I hope K will not be offended if I copy part of a comment that has suddenly came to surface from deep inside him. Myself have thought out this problem while still a child (before my Bar Mitzvah) but arrived to the opposite conclusion of his, and put the problem in the back of my mind where it has been for fifty years or so. K writes:
The prophetic words of the Wannsee Protocol have always echoed in my mind. The plan for the final solution was laid out - the able bodied will be taken for hard labor on roads, etc. where most will die of natural causes (i.e. be worked to death). But, the Germans understood, those that, like my father, refused to die would be the ones who threatened their plan the most:Eichmann, who wrote (but did not sign) the meeting's protocol, wrote like the concientious Austrian K-und-K low rank bureaucrat he was. Eichmann's genius was in perceiving that the efficient extermination of the Jews was an issue of coordination of bureaucracies (almost a logistic problem). The Jews had been mass exterminated before Eichmann was employed, as about 2 - 3 million Jews in ByeloRussia had already been killed by shooting, and the Polish ghettoes had been liquidated gradually. But Eichman did it vith no application of violence. Eichman did believe what the protocol says, because later in his life he wrote that Israel is the most terrible catastrophe that could happen to humanity. To him personally sure it was the worst of all possible catastrophies. It reminds me to the joke that an ant crossing a stream on a leaf starts to sink. He cries out: "The world is ending!". The elephant from the side says: "No, only an ant is sinking!" In this case, it was only a catastrophe for mini-Adolph. The big Adolph had killed himself before.
Der allfällig endlich verbleibende Restbestand wird, da es sich bei diesem zweifellos um den widerstandsfähigsten Teil handelt, entsprechend behandelt werden müssen, da dieser, eine natürliche Auslese darstellend, bei Freilassung als Keimzelle eines neuen jüdischen Aufbaues anzusprechen ist. (Siehe die Erfahrung der Geschichte.)
" The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly [i.e. exterminated], because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as a the seed of a new Jewish revival (see the experience of history.)"
"Den widerstandsfähigsten Teil" -That's what I am - and what my children are - the most resistant part...".
My mother always thought that the best and the brightest did not come back from Auschwitz and never thought herself special at all. She thought that Icig her younger brother and the adored boy in her family of many girls, was the very best - and he was killed on arrival. The first selection on arrival to Auschwitz was done by Dr Joseph Mengele himself, and he sent the pallid yeshivebocher of my uncle with his blond payes, to the the other side. The boys of the family (Shloyme, Moyshi) confronted Mengele and tried to take Icig come with them, but he was not tall (there was some kind of measuring) nor robust looking enough and an hour later he was dead. Conclusion: no darwinian selection of the fittest, but being in the right place at the right time. Good luck and good health. That's all.
28 comments:
I used to think that it was purely luck (and luck certainly played a large part) but as I have grown older I have read more accounts of the camps (in particular my father's little labor camp, just a few hundred men) and I understood that while there were a million ways to die (be too old, too young, in the wrong place at the wrong time, contract typhus, etc. etc.) there was only one way to survive. You had to be in it for the long haul, to be determined not to die just to spite the Germans, just out of pure Jew stubbornness (this is why we still have Jews but most of the other tribes mentioned in the Bible are extinct). In one of the accounts I read, an SS guard taunts a prisoner in my father's camp (who doesn't really answer) as they are being lead on yet another long march (a so called death march) at the very end of the war - "You know that we are never going to let you Jews go. Never. [This was bravado by this point - 1/2 the guards were already wearing civilian clothes under their uniforms so they could slip away quickly when they saw the Americans coming.] So why do you do it, why do you keep on going [If you stopped they would shoot you and put you out of your misery], keep on working for us like beasts? In the German's mind the Jews stayed alive only because they had no dignity - any honorable person would refuse to be a slave in this way, but he had it precisely wrong.
Many, many (probably most) of those who died were equally determined to live but died anyway. What I am saying is that it was easy to die by luck, but it was not possible, not at all possible despite what your mother may have said, to LIVE by luck. Maybe 90 or 95% of those who wanted to live died anyway but 100% of those who survived did not do so purely by luck - they were indeed the widerstandsfähigsten Teil, just as Eichmann wrote. It is no disrespect to the dead to say so.
You have to understand (and I'm sure you do but I say this for others who may be reading) that the selection was just the first step and that even of those selected for labor, to go on living was possible only thru sheer determination and daily struggle. The rations provided were inadequate for survival. Somehow you had to plot a way to get more. The clothing and footwear was inadequate - you had to find a way to get better ones. And so on, every day. You could do this dishonorably - there were Kapos that my father despised to his dying day. Or you could do it by being physically the strongest or you could do it by your wits, or by some combination, but you had to do it somehow and do it every day. Not everyone has this quality, but our parents did and I think (as you wonder why you are starting new ventures at an age when other men retire) that whether you know it or not, you do too and so do your children and mine too.
K
According to Viktor Frankl, the founder of the third Vienna school of psychology, those who survived were the ones who found some sort of meaning to keep themselves going. The same theme runs through Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn-those who could not find meaning in this new life, such as it was, quickly let themselves go, hygiene-wise to begin with, rapidly deteriorated physically and died, regardless of their initial strength and physical condition. On the other hand, Solzhenitsyn said that the best did not survive. Who knows?
The Twentieth Century, the century of populism's triumph, of total war, poverty and concentration camps, is behind us. We are the descendants of those who survived, whether by luck or virtue-who knows? Now we are being tested by prosperity and plenty, and eliminating ourselves by our own swinishness. I notice that again, it comes down to finding meaning or a lack thereof. KZ inmate Frankl might have gotten a grim chuckle out of it.
Regarding you mother (and my father and many others) , survivor's guilt and modesty prevented them from saying what I have said above. Of course you say that the ones who deserved to live, the very best and the brightest, did not and you should have been taken instead of them and it turned out otherwise only by luck and you are only the dirt that sticks to the boot, etc. You and I would say the same in their place. But this was a false modesty and now that they have joined their brothers and sisters in the eternal it can be spoken and analyzed cooly or as cool as it is possible to be around such a topic.
K
"Solzhenitsyn said that the best did not survive." See what I have written above - Solzhenitsyn was not an objective observer. Only a monster would say of himself, "I survived because I was better than those poor dead suckers. Much better." But he proved his own enduring qualities again and again after the war. He was able to reconstruct a life again after the camps, and again in America and again back in Russia, and would have ten times more in ten different places if it had been necessary, just as J (a man with these same qualities) has already led at least 3 lives.
But it is just as Frankl said - if you let yourself go, if you did not actively struggle every day, you would sicken and die. The idea of "meaning" is too much psychobabble for me and surely for my father. What is the "meaning" of life, of any life no less a life of daily misery? I don't think there was any meaning beyond sheer survival instinct - a cockroach struggles for survival even though it has no concept of meaning like a German intellectual. Many of those who died were overeducated folks who thought about stuff like "meaning" - they couldn't find any in those hell holes. My father, as a poor fisherman, never had the time nor the education to worry about such things.
To some extent, what was needed was a quality of self delusion. The rational thing was to conclude that you were, like the German said, NOT likely to get out alive and so you could save yourself a lot of suffering by dying immediately. But, isn't this a metaphor for all of us? Isn't the world itself one big KZ lager and none of us are ever going to leave those gates alive, and yet we struggle every day anyway?
K,
You make it sound like surviving Hell was an issue of will. I totally disagree. I believe that thinking this or thinking that did not make any difference. Just in our generation, no one can psych himself to do anything, no Napoleon Hill's "Think and Grow Rich", nor anything of that sort. May be I wrote about my discussion with Mr Zonneschein, a successful elder businessman, who maintained that believing that everything will be all right improves the out come of diseases - including cancer. That a positive attitude improves survival chances. I told him that it was bullshit, the attitude does nothing. He didnt want to agree - I imagined he did have some personal reason, so I faked some kind of "may be". His son is my client and pays on time.
Solzhenitsyn did not mean "better" as "tougher."
I believe that you don't need bookish intellect to find some kind of meaning in life, and don't believe that those who survived did so necessarily for the same reason that cockroaches survive our attempts to exterminate them.
PS It is all a question of health. The mind is an organ like others, if it is healthy, it keeps working just as the hair follicle or the heart. A healthy heart does not give up out of despair and stops. There is no such thing.
There are studies by the way that more people die immediately after their birthday than before. People will themselves to live so they can reach their birthday. You really can will yourself to live or die (within limits). However, the process in the camps was much more mundane - you did not will your heart to stop. You merely gave up the struggle to stay clean and nourished and within a relatively short time you would die. There was even a name for such people:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muselmann
"Dohodyagi" in Russian. A similar thing happens in wilderness survival: many die who "objectively" should have survived for much longer, and others, who "objectively" should have died right away, survive. Crazy stuff, floating around in the North Atlantic off Iceland for half a day, or whatever. The one common thing I recall is that they made a conscious decision: "I will live."
The question about the mussulmen is to what point the behaviour is voluntary, to what point it is physical. Extreme hunger, can be, produces a kind of stupor and indifference, which is the end of resistance. I think it is physiological. Yet I am no doctor, nor I have ever experienced extreme weakening hunger (Hunger I experience 24 hs a day for the last two months or so). I dont think we can solve this conundrum, better minds than us reached different conclusions.
In animals, and we are animals. there is a point when they "se entregan" - they give themselves up. The mice will stop running away from the cat, the gacelle will wait for the fatal bite. I think it is physical and mental exhaustion.
"I will live" - that's as close as I'm willing to buy into Dr. Frankl's "meaning" - the meaning of life is life. The purpose of living is in order to live. It's totally circular but there you have it.
I think though that will has more to do with it than you are willing to admit, J and it is not pure physiology - as B says those who survive are not necessarily those who are objective the "fittest" in any physical sense but those with the greatest determination(again, many with equal determination died anyway but almost none of those WITHOUT that determination survived). You might say that it was, a Triumph des Willens (a triumph of the will), or as the film about Salamo Arouch (who survived by boxing at Auschwitz) was entitled, the Triumph of the Spirit - ironic that the two films could not be more opposite but ended up with almost identical titles. Really it was a test of wills and the Jews that survived, though it was a totally unequal match, were willing to match their will against the Germans and ultimately their will prevailed.
Totally independent of this thread, recently a lightbulb went off in my head about visualization and why it works (sometimes). It has absolutely nothing to do with magical thinking - if you carry around a picture of your dream villa around in your pocket it will not materialize by itself, of course not. But human beings are very concrete thinkers. If you can actually see your goal, visualize it, then you can steel yourself better to achieve it than if you have no concrete goal.
At my wedding, my father told me a story about one of his buddies, Chaim Yankel (I love the Yiddish double names - Sura Laya (my daughter's name) , Chana Rukhl, etc.) who was a guest at the wedding that day. My father said that at the very end , on the death march, Chaim Yankel (who was a slightly built man, even by E. European Jewish standards - many of the Jews were virtual midgets) no longer had the strength to go on, so some of his friends (including my father) helped him to walk, put his arm around their shoulder and dragged him along (even though they themselves had little more strength - by then they were all down to less than 40 kilos). One of the things that my father said to him to encourage him was "we will dance at our children's weddings" (and indeed he did). Although I'm sure he could not picture the particulars (that the wedding would be somewhere in America, that the rabbi would be beardless, that men and women would sit together, etc.) I'm sure they visualized it at that moment - the chupa with his yet unborn son and his bride , the rabbi, the breaking of the glass the happy guests dancing, the tables laden with food and bottles of vodka, especially with food, and so on, and that vision helped him to keep going that day.
K
I will add one last thing - the vision of the wedding was significant - it was not a vision of just any feast or banquet but of genetic survival - they had to go on so that their bloodline would continue. They were shlepping along that day not just for themselves but for their children and grandchildren who were unborn and who never would be born unless they did so. This is why (I tell my children) for them to bear the offspring of some goy, some blond Nazi, would be the ultimate betrayal. If my father could have seen this, visualized that instead, he would have stopped and lay down by the side of the road so that the SS man could finish him and his blood line right then and there.
Ironically, Chaim Yankel never had any blood offspring - he and his wife were unable to conceive (at least he was not sterilized by the Germans like my father's other friend Mayer). He (and he was the only one I know who did this) went back to his home town (Radom) in Communist Poland in the early '60s and adopted a girl from a state institution, a very Polish looking girl with blue eyes (she was supposedly partly Jewish).
K
My wife's family name was Radomislski but they not, as far I care to know, from Polish Radom. Of course they changed it to a name more in tune with those times, like Tractorovich, Zinovieff or whatever.
K,
I suspect there was another selection factor that increased the chances of survival: metabolism/body type. That the Holocaust selected for Jews with lower metabolisms and more endomorphic body types.
Smaller stature would be helpful too, provided one was solidly built, as you would be able to survive on less food.
Regarding Frankl, his "Man's Search for Meaning" isn't psychobabble. It's pretty straightforward, and you can read the whole thing in an hour. He's pretty specific about what he means by "meaning", and it's not circular reasoning at all.
I you assign excessive weight to the concentration camp issue.
those who entered a concentration camp were basically doomed, their chances were slim.
Most - I think 90% - of the Jews who survived in Europe did it (1) by escaping, most to Russian Asia, (2) by being in the Budapest Ghetto (about 75% survived) or forced labor, (3) emigrating to America (100% survival).Those who fell into Nazi hands had no chances, and the selective value of those 30 - 40,000 who survived the camps does not affect the composition of the Jewish people. They are too few. No large darwinian effect.
The Wansee protocol phrase (see history) is typical of German race science of those times, and it is nonsense. Those who escaped to remote places such as Shanghai, Bolivia, etc. survived and the ones regenerating the Jewish people. if there was any selection effect at all it worked for those who foresaw in time what was coming and acted on that scenario. My grandparents did not imagine the unimaginable and they died. They had many opportunities to get out of Hungary almost to the end, but they were blind.
We are talking too much of the concentration camp, but that was atypical. The typical was normal life, and there are here many stories of people who succeeded to come to Palestina in the nineteen forties and thirties and WENT BACK TO POLAND UNDER GERMAN OCCUPATION. There are also many stories about the German occupation of Poland - the Russian State opened the frontier and let every Jews to escape with no questions at all, (the Jewish people is grateful to the Russian people for this gesture - remember that America CLOSED its frontiers at the same time to Jews - lets NOT forget who were the Jewish people's real friends in extreme necessity. Include the Japanese and the Chinese.). Well, the vast majority of the Jews did not go to Russia and there were many who welcomed the civilized Germans. Blindness to reality, or better unwillingness to see reality - kills.
Not every concentration camp was a death camp on the order of Auschwitz, there were some where there were higher survival rates. I would think many more than tens of thousands survived the camps.
You make an interesting point though about the self-selection of emigrants who left before war. Hans Stern, who passed away a year or two, comes to mind. His parents moved to Brazil with nothing but the their suitcases, and Hans ends up building a hugely successful global business, H.Stern.
I never heard of any Jew moving back to German-occupied Poland from Palestine. I'm not saying it didn't happen, but that wouldn't make any sense at all.
Dave,
There were many kinds of concentration camps, and even Auschwitz was not one but several camps. The camps for non-Jews were not hotels but the survival rate was in the order of 90% at least. So hundreds of thousands of Auscwitz immates survived - but there were not Jews and were not in the Jewish camp. I dont consider them in my analysis. The same about Dachau, which I visited, it was like a penitenciary camp, very bad, but more than half of the non-Jewish inmates survived. They were political and so on. Other camps were of different type and had no Jews. I read an autobiography of a Turk who was sent to Auschwitz, he survived quite well and never mentions - maybe he was not aware of it - the mass killings of Hungarian Jews that was happening in the same camp a few kilometers away. In Auschwitz camp itself there were also large industrial areas with forced Polish labor, they had a hard time working under the Germans but survived over 95%.
Regarding Jews going back to Poland, now it seems incredible, but people then did not know and did not believe that the Germans would kill every Jew. Also people came back from the woods to the ghettoes, and also I remember the Zionist movement's debates in Riga's ghetto if to escape to the woods or not. The majority decided to stay in the ghetto! They could not imagine reality, so I also somehow understand that the Americans and the British could not imagine what was going on.
Now the Final Solution is well known but in those days it was literally unimaginable to many (and was kept somewhat secret by the Germans, in a time and place when secrecy was still possible). Also in WWI, the British had spread false propaganda about German atrocities and so this time they assumed that the reports of atrocities that leaked out were being faked again.
I would say that in my father's particular labor camp, maybe 1/2 survived (although my father was in camp with 2 of his brothers and all 3 survived). Many died in the death march in the final days of the war and some even died after the liberation - some of those who gorged themselves with food would drop dead immediately. There were also typhus epidemics that killed many, spread by the lice that infested the prisoners. The Germans had scientifically calculated the minimum # of calories they could feed the prisoners and have them work for X number of months (something like 800 calories per day). Prisoners survived for more than X by somehow getting more.
K
Your father was in a work camp, not in Auschwitz or Treblinka or Sobibor or other Polish camps that were totally erased as if had never existed. It must have required luck and IQ to get into that paradise.
The people who did best was who foresee that the war would be a disaster for European Jews and left Europe in time with money. Example: Andre Kostolany. Mostly they were people without families nor roots. I knew many in Argentina. They did not really plan it - it happened and they were lucky.
Yes, of course in place like Treblinka (where my father's sisters and parents ended up ) the survival rate was zero. My father actually checked himself into a work camp because the Germans were doing the round-ups of the local ghettos (they called them Wysiedlenia- expulsion in Polish - ironic because this same word was applied after the war to the expulsion of millions of Germans from their former eastern territories in what is now Poland, an expulsion BTW that make the Palestinian Naqba look like a picnic in comparison but there is no peep from the Germans about this ) where they would put everyone on a train where they would never be heard from again (to Treblinka though they did not know this at the time, they still suspected that the train was not going anywhere good). The feeling was (and the Germans encouraged this - see "Arbeit mach Frei") that if you were working for the Germans they might not kill you right away and to some extent (at least in my father's case) this was true. Was it pure luck that he did this or was it some instinct or rational assessment of the situation? I think it was more than pure luck, it was a measured reading of the cards (all of which were bad but some were worse than others). In general, although many of the prisoners in his camp died of "natural" causes (just like little Adolph said), there were relatively few executions (only in case of "crimes" such as taking food). In fact, the camp was so "good" that after the war his commandant, Walling received only 20 years hard labor (let go after 10) instead of being executed like many of the other commanders.
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=109050
K
I read this with interest (and sadness.)
My father was also captured, and interned a German POW camp.
Not a death camp, to be sure, but not exactly Club Med either.
Anon.
Somewhere on the VW corporate website they have a PDF file of a study that the VW company commissioned (out of guilt) regarding the use of forced labor at the VW factory during WWII. There were apparently several types and levels of forced labor ranging from Jews (the lowest) to Russian POWs to conscripted non-Jewish workers from the Western and Eastern occupied countries, etc. and in their very precise German way and according to their position in the Aryan hierarchy, the different labor forces (even though they sometimes worked side by side - the armaments factory my father worked in in Radom was partly staffed by Polish civilians and partly by Jewish prisoners) were classified differently and given different treatment, rations, pay (if any), privileges, etc. So just like Dante's Inferno, even though they were all hell and none resembled Club Med, the German Hell had many different circles. A POW camp for Western Allied prisoners was probably the highest circle, with contact with the Red Cross, relief packets delivered, etc. Rolex even had a deal where they would sell Allied POWs a Rolex watch which was delivered to the camp and payment was not due until the war was over (I kid you not). The Russian prisoners OTOH were sometimes treated even worse than the Jews - they fed them even less if such a thing is possible, and most died.
For some reason (mainly a hope for reciprocity) the Americans made a decision to treat its German POWs extremely well. Many of the POWs moved to the US after the war because they had enjoyed American life so much. Ironically, in the POW camps in the American South (Texas was a popular spot) the white Nazis were often treated better than American black troops.
K
My father enjoyed his time so much he escaped twice.
Anon.
He's lucky the Germans didn't shoot him. Geneva Convention or not, if you tried to escape too often and they caught you the Gestapo might decide that you were "killed while resisting arrest".
I've never understood the escape thing. Assuming you are in the middle of a hostile country and don't speak the language like a native speaker, where are you going to "escape" to? I suppose it made sense in parts of France where some of the natives were sympathetic and there was some chance of getting to Spain, etc. but elsewhere what was the point of risking your life for a small chance of actually making it out of the country (not just beyond the wire, which was only the 1st step)? I assume escaped twice meant recaptured twice, or at least once?
I think part of it was that the prisoners needed something to occupy their minds and digging tunnels, forging documents, creating clothes, all that crap was a good creative outlet for them. The Germans in the US did the same and very few, possibly none of the escapees actually made it back to German lines, though a few managed to disappear into the populace. Even when they made it across the Mexican border, the Mexicans would just give them back to us. Supposedly part of the goal was to tie up enemy resources - someone out hunting for escaped prisoners could not be at the front line shooting at the enemy, but in practice these were not the same people .
K
Escaping from a prisioner camp is a social activity, filling with purpose the purposeless life of a prisioner. Each twisting the nose of the guard becomes a feat of heroism, even if it is banal and purposeless. Prisioners play complicated games with the guards, and intheir memoirs they describe with pride how they succeeded in winning a small victory over their guards, like opening he window or receiving some kind of food. Somethings I reflected that the guards must have seen the prosioners as mad, waging war onthem for things like a window, but then that is how people is managed. When I managed a plant, I was able to have grown up people begging to let them go half an one hour before or some other trifling.
Yes, the British prisoners especially thought that it was all a big sporting game, that war was like a soccer match with rules and that at the end of the game the gentlemen would all shake hands with each other. As I said before, the Nazis did not enjoy playing games - if a prisoner escaped once too often the Gestapo would just shoot him in the head with no witnesses and put and end to the games. This is what happened to the escapees depicted in the movie "The Great Escape".
K
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