Return to life after the Holocaust

Press, 22 July 1989, Page 24

Return to life after the Holocaust

The Journey Back From Hell: Conversations with Concentration Camp Survivors. By Anton Gill. Grafton/Collins, 1989. 494 pp. $47.95. (Reviewed by Ralf Unger) Clinical studies of Holocaust survivors who spent a year or more in a concentration camp have shown that for them it is abnormal to be normal, even 40 years after the event. Virtually all show major psychological disturbances in their adjustment to life in general and to relationships in particular. Even though the Nazi camps had the power to change a person’s nature fundamentally and permanently, they did not make people into the extremes of a saint or an empty shell. The author has followed up 120 survivors of the German concentration camps, now living in the United States or various parts of Europe. He takes a few typical case histories, from their arrest to the present day, and tries to work out some principles of effects.

On the positive side he found generosity with time, and the giving of food and drink and lodging. Many, in their new lands, become involved with food and clothing industries in an effort to have security always within grasp. Some speak more easily than others, but all, if prompted sufficiently, will recount their experiences of dehumanisation. A surprising group have never left concentration camps and, after liberation, stayed on as witnesses and guides to endlessly testify and to try to understand their past in repeated descriptions to tourists. If they were non-Jewish many could go back to their own country, language and culture, but for the Jews of Europe their world, as well as their families had disappeared. There was nothing to return for or to return to.

For all, ordinary daily events, sights and sounds — such as a chimney belching smoke in Israel — can trigger dreadful memories of the gassing and burning of thousands of

families each night. The urge to marry and reproduce as soon as released, both as a flight from loneliness and to replace people who had been lost, was very strong. The child soon born would be named after someone related who had died in the camps, and the new child would carry a heavy burden of emotional investment.

An inability to mourn the death of loved ones leaves a permanent scar when everyone around has similar experiences until death becomes temporarily meaningless, but even under the worst possible conditions ordinary decent flashes of humanity persisted and flourished. In general, the people who survived best physically and psychologically were independent of family ties just before the war. This meant that they were in their teens to early 20s, no longer dependent upon their parents and having not yet formed secondary dependencies. A second group who adjusted reasonably in the future were considerably older, with their parents dead and their children grown up. Mortality in the concentration camp was highest among the older prisoners and children, both groups being immediately on arrival at places such as Auschwitz pointed towards the gas chambers.

Further, a good education was advantageous as well as the ability to think independently when constantly pressed close to terrified other humans. There were few suicides of former inmates after liberation, but after a long period of quiescence of 20 years or more sudden ageing, tiredness, and depression are features. Feelings of affection took decades to emerge again, with constant watching for danger and keeping up one’s guard; and the well documented guilt at having survived by guile or pure accident when so many had died. Six million Jews, and at least five million others, are ashes covering the countryside of the network of camps stretching from France to Germanoccupied Russia. As one survivor finally puts it, “You have to come to terms with the memory, and find a way of fitting it into your future life; and you have to decide that you are going to have a future life.”

This is not a scientific analysis of the survivor-syndrome from this black period of man’s history, but the voices who are now coming to the end of their damaged span of life are left mainly to speak for themselves in a chorus of warning.