SURVIVING CONCENTRATION CAMPS

I purchased this book at a flea marker for around $5; it turned out to be far more than a coffee table book. It’s a firsthand account of life in Andersonville, the notorious Southern prisoner of war camp during the Civil War. Journalist John McElroy survived four years as an inmate in Andersonville. While Many thousands of prisoners died from despondency, McElroy lived to tell the tale.

The camp was horrible. Forty-one thousand Northern prisoners were packed into an open field. Water was contaminated, disease rampant. Some had tents; many did not. Rain was cold and miserable. If a prisoner accidently stepped over the perimeter, the uneducated Southern boys were happy to shoot him, as depicted on the cover of the book. Making matters worse, when new prisoners arrived, they were set upon and robbed of their meager belongings by the more experienced prisoners. Gangs of prisoners fought against each other; the most notorious was the New York gang.

Many succumbed to disease, some lost their minds, others just gave up and quietly died.

Mc Elroy explains.

Among the first to die was the one whom we expected to live the longest. He was by much the largest man in prison, and because of this was called Big Joe. He was a sergeant in the 5^th Pennsylvania Cavalry and seemed the picture of health. One morning the news ran through the prison that Big Joe was dead, and a visit to his squad showed his stiff, lifeless form occupying as much ground as Goliath’s after his encounter with David. His early demise was an example of a general law, the workings of which few in the army failed to notice.

The general law was simple: The big strong guys were the first to deteriorate and die.

The stalwart, huge-limbed, toil-inured men sank down earliest on the march, yielded soonest to malarial influences, and fell first under the combined effects of homesickness, exposure, and the privations of army life.

The slender, wiry boys, as supple and weak as cats, had apparently the nine lives of those animals. There were few exceptions in the army, there were none in Andersonville. I can recall few or no instances where a large, strong, “hearty” man lived through more than a few months of imprisonment.

The survivors were invariably youths on the verge of manhood, slender, quick, active, medium-statured fellows, of a cheerful temperament, in whom one would have expected comparatively little powers of endurance.

Assume that McElroy’s observations are correct. Why were the bigger, taller men the first to die? Knowing what we know today, taller men make more money, gain higher status and are more dominant than shorter men. Why, then, were they the first to die in the camps?

Perhaps the bigger boys were used to dominating their peers; they were effective in their everyday lives. In Andersonville, they lost control, they lost their high pecking order status and were reduced to ineffectiveness and suffering. With no prospect of an end to their suffering, they just gave up. (The bigger they are, the harder they fall.) The slender, quick, active boys, had less to lose in life’s hierarchy, providing them with better survival mechanisms.

Psychologist, Viktor Frankl, survivor of the Nazi camps, had another suggestion.

Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain (they were often of a delicate constitution), but the damage to their inner selves was less. They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom. Only in this way can one explain the apparent paradox that some prisoners of a less hardy make-up often seemed to survive camp life better than did those of a robust nature.

An investigation of women who survived Nazi concentration camps and went on to live happy, healthy, and active lives, revealed that knowledge, intelligence, a strong ego identity, and strong social ties, were qualities that aided survival.

Bruno Bettelheim, another psychologist and former concentration camp survivor, made this observation.

Prisoners who came to believe the repeated statements of the guards – that there was no hope for them, that they would never leave the camp except as a corpse -who came to feel their environment was one over which they could exercise no influence whatsoever, these prisoners were, in a literal sense, walking corpses. In the camps they were called, Musselmanner (Moslems) because of what was erroneously viewed as a fatalistic surrender to the environment, as Mohammedans are supposed to blandly accept their fate. They were people who were so deprived of affect, self-esteem, and every form of stimulation, so totally exhausted, both physically and emotionally that they had given the environment total power over them.

Frankl chillingly described the process. “Usually, it began with the prisoner refusing one morning to get dressed and wash or go out on the parade grounds. No entreaties, no blows, no threat had any effect. He just lay there hardly moving…He simply gave up. There he remained, lying in his own excreta, and nothing bothered him anymore.”

These men were not zombies, but were in fact the walking dead. Many who arrived in good health, McElroy wrote, “gave up the moment the gates were closed upon them and began pining away…they died in a few days and weeks…””

McElroy May have come up with a credible explanation when he noted in passing that survivors “had a cheerful temperament in whom one would have expected comparatively little powers of endurance.” (Emphasis added).

"It was painful," he added, to see how rapidly many of them sank under the miseries of the situation. They gave up the moment the gates were closed upon them and began pining away.

We older prisoners buoyed ourselves up continually with hopes of escape or exchange. We dug tunnels with the persistence of beavers, and we watched every possible opportunity to get outside the accursed walls of the pen. But we could not enlist the interest of these discouraged ones in any of our schemes or talk. They resigned themselves to Death and waited despondently till he came.

McElroy concluded, "their sickness was more mental than physical." Crushed by the atrocity, they lost the will to live.

In a fascinating and confirming parallel, Norman Cousins, a political journalist, author, and professor, spent six months in a tuberculosis sanitarium when he was ten years old in 1925. “The patients,” he wrote, “divided themselves into two groups: those who were confident they would beat back the disease and be able to resume normal lives, and those who resigned themselves to a prolonged and even fatal illness.”

“Those of us who held to the optimistic view,” wrote Cousins, “became good friends, involved ourselves in creative activities, and had little to do with the patients who had resigned themselves to the worst. When newcomers arrived at the hospital, we did our best to recruit them before the bleak brigade went to work.”

During World War 11, four thousand POW's died within the first few months of incarceration. One observer, J.E. Nardini wrote,

“Although physical disease and the shortages of food, water and medicine were at their highest during this period, emotional shock and reactive depression played a great part in individual inability to cope with physical symptoms and disease and undoubtedly contributed much to the massive death rate.”

Survival is all about attitude. Not physical strength but mental toughness and optimism.

SUBSTACK SIDEBAR

These are extraordinary situations. You and I are not likely to die from shock, hopelessness and inescapable suffering. Or are we? Do we become prisoners in our own lives, unable to escape from deadened lives? Does psychological death devolve into physical death? Do we become the walking dead without hope?

Anne Morrow Lindburgh, wife of aviator, Charles Lindburgh, wrote,

People "died" all the time. . .Parts of them died when they made the wrong kinds of decisions-decisions against life. Sometimes they died bit by bit until finally they were just living corpses walking around. If you were perceptive, you could see it in their eyes; the fire had gone out. . . you always knew when you made a decision against life. The door clicked and you were safe inside safe and dead.

In Andersonville, Dachau and Main Street, psychological resiliency is the key to survival. The inability to take action in order to escape untenable situations, often leads to escape through death.