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The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps
An eloquent revelation that touches the foundations of what man is. Neither despairing nor conventionally hopeful, The Survivor describes the most terrible events in human memory. But what emerges finally is an image of man stubbornly equal to the worst that can happen.
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1976
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August 20, 2012
For us the camps are terminal images. They are the realised archetypes of eternal victimhood and of evil forever triumphant.
This is a very unflinching book about those most extreme places that haunt our nightmares, the Nazi concentration camps. The author is concerned with survival. How was it done?
Survival is an experience with a definite structure, neither random nor regressive nor amoral. The aim of this book is to make the structure visible.
As he examines the testimony of survivors
an unexpected ambiguity arises : as a witness the survivor is both sought and shunned… insofar as we feel compelled to defend a comforting view of life we tend to deny the survivor’s voice
And the survivor, at times, becomes resented - because they remind us of a collective moral failure, yes, but also because we envy them their suffering, since suffering, some fondly imagine, equates to a moral stature we ourselves can never attain, and because our own pain is rendered trivial in the face of theirs. We resent their absolute moral authority. The author himself does not endorse this idea, that the survivors have a superior moral wisdom, but he recognises that many do, as a kind of straw to cling on to in a bleak universe.
The author examines the camp experience. He call it an "excremental assault" - the essence of the camp experience was to attempt to destroy the inmate as a human being with a sense of self. The goal was to turn them all into musselmen. (This was the concentration camp term for the walking zombie-men, who were indifferent to pain, unmoved, automatons - Leni Yahil says that the sight of emaciated bodies on the ground reminded the SS of Muslims at prayer, hence the slang term.) From the first hour of admittance a relentless attack was launched on the inmate’s sense of self-worth, stifling in common loathing the impulse towards solidarity. And in the guards, it was designed to inculcate conditions to make it possible for them to do what they did, allowing them to see the inmates as less than human - indeed, keeping some inmates barely alive simply to demonstrate daily to the guards that these inmates were sub-human.
The camps inflicted upon the inmates what the author calls "radical nakedness". The inmates were stripped of job, class, tradition, family, name, clothes and hair.
As opposed to this excremental assault and radical nakedness, the survivor was the one who resisted by - first of all - washing! Or perhaps we should say attempting to wash. This was a superhuman task in the camps. But it granted the self-cleanser a barrier of integrity between his interior self and the Nazi exterior. If there was one thing the survivor did it was this : he resisted in his mind. He did not accept the camp. Of course those who did wash, or resist, they too died. But a few did not die.
Naturally the newcomers who did not adjust fast enough, did not find it possible to think fast enough, died in their thousands. In some periods the life expectancy of a new inmate in a camp like Auschwitz or Mauthausen was two weeks.
Did the survivor practise altruism or did he look after number one first and last? To one degree or another, many survivors were spokes in the wheel of mass murder, the ultimate example being the Sonderkommandos whose job it was to pull the dead out of the gas chambers and take them to the furnaces. But the assumption that there was no moral or social order in the camps is wrong. There was, and it was complex.
If you do read this one, I would suggest interweaving its chapters with some writings by Primo Levi, especially his books of meditations called Moments of Reprieve and The Drowned and the Saved. His beautiful sanity is the antidote you will need.
This is a very unflinching book about those most extreme places that haunt our nightmares, the Nazi concentration camps. The author is concerned with survival. How was it done?
Survival is an experience with a definite structure, neither random nor regressive nor amoral. The aim of this book is to make the structure visible.
As he examines the testimony of survivors
an unexpected ambiguity arises : as a witness the survivor is both sought and shunned… insofar as we feel compelled to defend a comforting view of life we tend to deny the survivor’s voice
And the survivor, at times, becomes resented - because they remind us of a collective moral failure, yes, but also because we envy them their suffering, since suffering, some fondly imagine, equates to a moral stature we ourselves can never attain, and because our own pain is rendered trivial in the face of theirs. We resent their absolute moral authority. The author himself does not endorse this idea, that the survivors have a superior moral wisdom, but he recognises that many do, as a kind of straw to cling on to in a bleak universe.
The author examines the camp experience. He call it an "excremental assault" - the essence of the camp experience was to attempt to destroy the inmate as a human being with a sense of self. The goal was to turn them all into musselmen. (This was the concentration camp term for the walking zombie-men, who were indifferent to pain, unmoved, automatons - Leni Yahil says that the sight of emaciated bodies on the ground reminded the SS of Muslims at prayer, hence the slang term.) From the first hour of admittance a relentless attack was launched on the inmate’s sense of self-worth, stifling in common loathing the impulse towards solidarity. And in the guards, it was designed to inculcate conditions to make it possible for them to do what they did, allowing them to see the inmates as less than human - indeed, keeping some inmates barely alive simply to demonstrate daily to the guards that these inmates were sub-human.
The camps inflicted upon the inmates what the author calls "radical nakedness". The inmates were stripped of job, class, tradition, family, name, clothes and hair.
As opposed to this excremental assault and radical nakedness, the survivor was the one who resisted by - first of all - washing! Or perhaps we should say attempting to wash. This was a superhuman task in the camps. But it granted the self-cleanser a barrier of integrity between his interior self and the Nazi exterior. If there was one thing the survivor did it was this : he resisted in his mind. He did not accept the camp. Of course those who did wash, or resist, they too died. But a few did not die.
Naturally the newcomers who did not adjust fast enough, did not find it possible to think fast enough, died in their thousands. In some periods the life expectancy of a new inmate in a camp like Auschwitz or Mauthausen was two weeks.
Did the survivor practise altruism or did he look after number one first and last? To one degree or another, many survivors were spokes in the wheel of mass murder, the ultimate example being the Sonderkommandos whose job it was to pull the dead out of the gas chambers and take them to the furnaces. But the assumption that there was no moral or social order in the camps is wrong. There was, and it was complex.
If you do read this one, I would suggest interweaving its chapters with some writings by Primo Levi, especially his books of meditations called Moments of Reprieve and The Drowned and the Saved. His beautiful sanity is the antidote you will need.
April 25, 2019
This is, for me, no ordinary Holocaust record. Although Des Pres does include plenty of extracts from the accounts of survivors, he is more interested in analysing their testaments and distilling the message they carry for us all in the society outside. And he shows himself to be a deep philosophical thinker with some challenging ideas in the process.
He begins by examining the concept of the Hero - first of all in the world of fiction. The hero usually gives his life, or is prepared to do so, for a greater good - and his offering raises his stature and stands to raise him significantly above the rest of humanity, often making a large impact not just upon fellow sufferers, but also upon his oppressors, with his dignity and sacrifice.
There is no opportunity for such heroism in the camp situation where the normal expected outcome is a quick death, and dignity is stolen by the degradation of an existence which is disgusting, degrading, and randomly taken. Life in the camps is lived each day and night with death as the most intimate of companions, and is full of the insurmountable, unrelenting problems of excrement and work. Death seems the easier option in such a case, and carries no value.
It is hard to understand what motivation can inhabit the mind of the survivor in such a situation - why live in such a place, in such a state? This is part of what interests Des Pres in the beginning of this fine work. He examines the more orderly, salient world of the Survivor in fiction to discover what truths might be distilled from there. Works like Camus’ The Plague show us people dividing themselves into groups of the helpful and the hopeless, not through character, nor a wish to rise above the others, but as an imperative of the soul to live through an impossible situation, and because they have stopped avoiding the eyes and grip of death and are winnowed to their essences. Camus -‘as if there, at the absolute limit of body and soul, truths might be found on which a human being may firmly build”..(20 in Des Pres) Survivors and sufferers are often described as finding themselves pared down to a hard kernel of humanity and morality, even whilst they fail to recognise the person they once were: Nerzhin, in Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle remembers that in a previous life:
”I had no idea what good and evil were, and whatever was allowed seemed fine to me. But the lower I sink into this inhumanly cruel world, the more I respond to those who, in in such a world, speak to my conscience” (quoted by Des Pres on p 21). It would seem that a moral line is uncovered, by those who decide to survive, one which cannot be crossed: ‘as soon as a decision is made to stay pure and stand on the line the spirit begins to shore its strength, drawing on the survivor’s special wisdom’. . Although these are works of well researched and informed fiction, Des Pres teaches us to find hope that there will always be a few survivors who react like this in the most dire of situations, and so the spirit of some, is, in the end, indomitable even when faced by unmitigated evil.
But this is the neatness of fiction. As Des Pres says: “ to come from fiction to documents is to move from an ideal lucidity to the dense anguish of men and women telling us ..” Yet, there is a reliability, a completeness and a uniformity to the experiences described, painfully born of the sharing of necessity and living in rigidity, of their souls being rooted more urgently in life than the rest of us in our ‘civilised’ western world, which is shown in the consistency of the stories of witnesses. And there is a lack of ego in the testament of the vast majority of first hand witnesses to the holocaust..almost all survivors say ‘we’ rather than ‘I’. This is about the survivor as witness. And this is the motivation shared by almost all of our Holocaust survivors - to live to be the canary in the mine - to warn us all of what the human spirit is capable of, and where lies the danger.
But Des Pres perceives a more timeless and prescient warning in the testaments of the survivors than they even know themselves. He sees in their warning cries a spectre which still haunts western society - that western culture and civilisation is based on a nihilism which denies death and the needs of the body, and unavoidably, since death and life are inextricable, our denial of death is a denial of life itself:
When we hear of man’s inhumanity we talk of the beast that lies behind the veneer of culture. “We think we know what lies beneath the surface…What we have not seen is that our rage stems from the mind-body split that we have imposed upon ourselves making the body and its functions hateful..we have missed the fact that beyond our lust for disaster, there is a greater, life affirming and sustaining stratum of the human psyche” Des Pres: 208)
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not sure this isn’t a bridge too far for me - lover of Theatre and Books that I am, but I do see that Des Pres has a point - we do minimise and ritualise our encounters with death, both the death of our citizens and of the creatures that we eat, and we do disinfect and deodorise ourselves and our environments to the point of making ourselves sick and weak in our bodily defences, and we spend as much time as working life permits encased in the comforting upper reaches of the mind, avoiding the workings of our bodies as much as we can. Des Pres sees these tendencies as unnatural and unhealthy, and his reasoning is logical. Survivors have been forced to completely repudiate culture and learning in order to live with the reality of the stench and fester of injury, of constant shit, of the smoke of the chimneys, pollution of food and water, and of sweat, blood and foetid breath. Whilst in the camps, they truly live in the Present in a sense which only our earlier forbears would have recognised, which has been beyond our imagination for hundreds of years. They have given up a sense of the future and fear the assault of memories of their past which lead them into despair. They even fear Spring for its bursting forth with new life: “the whole of life’s promise implicit in a blade of new grass, suggested a future that, in the survivor’s case, was mockery. in extremity, life proceeds by rejecting hope, by refusing to consider the future”
And yet, despite its harsh criticism of Western Society, and despite the terror of its subject matter, this remains, for me a hopeful book. In the end, Des Pres believes ‘the survivor is evidence that men and women are now strong enough, mature enough, awake enough to face death without mediation, and therefore to embrace life without reserve.’(207) For him, now the work on developing a society which can exist without denial of our visceral selves can begin.
He begins by examining the concept of the Hero - first of all in the world of fiction. The hero usually gives his life, or is prepared to do so, for a greater good - and his offering raises his stature and stands to raise him significantly above the rest of humanity, often making a large impact not just upon fellow sufferers, but also upon his oppressors, with his dignity and sacrifice.
There is no opportunity for such heroism in the camp situation where the normal expected outcome is a quick death, and dignity is stolen by the degradation of an existence which is disgusting, degrading, and randomly taken. Life in the camps is lived each day and night with death as the most intimate of companions, and is full of the insurmountable, unrelenting problems of excrement and work. Death seems the easier option in such a case, and carries no value.
It is hard to understand what motivation can inhabit the mind of the survivor in such a situation - why live in such a place, in such a state? This is part of what interests Des Pres in the beginning of this fine work. He examines the more orderly, salient world of the Survivor in fiction to discover what truths might be distilled from there. Works like Camus’ The Plague show us people dividing themselves into groups of the helpful and the hopeless, not through character, nor a wish to rise above the others, but as an imperative of the soul to live through an impossible situation, and because they have stopped avoiding the eyes and grip of death and are winnowed to their essences. Camus -‘as if there, at the absolute limit of body and soul, truths might be found on which a human being may firmly build”..(20 in Des Pres) Survivors and sufferers are often described as finding themselves pared down to a hard kernel of humanity and morality, even whilst they fail to recognise the person they once were: Nerzhin, in Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle remembers that in a previous life:
”I had no idea what good and evil were, and whatever was allowed seemed fine to me. But the lower I sink into this inhumanly cruel world, the more I respond to those who, in in such a world, speak to my conscience” (quoted by Des Pres on p 21). It would seem that a moral line is uncovered, by those who decide to survive, one which cannot be crossed: ‘as soon as a decision is made to stay pure and stand on the line the spirit begins to shore its strength, drawing on the survivor’s special wisdom’. . Although these are works of well researched and informed fiction, Des Pres teaches us to find hope that there will always be a few survivors who react like this in the most dire of situations, and so the spirit of some, is, in the end, indomitable even when faced by unmitigated evil.
But this is the neatness of fiction. As Des Pres says: “ to come from fiction to documents is to move from an ideal lucidity to the dense anguish of men and women telling us ..” Yet, there is a reliability, a completeness and a uniformity to the experiences described, painfully born of the sharing of necessity and living in rigidity, of their souls being rooted more urgently in life than the rest of us in our ‘civilised’ western world, which is shown in the consistency of the stories of witnesses. And there is a lack of ego in the testament of the vast majority of first hand witnesses to the holocaust..almost all survivors say ‘we’ rather than ‘I’. This is about the survivor as witness. And this is the motivation shared by almost all of our Holocaust survivors - to live to be the canary in the mine - to warn us all of what the human spirit is capable of, and where lies the danger.
But Des Pres perceives a more timeless and prescient warning in the testaments of the survivors than they even know themselves. He sees in their warning cries a spectre which still haunts western society - that western culture and civilisation is based on a nihilism which denies death and the needs of the body, and unavoidably, since death and life are inextricable, our denial of death is a denial of life itself:
When we hear of man’s inhumanity we talk of the beast that lies behind the veneer of culture. “We think we know what lies beneath the surface…What we have not seen is that our rage stems from the mind-body split that we have imposed upon ourselves making the body and its functions hateful..we have missed the fact that beyond our lust for disaster, there is a greater, life affirming and sustaining stratum of the human psyche” Des Pres: 208)
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not sure this isn’t a bridge too far for me - lover of Theatre and Books that I am, but I do see that Des Pres has a point - we do minimise and ritualise our encounters with death, both the death of our citizens and of the creatures that we eat, and we do disinfect and deodorise ourselves and our environments to the point of making ourselves sick and weak in our bodily defences, and we spend as much time as working life permits encased in the comforting upper reaches of the mind, avoiding the workings of our bodies as much as we can. Des Pres sees these tendencies as unnatural and unhealthy, and his reasoning is logical. Survivors have been forced to completely repudiate culture and learning in order to live with the reality of the stench and fester of injury, of constant shit, of the smoke of the chimneys, pollution of food and water, and of sweat, blood and foetid breath. Whilst in the camps, they truly live in the Present in a sense which only our earlier forbears would have recognised, which has been beyond our imagination for hundreds of years. They have given up a sense of the future and fear the assault of memories of their past which lead them into despair. They even fear Spring for its bursting forth with new life: “the whole of life’s promise implicit in a blade of new grass, suggested a future that, in the survivor’s case, was mockery. in extremity, life proceeds by rejecting hope, by refusing to consider the future”
And yet, despite its harsh criticism of Western Society, and despite the terror of its subject matter, this remains, for me a hopeful book. In the end, Des Pres believes ‘the survivor is evidence that men and women are now strong enough, mature enough, awake enough to face death without mediation, and therefore to embrace life without reserve.’(207) For him, now the work on developing a society which can exist without denial of our visceral selves can begin.
April 6, 2014
I have a hard time categorizing this book, and its very resistance to standard academic pigeon-holes may explain its relative obscurity. It is a very important study of early Holocaust literature to attempt to understand the personal psychology and behavior of survivors. As Des Pres addresses early on, "survival" has sort of a bad rap in our culture, people who "merely survive" are not seen as "truly alive." Yet, for those who have experienced extreme conditions and organized efforts to destroy them as people, survival is itself a miracle. And, from the perspective of understanding genocidal efforts in history, survivors represent our most significant witnesses, the ones who truly bear witness to events of massive importance.
Des Pres admits that his book has a somewhat "religious" overtone, rather than the detachment appropriate to an academic study, and this too may scare off some of those who would most benefit from his analysis. But, as he argues, it would not have helped in his task to seem overly "objective" in relationship to his subject, because the trauma of their experiences was still too fresh. As such, he seems to me to fit into other explorations around the time, including the epic film "Shoah" and the writings of Raul Hilberg.
There are two things I remembered as takeways from reading it long ago: One, that no one survived without the sacrifice of others, and two, that those who did survive felt an ongoing debt to the dead. Revisiting it this time, what stood out to me was the fact that a "will to live," while being in no way a guarantee of survival, was a minimum requirement. While not everyone who fought for their lives survived, anyone who didn't was certain to die. These are only a few among the many lessons that Des Pres finds in reviewing the literature of, and about, survivors in his time. It would be interesting to see someone ask the same questions of the larger body of literature that exists today.
Des Pres admits that his book has a somewhat "religious" overtone, rather than the detachment appropriate to an academic study, and this too may scare off some of those who would most benefit from his analysis. But, as he argues, it would not have helped in his task to seem overly "objective" in relationship to his subject, because the trauma of their experiences was still too fresh. As such, he seems to me to fit into other explorations around the time, including the epic film "Shoah" and the writings of Raul Hilberg.
There are two things I remembered as takeways from reading it long ago: One, that no one survived without the sacrifice of others, and two, that those who did survive felt an ongoing debt to the dead. Revisiting it this time, what stood out to me was the fact that a "will to live," while being in no way a guarantee of survival, was a minimum requirement. While not everyone who fought for their lives survived, anyone who didn't was certain to die. These are only a few among the many lessons that Des Pres finds in reviewing the literature of, and about, survivors in his time. It would be interesting to see someone ask the same questions of the larger body of literature that exists today.
January 2, 2021
On your first day at the camp you take a dump but there is no toilet and you can’t just squat and relieve yourself anywhere because it is forbidden. If the guards catch you doing that you’d be shot on the spot. You want to live so, just like the other prisoners, you defecated with your clothes on, your shit forming a lump inside your underwear. You carry that all day even during your sleep. It smells like hell but your bunkmates also have their load with them so that somehow lessens the embarrassment.
The next day, even if you’ve taken very little food, your lifelong, instinctive daily regimen kicks in and you need to unload again. But the order not to defecate anywhere stays so you do the same thing you did yesterday. Your fresh shit mixes with the one you’ve had yesterday, or whatever’s left of it and has not seeped down your legs and unto the floor. This will go on day after day. You will have no water to clean yourself or a change of clothes. You’ll be a walking filth.
What will you do? Would you kill yourself? If not, would you at least WILL your death, not actively self-inflicting it, but wishing and praying for the merciful end? If still no, what about if, aside from this dehumanisation, you are perpetually hungry? Or in pain? Or exposed to the horror of people dying and being murdered right before your eyes? Whimsical and senseless deaths reminding you every hour of the day of the most likely fate that awaits you soon? Would these make you give up?
This is a scholarly study of those who had survived various Nazi death camps during the second world war and what it took for these hardy survivors to come out of this worst of all human experience with their body and soul intact.
How would you know you can survive something like this? Imagine yourself in Neumark, a minor concentration camp for women, during the winter of 1944. There is a tent there where the Nazis kept the “Stuthofers”. This name, “Stuthofers” is derived from a typical kind of SS joke. Those who are about to be shot are told that they will be “transported to Stuthof.” You narrate what you’ve seen there as follows:
“No one was allowed into the Stuthofers’ tent. If anyone was caught visiting a mother or sister, she was never allowed to leave the tent again. The Stuthofers were seldom given food, and on the rare occasions when it was supplied, it was placed on the ground in the dark in front of the tent. Then the strongest of them fetched it and distributed it.
“Entering the tent from the blinding snow-whiteness, I could hardly distinguish anything in the semi-darkness, least of all the women lying on the ground. The stench was over-powering despite the airy tent. After awhile my eyes became accustomed to the light, and I was completely overcome by what I saw.
“I screamed in horror and shut my eyes to the sight. My knees trembled, my head began to swim, and I grasped the central tent-prop for support. It was hard to believe the women on the ground were still human beings. Their rigid bodies were skeletons, their eyes were glazed from long starvation….
“For two months the Stuthofers had lain on the ground, stark naked. The meagre bundles of straw on which they lay were putrid from their urine and excreta. Their frozen limbs were fetid and covered with wounds and bites to the point of bleeding, and countless lice nested in the pus. Their hair was very short indeed, but the armies of lice found a home in it. No stretch of the imagination, no power of the written word, can convey the horror of that tent. And yet…they were ALIVE…they were hungry and they tore at their skeletal bodies with their emaciated hands covered in pus and dirt. They were beyond help. The SS guards denied them the mercy of shooting them all at once. Only three or four were called out daily to be shot….
“For days I couldn’t swallow even a crumb of bread. The horror I lived through watching this agony will remain with me to the end of my days. Later I saw thousands of my fellow prisoners die from rifle shots, but even that could not compare with the terrible and unspeakable ordeal of the Stuthofers.”
Would this not drain you, too, of all reason to live?
The next day, even if you’ve taken very little food, your lifelong, instinctive daily regimen kicks in and you need to unload again. But the order not to defecate anywhere stays so you do the same thing you did yesterday. Your fresh shit mixes with the one you’ve had yesterday, or whatever’s left of it and has not seeped down your legs and unto the floor. This will go on day after day. You will have no water to clean yourself or a change of clothes. You’ll be a walking filth.
What will you do? Would you kill yourself? If not, would you at least WILL your death, not actively self-inflicting it, but wishing and praying for the merciful end? If still no, what about if, aside from this dehumanisation, you are perpetually hungry? Or in pain? Or exposed to the horror of people dying and being murdered right before your eyes? Whimsical and senseless deaths reminding you every hour of the day of the most likely fate that awaits you soon? Would these make you give up?
This is a scholarly study of those who had survived various Nazi death camps during the second world war and what it took for these hardy survivors to come out of this worst of all human experience with their body and soul intact.
How would you know you can survive something like this? Imagine yourself in Neumark, a minor concentration camp for women, during the winter of 1944. There is a tent there where the Nazis kept the “Stuthofers”. This name, “Stuthofers” is derived from a typical kind of SS joke. Those who are about to be shot are told that they will be “transported to Stuthof.” You narrate what you’ve seen there as follows:
“No one was allowed into the Stuthofers’ tent. If anyone was caught visiting a mother or sister, she was never allowed to leave the tent again. The Stuthofers were seldom given food, and on the rare occasions when it was supplied, it was placed on the ground in the dark in front of the tent. Then the strongest of them fetched it and distributed it.
“Entering the tent from the blinding snow-whiteness, I could hardly distinguish anything in the semi-darkness, least of all the women lying on the ground. The stench was over-powering despite the airy tent. After awhile my eyes became accustomed to the light, and I was completely overcome by what I saw.
“I screamed in horror and shut my eyes to the sight. My knees trembled, my head began to swim, and I grasped the central tent-prop for support. It was hard to believe the women on the ground were still human beings. Their rigid bodies were skeletons, their eyes were glazed from long starvation….
“For two months the Stuthofers had lain on the ground, stark naked. The meagre bundles of straw on which they lay were putrid from their urine and excreta. Their frozen limbs were fetid and covered with wounds and bites to the point of bleeding, and countless lice nested in the pus. Their hair was very short indeed, but the armies of lice found a home in it. No stretch of the imagination, no power of the written word, can convey the horror of that tent. And yet…they were ALIVE…they were hungry and they tore at their skeletal bodies with their emaciated hands covered in pus and dirt. They were beyond help. The SS guards denied them the mercy of shooting them all at once. Only three or four were called out daily to be shot….
“For days I couldn’t swallow even a crumb of bread. The horror I lived through watching this agony will remain with me to the end of my days. Later I saw thousands of my fellow prisoners die from rifle shots, but even that could not compare with the terrible and unspeakable ordeal of the Stuthofers.”
Would this not drain you, too, of all reason to live?
April 14, 2014
Essential reading for human beings.
October 14, 2017
"Il sopravvissuto è uno che disturba la quiete. Forza il muro che gli uomini hanno eretto per proteggersi dal contatto con le verità 'indicibili'". (p. 43)
January 13, 2025
This book provided powerful stories about life in the concentration camps and the horrific events that took place there.
However, some parts felt overly in-depth on the psychology of it all and were a bit hard for me to grasp, which probably tells you more about me than the book in itself.
However, some parts felt overly in-depth on the psychology of it all and were a bit hard for me to grasp, which probably tells you more about me than the book in itself.
December 14, 2016
Brilliantly written and full of great research, this is a book I highly recommend. The title doesn't quite do it justice though. I found Des Pres's use of the death camp experience to illustrate his theories of what man is truly capable of to be a backdrop. And perhaps it is the only backdrop he could have used as he writes eloquently about in extremis conditions and those horrific experiences left a trove of written witness material behind. In fact, the need to leave testimony is one of the most salient points he makes about the will to survive against all expectations.
He curated his viewpoints and contradicts more well-known theories (specifically those of Bettelheim) in such a way that I will go back to this book more than once to review his arguments. I understood more about human nature and life's forceful thrust by reading this work and will delve deeper into his writing.
He curated his viewpoints and contradicts more well-known theories (specifically those of Bettelheim) in such a way that I will go back to this book more than once to review his arguments. I understood more about human nature and life's forceful thrust by reading this work and will delve deeper into his writing.
August 17, 2015
The way Elie Wiesel described this book was "An important, tormented, tormenting book" which is a very accurate description of the work the Des Pres created. It is very much a book that not only tells the stories of concentration and death camp survivors but also seeks to understand the power of life in the face of death. It is a powerful read.
December 8, 2007
No matter how many claim it wasn't like this
IT WAS!
IT WAS!
Read
June 13, 2009Non-fiction Holocaust- sad man
October 10, 2010
Must read for anyone who needs to get out of her own brain.
January 22, 2011
fantastic but the concluding chapter is not very good
April 26, 2012
macabre, yet epic in its ability to move you.
May 7, 2013
Read in college and have read several times after.
Read
December 7, 2013Des Pres offers an optimistic and moving theory of survival, which provides important guidance on a monumental topic.
January 12, 2014
I bought this and read again in fall of 2013.
Worthwhile study.
Worthwhile study.
January 15, 2014
Required reading. Period.
March 24, 2014
I have read almost all the Holocaust literature. This book said it best. It is deeply disturbing, deeply inspiring, and changed the way I see my personal history as well as the history of my family.
March 14, 2026
"The survivor's experience is evidence that the need to help is as basic as the need for help, a fact which points to the radically social nature of life in extremity and explains an unexpected but very widespread activity among survivors."
Terrence Des Pres' The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps is a study of survival. How people survived the death camps, why they did or didn't survive, and how human beings adapted in a situation of extreme deprivation and hostility to keep themselves, and sometimes others, alive.
Des Pres' work is unflinching. Throughout the book, readers are confronted with quotes from survivors (and sometimes writings from those that were murdered during the Holocaust) that explain the depths of their survival.
Des Pres prefaces the work with an interesting look at the fictional survivor--an ideal character that warps people's general sense of what a "survivor" looks like and acts like and should generally be. This sets the stage for reading about real survival, and how it contrasts against the picture-perfect ideal we create in fiction.
The rest of the book is divided into philosophical subjects, ranging from survival due to the need to bear witness; how people reacted to the attack on their bodily functions that prevailed in the camps; the impact of forced nakedness; the effect of sleep deprivation; and the exposure to life within a place of death.
The Survivor explores the depravity of the camps through survivor and victim testimony, while addressing some of the common prevailing myths about survival (such as the notion that there was no resistance, or that people did not help one another) that, when challenged and addressed as thoroughly as Des Pres does here, change the way we view survival of the death camps.
Terrence Des Pres' The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps is a study of survival. How people survived the death camps, why they did or didn't survive, and how human beings adapted in a situation of extreme deprivation and hostility to keep themselves, and sometimes others, alive.
Des Pres' work is unflinching. Throughout the book, readers are confronted with quotes from survivors (and sometimes writings from those that were murdered during the Holocaust) that explain the depths of their survival.
Des Pres prefaces the work with an interesting look at the fictional survivor--an ideal character that warps people's general sense of what a "survivor" looks like and acts like and should generally be. This sets the stage for reading about real survival, and how it contrasts against the picture-perfect ideal we create in fiction.
The rest of the book is divided into philosophical subjects, ranging from survival due to the need to bear witness; how people reacted to the attack on their bodily functions that prevailed in the camps; the impact of forced nakedness; the effect of sleep deprivation; and the exposure to life within a place of death.
The Survivor explores the depravity of the camps through survivor and victim testimony, while addressing some of the common prevailing myths about survival (such as the notion that there was no resistance, or that people did not help one another) that, when challenged and addressed as thoroughly as Des Pres does here, change the way we view survival of the death camps.
September 25, 2021
Expertly written. I appreciated very much the inclusion of the Gulags in the discussion which too often focuses solely on the Nazis. No desire ever to read it again, however.
A point made in the final chapters is that the concentration camps were the perfect embodiment of our concept of Hell -- I think for all the horror of the camps that this point is overstated. Depictions of Hell from medieval times are of incessant torture *for the very sake* of exacting suffering on the damned. My knowledge of the camps is that the horrors there sprang from, among other things: a closed environment with no consequences for the often capricious evils perpetrated by guards, near-total neglect of the inmates' basic biological needs encouraged by a policy from higher up that anyone in a camp was subhuman, and the intentional dehumanization of inmates in order to, as Des Pres points out, "make it easier for the guards to do their jobs."
It is difficult to overstate the suffering described in these pages. But to say that nothing worse is capable of being imagined is to do just that. One example is to be an isolated sex slave locked in a cellar, with no one to lean on or call for help to, subjected to torture by a captor who tortures you for the very sake of bringing about torture (and not the sadistic randomness of the often drunken shootings perpetrated by Nazis in the camps). The latter is much more like Hell than the effects of privation, however extreme.
A point made in the final chapters is that the concentration camps were the perfect embodiment of our concept of Hell -- I think for all the horror of the camps that this point is overstated. Depictions of Hell from medieval times are of incessant torture *for the very sake* of exacting suffering on the damned. My knowledge of the camps is that the horrors there sprang from, among other things: a closed environment with no consequences for the often capricious evils perpetrated by guards, near-total neglect of the inmates' basic biological needs encouraged by a policy from higher up that anyone in a camp was subhuman, and the intentional dehumanization of inmates in order to, as Des Pres points out, "make it easier for the guards to do their jobs."
It is difficult to overstate the suffering described in these pages. But to say that nothing worse is capable of being imagined is to do just that. One example is to be an isolated sex slave locked in a cellar, with no one to lean on or call for help to, subjected to torture by a captor who tortures you for the very sake of bringing about torture (and not the sadistic randomness of the often drunken shootings perpetrated by Nazis in the camps). The latter is much more like Hell than the effects of privation, however extreme.
June 30, 2024
I have always been captivated by Holocaust literature and film. This book approaches the description of the concentration camp experience in an intellectual method that explains the mechanisms of human behaviors that caused some people to become survivors. It’s a treatise that seems well supported by citations from many actual survivors’ accounts.
A must-read for any human.
A must-read for any human.
April 20, 2026
I read because otherwise I never would have. It was the deepest, most meaningful read of my semester so far. It delves into what makes a person human. Is it their worldly possessions? Their superiority over animals? Or is that they have a could when no other know creature does? And what really makes a human soul? These are the questions the author wants you to decide for yourself.
January 19, 2023
A very good book about the Holocaust. Terrence Des Pres takes a different approach and explains the psychological side of things. I don't always agree with his conclusions; however, he does cover parts of camp life not often discussed in other books on the topic.
March 25, 2020
Hard book to read but his analysis is actually really inspiring despite the sources being horrific. Highly recommend.
Read
October 6, 2022Smart and empathetic and humanizing
November 20, 2023
Fuck psychoanalysis 🗣️
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