‘To live is to suffer,
to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.’ – Friedrich Nietzsche,
German philosopher, 19th century
It is now a year and half since I launched Survive Your Camp. The time has been a
continuation of previous life with some victories and many difficulties. I did
not have the time to promote Survive Your
Camp as much as it deserves to be promoted. Recently a friend told me that
she had given copies to a friend and her brother and they really appreciated
the advice in the book. More people could benefit if they have the opportunity
to read it.
So I am relaunching Survive
your Camp. I will speak to any group and any radio station to promote Survive your Camp. Send an email with
contact details and I will contact you to arrange my talk. Following is the story
of the book.
I read many books to learn lessons to help me better deal
with difficult life situations. I came across a reference to Viktor Frankl.
Frankl, a Viennese psychiatrist, survived for three years in Auschwitz and
other concentration camps. He applied what he learned from his camp experiences
to logotherapy, the theory of psychotherapy that he developed.
One can survive a difficult situation by having a meaning in
life, a great love, or a noble, stoical acceptance of one’s suffering.
I read many of Frankl’s books, especially Man’s Search for Meaning, the book that
describes his experience. I used his experience as a guide for dealing with my
difficulties. I surmised that skills learned and used to help someone survive
the greatest, most evil calamity that man has committed against man must be
powerful skills.
So I started to write this book and read about other
concentration camp experiences. I extracted lessons that can be applied to our
own lesser difficulties in life. Our difficulties do not approach the horror of
the Nazi death camps.
Nothing else that man has ever done to his fellow man
approaches the organized, systematic horror of the Nazi death camps. Only one
inmate in 28 sent to these camps survived. Their main purpose was racial
extermination.
The Nazis established several camps for the sole purpose of
extermination – most notably Treblinka, Sobibor, Chełmno and Bełżec. There were
very few survivors of these camps, which is why they are less well known than
the bigger workcamps.
Only two Jewish prisoners survived Bełżec, in which around
500,000 died. Only three survived Chełmno. There were revolts in Treblinka and
Sobibor and some escapees survived to tell their tale. Extermination was
carried out on a similar scale at the multi-purpose camps of Auschwitz and
Majanek.
The Soviet Gulags, to which I also refer, were bad but not
in the same league. Many were imprisoned for surprisingly minor reasons such as
escaping from a German POW camp or referring to Stalin as ‘Old Man Whiskers’ in
private communication to a friend.
30% of those imprisoned in gulags perished. This was an
inevitable result of carelessness and indifference. Inmates died because they
were underfed and overworked in Siberian winters. There was not a policy of
deliberate extermination as there was in Nazi camps.
Auschwitz, in Poland, earned its notoriety because more
people died there than in any other camp – over one million. It was the main
destination for Jews transported from occupied countries as part of the Final
Solution in the latter years of the war. By then the Germans were losing the
war and most other extermination camps had been closed.
Upon arrival there was the first selection. Children, old
people and those judged unfit to work went straight to the gas chambers in
Auschwitz-Birkenau.
During those latter years of the war, healthy adults were
sent to workcamps to help the failing war effort. Frankl was transported to a
subcamp of Dachau near Munich. Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, other authors I
refer to below, were both sent to Auschwitz-Monowitz. This workcamp, also known
as Auschwitz III or Buna, provided labor for building of a synthetic rubber
factory.
Wiesel also survived the notorious death march and
transportation ahead of the Russian advance to Buchenwald in Germany. His
father died shortly after arriving in Buchenwald.
Some uneasy facts that I came across in my research present
surviving a concentration camp in a darker light than that presented by Frankl.
Primo Levi, an Italian Jewish chemist who survived for a year in Auschwitz,
wrote extensively on his experience in If
This Is a Man.
In his follow-up book The
Drowned and the Saved, published in 1986, Levi makes the point that the
privileged prisoners were a minority in the camps but represent a majority of
the survivors.
Privileged prisoners, or Prominenten
in German, helped run the camps. They included specialist workers such as
doctors, and cooks, and supervisors to help run the camp — camp wardens and
foremen, known as Kapos. They
received better treatment than the ordinary prisoners.
Many of the survivors felt guilty about surviving when so
many ‘better’ people died. They might have done something that they felt was
not the right thing in order to survive a bit longer.
This is another reason that the death camps were so evil.
Not only did they kill so many people, but they also scarred many survivors
with feelings of guilt. The Nazis wanted those imprisoned, especially the Jews,
to be degraded.
I now realize that doing whatever it takes to survive is a
key message of this book. To survive you need not just a noble attitude, your
life work or someone to love, and resilience. You may also need to make
compromises. You may have to do things that you would not do in better
circumstances.
This book contains lessons to help you survive a difficult
situation until a better day. When that day comes you can fully enjoy life
again. Do not feel guilty about doing what it takes to survive your difficult
situation.
