The physicality of pain, the hunger, the feces and spit, all the brutalities that served to dehumanize them became precisely what brought the survivors out of the camps alive. Many if not most survivors were purely lucky. All learned how to live with dehumanization: to live while being dehumanized. All were able to resist succumbing to the belief that they were truly inhuman creatures, and all rose above and re-humanized themselves when they re-entered the world. Survivors use the process and act of remembering as the key to rehumanizing themselves. To rejoin the human race, they must remember the compassion and empathy they felt for their fellow prisoners: the images so deftly recalled in Holocaust literature and poetry. Only the stories of survivors exist to recreate the holocaust experience. As Andrei states in "The Last Camp," "our ideas would survive but the Nazi evil wouldn't."

When Gotfryd states, "I couldn't...
[ View Full Essay]