“Confrontation with Death”
by Eddy de Wind
The Dutch original of this article was first published in Folia psychiatrica, neurologica et neurochirurgica Neerlandica Vol. 52 (1949), December, 459–466. It was first published in English, in a different translation, in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis Vol. 49 (1968), 302–305.
Immediately after liberation people were keen to read everything that was published about the concentration camps. Even in those early days, some writers tried to make sociological and psychological conclusions in their work. The public devoured it all uncritically, but soon became sated. Financial worries, fears of new global catastrophes, and, above all, disillusionment about post-war relations dulled people’s interest. At the same time, it is not pleasant to be constantly reminded of the suffering of others, while also feeling as if one is being held responsible because of real or alleged failings regarding those who have died or undergone great hardship.
I would spare the listeners all of the horror stories about the camps, if it were not for the fact that we—the former inmates—are still astonished every day by how little is known in the Netherlands about what happened there, especially in Polish camps like Auschwitz. Those who wrote about their experiences shortly after liberation did it mainly to try to find some peace of mind. By writing about the camps, one conquered one’s pent-up emotions. It is understandable that readers, who had to take over this burden, soon had enough of it, and the interest for camp literature began to wane. Unfortunately, people threw the baby out with the bathwater by failing to subject the former inmates’ academic conclusions to closer inquiry.
Several years have now passed and the memory of the camp is beginning to lose some of its torturous, affective character. What was once the most hideous reality now seems like a horror film we saw in our childhood years. Fear and rage still rush at us together with the remembered images, but they are like wild animals that have been caged… They can no longer pounce; we have distanced ourselves from them.
Thanks to this distancing we can consider what we experienced more objectively. We no longer feel caught up in the atmosphere of the camp, but think about how to convey it at our desks, studying it the way a chemist observes reactions in test tubes. We see the camp with its streets and barracks, and inside them—as reagents—the people. We let the circumstances affect them and watch the way they change. The experiment takes place…
We are familiar with many of the Germans’ experiments: dermatological, surgical, and numerous others. I have studied the protocols (in Nuremberg), which the “SS Lagerärzte” wrote for Brandt, the “Führer’s” personal physician… I shall spare you the horrors. But there was one experiment I couldn’t find any report of, the experiment “Camp.” The Germans are not aware of the meaning of the camp as a social psychological experiment. It is up to us now to draw up these protocols.
Much has been written about man in mortal danger. I remember the well-known publication in which Dr. M. G. Vroom describes the experience of deadly peril during bombing raids. In this situation, however, and also for troops at the front, the threat of death has a different meaning than it does for the inmates of a camp. For the former the threat is acute, whereas for the latter it is chronic and, unlike soldiers who have a sense of fighting for their lives, prisoners are also defenseless.
We immediately think of the experiences of Dostoyevsky, which he—autobiographically—describes for us in The Idiot: “But in the case of an execution, that last hope—having which it is so immeasurably less dreadful to die—is taken away from the wretch and certainty substituted in its place! There is his sentence, and with it that terrible certainty that he cannot possibly escape death—which, I consider, must be the most dreadful anguish in the world. You may place a soldier before a cannon’s mouth in battle, and fire upon him—and he will still hope. But read to that same soldier his death-sentence, and he will either go mad or burst into tears. Who dares to say that any man can suffer this without going mad?”1
Later in The Idiot we read about a condemned man who is standing on the scaffold: “What should I do if I were not to die now? What if I were to return to life again?[… ]He said that this thought weighed so upon him and became such a terrible burden upon his brain that he could not bear it, and wished they would shoot him quickly and have done with it.”2
Running through these quotes, we see two lines of thought.
First, that it seemed inconceivable to Dostoyevsky that someone could have the certainty of a death sentence and not go insane.
Second, that as soon as death has become a certainty, the tension becomes so unbearable that one longs for death as the only escape from the tension.
Of the four and a half million Jews who arrived in Auschwitz, 4,000 at most (one per thousand) survived.3 Most of those who died knew the inevitability of death. Nonetheless, they did not go mad. Let us investigate how that was possible. To understand the thoughts and emotions of camp inmates confronted with death, we need to review what the Jews had been through before their deportation to Auschwitz.
In Amsterdam and in Westerbork, for instance, the mentality of the Jews was characterized by a tremendous repression of reality. Despite the fact that everyone could rationally understand that they too would one day be compelled to make the journey to Poland, everyone convinced themselves that they would avoid it, and the gassing in Poland (discussed on BBC radio as early as 1941) was something people simply didn’t want to hear about; reality was fobbed off with the words “British propaganda.” It was only when they were on a train crossing the Dutch border that everyone realized just how fictitious the sense of security that had been maintained with Jewish Council stamps and all kinds of German lists and other assurances had been.
Because of this repression of reality and their fictitious sense of security, the great majority of Dutch Jews never made any attempt to save themselves through flight or resistance, as opposed to Jews such as those in the Warsaw ghetto, who were realists with centuries of training in resistance to antisemitism.
The Germans cunningly promoted this process of repression in the Netherlands by making Westerbork a “good” camp, where many facilities were provided.
Deportation still remained inevitable and when, on the train to Poland, repression became unsustainable, another defense mechanism took effect: people succumbed to a hypomanic mood. The crowd was like a frightened child who sings in the dark to hide his fear. One pulled out a guitar, a second started to sing, infecting a third with his cheerfulness, and soon the whole cattle-truck was singing along. The perversely cheerful mood was intensified by the sight of bombed cities in Germany and, consciously at least, the fear of the camp disappeared completely.
When the train then stopped for a long time in the yards at the railway station of the town of Auschwitz, there was only one longing: to set off again and reach the camp as quickly as possible. Nobody realized that this arrival would probably be their end…
After many hours the train started rolling again, only to stop soon afterward at a long embankment in the green countryside. Standing on the embankment were shaven-headed men in striped convict uniforms. As the train pulled up they rushed over to the wagons and jerked open the doors.
In that instant the repression was still in effect. A doctor who had made the journey in the same wagon as me with his wife and child remarked, “Look, they’re prisoners from a concentration camp. They have to help us with our baggage.”
This man was like a tourist on a merry mountain hike who is oblivious to all danger until the avalanche comes crashing down on him. Arrival in a concentration camp is a severe psychic trauma akin to being buried by an avalanche. The facts rush at the newcomers so fast that they are in danger of being crushed by them.
Eighty percent of the travelers were loaded onto large trucks. These were the old, the invalids, and the mothers with children. They were taken to the “Bad- und Desinfektionsraum.” There, in the hermetically sealed washroom, they were summoned by loudspeaker to breathe in deeply to disinfect the lungs of contagious diseases. What went through these people’s minds in the instant they realized that the gas was poisonous is something we can scarcely imagine. As cruel as their fate was, it would be too speculative to go into their emotions during the moment of stupefaction…
We will follow the others, the strong young people, closely.
The psychic trauma took place in several phases. After the doors of the goods wagons had been thrown open, the prisoners drove the travelers out with sticks and cudgels. For the first time the new arrivals discovered how people are treated in a concentration camp, not just by the SS, but also by some categories of prisoners with long experience of camp life. In Auschwitz these were mostly Poles.
Then all the baggage had to be thrown onto a pile and one said goodbye to the last material possessions one had brought from home. But what followed was worst of all. Long lines were formed on the embankment: the line for the elderly, the young men’s line, and the young women’s. People now realized the inevitable, that they were going to be split up and would have to go through a long, fearful period of uncertainty before seeing each other again.
But in that instant people still believed that they would be reunited later and called out a sincere “till we meet again.”
As the rows set in motion, the multiple psychic trauma continued step by step.
After passing a barrier, the line of young men entered the grounds of the actual camp.
Storage yards for building supplies, large ramshackle sheds, and enormous stacks of bricks and timber. There were small trains, propelled by hand power, and large wagons pulled by fifteen to twenty men, all dressed in prison uniforms. Here and there along the road there were factories with the hum of machinery coming from the inside, then more timber, bricks, and sheds. There was life everywhere and everywhere buildings were being built.
The newcomers began to make associations with descriptions of forced labor in previous centuries—galley slaves and convicts—and then came the incomprehensible thought, now I am a convict too. Things one had only known from books—Dostoyevsky’s House of the Dead—and from the film I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang suddenly became reality.
Then the lads were at the gate and seeing the camp they would have to live in for the first time. Above the gate, in decorative cast iron, the concentration camp slogan: ARBEIT MACHT FREI.
A suggestion designed to reconcile the thousands who would enter here to their fate, by offering them a glimmer of hope.
Keeping that hope alive until the last moment was part of the camp system. Besides perhaps in individual threats, the SS never admitted that extermination was the goal. Artificially launched rumors seeped through the crowded camp like an anesthetic poison, feeding irrational illusions and keeping the prisoners from active resistance. The suggestion that work would set you free was soon rendered ineffective by the first conversations with more senior camp residents, among them some of our compatriots.
The truth about the tortures, infectious diseases, starvation, and especially the weekly recurring “selections,” in which the weakest were picked out and taken to the gas chambers, was flung mercilessly in the newcomers’ faces.
I remember speaking to a Dutchman—perhaps an hour after my arrival in the camp. He was a strong, well-built young man, who also looked well nourished. He predicted that none of us would get out alive. I still clung to him: “How long have you been here then?”
“A year.”
“But then it must be bearable!”
Unfortunately, the Dutchman wasted no time in shattering my illusions by telling me that he was the last survivor from his transport of one thousand people. He was a champion boxer and the SS appreciated his boxing skills so much that they had taken him under their wing.
In this way we soon knew very precisely which fate was in store for us. The exhausting work, the meager daily rations, and the lack of rest already made it clear to us that camp life was unbearable. And when we first saw the wagons with the most exhausted prisoners leaving for Birkenau, the part of the camp with the crematoriums, there was no more room for doubt. Although our rational minds were convinced, irrational hope remained. Hope was mainly nourished by the rumors, which were, in turn, fed by hope, but besides this there were also peculiar facts: for instance, many of the prisoners worked in Krupp and IG Farben factories and in the so-called Deutsche Ausrüstungswerkstatte. There they were given certain privileges: an extra half liter of soup and sometimes extra bread, a straw mattress to themselves that they didn’t need to share with two or three other men. Sometimes they even got “pay,” a Prämienschein of one mark, which they could use to buy onions in the canteen, or lavatory paper, an enormous luxury.
If we spoke to the older prisoners about these facts, they only responded with a sneer. They knew all too well how it would end. Nonetheless they had to admit that something had changed in the camp, and when we sometimes bemoaned our fate, they mocked us. “You have no idea what a camp is. Compared to our day it’s a sanatorium here now.” We were constantly hurled back and forth from hope to dread, from emotional, irrational hope to reasoned dread, the virtual certainty that this would all mean the end.
This mixture of conflicting responses is not that strange. It is familiar to everyone. But in the camp the divergence was so strong, there was such a distance between thought and emotion, that it was scarcely possible to speak of a mixture anymore. It was so overwhelming that there were two consciousnesses living in each person—one knowing and the other hoping—moving independently of each other and having virtually no influence on each other.
The certainty of the approaching end gave rise to a numbed resignation, but in those urgent moments when a prisoner was in danger of succumbing, the quiet hope was a stimulus to hold out a little longer.
In this way one always lasted a little longer in the camp than one could have lasted according to human calculations.
The six phases of the confrontation with the concentration camp had the effect of an equal number of psychic traumas: the confiscation of the baggage, the separation of the families, the impressions of the people working outside the camp, the sight of the camp with its electrified barbed wire, the shaving and the tattooing with the Häftlingsnummer, and, above all, the newcomers’ communications with the senior prisoners are comparable to the most intense traumas we see in the field of traumatic neuroses. And the reaction to these traumas was the same as the reaction to an intense, acute shock: the result was a stuporous condition. Stupor characterized the prisoners’ behavior in the first weeks. They were quiet and inhibited, and unable to understand the snarled orders in concentration camp jargon.
They found it impossible to get the soup, which they would later crave, down their throats, and the slowness of their reactions made an extremely stupid impression on the more senior prisoners and especially the SS. This was the “blödes Schwein” stage in which many perished. When they failed to properly follow the orders they had not understood, they were beaten to death, or their awkward behavior resulted in their being assigned to the heaviest Kommandos, where they had to carry out unbearable labor. There were also some, though these were the least in number, who showed a different attitude right from the start. They refused to bend the knee and behaved fairly arrogantly, trying to withstand the law of the concentration camp with their iron will and putting on a show of bravery. They too soon went under. Rather than “blöd,” they were “frech” and those who were frech were also beaten to death, albeit for other reasons than the Blöde. Still there were also some who, after a short while, managed to find an attitude that made it possible to bear the camp over a longer period thanks to a peculiar kind of adaptation, which is such an interesting phenomenon that I would like to take as an additional subject for this study. And although I realize that what I will now say is still very incomplete and in many points disputable, I believe nonetheless that I have sufficient material to justify elaborating my chain of thought for you. To immediately give you a picture of a prisoner who found the right style, I will read you a passage from the case history of a patient who spent a long time in camps and recently came to me because of the difficulties he is having adapting.
The patient said the following: “I don’t understand myself how I came through it. Of the four hundred men who were transported to Buna with me, only thirty were left after a year. I always just let myself go. When the Kapo hit me, I thought, just beat me to death. When there was a bombing raid, I thought, if only I’m lucky enough to be hit by a bomb. I was completely apathetic. When the Dutch lads spoke to me, I thought, ah, just let them talk, and couldn’t follow the conversation. The Kapo said, ‘I don’t understand why you’re not in the crematorium yet.’ I shirked work as much as I could and if they noticed, they’d sometimes beat me to the ground; I didn’t care. In the end I didn’t feel the blows anymore. I didn’t bleed from them anymore either. Once during a selection I was written down, standing among dozens of Mussulmen. The next day I presented to the Lagerarzt, who asked me what my profession was. I said ‘warehouseman.’ If I’d said ‘diamond cutter,’ I’d have been gone. They always said, ‘All you Jews are good for is cutting diamonds and doing business.’ On an impulse, I answered ‘warehouseman.’”
In this man we see a remarkable capacity to let insult and injury pass him by virtually unnoticed. Later we even heard from him that eventually he almost found it pleasant to be tormented. The line from Exodus we can find on the urn tomb in Westerbork is applicable to him: “Pure oil from olives, beaten, beaten and pounded, to bear suffering as light.”
Although I can’t go too deeply into the theoretical background of this capacity to “bear suffering as light,” I would like to draw several parallels and would primarily recall what Freud has described for us in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, although it’s certainly not necessary to quote Freud in this company. And we are also familiar with just how much the death drive Freud posits in that essay is still a moot point. Nonetheless we must admit that people like the patient I have just described had adapted strongly to the idea of dying. And in their cases we can clearly apply the opinion of Carp,4 who puts it a little more broadly when he says that people whose individual earthly existence has become unbearable because of certain tensions long for a resolution of this existence and a continuation in another. And is it not abundantly clear that the stupor we have described in the newcomers was a consequence of this death principle? The prisoner who had actually given up on life under the influence of psychic trauma had reconciled himself to the idea of dying. He was certain that he would one day get out of the camp, but believed—to express it in concentration camp terms—that it would be “durch den Kamin,” by way of the crematorium chimney; or, in other words, “I will definitely get out, if not horizontally, vertically.” The prisoner was like a Raskolnikov.5 He sought misery and humiliation. For him, blows and hunger were no longer traumas but aids to achieve his goal: death. If this condition continued, death would be the result. If the prisoner did not get beaten to death, he would die from disease, and it was apparent that the exceptionally florid tubercular processes we saw in the camp were exacerbated by a desire to die.
We have seen that the man who surrendered completely to the camp soon perished, but the man who resisted with all his vitality exhausted his energies quickly as well, using up his mental and physical reserves in a futile struggle against the law of “L’Univers concentrationnaire.” This brings us to the paradox that reconciling oneself to death was a vital condition for the prisoner, that it was necessary for him to submit, and that his only chance of staying alive was if he, alongside this submission, which really can be called a form of inner acceptance, retained sufficient vitality to give the right answer at critical moments, just as our patient, who had let himself go completely, answered warehouseman instead of diamond cutter in the moment when the Lagerarzt was choosing his victims for the gas chambers.
Compared to ordinary life, staying alive in the camp required a different relationship between vitality and what I—to avoid discussions about the term “death drive”—would like to call the death principle. Whereas in ordinary life vitality generally has the upper hand and the death principle only dominates in pathological conditions such as melancholy, its domination in the concentration camp was a necessity. To summarize, I can say that the stuporous prisoner who was completely dominated by the death principle perished from it, as did those who resisted the camp with all their vitality. The prisoner who wanted to have a chance of life had to develop a certain camp psyche, the deeper basis of which was an altered attitude to death.
Let us now analyze the factors that made the emergence of such a camp psyche possible. In the first instance several physical factors.
Various experiences, particularly in the last war, have made it clear how much deficiencies play a role in the decline of mental function. This decline is not regular, but selective. The vitamin B complex in particular seems to play a role. During the autopsies carried out by Russian doctors on prisoners who had died after liberation, I saw very remarkable abnormalities. The intestinal wall had become as thin as parchment, which was explained as epithelium loss from B deficiency. In cerebro we saw petechiae, a presentation similar to that of Wernicke encephalopathy, and although there is still a shortage of facts regarding deficiency psychoses, I would like to draw attention to experiments by American researchers who evoked psychotic states by putting experimental subjects on a diet that was low in vitamin B6, niacin. May I also draw attention to Grewel’s description of “anaemia perniciosa,” not a direct result of malnutrition, but nonetheless a deficiency disease:
“Speed of action and resilience decline. The same applies to thought processes. Psychological tone is reduced… Sometimes there are over-sensitivities, including to pain and emotions… Apathy alternates with fits of anger, irritability and affectability.”
It is apparent that these few facts require further study. Nonetheless I am convinced that we will gain the most not from studies of the prisoners’ physical conditions, but by paying particular attention to the sociological conditions in which they lived. And this brings us to the second group of factors that give rise to the development of a camp psyche.
The word sociological may sound inflated, until one realizes that a conglomeration of tens of thousands up to as many as 200,000 people, as in Auschwitz-Birkenau, cannot simply be seen as an unstructured crowd. Instead, various social ranks operated within this mass and could not but influence the psychological condition of the individuals.
In order to explain the social relations in the concentration camps, I must first summarize several facts from the history of these camps. The first ones were set up in 1933: small camps with two to three hundred prisoners each. These had a purely political function in relation to the Nazi takeover. In addition they were a practicing ground for SS methods. The SS was trained there for its later task of European domination.
Around the start of the war, the camps’ second function developed. The mass extermination of the Jews became an economic necessity for the German conduct of the war. This led to the large death camps Majdanek and Treblinka, and the largest, Auschwitz. But once such enormous SS cities had arisen, it turned out that these could also fulfill a further function. In 1937, Pohl, who was in charge of the economic side of the camps, uttered his historic words: Warum sollte die SS nichts verdienen,6 and increasingly from then on, the camps became enormous factories in which the prisoners labored as brutally exploited workers.
Initially all of the prisoners in the camps were treated equally badly, but gradually a separate class arose among them of prisoners favored by the SS, the Kapos and Blockälteste, who served as an extension of the SS and allowed them to put as many prisoners as possible to work. In 1937 the first public limited companies in concentration camps were created. The shareholders were… members of the SS. During the war important branches of German industrial concerns (Krupp, IG Farben) were established in the camps. The prisoners were hired from the SS for six marks a day. In his book The Theory and Practice of Hell, Kogon7 calculated that the profit per prisoner per day was approximately four marks, which across all camps came to hundreds of thousands of marks a day, and billions over the whole war. After all, nine and a half million people died there,8 of whom approximately forty percent produced several months of profit for the SS.
As long as there were enough Jews and political adversaries in all of the countries of Europe, the SS was reckless with prisoners’ lives. But around 1943 the supply began to dwindle and it therefore became necessary to relax the regime in the camps to safeguard war production and SS profiteering. This gave the prisoners a little breathing space. We see that the SS had two contradictory goals with its prisoners: on the one hand, rapid and efficient mass extermination; on the other, sparing them for the economic benefit they could generate. In 1944 this split in the mentality of the camp reached a climax with the double function of death camp and economically essential labor camp. The remarkable tension that existed in the prisoners between surrendering to death and their constantly recurring bursts of vitality, the inner ambivalence, being thrown back and forth between hope and dread, was sustained by its emotional resonance with the split nature of the social environment.
This already indicates a likely link between two apparently independent phenomena, the sociological structure of the camp and the prisoners’ psychic structure. We see how a social form that is essentially different from any society we know can also cause psychological changes of a depth we could not have previously suspected. It goes without saying that there is important individual variation in the ability to adjust to the camp environment by developing the psychic state described above. There was a great difference between the reactions of Eastern European Jews with their strong Slavic streak, who had been accustomed to antisemitism from an early age, and those of Western Jews. When it came to the Dutch, the Jewish proletarians—the orange vendor from Waterloo Square and the cigar maker from Uilenburg—were made of sterner stuff than members of the prosperous middle class, whose entire facade of self-importance collapsed at the first blow or swear word, at least when they had no deeper source of self-esteem than their social position. In general in the camp we saw that those whose lives had some kind of religious alignment (this in the broadest sense, also as a devotion to a political system or a humanistic philosophy) were the quickest to recover from the initial stupor. It is therefore no coincidence that both the faithful Christians and those who would seem to be their psychological opposites, the communists, were best at holding their own in the camp and even found opportunities to achieve some degree of anti-fascist organization. The same phenomenon was seen in the Dutch resistance with the close-knit groups around the underground newspapers Trouw and De Waarheid.
Of course the adaptive mechanisms described above did not apply to the ruling group among the prisoners, the Kapos and Blockälteste, often sadists and psychopaths and as bad as the SS buddies they drank with and joined in visits to the brothel. But of those prisoners who suffered the full misery of the camp, it can be said that, inasmuch as they managed to stick it out, it was because they had so deeply reconciled themselves to the idea of going under and because the normally dominant vital urge only manifested itself incidentally, in truly critical moments. A small reserve of this will to live could be kept for those moments because in the background of consciousness the thought remained alive that existence might have another meaning than just making it through another day.
Even now, years after the war, we regularly see how difficult it is to reverse the far-reaching alteration of personality that took place in the camps. For this reason it seems to me that an insight into the living conditions that formed the people in the camps, which I have sketched briefly above, is a necessary prerequisite if we are to offer help to the disequilibrated former prisoners who visit our practices.