ABSTRACT
My subject in this book is survival, or more specifi cally 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 castaway on a remote tropical island or the artifi cially 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 fi res of peril, . . . looking death in the face.” More recently, in The Survivors Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life, Ben Sherwood defi nes 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 confl ict, 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 fi rst 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 fl ood-could be equated.10 His focus was the “total disaster:
the physical, social, and spiritual obliteration of a human community,” and he defi ned 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 defi ned 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 eff ective agent in the fi ght 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 defi ned 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 signifi cant 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 signifi cant 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 diff erent 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 infl uences 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 fi rst 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, fi lms, 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 unifi ed 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.
