Surviving the Holocaust

A Life Course Perspective

Ronald Berger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415997300
• eBook ISBN: 9781136948886
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

Surviving the Holocaust is a compelling sociological account of two brothers who survived the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland. One brother, the author's father, endured several concentration camps, including the infamous camp at Auschwitz, as well as a horrific winter death march; while the other brother, the author's uncle, survived outside the camps by passing as a Catholic among anti-Semitic Poles, including a group of anti-Nazi Polish Partisans, eventually becoming an officer in the Soviet army.

As an exemplary "theorized life history," Surviving the Holocaust applies concepts from life course theory to interpret the trajectories of the brothers' lives, enhancing this approach with insights from agency-structure and collective memory theory. Challenging the conventional wisdom that survival was simply a matter of luck, it highlights the prewar experiences, agentive decision-making and risk-taking, and collective networks that helped the brothers elude the death grip of the Nazi regime. Surviving the Holocaust also shows how one family's memory of the Holocaust is commingled with the memories of larger collectivities, including nations-states and their institutions, and how the memories of individual survivors are infused with collective symbolic meaning.

1
JEWISH SURVIVAL OF THE HOLOCAUST

The “special detail” lived in a crisis situation. Every day we saw thousands and thousands of innocent people disappear up the chimney. With our own eyes, we could truly fathom what it means to be a human being. There they came, men, women, children, all innocent. They suddenly vanished, and the world said nothing! We felt abandoned. By the world, by humanity. But the situation taught us fully what the possibility of survival meant. For we could gauge the infinite value of human life. And we were convinced that hope lingers in man as long as he lives. … That’s why we struggled through our lives of hardship, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, hoping against hope to survive, to escape that hell.

Filip Müller, survivor of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando¹

My subject in this book is survival, or more specifically survival of the Holocaust—the Nazis’ genocidal campaign that took the lives of about six million Jews, what is called the Shoah in Hebrew (for catastrophic destruction) and what the Nazis called the Final Solution.² The question of survival has been a long-standing preoccupation of literature and popular culture, whether it is the story of Robinson Crusoe cast-away on a remote tropical island or the artificially constructed competition of the “reality” TV show Survivor. In his book Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, Laurence Gonzales purports to describe “the art and science of survival, … whether in the wilderness or in meeting any of life’s great challenges.”³ According to Gonzales, “every survival situation is the same in its essence”—it is one in which the individual is “annealed in the fires of peril, … looking death in the face.” More recently, in The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life, Ben Sherwood defines a survivor as “anyone who faces and overcomes adversity, hardship, illness, or physical or emotional trauma,” including “the friends and family who stand beside them,” noting that “everyone is a survivor.”⁴

Surely it is a stretch to say that “every survival situation is the same in its essence” and that “everyone is a survivor.” Is the experience of Auschwitz really the same as being stranded in the wilderness? It is one thing to portray genuine victims of terror as “survivors” (such as survivors of rape, domestic violence, and childhood sexual abuse, or even survivors of life-threatening illnesses), but it is quite another to portray the crises and challenges of everyday life (such as surviving a divorce, surviving college, getting a job, or keeping a job) as akin to surviving the Holocaust. Nevertheless, popular culture is replete with such injudicious comparisons,⁵ which include using the Holocaust, Nazism, and Nazi concentration camps as metaphors to describe such diverse phenomena as the condition of women in society, abortion, the AIDS epidemic, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the experience of adult children of alcoholics, and the exploitation of animals.⁶

Clearly, if we are going to consider survival of the Holocaust as an object of serious scholarly inquiry, the concept requires more rigor. As far as I can tell, outside of some early studies of human behavior in the concentration camp, which treated the prisoners more as passive victims than as survivors,⁷ as well as the genre of the Holocaust memoir itself, of which Elie Wiesel’s Night and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz stand out as classics,⁸ Robert Jay Lifton (1967) was perhaps the first scholar to bring the concept of the survivor into the social and behavioral sciences, beginning with his work on the survivors of Hiroshima.⁹ Later, in his essay “The Concept of the Survivor,” Lifton aimed to delineate “common psychological responses of survivors” without implying that the events themselves—Hiroshima, Auschwitz, or a devastating flood—could be equated.¹⁰ His focus was the “total disaster: the physical, social, and spiritual obliteration of a human community,” and he defined the survivor in this context as “one who has encountered, been exposed to, or witnessed death, and has himself or herself remained alive.”¹¹

During the period in which Lifton was working on this topic, Terrence Des Pres published his important treatise, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps.¹² Des Pres defined the context of survival as a “condition of extremity” that persists beyond one’s “ability to alter or end,” where “there is no escape, no place to go except the grave.” The survivor, according to Des Pres, is one who sustains unimaginable physical and psychic damage and yet “manages to stay alive in body and in spirit, enduring dread and hopelessness without the loss of will to carry on in human ways.” He is not a hero but “a protagonist in the classic [literary] sense, for by staying alive he becomes an effective agent in the fight against evil and injustice.”¹³

The topic of survival is immensely personal to me because it involves members of my family who survived the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Poland. When I say members who survived, I should not exaggerate, because there were only two members of our Polish family who had not emigrated before the war who eluded the death grip of the Nazis: my father, Michael Berger, was interned in several concentration camps, including the Auschwitz camps at Birkenau and Monowitz; and my uncle, Sol Berger, escaped the camps by passing as a Catholic Pole with a construction crew, the Polish Partisans, and the Soviet army. In this book, I recount their story of Holocaust survival and interpret their experiences—before, during, and after the war—using the tools of sociological analysis. In particular, I use a life course perspective to interpret the trajectories of my father and uncle’s lives, enhancing this approach with insights from agency-structure and collective memory theory.

The concept of the life course refers to an age-graded sequence of socially defined roles and events that individuals enact over time.¹⁴ A basic premise of this approach is that human lives are shaped by a person’s unique location in historical time and place. While being concerned with how people live “their lives in changing times and across various contexts,” life course theory postulates that early life experiences have a significant impact on later life outcomes.¹⁵ For our purpose, it draws attention to the prewar experiences of Jewish survivors that maximized or minimized, as the case may be, their chances of eluding the Nazis’ killing machine and enduring their condition of trauma. Such a view, as we shall see, challenges the conventional wisdom about “luck ” or randomness as the preeminent feature of survival. It also gives us a way of accounting for survival without relying on psychological theorizing that has dominated the scholarly literature, which assumes that survival was a matter that was endogenous to individuals.

Life course theory characterizes human action as consisting of the dynamic interplay between personal agency and social structure, which agency-structure theory posits as the two foundational or presuppositional categories of all sociological discourse.¹⁶ Personal agency entails a person’s capacity for self-direction, an ability to make decisions and exercise a degree of control over their life, even transform the social relations in which they are enmeshed. Social structure, on the other hand, establishes the external parameters of human action, which enhance and/or limit opportunities and life outcomes. With regard to the Holocaust, one might ask: didn’t a social structure as powerful and ruthless as the Nazis’, which appeared beyond one’s ability to alter or end, negate the human capacity for agency? Indeed, doesn’t the circumstance of the Jews in this context illustrate, as Lawrence Langer observes, “what it meant (and means) in our time to exist without … human agency”?¹⁷ Life course and agency-structure theory will help us grapple with such complex questions of futility and resistance to social structures of extremity in a way that avoids dichotomous characterizations of Jews as overly passive or overly heroic.

An additional focus of the life course perspective entails the concept of life trajectories, or life pathways, a sequence of social roles and experiences that are marked by significant events, transitions, and turning points; as well as the concept of population cohorts, which is akin to the notion of generations, which consist of individuals who share the experience of particular historical events at particular points in their lives.¹⁸ Whereas transitions are more or less orderly or gradual, turning points are marked by disruptions, which are generally unexpected, that propel one into a dramatically different life trajectory. The Holocaust was, of course, a dramatic turning point in the lives of European Jews, which fundamentally altered the trajectory of their lives, if they lived at all. Moreover, the trauma of the ordeal was something that survivors reckoned with for the rest of their lives, whether they tried to express or repress their anguish. This trauma was cultural, as well as personal, as it left an indelible mark on later cohorts of Jews who did not live through the event themselves.¹⁹ It had a particular impact on the “second generation” children of survivors, like myself, who have played a special role in helping our elders explore their past and narrate that past to broader audiences,²⁰ which illustrates the life course axiom about linked or interdependent lives, whereby “socio-historical influences are expressed through [a] network of shared relationships.”²¹ This cross-generational practice of “collective witness,” as Stephen Couch calls it,²² has been a bonding experience for the first and second generation and has symbolically substituted for the “rituals of mourning” and the absence of “graves, headstones and burial places which were so cruelly denied to the victims” and their families.²³

This brings us to the third theoretical orientation that informs this book, which focuses on the phenomenon of collective memory, of which the practice of collective witness is a part. Collective memory entails the ways in which historical events are recollected in group context, if they are recollected at all, for collective memory entails both the remembering and the forgetting of the past.²⁴ While collective memory is constructed, in part, by members of the group that lived through an event, it is also constructed by members of subsequent generations who experience the event vicariously through books, films, memorials, museums, and so forth. Indeed, most of us learn about the past through cultural representations and social institutions that infuse disparate individual memories with common symbolic meaning, creating a sense of shared values and ideals that persists across cohorts and provides the foundation for social solidarity and a unified polity. As we shall see, however, the manner in which the Holocaust was remembered in the postwar years was not self-evident from the trauma of the event itself, and alternative or multiple collective memories of the Holocaust have competed with each other for social recognition as the “master narrative” of the past.

Breaking the Silence

The Holocaust was a traumatic experience for the individuals who died and lived through it, but it was also a collective trauma, not only for Jews, but for the entire world. In the early postwar years, however, it was not explicitly recognized as such, and silence permeated the cultural air. As a member of the postwar “baby boom” cohort, growing up in Los Angeles, California, in the 1950s and 1960s, I actually knew very little about the Holocaust and about what had happened to my father and our European family during World War II. When I was much older, after the veneer of silence had been lifted, my father told me that after he immigrated to the United States in 1946, no one, even Jewish relatives, was particularly interested in hearing about his ordeal. People would say things like, “We suffered too. Did you know that we couldn’t get sugar [during the war] and that gasoline was rationed?” So my father and other survivors like him stopped talking about their experiences. At that time the idea of the Holocaust “survivor” who was held in awe as a witness to history had yet to be constructed. The world was not ready to listen to their stories, to say nothing of embracing them as revered figures. They were viewed as “displaced persons,” “refugees,” “greenhorns.”²⁵

When I was six or seven years old, my father later reminded me, I asked him why I had grandparents only on my mother’s side of the family while all my friends had two sets of grandparents. At that time all he said was that they had died. When I was a little older, he did tell me about being in a concentration camp and about his agony over losing his parents. At that age, however, I do not think I really understood what being in a concentration camp entailed. Back then, it seemed to me, the only observable trace of his ordeal was the blue number 160914 tattooed on his left arm.

Moreover, I cannot recall any attention given to the subject during all my years in public school or later even in college at UCLA. Nor can I recall it mentioned in Hebrew school during the period of my life I was preparing for my bar mitzvah. Quite frankly, my most vivid images of World War II came not from the Holocaust but from movies about the experiences and heroics of American soldiers. My first serious encounter with the Holocaust, if you can call it serious, did not occur until the 1978 airing of the television miniseries Holocaust, a docudrama based on the Gerald Green screenplay about two fictional families, one Jewish and one German, which was viewed by some 120 million viewers in the United States alone.²⁶

I was raised in a working- and middle-class Jewish enclave on the west side of Los Angeles. It was my mother’s decision that we should live there. Her parents, who were also Jewish, had immigrated to the United States between the two World Wars and had settled in Glendale, California, just outside the borders of Los Angeles proper. This is where my mother was raised. It was an anti-Semitic community, a stronghold of the John Birch Society. My mother never experienced violence because of her Jewish identity, but neither did she think it was an environment in which she wanted to raise her own children....

Table of contents

• Contemporary Sociological Perspectives
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• 1 JEWISH SURVIVAL OF THE HOLOCAUST
• 2 THE FINAL SOLUTION TO THE “JEWISH PROBLEM”
• 3 THE PREWAR AND EARLY WAR YEARS IN POLAND
• 4 DEATH AND EVASION
• 5 SURVIVING THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS
• 6 WARTIME ENDINGS AND NEW BEGINNINGS
• 7 LIFE IN THE PROMISED LAND
• 8 COLLECTIVE MEMORIES AND THE POLITICS OF VICTIMIZATION
• 9 JEWISH CONTINUITY AND THE UNIVERSALITY OF DIFFERENCE
• APPENDIX
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX