Last night I watched a movie based on a Holocaust memoir I’d read, and I’d also seen the author’s interview with Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation. That’s really why I watched the 2011 movie In Darkness in the first place, because it’s based on that family’s experience hiding in the sewer system of Lvov for over a year.

Krystyna Chiger (later Keren) was only a young child when her family was forced into the Lvov ghetto, and then when the ghetto was liquidated they hid in Lvov’s sewer system where they remained for fourteen months. That’s the story the movie purports to tell, the same story in her book The Girl In the Green Sweater.

But it’s not the same story, although it sticks to the general outlines. Although the movie was one of the Oscar nominees for Best Foreign Language Film (it’s a joint Polish/German/Canadian effort), and also received a whole bunch of awards from European groups, IMHO it’s only about one-tenth the film it could have been, using the same source material. And that left me in a state of frustration at many moments while watching it, yelling at the screen things like, “That didn’t happen!” and “What about [fill in the blank]?”

The writers saw fit to add a bunch of exceptionally dramatic – sometimes cheesy and cliched – scenes that didn’t happen, and left out or minimized many of the most dramatic true events that did happen. They also threw in a host of completely gratuitous sex scenes that added nothing but more cliches.

Just to take one of many examples where the movie played down scenes when the truth would have been far more suspenseful and cinematic, we have the way the Jews managed to get fresh water every day. According to Krystyna’s book, there was a broken pipe that dripped fresh water, but it was several kilometers away from their hiding place and could only be reached by her father (or another of the men) crawling through a narrow pipe, carrying the kettle that would hold the water in his teeth the whole way. Now, we don’t need to see the entire trek, which must have taken a long time. But in the only scene in the movie that refers to the process, we see someone (is he walking or crawling? The scene is so fleeting I don’t remember) for a couple of seconds going to get the water, and to the best of my recollection he was carrying the receptacle in his hands.

That’s it for the water. No drama at all. Why oh why? And this is just one of many instances like this, including the film’s climactic scene – which I won’t describe, in case you want to watch it.

Instead, we have the repetitive sex scenes, and a few made-up action scenes as well as the action scenes that really did happen. The film also skips the main motive of the Polish Catholic man who is most instrumental in helping them – which is that he’s led a fairly dissolute life, wants to go straight, and believes that helping the Jews will save his soul. It’s an exceptionally moving fact – at least, I think so – but the movie leaves it out entirely or in one brief sentence makes a sort of oblique joke out of it.

The title In Darkness makes sense; the sewers were very dark indeed, so dark that when the survivors emerged after fourteen months, their vision was temporarily affected (although the movie shows their vision as blurred when in fact they saw things shifted to red, as though through a red filter). But it makes for a mostly dark movie, and even the scenes shot outside the sewers – and there are quite a few – are somewhat monochrome.

But there would have been a simple remedy for that. Leave out some of the hokey action scenes and the sex scenes, and give us some of the people’s previous life before the Nazis. Introduce them to us as they were before the war, and let us get to know them before they become nearly-indistinguishable from each other in the dark of the sewers. The contrast – which we learn from Krystyna’s book and her interview – was stark, and would have made good cinema. But we get none of that. We first meet these people when they’re about to escape the ghetto and go down to the sewers, and I (who knew pretty much who the actors were supposed to be) still spent at least the first half hour trying to figure out their identities.

Speaking of the characters’ missing backstories, in the film the little girl who plays Krystyna wears the green sweater of the book’s title throughout the film. But it has no significance for us; we never learn that the sweater was knitted by her grandmother. Here’s the actual story, not a bit of which is told in the movie:

The green sweater, which her paternal grandmother knit before the German invasion of Poland, was a treasured object. Two years before, Kristine had watched that beloved grandmother being loaded onto a truck and deported, likely to the nearbyBelzec death camp. When her grandmother had waved goodbye, a Nazi guard had bashed her head with the butt of a rifle.

The sweater was a precious link to prewar love for the child, from a grandparent who’d been cruelly ripped away, and the garment is now in the Holocaust Museum in DC.

And then there was the time element, which is practically ignored in the movie. The movie only discloses at the very end of the film, in titles, that the length of their sewer stay was fourteen months. Why couldn’t the viewers have known that while watching the movie, with some sort of periodic time stamps now and then to let us know how long this was taking? Instead, we have no idea, and it could just as well have been fourteen days or fourteen weeks as fourteen months.

Now that I’ve said all this, I bet it’s not a bad movie if you don’t know the story in advance. But I suggest this video in which the beauteous Krystyna (now Kristine) tells the story, or her book to which I’ve linked above. And yes, she seems to still be alive now, at around ninety years of age. A strong constitution, I guess. The video interview is from 1998, when she was 63 (and as usual, I suggest that if she speaks too slowly for you, you can watch at faster speed by adjusting the settings). It’s long but I think it’s very rewarding:

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So although Sharabi is having a reunion with relatives, there won’t be any reunions on earth with his wife and daughters except by their gravesites. It’s a blow of such magnitude it’s hard to fathom, but many Holocaust survivors (including Otto Frank) endured similar suffering and losses: the torment and horror of the camps, and then the tragedy of learning that their families were gone. The road to recovery was difficult, and if you have read many tales of Holocaust survivors, you learn that some don’t make it back to wholeness.

I’ve written before about Holocaust survivors and their differing reactions; some do a great deal better than others. Part I of the series can be found here, and Part II can be found here. Part I is about a survivor who had an unusually optimistic nature and made quite a smooth transition, and Part II is about the brilliant Italian writer Primo Levi. I urge you to read them both, but especially the essay about Levi.

Levi may or may not have killed himself forty years after his war experience. He was in his 70s and suffering from depression, but the fall which caused his death may have been an accident. No one knows. In that essay, I quote some passages from his masterpiece Survival in Auschwitz. I cannot recommend the book highly enough.

But it is the sequel to that book that I’m going to be talking about now; its American title is The Reawakening [*see below]. It tells the tale of his year-long journey to get home and to recover from enormous emotional and physical devastation. He was very fortunate in some ways – his family had survived, and he was young (25) and was able to marry and rebuild his life.

This passage from the book (translated from the original Italian) describes the moment when – having been left behind ten days earlier at the camp, expected to die with hundreds of others because of severe illness, when the Germans abandoned the camps and led the rest of the inmates on horrific death marches, so determined were they to cause the death of all the remaining inmates – Levi sees his first liberators, four Russian soldiers on horseback:

To us they seemed wonderfully concrete and real, perched on their enormous horses, between the grey of the snow and the grey of the sky, immobile beneath the gusts of damp wind which threatened a thaw.

It seemed to us, and so it was, that the nothing full of death in which we had wandered like spent stars for ten days had found its own solid centre, a nucleus of condensation; four men, armed, but not against us: four messengers of peace, with rough and boyish faces beneath their fur hats.

They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funereal scene. It was that shame we knew so well, the shame that drowned us after the selections, and every time we had to watch, or submit to, some outrage: the shame the Germans did not know, that the just man experiences at another man’s crime, the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that his will for good should have proved too weak or null, and should not have availed in defence.

That’s a sample of the quality of Levi’s writing and the depth of his thought: the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist …

The Holocaust haunted him. At the very end of the book The Reawakening, he sounds a chilling note about how extraordinarily difficult it is to endure experiences such as those of the camps, and how life-changing, and how hard to shake. This was written in 1961:

I reached Turin [his home town] on 19 October [1945], after thirty-five days of travel; my house was still standing, all my family was alive, no one was expecting me. I was swollen, bearded and in rags, and had difficulty in making myself recognized. I found my friends full of life, the warmth of secure meals, the solidity of daily work, the liberating joy of recounting my story. I found a large clean bed, which in the evening (a moment of terror) yielded softly under my weight. But only after many months did I lose the habit of walking with my glance fixed to the ground, as if searching for something to eat or to pocket hastily or to sell for bread; and a dream full of horror has still not ceased to visit me, at sometimes frequent, sometimes longer, intervals.

It is a dream within a dream, varied in detail, one in substance. I am sitting at a table with my family, or with friends, or at work, or in the green countryside; in short, in a peaceful relaxed environment, without tension or affliction; yet I feel a deep and subtle anguish, the definite sensation of an impending threat. And in fact, as the dream proceeds, slowly or brutally, each time in a different way, everything collapses and disintegrates around me, the scenery, the walls, the people, while the anguish becomes more intense and more precise. Now everything has changed to chaos; I am alone in the center of a grey and turbid nothing, and now, I know what this thing means, and I also know that I have always known it; I am in the Lager [German expression for concentration camp] once more, and nothing is true outside the Lager. All the rest was a brief pause, a deception of the senses, a dream: my family, nature in flower, my home. Now this inner dream, this dream of peace, is over, and in the outer dream, which continues, gelid, a well-known voice resounds: a single word, not imperious, but brief and subdued. It is the dawn command of Auschwitz, a foreign word, feared and expected: get up, Wstawàch.

* As I said, the second book is called The Reawakening in the US, but the actual title in Italian is better translated as The Truce, and that’s what it was called in other countries. I think the difference is meaningful. The American title emphasizes hopefulness: the author has come back nearly from the dead, returned to life, and has many adventures. Although the book is hardly light, it’s lighter than Levi’s Auschwitz masterpiece, which was called Survival in Auschwitz only in the US; in other countries it was published with a title that seems to have been Levi’s choice: If This Is a Man.

In each case, the original title is more poetic, more ambiguous, and less upbeat. Yes, the quotes in this post refer to Levi’s reawakening to normal life. But as he describes in his nightmare, it’s not a totally successful reawakening. Sometimes he’s still in the nightmare, and has trouble knowing which world is real. Perhaps they both are real: thus, The Truce.

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For example, a pogrom in Amsterdam:

As Europe marks the 88th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Dutch city of Amsterdam gave police emergency powers to prevent further breakout of antisemitic violence. The measures to protect the Netherlands Jewish monitory came after the city on Friday night witnessed an anti-Jewish pogrom as organized Muslim migrant gangs ambushed hundreds of Israeli soccer fans after a match between Israel’s ‘Maccabi Tel Aviv’ and the Dutch team ‘AFC Ajax,’ historically seen as a Jewish club.

“Amsterdam banned demonstrations for three days from Friday after overnight attacks on Israeli soccer supporters by what the mayor called “antisemitic hit-and-run squads,” Reuters reported Saturday.

Everything I’ve read about the violence indicates that it was perpetrated by Muslim gangs and that it was preplanned. It’s an example of what happens when a Western country absorbs huge numbers of unvetted immigrants from Muslim countries and fails to assimilate them.

Amsterdam is, of course, the city where Anne Frank’s family and friends hid for years, protected by brave people such as Miep Gies, but in the end were betrayed and sent to the camps. Because the story of Frank is so well known, I believe most people are unaware that The Netherlands had a terrible record during the Holocaust:

A key aim [of the German occupation] was to separate Dutch Jews from their legal protections and Dutch cultural milieu, extinguishing first their rights and then their lives. One of Rauter’s first initiatives involved consolidating the Dutch police under the Nazi-controlled Ministry of Justice. Rauter positioned the SS and the police to have full authority over the entire Jewish population of the occupied Netherlands. This gave the SS and the police the ability to persecute Jews in the Netherlands, and eventually implement the Final Solution.? Rauter had not only the Dutch police, but 4,700 German police personnel at his disposal. …

Many non-Jewish Netherlanders helped to hide Jews, often individually in exchange for payment. Two of the most active helpers were Corrie Ten Boom and Henriëtte Pimentel, both of whom were eventually arrested and deported themselves. Another notable person was Leendert Overduin, a Dutch Reformed Church pastor who ran Group Overduin that helped about 1,000 Jews to find hiding places. 21 Dutch people have been awarded the Jewish Rescuers Citation by B’nai B’rith for helping to save Jews from deportation.

The onderduikers in turn drove a reward system for “Jew-hunters”—notably the Henneicke Column, originally a group tasked with inventorying abandoned Jewish properties, which became a bounty-hunting operation. The Henneicke Column delivered 8,000-9,000 Jews to Nazi authorities between March and October 1943 alone, earning up to 15 guilders per head.

Of the onderduikers, about a third were caught and deported.

A tale of heroism by some and betrayal by others. Much more at the link.

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Germany is planning to intervene in the ongoing genocide case against Israel at the UN’s top court, a government spokesman said on Friday.

“German government firmly and explicitly rejects the accusation of genocide that has now been made against Israel before the International Court of Justice. This accusation has no basis whatsoever,” spokesman Steffen Hebestreit said in a statement.

He stressed that Germany bears special responsibility for Israel due to the Nazi genocide of Jews during World War II, and said the government will continue to support Israel to defend itself against Hamas.

This Politico article (which seems to have an anti-Israel slant) reports on the following exchange:

Caroline Gennez asked German officials a rhetorical question in an interview with a Belgian weekly: “Do you really want to be on the wrong side of history twice? Will we continue to stand by while ethnic cleansing takes place? Surely that was ‘never again’?”

Germany, which has offered Israel unyielding support since the October 7 Hamas attack, has stood in stark contrast to public statements in recent months from officials from Ireland, Spain and Belgium.

I’m not sure how the German officials responded, but I’d suggest the following response to people like Gennez: “Why do you want to be on the wrong side of history this time, defending savage genocidal Jew-hating murderers like Hamas, and blaming Israel for defending itself?”

As for Caroline Gennez herself, she’s pretty much what you’d expect:

Caroline Gennez … is a Belgian socialist politician who has been serving as the Minister of Development Cooperation and Urban Policy in the De Croo Government since December 2022. She is a former chairwoman of the Socialist Party … in Flanders. …

[In 2003] she called for a boycott of the Israeli song in the Eurovision song festival contest.

Many countries of Europe are right up there – or down there – with Belgium. But I must say that Belgium is in the forefront.

But at least some countries besides Germany, in Europe and elsewhere, are on Israel’s side, although I don’t think they’re planning to do as Germany has announced it will do: to intervene in the ICJ proceeding on Israel’s behalf. But support is support, and I’m surprised that Trudeau voiced any support for Israel at all. My guess is his motive was fear of political disapproval from the Canadian people if he didn’t at least offer some sort of verbal support:

Now Canada speaks out against South Africa's baseless #ICJ genocide claim against Israel, with @JustinTrudeau saying Canada does not support "the premise of the case brought forward by South Africa."

Canada now joins US, Germany, UK and Austria, in opposing South Africa's claim. pic.twitter.com/PF8kwwTtia

— Arsen Ostrovsky ?? (@Ostrov_A) January 12, 2024

Germany’s statement is very strong:

The German government sharply rejected on Friday allegations before the UN’s top court that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza and warned against “political instrumentalization” of the charge …

As a signatory of the 1948 Genocide Convention, [Germany] has the right to join cases and put forward its arguments on the case. …

[German spokesman] Hebestreit acknowledged diverging views in the international community on Israel’s military operation against Hamas in Gaza.

“However the German government decisively and expressly rejects the accusation of genocide brought against Israel before the International Court of Justice,” he said.

“The accusation has no basis in fact,” he said.

Netanyahu told German Chancellor Scholz, “Your stance and Germany’s stance on the side of the truth moves all the citizens of Israel.” Scholz was the very first Western leader to visit Israel in support after 10/7.

It’s been almost eighty years since the end of WWII, but this is indeed moving – in both senses of the word.

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…[B]etween 1934 and 1939. Vishniac walked across Poland, the Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Latvia, and Lithuania with his camera, preserving for posterity images of a Jewish way of life fated soon to be destroyed. Of the 16,000 photographs he managed to take — secretly and under dangerous circumstances — he was able to rescue only about 2,000. Some he sewed into his clothing when he came to the United States in 1940, most he left with his father in a village in France for the duration of the war. A Vanished World brings together nearly 200 of these images…

There is something almost unbearably poignant about the photos and the situation. This is indeed a world that will soon vanish – not just vanish but be violently, cruelly, and purposely obliterated, with great suffering to its inhabitants.

And yet they’ve not all vanished. In fact, some of the former inhabitants of that vanished world are still around, although they are very elderly and won’t be here for much longer. This is an article about a recent get-together of 56 of them, and some of their reminiscences:

“You come home from Auschwitz like you fell from the sky,” [Auschwitz survivor Einhorn] recalled. He had “no parents, no siblings, no nothing.” He worked in the Tel Aviv port, but there was a time when he had to sleep in a public park. He had no living connections to the rest of the world and no one to guide him, just people who seemed eager to evade what he’d been through and what it might represent. For decades, no one asked Einhorn about the numbers on his arm, or seemed to care very much about them.

In New York, Einhorn worked at a kosher butcher shop on the Lower East side and raised a family. Most of a century later, the horrors of the Holocaust are still recent enough to be able to cause nightmares in the people who experienced them, Einhorn included. “You know, I still dream of Auschwitz,” he said. “My mind is still in Auschwitz … I’m still crying. I cry in the night, I cry in the day. I’m still not finished from there.”

It is indecent, not to mention inaccurate, to imply any neat ending to the survivors’ stories, as if living through the Holocaust were a fair price to pay for getting to spend the rest of one’s life in the United States making womens’ belts or selling kosher meat. If one insists on extracting any hope from the experience of the war and the subsequent decades, it shouldn’t come from the inevitable need to salvage meaning from evil, or from the psychological impulse to vulgarize tragedy in order to make it comprehensible, but from forces beyond the merely human, far outside our meager range of understanding.

If you’ve never read Primo Levi’s book Survival in Auschwitz, or its less-well-known sequel The Reawakening, about Levi’s return to the post-Holocaust world, I highly recommend both. In my opinion they are the most brilliant things ever written on the subject.

I wrote a lengthy previous post discussing Levi – and his probable suicide. It contained this quote from Survival in Auschwitz, which gives you a flavor of his work:

Strange how, in some way, one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy. Or else, it is raining and is also windy: but you know that this evening, it is your turn for the supplement of soup so that even today, you find the strength to reach the evening. Or it is raining, windy and you have the usual hunger, and then you think that if you really had to, if you really felt nothing in your heart but suffering and tedium – as sometimes happens, when you really seem to lie on the bottom – well, even in that case, at any moment you want you could always go and touch the electric wire-fence, or throw yourself under the shunting trains, and then it would stop raining.

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I can’t find the quote right now, but Holocaust survivor and author Primo Levi—who wrote Survival In Auschwitz, which I consider the single most definitive and brilliant book on the camps from the point of view of someone who experienced them firsthand—said that for many ex-inmates, comparisons between what happened in the camps and their lives afterwards didn’t help (although it certainly did for the interviewee I quoted in Part I of this series). Levi said that even though the camps were exponentially worse than the rest of the more petty difficulties of life outside the camps, that each state (camps versus ordinary life) had its woes, and that survivors could still get annoyed and upset afterwards at the smaller frustrations and sorrows of ordinary existence.

That’s the human condition for most people; few are able to keep the contrast constantly in mind like the man in the Part I interview, and there’s no shame in that.

Levi was a scientist who wrote about the camps as though he were a scientist studying them: cool, dispassionate, analytical. He died as a possible suicide in a fall in 1987 at the age of 67. Whether he killed himself or died accidentally has been hotly debated and the answer is still unclear.

Levi is an author whose work I greatly admire, and I am hardly alone, as his biographer Carole Angier writes:

We feel we know and love him from his work, because we know and love his gentle, rigorous, witty, open mind. But the rest of him is completely closed. Primo Levi is, in fact, one of the most secretive writers who ever lived. And not only in his work. Though he gave hundreds of interviews, he used them not to lower the walls but to raise them still higher, by presenting a careful construct of himself almost to the end. He presented the same construct to most people throughout his life; even, as long as he could, to himself. That construct – the calm, rational, optimistic man – was his ideal: an ideal he managed to reach in much of his life, because it was both a moral imperative and a psychological necessity to him.

But it was not the reality. “I have no instincts,” he said, with his smile, “or if I do, I repress them.” But the more he repressed them, the more they resisted, and took their revenge. The man who loved and spoke to the whole of humanity found private, emotional life impossibly hard. And the man who chose optimism, because one must not spread despair, found he had locked the despair inside him; and more and more often it rose and drowned him.

Even though it is not known whether Levi killed himself, it is known that he suffered from depression. But his depression predated his Holocaust experience and represented a lifelong struggle. A different man, a different temperament, than the man interviewed in Part I. And yet Levi managed to live and work for about forty highly productive and creative post-Holocaust years until his death. If he did kill himself (and the preponderance of evidence is that he did; he certainly was depressed prior to his death) it was his own temperament, and his own unhappy family history, that probably led him to it:

…Auschwitz did not destroy him. It came very near at the time, and immediately afterwards. But after that it did almost the opposite, requiring him to understand and to communicate, the two things that kept him alive. “I am a talker,” he said. “If you stop up my mouth, I die.” When, in his last depression, he felt he could no longer communicate, he died. That is what killed him, not his memories of Auschwitz. Neither Alex the Kapo of If This Is A Man [the European title of Survival in Auschwitz], nor his heirs, should imagine they have that victory.

Angier also offers a few excerpts from Levi’s great masterpiece about the camps. Here is a passage that reflects with Levi’s usual brilliance and extraordinary clarity on the mindset in the camps that brought some small (very small, in this case) measure of optimism to a situation so full of nearly unfathomable misery:

Strange how, in some way, one always has the impression of being fortunate, how some chance happening, perhaps infinitesimal, stops us crossing the threshold of despair and allows us to live. It is raining, but it is not windy. Or else, it is raining and is also windy: but you know that this evening, it is your turn for the supplement of soup so that even today, you find the strength to reach the evening. Or it is raining, windy and you have the usual hunger, and then you think that if you really had to, if you really felt nothing in your heart but suffering and tedium – as sometimes happens, when you really seem to lie on the bottom – well, even in that case, at any moment you want you could always go and touch the electric wire-fence, or throw yourself under the shunting trains, and then it would stop raining.

The post Holocaust stories: temperament and trauma [Part II] appeared first on The New Neo.

[NOTE: Part II can be found here.]

Here is a fascinating interview with an elderly concentration camp survivor. If you’ve read or heard many camp survivors’ tales, the horrors he faced will not surprise you. But that’s not why I’m linking to the interview, because I assume you’re all familiar with the almost unimaginable type of brutality this man experienced.

No, I’m linking because of statements such as these:

Q: In those dark days how did you find the strength to survive? Did you ever want to give up so the suffering would end?

A: Well, the answer to that question is simply that it’s human nature to overcome most of the atrocities and difficulties that are thrown at them.

But I didn’t think that I was any different than any other person. At least at that time, I didn’t give it any thought. I just wanted to survive – to get by every day, to stay out of the way, not to be as visible, because these – I don’t know what to call them – these monsters just look for any kind of reason to pull someone out to kill them, to set an example…

And I was always very – don’t know how to say it? I was always very enthusiastic about life itself.

I hadn’t had a life, until that point, and whatever I did have, at this point, was sort’ve blocked out of my mind. I didn’t remember the good years any more. So to me, life was very important, and I had to do everything humanly possible to survive, not to give them a reason or a cause to pull me out, and kill me.

The speaker (who is not named in the excerpt) seems to think he wasn’t unusual. But I would say he is quite unusual. In fact, since most people did not survive the camps he was in (Auschwitz and Dachau), there is no question he had unusual mental and physical strength. He says it is “human nature to overcome most of the atrocities and difficulties that are thrown at them”—and that’s true, up to a point. But some people in the camps did give up, and it hastened their deaths (that is, if they had been spared to work in the first place; most people who arrived at death camps were killed on arrival).

The speaker had been a young man during the war, probably in his early-to-mid-teens. He was smart; he figured out that keeping a low profile would be a good thing under those circumstances, and that helped. But I think the most revealing statement he made in that passage was “I was always very enthusiastic about life itself.” He had a vigorous and naturally optimistic life force that held him in good stead throughout some of the most trying circumstances human beings can ever experience.

Perhaps he was born that way.

Perhaps it was also due in part to his happy family life, which he describes this way, “I came from a wonderful loving home, a family of 7.” This can help to give a person unusual strength of will and personality, the ability to be a survivor. And yet somewhat paradoxically it was not his happy memories that helped him, at least not consciously, although I believe the joy and loving support he had experienced while growing up gave him tremendous internal strength. But in order to get through the ordeal, his mind seems to have suppressed those loving memories and kept him in the present moment:

I hadn’t had a life, until that point, and whatever I did have, at this point, was sort’ve blocked out of my mind. I didn’t remember the good years any more. So to me, life was very important…

He wasn’t comparing this to what had been; he was just focused on the act of survival.

After tremendous horrors, he was liberated and restored to health, and then came to America:

Q: What was your initial experience of America when you first arrived in 1947?

A: Well, when I was arrived, I was very, very overcome. I was impressed. It was just overwhelming to me.

First, I arrived in New York harbor, and of course, the skyscrapers, the lifestyle – I made a sort of promise to myself then: This is going to be the first day of your life. From this day on, there is only ONE place to go: SUCCEED. I will build a family, I will do whatever I can in my power to succeed in this United States of America.

And this was my first impression. I liked what I seen. I met people who I thought were industrious, with businesses and families and love – there’s respect. I loved what I saw in America. I became American in my heart immediately. So I adopted America, and I am glad America adopted me, and allowed me to be part of it, and become a citizen.

Again, it seems as though he had a rare ability to blot out the past and in this case to focus on a happier future. He also was one of those people who—no matter where they are born—have an American spirit and immediately recognize America as the place for them. America suited him.

The following passage in particular shows the sort of extraordinary emotional fortitude and upbeat nature this man has:

Q: Have you or any other survivors you’ve met had to deal with PTSD or other mental health issues after the war ended? How were you able to go through it?

A: Post-traumatic stress, is that what you’re saying?

I didn’t have very much of that.

I knew – there were no surprises. I knew exactly what was happening in the camps. I went through it every day.

So after liberation, I really did not have that much stress, because after going through hell, everything is paradise.

I knew I had to work hard in order to achieve my dream, to be successful in this world, but to have post-traumatic stress – I didn’t. I dunno. Maybe because i was too young, I didn’t realize. But to me, every day was a gift from heaven.

So after going through what I went through – everything was easy. It was simple.

To some people – things may look hard, like hard work, or digging ditches, or who knows what you’re doing that’s hard. To me, it was a pleasure, work. I’m doing this as a free man, a free person!

But this feeling was certainly not universal. Some survivors were so overwhelmed by what had happened to them in the camps that they committed suicide. In fact, the suicide attempt rate for Holocaust survivors living in Israel has been found in one study to be three times higher than the suicide rate in the rest of the aging population there. In addition:

Earlier studies had shattered another myth, that despite the intense suffering in the concentration camps, few inmates tried to commit suicide. These studies found that while 100 suicides per 100,000 people is considered a very high rate in normal times, the rate in the camps was about 25,000 suicides per 100,000 people, or almost one out of every four people.

“As far as is known, this is the highest suicide rate in human history,” Barak said. “We’ve learned that religious people in Auschwitz and other camps made formal applications to rabbis in the camps seeking permission to commit suicide.”

People exposed to similar experiences react differently. I make no negative judgement on any of them, because what they were subjected to was so extreme that I am astounded that any of them could go on to live a relatively happy and normal life.

[Part II coming soon.]

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