One Who Survived

When the Nazis overran the Low Countries in 1940, they barred Dutch Physician Elie A. Cohen from practice. Cohen and his family tried to escape to Sweden, but the Gestapo caught them and sent them to Auschwitz. There, the SS gassed Cohen's wife and four-year-old son, his parents, his only sister, and about 50 other relatives. Much of the time Cohen had to do the same manual labor as other prisoners; only part of his three years, in a series of concentration camps was spent working as a doctor. Liberated in May, 1945, he weighed 77 pounds.

"It was very difficult to find my way back," says Dr. Cohen now. "I was exhausted, and psychologically not very sound. I didn't know what I should do." Soon he knew: he would make a psychological analysis of both the miserable prisoners and their monstrous jailers in the concentration camps. The result, Het Duitse Concentratiekamp, was selling so well last week that it was in its second edition--a rare thing for a doctoral thesis.*

Without Emotion. After studying Freudian analytical methods to fit himself for the task, Cohen still had difficulty finding his way. "I wrote the thesis three times," he says, "first with all my emotions, then with some of my emotions, finally with no emotions." Even so, he left in some very personal touches.

At Auschwitz, he was physician in charge of a block where psychotics, imbeciles, invalids and the aged were housed. "Because the portions of bread, cheese, sausage or margarine were never equally cut," Dr. Cohen recalls, "I could, and did, always choose the thickest. During the ladling out of the soup, the stirring was always done horizontally, so that the thick remained at the bottom. I always took care to get only the thick . . . The motivation I gave myself, namely that I had more value than the patients, didn't hold water, of course."

Of the Jews sent to Auschwitz, only a handful survived, and Cohen asks himself relentlessly, "Why did I survive?" The answer, he believes, lies largely in his psychological preparation for the ordeal. He had an active, personal philosophy of life. A theoretical Zionist who had put the comforts of Holland above the rigors of pioneering in Palestine, he blamed himself: "I hadn't been enough of a 'hero' to go to Palestine." Much the same, he adds, was true for the political foes of Naziism who were prisoners: "They could understand why they were in camp." Finally, Cohen knew what to expect.

Without Conscience. The prisoners who were thus fortified by an understanding of their plight were the ones best fitted for the jungle-style struggle for survival, in which ethics and conscience are shunted aside and almost lost. Rarely, as an exception to the rule of animal egotism, a group of prisoners would sacrifice part of their ration to give a dying friend a last pleasure. "In those people, I think, some standards of their old superego [conscience] had remained stronger than the influences of the concentration camp," says Dr. Cohen.

In summary, Dr. Cohen describes the prisoners' transition from the initial reaction to the stage of adaptation, in which hunger becomes the all-consuming drive and the sex urge disappears. Then comes the third stage, one of acquiescence, when prisoners accept their fate and the amorality of camp life. With their jealousies and factionalism, the prisoners do not form an "organized mass" in the Freudian sense, says Dr. Cohen, but merely a crowd.

The SS jailers, on the other hand, he sees as a highly organized mass. He tries to explain their psychology in the light of German traditions. First, Dr. Cohen makes a distinction between SS men who committed common acts of cruelty and those who had the job of gassing Jews. "The latter," he says, "were educated to believe that jews were inferior people, guilty of Germany's defeat in the First World War. The German superego (the interaction of parents, educators, laws of the country, rules of society) accepted these ideas . . . German education taught that you have to obey every order from those above you." The SS men at the gas chambers, Dr. Cohen believes, had no emotional reaction to their gruesome task--"It was their duty."

Minor mistreatment of prisoners was also part of the German pattern, in which superiors mistreat subordinates, Dr. Cohen reasons. Most difficult to explain, he found, were deliberately planned tortures. He feels these cases cannot be dismissed as simple sadism. Rather, he believes, they resulted from Freud's drive of aggression, heightened by frustration. "Normally this drive is counteracted by mental inhibitions provided by society, but Nazi society supported this aggression."

Dr. Cohen considers that his own psychology is now sound again. "Writing the thesis was a catharsis for me," he says. "I'm freed of my troubles." He has remarried, has a baby daughter, and is practicing in Arnhem.

* Which Cohen, already a licensed physician (dokter), submitted to Utrecht University to earn the title doctor.

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