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An older family member grew up in WW2 Europe under German occupation. I asked them about general everyday life during the war and the holocaust. Besides getting
by JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
An older family member grew up in WW2 Europe under German occupation. I asked them about general everyday life during the war and the holocaust. Besides getting bombed on en route to school, it "wasn't that bad". I don't know if it's justification or stockholm syndrome. Part of me speculates people in these situations suspend their reality as a survival mechanism.
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoThis is the key observation of Imre Kertész's book Sorstalanság about his surviving Auschwitz and Buchenwald as a deported Hungarian Jew. He is frustrated by people asking him postwar about how terrible the camps were. His thinking sort of goes like this: the human spirit is strong and can survive anything an oppressor throws at it, but to ask about the horrors of the death camps is to suggest that they were capable of breaking one’s spirit. In the end (I don’t know if this counts as a spoiler or not) Kertész even admits to feeling nostalgia for some of the moments in the camps.