Survival in the camps was a matter of luck. The hardest fact of camp survival is that no amount of intelligence, virtue, courage or determination was enough to keep a prisoner alive if the SS man at the head of the work column took against them, or if the deportation train was selected for direct gassing on arrival, or if a louse carrying typhus reached them in the bunk that month. The prisoners who lived to write about the camps were keenly aware that they were not the strongest or the most resourceful of the people who had been deported with them. They were the ones the dice had not yet rolled against. That awareness shapes much of the survivor literature, and it shaped much of how survivors lived afterwards.
That said, beyond luck, there were attitudes and habits that improved the odds. The men and women who came out of the camps had usually developed them. They are described, with some variation, in the major survivor memoirs. The pattern is consistent enough that it is worth setting out.
The first phase: shock
The first days in the camp were the most dangerous. The new arrival was disoriented by the sudden loss of family, identity, clothes, possessions and language. The SS regime depended on this disorientation. A prisoner who could not understand the orders being shouted in German would be beaten for not obeying them. A prisoner who hesitated at the wrong moment, or stood in the wrong place at roll-call, or failed to remove their cap quickly enough, could be killed. The death rate among new arrivals in their first month was several times higher than among prisoners who had been in the camp longer.
The first task of survival was therefore to get past the shock period as quickly as possible. Survivors describe a deliberate mental decision, made in the first day or two, to stop reacting to the camp as a normal person would and to start reacting to it as the camp required. To accept that the world had changed and that the rules of the world they had come from no longer applied. Those who could not make that adjustment, who continued to expect fairness, or to stand on dignity, or to argue with orders, generally did not last long.
The middle phase: routine
Past the shock period, survival became a matter of small daily tactics. Find a work assignment that was less lethal than others. Stay close to a more experienced prisoner who knew the rules. Save a piece of bread from the morning ration to eat at midday, when hunger would be worse. Find a way to wash, even briefly, because lice carried typhus and clean prisoners were marginally less likely to be infected. Learn enough German to understand orders. Learn the names of the SS men and the kapos and which were dangerous and which could be approached. Stay out of the infirmary unless the alternative was death, because the infirmary was checked regularly for selections.
Most of all, get into a labour assignment that involved indoor work or skilled work rather than outdoor heavy labour. The Auschwitz Sonderkommando, despite its appalling work, had access to better food than the labour columns and was kept alive longer for that reason. The Auschwitz orchestra, made up of professional musicians forced to play marches as the labour columns went to and from work, was kept in good health because the SS wanted the music. Office workers, kitchen workers, prisoners in the camp infirmary as nurses, prisoners working in the warehouses sorting confiscated goods, all had better odds than men working in the quarries or on construction details. Getting one of these assignments was usually a matter of contact with a kapo or a more senior prisoner. The relationships involved sometimes had a price, particularly for women.
The mental discipline
Beyond the practical tactics, survivors describe a particular mental discipline. Primo Levi calls it the refusal to consent. The camp was designed to reduce the prisoner to an animal, to make them think only of food and warmth and the next hour, to strip them of any larger frame of reference. The discipline of survival was the daily refusal to be reduced. Some survivors held on to a piece of work in their head, a poem they were writing, a mathematical problem they were thinking through, a prayer they would say each morning. Others simply held on to the determination to remember, so that they could tell what had happened. Levi writes about a fellow prisoner who taught him a fragment of Dante in the camp, to keep his mind alive. Viktor Frankl writes about the deliberate cultivation of inner life. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch describes the mental space she kept around her cello playing, even as a prisoner in the women’s orchestra at Auschwitz.
Other survivors had no such resource. Many had been simple working people whose pre-war lives gave them no spiritual or intellectual reservoir to draw on. Survival for them was harder, but it was not impossible. What survivors describe in common is a refusal to give in to the camp’s logic, a stubborn insistence that they were still themselves. The prisoners who stopped insisting, the ones who became the Muselmanner, generally died within weeks.
The factor of relationships
Survivors who had a friend or a sibling or a close acquaintance in the camp generally lived longer than those who were entirely alone. The pair of prisoners who could share food, take turns sleeping when one was sick, and warn each other of dangers, doubled their chances. The literature of camp friendship is one of the strongest in the survivor canon. Levi’s relationship with Alberto, his Italian friend at Monowitz; Wiesel’s with his father; Lasker-Wallfisch’s with her sister Renate; Kitty Hart-Moxon’s with her mother. Many of these pairings ended with one half dying, often in the death marches in the final weeks. The survivor was usually the one who lived to tell the story, carrying the dead partner through the rest of their life.
The factor of luck
Above all of this is luck. The most carefully tactical, mentally disciplined, well-connected prisoner in the camp could die in a typhus outbreak in the next bunk, or be selected for the gas chambers in a sudden cull, or be shot by a guard for an imagined offence. Survivors are usually the first to say so. The famous opening of Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved insists that the survivors are not the truest witnesses, because the truest witnesses, the ones who saw the camp at its worst, did not come back to speak. The survivors saw a partial picture. The picture is the only one we have, but its incompleteness is the first fact about it.
What it tells us
The psychology of survival was not the application of some special inner strength. It was a daily, partial, mostly unsuccessful set of small tactics, supported by relationships, mental discipline, and the random absence of the things that would have killed the prisoner. The camp could be survived in the sense that some prisoners survived it. It could not be survived in the sense that any prisoner could rely on a strategy. The men and women who came out had been spared, more than they had succeeded.
See also
Sources
- Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, Summit Books, 1988
- Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, Beacon Press, 1959
- Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, Inherit the Truth, St Martin’s, 2000
- Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps, Oxford University Press, 1976