Survivors

Studying Surviving, Survivors and Survivorship is a critical component of any attempt to describe and ultimately understand the Holocaust or any other Genocide or situation of human oppression, brutality, cruelty and dehumanization. To lose sight of the Human Face of the Holocaust and other Genocides and to ignore the reality that every number cited for any or all victims is a human being with many ties to other human beings is to diminish the reasons we attempt to study these events and understand them for the lessons of humanity it may teach us. For all our needs to understand the conditions under which these events may or do occur and to understand the institutions that may come into being to carry out the acts that define the event, it ultimately comes down to trying to understand human behavior and and its inhumanity to others. While we apply the various methods of many areas of study to this endeavor, any final hope of understanding demands a recognition of the many interactive components of these evens and that all of this emerging knowledge must always bring us back to the human face of these tragedies.

To help facilitate that learning, the following material is important in any studying we may do. .
One approach to understanding the idea of being a survivor comes from the work of Robert J Lifton in which in identifies the following characteristics of survivors:

1:Death imprint and death anxiety--Memories and images of the disaster.
2: Death Guilt--Self and societal condemnation over surviving while others died.
3:Psychic Numbing--a diminished capacity for feeling of all kind.
4:Counterfeit nurturing and unconscious rage--impaired human relationships and distrust of others.
5:Inner Form-The Struggle for Significance--The search for meaning in the event and the question of Why Me.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder--Long term effect of the trauma, relationships between trauma, coping strategies and later life.

Conditions of Extremes (DesPress)--the survival experience and the meaning of being a survivor.
Rescuers and Altruism:                                           
Nature of Altruism
Characteristics of Rescuers--Le Chambon
Heritage, Sense of Humanity, Individualism, Identify with victim, Continuum of Benevolence, Self Identity, Anger at wrongness. 

The following is based on my work with survivors and the contributions of many scholars including Lifton, DesPress, Mrs. Lilly Kopecky an Auschwitz survivor and one of my mentors. It also draws upon the work of Hirsch and Staub.

Factor in Studying Conditions of Extremes and Survival:

1: Antecedents--Prejudice, Movements, Hate, Frustration, Difficult Life Conditions, Ethnic Identity,Politics of Memory, Concepts of Superiority, Economics, Morality, etc.
2: Contemporary Demography--Make-up of the current society, ethnic, religious, gender, age, economics, education, political affiliation, group identifications, etc.
3: Historical Profile of People--Perpetrators, victims, bystanders.
4: Situational Conditions: Economy, Politics, Government, Belief Systems and Ideology, Mindset, Specific events, etc.
5: Environmental Conditions--The Setting-Geographical, Climatic, etc.
6: Physical Conditions--Structural, Housing, Camps, Ghettos, etc.
7: Social Conditions--Living, Communications, Laws, Contacts, Group Dynamics, etc.
8: Biological/Physiological Conditions--Health, Nutrition, Starvation, Physical Abuse, Disease, etc.
9: Historical Profile/ People--Perpetrators/Victims, Cultural Identity, Ethnic Identity, Collective Survival, Memory and Politics, Religious/Moral/Ethical Systems, etc.
10: Stress Patterns--Social, Psychological, Familial, Environmental, General Adaptation Syndrome, Cognitive Appraisal, etc.
11: Psychological States--Will to Live/No Will to Live, etc.
12: Behavioral Options--Coping Strategies, etc.
Congregation B'nai Israel of Boca Raton
From the Pulpit
Report from the March of the Living 2001
May 11, 2001--18 Iyar, 5761

By Jocelyn Young

The Friday we were in Poland, we went to a death camp called Majdanek. I did not know much about this camp, except that it could be up and running in 36 hours. This is an excerpt from my journal, written at the camp:

I don’t understand, I’ll never understand. How could the world let this happen? How could we let this happen? The barrack was FULL of shoes, they were surrounding me on both my sides, towering over me, each asking me these questions- Why me? How did the world stand by and let me die? Why did no one stop this? Why didn’t I stop this? They were of all shapes and sizes, all the same color but for a few that were red, each giving a hint of who had last worn them, who had been ordered to take them off amidst screams and barking dogs and beatings. A small lace up boot- maybe a young child, 5 or 6, who got them for his last birthday, a huge shoe, a daddy shoe, symbolizing a person who loved and cared and worked and died before his time. A shoe with a red heel, for a young woman who had fun with her life, who liked to be noticed… I noticed her shoe among thousands, because of that red heel.

I see people around me crying, but I can’t cry right now. I cried for the six million at Auschwitz…now I just feel sick. My stomach churns out of sadness and anger and every emotion that I possess, because those shoes witnessed every emotion and gave them to me as a memory of the souls that possessed these shoes.

…From the shoes to the ashes- 70 tons, 3 stories, a memorial by Victor Tolchin- a gigantic marble urn. How did I not notice the mound when I was first walking up to it? Because I didn’t think, I didn’t look, I didn’t pay attention. Now I can’t take my eyes off of it.

My first tears fell after the crematorium, when Rose, a bus captain, was telling her grandparents’ story. She was so angry, and I felt the same was. She was so mad at the nearby town because they knew what was going on- they could see, hear, and smell everything. And they did NOTHING! Why? How? Were they human? They had no humanity.

I thought the ditches covered with grass were bad enough- they were filled with 45,000 bodies in a mass execution of all the Lublin Jews from Majdanek and the surrounding areas- but I did not know what was up those stairs, I forgot that the bodies started to rot and smell and the Nazis exhumed them and cremated the owners of those shoes. The monument was beautiful…the most beautiful urn I have ever seen. We said the Ahl Malechem and the Mourner’s Kaddish. Arm in arm, I noticed a tear drop from Lauren onto her cheek. She looked at me and put it so simply, the simple truth. "Those are people." And they are…and I cry for them, for those who couldn’t.

While we were all writing in our journals after seeing the barracks, Jeremy got up and read a poem written by Moshe Shulstein:

"I Saw A Mountain"
I saw a mountain higher than Mt. Blanc
And more holy than the Mountain of Sinai
Not in a dream. It was real.
On this world this mountain stood,
Such a mountain I saw--of Jewish shoes in Majdanek.
Such a mountain--such a mountain I saw.
And suddenly, a strange thing happened…
The mountain moved…
And the thousands of shoes arranged themselves
By size--by pairs--and in rows--and moved.
Hear! Hear the march.
Hear the shuffle of shoes left behind--that which Remained.
From small, from large, from each and every one.
Make way for the rows--for the pairs--
For the generations—for the years.
The shoe army--it moves and moves.
"We are the shoes, we are the last witnesses.
We are the shoes from grandchildren and grandfathers,
From Prague, Paris, and Amsterdam,
And because we are only made of stuff and leather
And not of blood and flesh, each one of us avoided the hellfire.
We shoes--that used to go strolling in the market
Or with the bride and groom the chuppah
We shoes from simple Jews, from butchers and Carpenters
From crocheted booties of babies just beginning to walk and go
On happy occasions, weddings and even until the time
Of giving birth, to a dance, to exciting places in life…
Or quietly--to a funeral.
Unceasingly we go. We tramp.
The hangman never had the chance to snatch us into his
Sack of loot--now we go to him.
Let everyone hear the steps, which flow as tears,
The steps that measure out the judgment."
I saw a mountain
Higher than Mt. Blanc
And more holy then the Mountain of Sinai.


These words are dedicated to those who survived
because life is a wilderness and they were savage
because life is an awakening and they were alert
because life is a flowering and they blossomed
because life is a struggle and they struggled
because life is a gift and they were free to accept it
These words are dedicated to those who survived.
From 'Bashert' by Irena Klepfisz.

I'm very grateful to you, Kenneth Waltzer, for the confirmation that the famous ZOB fighter Michal Klepfisz was the father of Irena Klepfisz, writer, critic, essayist, poet, university teacher, and
social activist.

I thought that he must have been, but could not reconcile the Warsaw accounts of his death with the one given by Ms. Carolyn Forche (1) in her introduction to Irena Klepfisz's "Bashert" (op. cit. pp. 391-403). Spurned on by your letter (Re: Truth, H-H, 8/28) I re-read it all again. Several years erased from my memory what Ms. Klepfisz herself
wrote about her father's death:

... I am born on my father's twenty-eighth birthday.
Two years later, exactly three days after his
thirtieth and my second birthday, he is dead in the
brush factory district of the Warsaw Ghetto. His
corpse is buried in a courtyard and eventually the
spot blends with the rest of the rubble. The Uprising,
my birth, his death - all merge and become interchangeable That is the heritage of one continent. 'Bashert,' op. cit. 398-399.

You wrote:
... she was handed over the wall by Marek Edelman and placed in hiding in a convent (I believe the Boduan convent) in Warsaw. Rose was in hiding on the Aryan side and worked as a maid. Following the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 Warsaw was emptied of its inhabitants, and much of what still remained of it the Germans razed by explosives and fire.

Thus Ms. Klepfisz:
My mother is walking down a road. Somewhere in Poland. Walking towards an unnamed town for some kind of permit. She is carrying her Aryan identity papers. She has left me with an old peasant who is willing to say she is my grandmother.

She is walking down a road. Her terror in leaving me
behind, in risking the separation is swallowed now,
like all other feeling. But as she walks, she pictures
me waving from my dusty yard, imagines herself
suddenly picked up, the identity papers challenged.
And even if she were to survive that, would she ever
find me later? She tastes the terror in her mouth
again. She swallows.

I am over three years old, corn silk blond and blue
eyed like any Polish child. There is terrible
suffering amongst the peasants. Starvation. And like
so many others, I am ill. Perhaps dying. I have bad
lungs. Fever. An ugly ear infection that oozes puss.
None of these symptoms is disappearing.

The night before, my mother feeds me watery soup and then sits and listens while I say the prayers to the Holy Mother, Mother of God. I ask her, just as the nuns taught me, to help us all: me, my mother, the old woman. And than catching myself, learning to use memory, I ask the Mother of God to help my father. The Polish words slip easily from my lips. My mother is satisfied. The peasant has perhaps heard and is reassured. My mother has found her to be kind, but knows that she is suspicious of strangers.

'Bashert,' op. cit. 393-394
We are in agreement: She is a wonderful writer. So I append a list of her writings to make it easier for someone to read something by her. As you observed: hers is a painful, touching poetry.
In later portions of 'Bashert' she tells of her life in the USA, her studies, her teaching, her friendships, and how she too, Like these, my despised ancestors has become a keeper of accounts.

Separately I might add more information about the 'Dom ks. Baudouina' (Father Baudouin's House), and a recent book about the role of nuns in saving Jewish children.

(1) "Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness" edited and with an introduction by Carolyn Forche.
New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.
Works by Irena Klepfisz:
Klepfisz, Irena "Periods Of Stress" Brooklyn, N.Y.: Out & Out Books, 1977.

Klepfisz, Irena "Keeper Of Accounts" Watertown MA: Persiphone, 1982 Beck, Evelyn Torton, ed. [Adrianne Rich, Pauline Bart , Melanie
Kaye, Irena Klepfisz, JEB, Ruth Geller, Elana Dykewomon, Harriet Malinowitz, Andrea Loewenstein, etc.] "Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian
Anthology" Watertown, MA: Persephone Press c. 1982.

Klepfisz, Irena "Different Enclosures" London: Onlywomen Press, 1985 "The Tribe of Dina: a Jewish women's anthology" ed. by Melanie
Kaye/Kantrowitz and Irena Klepfisz. Boston: Beacon Press, c1989.

Klepfisz, Irena, 1941- "Dreams of an insomniac: Jewish feminist essays, speeches, and diatribes" 1st ed. Portland, Or.: Eighth Mountain Press, 1990.

Klepfisz, Irena, 1941- "A few words in the mother tongue:
poems selected and new (1971-1990)" Introduction by Adrienne Rich.
Portland, Or.: Eighth Mountain Press, c1990.
Zahava, Irene, ed. [Elana Dykewomon, Irena Klepfisz, Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, Jyl Lynn Felman, et al] "Speaking for Ourselves:
Short Stories by Jewish Lesbians" Freedom, CA: Crossing Press c. 1990.

"Found treasures: stories by Yiddish women writers."
Edited by Frieda Forman and others Toronto, Ontario:
Second Story Press, copyright 1994.

1) A collection of fiction that gives the reader a social,
historical and cultural window on the everyday occurrences of
Jewish women's lives, as well as on those momentous and horrific
times which challenged and sometimes defeated them."
2) Queens of contradiction: a feminist introduction to Yiddish
women writers, by Irena Klepfisz.
Tadeusz K. Gierymski