Like so many things today which were unimaginable ffity years ago, the current hostility to Jews boggles my mind.

When I first learned of the Holocaust as a kid, I thought it meant that anti-semitism could never happen again.

What fascinating testimony!

You remind me of a term Leon Uris used in his book “Exodus”. He very deliberately did not write of Holocaust survivors; he called them “graduates”. (In one memorable scene, a British officer threatens to torture a Jew to get him to divulge information. A British colleague snorts and says something like: “These people are graduates of Hitler’s concentration camps. What, exactly, do you think you can do that would scare them?”)

That’s QUITE a story. Wow!

I also know some people of that generation with something like that mentality. But very very feisty and they all lived to a ripe old age.

But, in the gulag they did not know what was going on in the rest of the world. Apparently they bickered the entire time over which one of them was the idiot responsible for getting them sent there, and by the way, who was uglier and skinnier.

My mother did not consider herself a holocaust survivor, because, she “had it good in the gulags.”

As luck woukd have it, my uncle married a woman who was in a Nazi death camp, although she did not consider herself a holocaust survivor either, because, (I think Stalin?) bombed the camp and she escaped.

From what I can figure, she and her sisters spent the rest of the war bickering over who was the idiot responsible for them fleeing to the forests, and how they would have been better off in the safety of the Nazi camp.

That’s when they weren’t bickering over who was the more difficult, hysterical, insane and sickly and who was the idiot who thought it was a good idea to leave the forest and drag themselves across Europe and illegally break into British mandate Palestine.

I suspect that luck was the most important factor as you basically state later on in the paragraph.

After the US Army put the SS out of business, they put the locals to work, attending to the dead. The US Medical Corps attended to the living. ( No American trusted ANY German in such matters. )

Our officers simply did not believe that the locals were ignorant of Dora.

But, the German civilians WERE telling the truth.

The SS had walled off Dora from the outside world — completely.

It was for secrecy that the SS would not use guns to murder the victims. The mountain’s acoustics would report such discharges all the way to Nordhausen, the nearest burg.

( Nordhausen => North (pig) sty ) — What a strange title for a minor town.

The whole reason for Dora’s name was to make the camp invisible even within SS records. THAT’S how secret it was. It was Area 51 for the Nazis.

BTW, Area 51 is a US MILITARY ADDRESS exactly equivalent to Dora. The German post would send all mail to Buchenwald. Then it would go over by SS courier. Dora had extremely limited phone links to the outside world, too.

It was the MOST secret Nazi war plant, and no effort was spared to hide its existence from BOTH the German volk and the Allied Powers.

This is why the SS would not suffer any crematoria.

My Uncle was not even housed in barracks !

Instead, they slept — usually — under open skies — even in foul weather.

There never was a call for lights-out… There were no lights, either.

The SS didn’t want ANY visible trace of Dora’s activities to be visible to Allied spy planes.

Dora was, simply put, the ultimate secret Nazi war plant. It had no peer.

Even now, reading the Internet histories of Dora, it’s apparent that few discovered how Dora operated.

As for my Uncle’s peers: without a doubt every last one was murdered by the SS before they could be saved.

One entered the ranks of the sondercommandos by way of the selection process at the main works.

The SS had totally systematized exploitation and murder at Dora. “Fresh ones” were folded into the ‘talent pool’ every Tuesday — having been vectored over as being of ‘promise’ by every other camp in the SS empire.

My Uncle noted that every single peer was a Jewish male in the prime of his life. They felt sorrier for him than he did them, as he was a ‘political’, wearing a red badge of damnation.

Camp policy for politicals was that every time any other prisoner was belted, the political was belted, too. Yes, it was policy.

The Nazis prioritized punishments for all politicals.

Which is why so FEW survived the SS.

My Uncle was discovered by the US Medical Corps in the Buchenwald ‘hospital.’ ( What a perversion of the term. )

As you might guess, the attending physicians were almost entirely German speaking Jewish-Americans.

You can only imagine the shock experienced when a Jewish-American military doctor conducting first contact triage in the Buchenwald hospital heard my Uncle whisper his name, rank, and serial number.

He was a living cadaver by such a time.

After being stabilized ( IVs ) he was flown to England — to begin recovery. That went on for months. The US Army was concerned that he was still too weak to transit the Atlantic !

It took my Grandmother’s cooking to put some real weight back on him… five to seven meals a day. That’s how tiny his stomach had become. He ate like a baby.

So, naturally, he entered the food business after the war. He was obsessed with preventing starvation, and food, for the rest of his days.

Food was the ONE topic that all prisoners agree was taboo. For to bring up ‘food’ was to make them even more miserable than they were already.

This prohibition was self-generated. If the SS ever figured out how painful the thought of food was, they would’ve plastered food advertising all over the camps.

“Food” was enough to trigger prompt suicides, too.

It was more than enough to send prisoners clean over the edge.

Like chanting water, water, to a fellow in the Sahara.

%%%

BTW, the goons at Dora were uniformly huge and robust… and deranged.

The entire enterprise was run like a medieval dungeon.

Cruelty was its number one product.

%%%

In modern Germany, the entire area is treated as haunted.

It’s off limits to all development.

Even documentary film producers shun the area.

It’s V-2 and V-1 connections made it taboo for even America, Britain and the West, generally, to dwell on it — even years after the event. Note how “World at War” skips past it. Whereas, Dora deserves an entire episode to the Nazi atrocities committed there.

Think of it as a hell camp — perfected — Nazi style.

Agreed.

Some people with a great attitude died within hours of arriving at the camps.

I have always been reluctant to criticize Frankl because (a) he’s got a lot more knowledge about the camps than I; and (b) I think there’s some truth in what he writes. However, his message has always had troubling aspects, and the main one is that it seems to blame the victims. Survivors were very very few, and in many cases survival was indeed dependent on late arrival at the camps—among many other reasons, all of which had to come together to enable a person to survive, and the confluence of all those elements did not happen often at all.

This post is not really about camp survival, however, so much as recovering afterward and what helped people to deal with that. I am convinced that some of it was innate temperament.