The Survivors Experience

1
The Survivors Experience

• Primo Levi Survival in Auschwitz

2
The Survivors Experience

• Introduction to Elie Wiesels Night and Primo
  Levis Survival in Auschwitz

3
What was the experience like?

• Here we have one account, but the opinions about
  what it was like vary.
• Why? The experiences varied.
• The people who experienced it varied a great deal.

4
How did people deal with the Holocaust?

• --Some said the prisoners adjusted to the point
  that he/she accepted the values of the SS as
  his/her own.
• That the art of cruelty was refined to perfection
  and that every facility of modern technology and
  psychology was combined to destroy men mentally
  and physically

5
How did people deal with the Holocaust?

• Other say there was a social and moral order,
  there were innumerable small acts of humanity
  that kept the prisoners sane.

6
What made it possible for a prisoner to survive?

• One survivor put it thus
• It wasnt ruthlessness that enabled an individual
  to survive -- it was an intangible quality, . . .
  An overwhelming thirst --perhaps too, a talent
  for life, and a certain faith in life.

7
Bruno Bettelheim

• Until his death in 1990, one of the worlds
  leading child psychologists
• Had been an inmate at a KZ in the late 30s for a
  year.
• Formed one of the most influential views of the
  experience.

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Bruno Bettelheims View

• There was systematic dehumanization of the
  victims of the Nazi camps,
• It crippled the inmates psychologically and
  caused them to regress to childlike behavior.
• In his view, the victims had little influence on
  their fate.
• Survival was not so much dependent on the
  prisoner, but often just on chance.

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Question and Point of Contention

• One major point of contention was survival in
  the hands of the victim at all?
• To some degree. The victim had to be determined
  to outlast his tormentors.

10
Another Controversial Point by Bettelheim

• Prisoners, especially those who were in the camp
  a long time, took over the behavior of the SS.
• Tortured fellow prisoners, behavior modeled by
  their surroundings.
• They would try to get parts of SS uniforms to wear

11
Terrence Des Pres

• Disagrees with Bettelheim
• Says the prisoners in power who did the killing
  were criminals, murderers and rapists who behaved
  badly before they came to the camps.
• They found their behavior endorsed there.
• The imitation of the SS is strategic imitation.
  A way to get positions of power to help each
  other out.
• The assumption that there was no moral or social
  order in the camps is wrong.

12
Who was the witness?

• Important to remember that all the accounts we
  have of the Holocaust are from survivors whose
  experience by its very nature is not typical.
• Primo Levi I must repeat we, the survivors, are
  not the true witnesses.
• This is an uncomfortable notion, of which I have
  become conscious little by little, reading the
  memoirs of others and reading mine at a distance
  of years. We survivors are not only an exiguous
  (small, diminutive) but also an anomalous
  minority we are those . . . who did not touch
  bottom. Those who did so, those who saw the
  Gorgon (Medusa was one), have not returned to
  tell about it or have returned mute, but they are
  the Muselmen, the submerged, the complete
  witness, the ones whose disposition would have a
  general significance. They are the rule, we are
  the exception.

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What was the typical Holocaust Experience?

• The typical experience was one of death. Those
  stories cannot be told, at least not first hand.
• No one can be sure how their experiences were
  different from the survivors.
• Think about it What would those who died say?
• Important to note
• the Holocaust was a vast and complex process
  which involved millions of people.
• We will be reading/seeing various accounts to
  give us at least a varied picture. There can
  never be a complete picture.

14
Primo Levi

• Born in Turin in 1919
• Raised as a Jew, not religious
• Studied chemistry
• Graduated in 1941, Mussolinis race laws come
  into effect
• Hard to find a job, joined the resistance.

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Primo Levi

• Captured in 1943
• Sent to Auschwitz
• After the Holocaust, returned to Turin and
  chemistry
• Started writing, many famous works
• The Periodic Table
• Married, had two children
• 1987 died falling down the stairwell of the house
  he was born in. Committed suicide?

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Map of Birkenau, Auschwitz camp
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Auschwitz Camp One

• Arial view

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Birkenau Photo
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Dantes Inferno

• The levels of hell

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Dantes Inferno

• Medieval vision of the levels of hell

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Dantes Inferno

• The levels of hell