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Holocaust Survivors: Book Review

© Katie Anne Gustafsson

"Love Carried Me Home - Women Surviving Auschwitz"
Joy Erlichman Miller, Phd

"A survivor will go on vacation, and, whilst watching a show, will picture her mother, holding her grandson in her arms, gasping for breath."
"A survivor will think of her sister with her three dead children and inhale the gas to feel the gasping agony of their deaths."
"A survivor is a wife, mother, friend, neighbour, yet no-one really knows her."

.....Cecilie Klein, "Sentenced to Live"

The above excerpts from survivor Cecilie Klein's "Sentenced to Live" give some indication of the ordeal that faced the women of the Holocaust - both those who were murdered, and those who miraculously survived. We can watch Hollywood's offerings of how life was for those condemned to the camps, but it is too easy to dismiss these movies as either yet another example of a Director with an overactive imagination, or one more concerned with entertainment rather than reporting the full reality. A work of fiction, rather than a portrayal of fact. Joy Erlichman's book erases the possibility of escaping to fantasy world by using first-hand accounts in her findings.

Although the purpose of the book is to report Dr Erlichman's research findings on the coping mechanisms that women find within themselves at times of trauma, she has pulled together oral histories of 16 survivors from Auschwitz that tell a harrowing tale of death and torment. The youngest survivors of those cited in the book entered the death camp aged 13 years old. These accounts are not movie scripts. They are potted histories of what life was like for these women leading up to their entry at Auschwitz, an account of what they encountered there, and how they are now. To this is added a small piece in their own words.

These are the memories of women who experienced horror first hand, and the raw emotion in their words takes you for a short while to their world of nightmares. A world where the unthinkable was allowed to happen.

Dr. Erlichman has produced a book that looks at the mechanisms women apply when faced with a traumatic situation, but despite its interesting psychological material, for anyone interested in women's history it is the survivor's voices that give this book power.

Anyone studying this period of history will find this not only an insightful glimpse into the lives of the women who entered the camps, but a journey where the emotive words of the survivors make you question how you would have coped had you stood on that platform awaiting the life or death selection.