie Wiesel) and Se questo e un uomo (Primo Levy), both in translation; and Jenseits von Schuld und Suhne (Jean Amery), Der siebente Brunnen (Fred Wander), and weiter leben (Ruth Kluger), all three in the original German.

Joseph B. Kirsner, MD, PhD, 1909-2012

Joseph B. Kirsner, MD, PhD, 1909-2012

Exposure to the Holocaust and World War II Concentration Camps during Late Adolescence and Adulthood is not Associated with Increased Risk for Dementia at Old Age

Holocaust and Nazi concentration camp survivors were subjects to prolonged and multi-dimensional trauma and stress. The aim of the present study was to assess the association between exposure to such trauma during late adolescence and adulthood with dementia at old age. In 1963, approximately 10,000 male civil servants aged 40-71 participated in the Israel Ischemic Heart Disease (IIHD) study. Of them, 691 reported having survived Nazi concentration camps [concentration Camp Survivors (CCS)]. Additional 2316 participants were holocaust survivors but not concentration camp survivors (HSNCC) and 1688 were born in European countries but not exposed to the Holocaust (NH). Dementia was assessed in 1999-2000, over three decades later, in 1889 survivors of the original IIHD cohort; 139 of whom were CCS, 435 were HSNCC, and 236 were NH. Dementia prevalence was 11.5% in CCS, 12.6% in HSNCC, and 15.7% in NH. The odds ratio of dementia prevalence, estimated by age adjusted logistic regression, for CCS as compared to HSNCC was 0.97 (95% CI: 0.53-1.77), approximate Z = -0.10; p = 0.92. Further adjustment for socioeconomic status, diabetes mellitus, and other co-morbidity at midlife (coronary heart disease, lung, and kidney disease), and height did not change the results substantially. Thus, in subjects who survived until old age, late adolescence and adulthood exposure to extreme stress, as reflected by experiencing holocaust and Nazi concentration camps, was not associated with increased prevalence of dementia. Individuals who survived concentration camps and then lived into old age may carry survival advantages that are associated with protection from dementia and mortality.

Lack of Long-Lasting Consequences of Starvation on Eating Pathology in Jewish Holocaust Survivors of Nazi Concentration Camps.

The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether Holocaust survivors will show the same eating pathologies that were found in other participants who had also undergone starvation. Fifty-five Holocaust survivors and 43 matched control participants answered a questionnaire designed to explore eating problems and pathologies described in the literature as lasting for decades after a period of severe food restriction. Confirmation of the survivors' reports was obtained from their children. No significant differences in current eating habits were found between the Holocaust survivors and their matched controls. Prolonged starvation in Holocaust survivors did not lead to disordered eating habits in the sample. These results conflict with the notion that severe starvation consistently leads to food preoccupation and disordered eating.

Practical geriatrics: possible association of posttraumatic stress disorder with cognitive impairment among older adults.

Practical geriatrics: possible association of posttraumatic stress disorder with cognitive impairment among older adults.

Magnitude of trauma and personality change

In this paper the author postulates that, in post‐traumatic personality structures caused by overwhelming traumatic experiences, pre‐traumatic personality features and childhood experiences are of little or no relevance. Sixty‐four survivors of Nazi concentration camps are examined, their concentration camp experiences detailed and pre‐persecution histories and post‐persecution psychopathology studied. The significance of a concentration camp experience is analytically discussed and evaluated. This study shows that 52 cases (81.2%) of the 64 survivors of concentration camps presented an almost identical depressive personality structure irrespective of their prepersecution life history. The 64 survivors of concentration camps are psychologically compared to 78 cases of people who, in view of the menacing circumstances, decided to emigrate and in this way were spared from becoming victims of the Nazi ‘final solution’. Finally, the author discusses the value of psychoanalytical treatment.

Parental communication of Holocaust experiences and interpersonal patterns in offspring of Holocaust survivors

This study examined the interpersonal problems and central relationship patterns of Holocaust Survivors’ Offspring (HSO) who were characterised by different patterns of parental communication of their parents’ Holocaust trauma. Fifty-six adults born to mothers who were survivors of Nazi concentration camps and 54 adults born to parents who immigrated to Israel before 1939 with their own parents (non-HSO) were recruited randomly from an Israeli sample. While the groups did not differ in their current mental health, HSO who reported nonverbal communication with little information about their mother’s trauma endorsed more interpersonal distress than HSO who experienced informative verbal communication and less affiliation than either HSO who experienced informative verbal communication or non-HSO. They also differed in their central relationship patterns with their parents and spouses. The findings are discussed in the context of the unique dynamics of growing up with the silent presence of the mother’s trauma.

Binge eating and eating attitudes among Nazi concentration camp survivors.

Prisoners in Nazi concentration camps lived through extreme situations that included starvation. We test our hypothesis that there is a greater lifetime presence of binge eating among survivors from concentration camps than in a control group. The subjects were 51 political prisoners who survived Nazi concentration camps and 47 ex-partisans of similar age and sex. A clinical interview investigated the lifetime occurrence of binge eating. The Eating Attitudes Test was also administered. The mean reported loss of weight among survivors was 27-3 kg. Thirty-three per cent of them and 4% of the ex-partisans reported going on eating binges at some time in their lives (P < 0.0007). There was no significant difference in the Eating Attitudes Test scores of survivors and ex-partisans, but, among survivors, the Bulimia subscale significantly discriminated subjects who reported current binge eating. Our study confirms that subjects who have survived a period of extreme food deprivation are more likely to develop binge eating behaviour.

Post-traumatic stress disorder and major depression among Italian Nazi concentration camp survivors: a controlled study 50 years later.

The study aimed to assess the current and lifetime rates of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and major depression (MDD) among Nazi concentration camps survivors. We investigated 51 Italian political deportees and 47 Resistance Movement veterans who reported traumatic experiences during active service. The Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV was used to assess the presence of PTSD and MDD. The Dissociative Experiences Scale and the shorter version of the Hopkins Symptoms Checklist were also administered. The lifetime rates of PTSD and MDD were 35.3% and 45.1% respectively among deportees and 4.3% and 6.4% among former partisans. The current rates for PTSD and MDD were 25.5% and 33.3% among deportees and 4.3% and 4.3% among former partisans. Dissociative symptoms were more severe among deportees than among Resistance movement veterans. Concentration camp internment, even for political reasons, appears to have severe long-term psychiatric consequences.

Holocaust victims seek restitution from Degussa

Holocaust survivors are asking a U.S. court to award them unspecified restitution, including compensatory and punitive damages, from German chemical producer and metal refiner Degussa. They allege the firm profited from atrocities committed when the Nazi Party controlled Germany prior to and during World War Ð. Lawyers working on behalf of the survivors say the suit could bring them ownership of Degussa, which had sales of $8.5 billion and assets of $2.6 billion for the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 1997. In a class-action suit filed in federal district court in Newark, N.J., on behalf of more than 100,000 survivors of Nazi concentration camps, four New York City complainants allege the firm sought to profit from the theft and confiscation of looted personal assets. Those assets included but were not limited to gold taken from jewelry, precious-metal coins, eyeglasses, and teeth stolen from concentration camp inmates. The suit also accuses Degussa of acquiring on the ...

Embers of war: letters from a Quaker relief worker in war-torn Germany

Grigor McClelland served as a Quaker relief worker in British-occupied Germany between May 1945 and June 1946, working first for Displaced Persons who had been brought to work in Germany during the war and stranded there. These were mainly Russians and Poles, but also people from most of the other countries of Europe, often perplexed as to whether they could or should return home. From December 1945 McClelland and his team transferred to work on the problems of the German population in part of the Ruhr. They distributed food and other supplies, helped German welfare and youth organizations to start again, and liaised closely with the British Military Government and with the new civilian administration, working cheek by jowl with the Swedish and Swiss agencies. The team had entered Germany whilst General Montgomery's non-fraternization order was in force, but soon their lives mingled with those of Germans, they sat up late at night with them, discussing religion, politics, literature and art, and developed some lasting friendships. McClelland met many survivors of Nazi concentration camps and visited two camps run by the British for Nazis and suspected Nazis. He heard Pastor Martin Niemoeller talk about the Guilt Question to a hostile audience of Westphalian pastors, and visited the War Crimes Trial at Nuremberg. He and his fellow workers were addressed by General Montgomery, and met the saintly pacifist, Pastor Wilhelm Mensching, and his congregation. The letters in this book, which were written by McClelland during those 13 months in Germany, provide a day-by-day account of the relief team's life and work, the conditions they tackled and the people they met.

Long term mortality of NAZI concentration camp survivors

Nazi concentration camp survivors have been shown to have excess mortality in the first 20 years following their release. To determine if this excess persists, Israeli civil servants were studied. Mortality of camp survivors and of other post-war European immigrants was compared 20–41 years following World War II. Using survival analysis and proportional hazards models, no difference in mortality rates was found.

Time orientation in Nazi concentration camp survivors: forty years after.

Temporal aspects were evaluated in 44 Nazi concentration camp survivors and 31 control subjects, all 50-60 years old. The survivors attached to the Holocaust a more intense role within time orientation; they were more past-oriented, less future-oriented, and had a generally more pessimistic attitude toward life events. Implications of the findings are discussed, with emphasis on the role of time orientation in the long-term effects of the Holocaust on survivors.

The coping behavior of Nazi concentration camp survivors.

This study of coping strategies reports on interviews with 19 survivors of Nazi concentration camps. The subjects, relatively healthy survivors who were not severely psychiatrically disabled, were interviewed in Jerusalem and the San Francisco Bay area. The author presents a classification of coping strategies in extreme stress situations and discusses the long-term effectiveness of certain of these strategies.

Some second-generation effects of survival of the Nazi persecution.

Nazi concentration camp survivors are known to continue to suffer the adverse physical and psychological effects of their internment. This is a study of the effects on their children. A clinical sample of mid-teenage children of survivors was found to have more behavioral and other disturbances and less adequate coping behavior than did a clinical control group. Parental preoccupation is suggested as a contributing factor.

Persecution trauma and the reconditioning of emotional life: a brief survey.

This brief survey is intended to outline the types of persecution trauma commonly seen among the survivors of Nazi concentration camps. Many psychiatric evaluations of these victims for purposes of compensation under the German law of restitution are, the author feels, cursory, unrealistically limited, and biased in favor of a narrow etiological view. He offers specific guidelines to aid future examiners in their psychiatric evaluations.