The Holocaust and Its Survivors: Critical Essay

Holocaust survivor Lydia Tischler mentioned in her interview that she had never felt like giving up and only wanted to know what it would feel like to have a full stomach. She took every day as it came and, paradoxically, got acquainted with a cultivated life while being in Teresin. She shared that, as far as it was possible, there was rich cultural and intellectual life in camps filled with well-known actors, musicians, writers and professors, and she even heard Verdi’s ‘Requiem’ for the first time in her life. Her life story brings out the experience of hardship and trial, but also shows that every life offers deep possibilities for meaningful work and love. She has learnt that courage and compassion can be valued in three significant ways: through their work, their relationship and by how they choose to meet unavoidable sufferings.

After multiple stories’ analysis, I came to the conclusion that one of the biggest motivations of coping with daily life within concentration camps and a desire to stay alive was faith: the religion, the future, the inner self.

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The Influence of Faith and Its Change

It felt like the world would come to an end because the God is dead – that is how millions of chosen by the Holocaust thought, while escaping death day-by-day. By going through horrible experiences some lost their belief in God: “Was God dead? Was He just indifferent – or worse, a sadist? If He could not be counted on to live up to His reputation for mercy and intervene, what good was He? And if He did not intervene, by what reasoning did He merit our allegiance?”. Millions of people faced moments that murdered their God, their souls, and turned their dreams to ashes. They could not believe that the one who always gives mercy could allow all their families, all those people, to be killed. They claimed that if there is any God, He will beg for forgiveness. Others found their hope in faith, because only the Lord remembers. They had moments of anger and protest that connected them closer to Him for those reasons; they believed in God even when He was silent, as they believed in the sun when it was not shining, as they believed in love when it could not be felt. People would pray to the Creator in order to give them a strength to ask Him the right questions, showing that only fanatics – both in religion and politics – can find a meaning in someone else’s death.

To have faith is truly seeing light with your heart when the darkness is all that your eyes can see. Faith gave and continues to give people hope, and hope itself makes all things work. The Jews were forced to saw on their clothing the yellow Star of David, which was a humiliation of not only religion: the yellow color symbolized the dirty Jew, a sign of discrimination that forced anti-Semitic behavior – people could beat them up or attack without a reason. From that time on Jews lived in fear – they were forced into cattle wagons, taking them to the concentration camps, where they were separated through a degrading selection process.

“I want you to follow the path of love, forgiveness and tolerance. Hang on to the three strongest pillars of life: faith, hope and love, and never let hatred enter your heart, because hatred is an evil force and ultimately it will destroy you”, were the last words Magda heard from her father. In order to survive, she had to accept an indescribable emotional pain of realization that what was going on was true, the past present of pure nightmare. Magda shares that it was the hardest thing she has even done in her entire life, trying to bring some positivity, some hope into herself, convincing her spirit that all this inhumanity is not going to last forever. One day she collapsed, fell on her knees and prayed to God, hardly speaking and not being able to move. She thought she was going to die and asked the Lord to take her soul to heaven, but that day she also asked Him for a second chance miracle, so she could dedicate her whole life to people, sharing the memory of all who perished there and the memory about the Holocaust.

That day the concentration camp was liberated by British soldiers. Magda referred to her lifesaver as a guardian angel, who found her lying on the ground surrounded by corpses and blinking. Nowadays, she is a former marathon runner, skier and mountain climber, lecturer and author of 14 books, including her autobiography and poetry. She believes it is only because of God she has been able to forgive and fulfill her mission to never let the Holocaust be forgotten. Despite all her experienced sufferings, she is still a loving and forgiving person; her desire for peace, harmony, love, tolerance and brotherhood on earth is best expressed in all her prayers, which are enclosed in her book: “Almighty God, upon I call you, do not let evil spirits possess my soul, do not let hatred strange my love or despair crush my hope”.

Life After the Holocaust

Despite of all life battles of Holocaust survivors, they were able to find resilience and start a new life again, referring to the past as a lesson and the present as a gift. The ordinary daily routine seemed for majority as a sort of abnormal: “That I survived the Holocaust and went on to talk, to write, to have a toast with tea and live my life – how crazy is that?”. Some of survivors had nightmares for couple of months, even these days, waking up and thinking that they are still in the concentration camps and being so happy that they are in a real bed.

Those who survived the Holocaust, right after their liberation, completely stopped talking about it. It was such a horrific event that people had only one desire – to shut it up from their minds, and for 55 years not even a word was said. There were thousands of people who had the same experience and in a way were protected by nature, because the constant thought about inhumanity would drive every one of them mad. There were others that could not recuperate because of trauma (being afraid to go to a shower because there is a possibility of gas coming out). Over time, survivors started to speak up about their experience in order to make peace with the past so it would not spoil the present. They did not want to carry any hatred, because if you go through your life hating people, the people who you hate will not suffer, but you will.

The main message of survivors’ stories is to share love that grew through hell, to maintain hope and faith when it seems like the whole world is going to collapse. They do not want their past to become anyone else’s future and that only the guilty are guilty, but their children are not. Many of survivors were inspired to share their stories through art and literature because they could no longer stay silent when reading articles that the Holocaust had never happened.

Eva Mozes Kor even has an original document signed by a Nazi, so if she ever met a revisionist who said the Holocaust did not happen, she could take that document and shove it in their face. She also thanked this Nazi doctor for his willingness to document the gas chamber operation; she did not want to tell anyone about it, because even to her it sounded strange – the letter of forgiveness to Dr. Munch, the most meaningful gift he had ever received.

The Holocaust as a Life Lesson

There have been much genocides since the Holocaust - too much power in too few hands - that could be prevented together if every single human being would not be seen as abstraction. Instead, the one should be looked at as a universe with its own secrets, treasures, sources of anguish and some measure of triumph. The harrowing experience in Nazi concentration camps should never be forgotten, and the history itself should not be repeated. In all interviews, individuals admitted that they survived for some reason and they had to do something with their lives, because someone else could have been saved, so the voices of those who passed away will be spoken by ones who were rescued. To forget the dead would feel like killing them a second time, not only dangerous, but terribly offensive. The sides must be taken - silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented; neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim; sometimes people must interfere when human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant (Wiesel, 2006). Without hope memory would be morbid and sterile, empty with no meaning and, above all, empty of gratitude.

The Holocaust teaches us that everybody has a capacity to be sadistic and horrible to other people, and that the destructiveness exists in all of us. People are born neither good nor bad, and the badness is something that is the way someone is treated as a child. One of the greatest forces in life is the ability to forgive. No one can give this power, and no one can take it way – it is all yours to use in any way you wish. And what is forgiveness? It is an act of self-healing, self-liberation and self-empowerment.

We are alive; we are human beings who tend to make mistakes, with good and bad in us. The new world cannot be created, it has been done already, and now people should learn how to live within those boundaries. All can make a choice of changing nothing, stuck with despair and curse, being evil like enemies, and build a world based on hate. Or all can become immortal through sharing truth and embracing it together with love, tolerance and a desire to heal.

Conclusion

This analytical project focuses on how survivors, after acts of atrocity, extreme violence of war and genocide, extend the memory of those events until it becomes part of a national consciousness in ways that counter more personal narratives. The sources of cultural production such as literature, film, interviews and memorial sites were explored in order to highlight that the absence of the dead and past is remembered through various forms of symbols and metaphors. The disconnection between the political process of reconstruction and more individual view on events gives an idea for the image of the act of violence in ways that promote the building of trust, a rehumanizing of one another so that the communal projects can take place, the existence of cultural production that does not ignite or reignite anger. The memory is so multidisciplinary; it spans fields of psychology, politics, philosophy, literature, film etc. But also represents a global phenomenon, particularly in international relations, including cultural meaning at the politics of reparation, reconciliation or reconstruction.