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ABSTRACT Their Daily Bread: Stories of Suffering and Survival in the Nazi

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ABSTRACT Their Daily Bread: Stories of Suffering and Survival in the Nazi ABSTRACT Their Daily Bread: Stories of Suffering and Survival in the Nazi and Soviet Labor Camps Kody Sherman Jackson Director: Julie K. deGraffenried, Ph.D. While my friends complain about many of their classes, they harp on history the most, saying that they would rather spend hours in the lab than read even a short history article. How did so many people come to view history as so boring and even painful to learn? In this paper, I seek to remedy this problem by using personal testimony (in the form of memoir) to examine the daily joys and tribulations of those who suffered through the Nazi and Soviet labor camp systems. Beginning with an analysis of the strengths, flaws, and practicality of memoirs as historical sources, this paper then embarks on a journey through the respective camp systems. In separate chapters on the Nazi and Soviet camps, it explores events like the prisoners’ interrogations, back-breaking labor, and death and themes like religious devotion, moral transformation, and the obligation to testify. Next, it discusses Margarete Buber-Neumann, a survivor who lived through both sets of camps, as a bridge between these two atrocities and a way to bring them together into a comparative history. Finally, this paper discusses how survivors remember their experiences and what that means for all of us who wish to understand the Nazi and Soviet camp systems and to use personal testimony to supplement traditional history. APPROVED BY DIRECTOR OF HONORS THESIS: ______________________________________________________ Dr. Julie K. deGraffenried, History APPROVED BY THE HONORS PROGRAM: ___________________________________________________ Dr. Andrew Wisely, Director DATE:________________________ THEIR DAILY BREAD: STORIES OF SUFFERING AND SURVIVAL FROM THE NAZI AND SOVIET LABOR CAMPS A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Baylor University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Honors Program By Kody Sherman Jackson Waco, Texas May 2013 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................... iii CHAPTER ONE You Shot Who in the What Now?: Validity and Memoir ............................................... 5 CHAPTER TWO Into the Abyss: The Nazi Labor Camp Experience ....................................................... 35 CHAPTER THREE The Same Side of the Fence, the Other Side of the World: The Soviet Labor Camp Experience ..................................................................................................................... 77 CHAPTER FOUR When Worlds Collide: Margarete Buber-Neumann in the Nazi and Soviet Labor Camps .......................................................................................................................... 134 CHAPTER FIVE The How of the What: Examining the Structures and Similarities of Camp Memoirs158 APPENDIX A Memoirist Index Nazi Camp Memoirists ............................................................................................ 179 Soviet Camp Memoirists ......................................................................................... 180 Nazi and Soviet Labor Camp Memoirists ............................................................... 182 APPENDIX B Glossary ....................................................................................................................... 183 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 185 ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would just like to acknowledge the many academic debts that I have incurred throughout the course of this project. Above all else, I need to thank Dr. Julie deGraffenried for her work as my thesis director. I cannot think of anyone more supportive, kind, or knowledgeable who I could have chosen. For better or worse, this project is what it is because of you, your advice, and your constant editing. Thank you so much. I hope one day to be able to serve my students in the way that you have helped me. Additionally, many thanks and much appreciation goes out to Dr. Stephen Sloan and Dr. Michael Long for serving on my thesis defense committee. Thank you for validating and improving my work. So many other people in the Department of History, the Honors Program, Baylor University, and the Baylor Libraries deserve to be thanked and I wish I could name all of you and maybe even bake you something special. Through all of your support and wisdom, you shaped who I was into what I have become. Two more groups still need acknowledgement and I am running out of room here: it is overwhelming to reflect back on everyone who has contributed to this project. Penultimately, I would like to thank the community of St. Peter’s Catholic Student Center for their prayers and support throughout this project. You may never read my work, but you have supported me throughout this whole process with jokes, listening ears, and prayers. I will forever remember all of you. Finally, I need to thank my family. I love you more than words can say. Thank you for who you are and what you mean to me. iii To Gray, this paper is more interesting than anything you will ever write. To my parents, now you know what I have been doing with my time in college. To Maddie, I love you, even if I forget to tell you as often as I should. To Joe, Stephen, Drew, David, Aaron, and Audrey, for your constant friendship. To Dr. deG and the two Dr. Sloans, thank you for showing me that professors can be real people too. CHAPTER ONE You Shot Who in the What Now?: Validity and Memoir On the whole, those who live in the United States are obsessed with the Holocaust. To them, it stands as the supreme example of good versus evil, life struggling against death, and democracy overcoming fascism. Furthermore, not only have they learned about it through their history textbooks, school assemblies, and even class field trips, but also through their popular culture and movies. The United States is a country that has a National Holocaust Museum even bigger than the one in Israel. Yet, despite all this education, despite all this information, despite all this emphasis of knowing the Holocaust, few of these people actually understand the Holocaust. In their quest to intellectually know, true understanding escapes them. They lack the sort of knowledge that comes from poems, stories, and all those things everybody has to suffer through in English class. Take the beginning of Primo Levi’s poem If This is a Man as an example: You who live safe In your warm houses, You who find, returning in the evening, Hot food and friendly faces: Consider if this is a man Who works in the mud Who does not know peace Who fights for a scrap of bread Who dies because of a yes or a no. Consider if this is a woman, Without hair and without name With no more strength to remember, Her eyes empty and her womb cold Like a frog in winter.1 1 Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (London: Sphere Books, 1987). 5 On the most basic level, this poem describes the working conditions, fights, arbitrariness, hunger, and death that plagued all political prisoners in the Nazi camps. This poem’s real strength, however, lies not in its basic descriptions, but in its emotional manipulation of its readers. Through the poem’s structure and our own emotions, Levi shows his readers both what the Jews went through in the camps and how they remembered their experiences. He begins with life as it was meant to be lived, the life of the Jews and even other political prisoners before the Nazi scourge. Here, the unnamed characters have food in abundance and homes of their own. Everyone is happy and in the company of friends; everything is “safe” and “warm.” By painting this heaven on earth, however, Levi only wants to shock his readers more with his descent into the coming hell. For this reason, just as his readers have become accustomed to his rosy language and languid prose, Levi transports them abruptly and without warning into a strange and brutal world. He leaves them disconcerted, disoriented, and disheartened; he wants them to feel as his people did so long ago. How different this life is from the image of the happy home in the stanza before! How can people be full when they fight over a “scrap of bread,” secure when their fate no longer rests in their hands, or happy when they are so far and separated from everything they love? Worse still, how can people “without name, with no more strength to remember,” keep on living? With their lives, futures, and even their personalities taken from them, they have ceased to be human. The ultimate answer to Levi’s title, If This is a Man, is an unequivocal no. By presenting us with this dramatic juxtaposition, Levi helps us to not only know what the Jews (and other political prisoners) went through and how they felt about their experiences, but also to experience a small bit of the Holocaust for ourselves and 6 understand his suffering on a personal level. The poem’s application and lessons do not apply only to the Holocaust, however. In many ways, Levi’s work uncovers much about the life of those trapped in another system of concentration camps, the Glavnoe upravlenie ispravitel’no-trudovykh lagerei, popularly known as the Gulag. A string of labor camps located throughout the Soviet Union, the Gulag brought untold suffering to its prisoners. Although they lacked adequate clothing and nourishment, the Gulag forced them to tame wild forest, cultivate the dry steppe, and mine the unforgiving earth. They too worked in filth, fought
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