Part IV - The Years after 1945

Summary

THE YEARS AFTER LIBERATION brought no respite: to this day, the survivors of Dachau, like those of the other concentration camps, continue to be traumatized by their extreme experiences. This trauma became a noticeable feature of survivors’ daily lives, but it also surfaced in their poetry written years or even decades afterwards. Even now, many of the survivors suffer from nightmares, and almost all are racked by feelings of guilt toward those who lost their lives in the concentration camps. A not insignificant number—including Sylvain Gutmacker, Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, and Bruno Bettelheim, who was also imprisoned in Dachau until 1938—were no longer able to bear this trauma and committed suicide, often years or decades afterwards.

Edmond Michelet described his experience of Dachau and its consequences:

The experience we survived is indelible. It has marked us for the rest of our lives. It has left us with scars, not all of which are visible. Neither healthy nor whole—which is such an oppressive word! This is the truth and it is something I wish to say again. We have plumbed the very depths—our own and other people's. A certain open-hearted trust remains denied to us forever. On the other hand, the word resists my use of it. It would be wrong to consider us all jaded cynics, even if our apparent indifference sometimes astounds those who do not know where we have come from, who do not know, as we do, that arresting feeling of having second helpings of life. The return of spring becomes, from now on, something inexpressible. Every year, we congratulate each other spontaneously on the anniversary of liberation. This is how we celebrate our second entry into the world of the living, our rebirth.

Everybody who has been imprisoned in a concentration camp has the right to draw the conclusions he or she sees fit from it. These conclusions are determined just as much by the particular circumstances of an individual experience as by the nature of the person who experienced it.