People in survival situations do have to get ruthless. Being a nice guy and sharing food means you starve & die quicker. That’s especially true when you’re surviving on a calorie deficient diet. Missing any meals can be catastrophic.
I have no idea how surviving a concentration camp effected people later in life.
I’d guess there was some guilt that haunted them privately for the rest of their lives. I have read some Holocaust literature for a class. I can’t recall ethical behavior by victims in the camps being addressed.
There was a 1991 movie called Never Forget with Leonard Nimoy who played a holocaust survivor who was hard on his kids and had trouble dealing with them. For example when his kid would say “I’m hungry” he would fire back “Hungry! You dont know what hungry is!”. Now I dont know how much of this is based on real ,life but I’d guess some survivors would have PTSD and trouble relating to new situations.
I have heard of other situations where holocaust survivors are hard on their kids because they want to make them strong in case they have to go thru a similar situation.
Really no different than others who have been thru a difficult time like the great depression.
Or it could just be that particular lines of inquiry are met with kneejerk scorn and shouted down by people unwilling to examine the motivation of the questioner.
I recall reading one of Primo Levi’s books where he described leaving the concentration camp on foot with several other men. He said that one of the men he was with would intentionally step on flowers to kill them & said something to the effect of 'Why should I care about any living thing when nobody cared about me?". He found it interesting that his own reaction was to preserve everything beautiful & living due to his experiences, while others had the polar opposite reaction.
So as others have commented, I’m sure there are many terrible people who survived. In some cases, they were organically terrible, others became “terrible” in order to survive, and others became terrible due to their experiences.
Since adversity is said to be what sparks empathy, and surviving the Holocaust I’m pretty sure would qualify as “adversity”, perhaps the OP is asking if, due to the EXTREME adversity that these survivors endured, followed by the correspondingly extreme increase in ability to empathize with their fellow man, a sort of shield against “terrible” actions was created. Given this dubious context, were there non-psychopath exceptions to this process?? Ehh, idk. Just spitballing. Fucking weird question is right.
I’ve known a number of holocaust survivors. By and large they’re just people, with all the flaws and graces of anyone else. I’ve never noticed any exceptional empathy. I do think some go numb as a defensive mechanism.
I expect there is a propensity for nightmares, thousand-yard stares, and really really heartbreaking fear if dementia takes hold and the relive the trauma they suffered.
Since 9/11 was brought up, I am going to add that I have never heard anybody say anything negative about someone who died on that day, not even something relatively innocuous like, “Our marriage wasn’t happy, but I sure didn’t want it to end this way.” I suppose this would be like people who die in less disastrous ways, where people just don’t say anything at all if the person wasn’t a good one?
I’m sure that’s the case. thousands dead and not an arsehole amongst them? impossible. When someone dies the reaction is typically to praise them and forget their faults.
However, memorably, a certain Mr. Hitchenswasn’t playing that game when Jerry Falwell died.
I would think many survivors were even more angry when they went home and found other people had moved into their homes or stolen all their property. So much for “caring neighbors”. Also say a person living here in the US would not be so nice to a person from their old country.
OTOH I knew an American Danish man who knew some holocaust survivors and they went out of their way to be nice to him citing how the people of Denmark helped save jews.
Nearly 3000 people died on 9/11. I don’t personally know anyone who was directly related to a victim, so the only stories I’ve heard are those published in documentary/news programs, and I’m sure I’ve heard far fewer than 3000 stories. Surely there are people who feel as you describe (“our marriage wasn’t happy…”), but their stories don’t tug at viewer’s heartstrings in quite the way that documentarians would like; such people may confide in close friends, but we, the viewing public, are probably never going to hear from them.
As noted upthread, it seems patently obvious that any large cross-section of humanity is statistically likely to contain at least a few assholes and miscreants. Googling “notorious concentration camp survivor” turns up nothing. “notorious holocaust survivor” gives some results, chief among them Evelyn Davis. It doesn’t sound like she murdered anyone, but from the description in that article, it does sound like she was a pain in the ass.
I don’t think I have ever met any concentration camp survivors. Nor Nazis - apart from a distant (and 20 year old in 1995) relative of Goebbels.
The pschological reports I have seen state that when in the camps many resorted to very infantile behavior, and by now I cannot be more specific. After the war they have survivor’s guilt and massive PTSD, which often expressed itself in being emotionally closed off. This must have been tough on their kids. And on a spouse, although it seems that marriages worked more or less OK if both partners had had similar experiences.
I don’t know if as a group they had an above average proportion of murderers, given a somewhat detached attitude to death, but I will bet that their suicide rate was far higher than the average.
I don’t know if it’s just another story people tell, but concentration camp survivors are reported to be far more dedicated to /not/ dying than the average.
On a related note, it was a known problem around here 20 years ago that CCS’s (getting pretty old at that point) would actively avoid medical care when sick.
That’s not dissimilar to the portrait Art Spiegelman paints of his father in Maus. The very first thing we see is a scene from Art’s childhood where Art falls down skating and his friends race off without him. A tearful Art returns to his house where his father’s doing some outdoor work. Pop asks, rather matter-of-factly between asking Artie to help, what’s the matter? “I fell down and my friends left me there,” Artie says sadly. Vladek, his dad, doesn’t console his son–he just says, “Huh…friends? If you were locked up together for a week with no food, then you’d see what friends are worth!” This to a seven or eight-year-old kid.
During the rest of the work, present-day Vladek (the one we see in between his stories of the Holocaust) is portrayed as quite a pain in the neck–he’s stingy to the point of paranoia. (Vladek, wanting to return an open box of cereal he’s not going to eat: “Ever since Hitler I don’t want to throw out even a crumb.” Art: “Then just save the damn Special K in case Hitler ever comes back!”) He causes his second wife no end of grief over it–at one point she laments, “Pragmatic?! Cheap, you mean! It causes him physical pain to part with even a nickel!” Art says that maybe the camps made him like that (and he’s not wrong), but Art’s stepmother says that she’s a survivor, too, as are many of their friends, and none of them are like that. Art later tells his wife that it’s a sticking point in the graphic memoir he’s writing (and that we’re reading)–Vladek’s a little too close to the stereotype of the miserly Jew for comfort.
He’s also a guilt-tripper and more than a little self-centered–how much of this has to do with age and how much of it has to do with his experience is up in the air.
Not a “terrible person”, of course, but a pretty difficult one to deal with–at least, if we’re to believe Art’s perspective. How reliable a narrator Art is remains a question–as does how reliable a narrator Vladek himself is, in his reminisciences where he always seems to come off in a good light.
Reminds me of Gunther Grass’ Danzig Trilogy, the first line of which is: “Granted: I AM an inmate of a mental hospital” followed by some rather fantastic(al) doings in the narrator’s life during the rise of the Third Reich and after. He presents even the most outrageous tales as God’s truth, and the reader has to always keep in mind the narrator impugned his own credibility at the beginning. I wish I’d gotten deeper into post WWII Euro literature to see if that was a more common technique: “This is my perspective, and it’s the only one that matters because this is MY story. Who knows what the actual truth is?”
Hitler, himself, was supposedly charming with women, kind to children (alright, probably not those of Jews, Gypsies, etc.), and a great lover of dogs. What a swell guy!