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Concentration Camp, Internment Camp or POW Camp Survivors

07:01 / 27.07.02

I was reading this article (from the Arab-American Anti-Defamation Committee site www.ADC.com) about the possibity of detaining Arab-Americans in internment camps. And I got to wondering how many of you have met anyone who's been in any sort of camp. Myself, I've only met one that I know of. He was sent to one of the Nazi concentration camps (Dachau, I think) and somehow survived. Oddly enough, he wasn't there because he was Jewish but rather because he was a French priest. I only met him the one time at a dinner party and, not surprisingly, the subject didn't come up at the supper table. He struck me as a really somber person, especially compared to the few priests I've met in my youth who knew how to crack at least a few jokes. It wasn't until afterwards, that my then-girlfriend hipped me to his past and mentioned that he never wears short-sleeved shirts because he doesn't like exposing the tattoo of his prison number. I've probably met a few POW camp survivors without knowing it, but I've never met any Japanese-Americans that lived in internment camps during World War II. Anyways, how about you?

12:14 / 27.07.02

I met this woman once.

And my old Religious Studies teacher was in a POW camp (as a Brit soldier). His words: "I didn't like it, so I went home." Dammit, that's the spirit that keeps Britain Great. Ahem, sorry, I'm an anarchist aren't I? Ignore that last bit.*

Also, I don't mean to sound snarky Margin, but there's nothing odd about non-Jewish people being in concentration camps. Loads of 'types' of people ended up in them, for one reason or another. This (Jewish) guy caused a shitstorm for saying that Jewish people have monopolised the holocaust rememberance thing. Like, there's a park in London with a holocaust memorial: the writing's in Hebrew. Which I'm sure makes it easy for the all gay/Catholic/gypsy/POW etc etc etc people to relate to!

I have set my stopwatch to see how quickly an accusation of anti-semitism hits me...

*In fact, it was supposedly us Brits who were the first people to use concentration camps in the 20th century. I believe though that it was the wicked Spanish who actually invented them. But I'll stand corrected if need be. Apparently us Brits invented chemical warfare too. But I'm rambling off topic now.

Tryphena Absent

16:33 / 27.07.02

My grandparents were both placed in temporary camps, they were Polish Catholics and were sent to Siberia, my grandmother was then moved to Uganda and my grandfather to Scotland. It was very traumatic for both of them, my grandad was the only person out of his army unit to survive Siberia and my gran caught meningitis in Africa but neither of them ever spoke about their experiences and what my mum knew she picked up without ever having a real conversation about it.
They were both very sombre, my gran was pretty much destroyed by her experiences, a woman who found it particularly difficult to be happy. She went through massive periods of depression. My grandad just damn well lived with it but he had a proper survivors spirit, he applied his sense of humour to that part of his life and used to tell me (and my brother) stories about a dancing bear that they took around Scotland with them. That's pretty much my whole knowledge of army life, guys with guns and a dancing bear.

16:50 / 27.07.02

My grandfather spent some time in a POW camp run by the allies (seeing as he was on the side that lost) when WW2 ended...he never talked about it much, but I got the impression that it wasn't exactly a cakewalk. From what my relatives tell me, he used to be a fairly cheerful person. His experiences in the war and the subsequent internment removed what little good humour he had. From what I gather, the allied staff (I think that they were either US or British) took the opportunity to take out a certain degree of frustration on their German captives...

17:29 / 27.07.02

Bill Posters inexplicably writes there's a park in London with a holocaust memorial: the writing's in Hebrew. Which I'm sure makes it easy for the all gay/Catholic/gypsy/POW etc etc etc people to relate to!

The fact is that the majority of people who died in the camps were Jews. Who put up this memorial? If it was, as I suspect, a Jewish organization, then your criticisms are thoughtless and ill-founded. As far as the idiotic suggestion that Jews are somehow "monopolizing the holocaust rememberance thing", Jews are certainly not keeping anyone else from remembering their own losses in the camps; don't begrudge us our efforts to ensure that a horror of such magnitude is never perpetrated against anyone ever again.

And I don't think (at least on the basis of the evidence presented so far) that you're an anti-Semite: just a chowderhead.

17:57 / 27.07.02

I dont think bill was saying that at all, just pointing out that it wasnt exclusively jews via this other persons message.

06:15 / 28.07.02

Bill Posters wrote: Also, I don't mean to sound snarky Margin, but there's nothing odd about non-Jewish people being in concentration camps. Loads of 'types' of people ended up in them, for one reason or another.

Yeah, I know. I didn't explain it as such, but I meant that it was odd meeting a survivor that was a French priest because the odds would be so high. The possibility of meeting a Jewish survivor would've been more probable because there were more Jews in the camps than priests. See, it took 3 sentences to explain that, which is why I didn't put it in the initial post in the first place.

09:41 / 28.07.02

I've met lots of people who've been in concentration camps - almost exclusively Jews in Nazi camps during the war. I think they fall - broadly - into two cateregories; people who want to educate anyone they can find about it, and never stop discussing their experience, and people who choose never to mention it.

When I was at college, I went home for the weekend with a friend, and over friday night dinner, I asked her Dad about his background; he had a mittel European accent, he was grey before his time, and extremely short (lots of people who were kids in the camps didn't get enough nutrition, and look a certain way. Though I didn't know this at the time.)

He told his extremely moving story; being taken to the camps from his village in Poland, losing his parents and never finding them again, seeing his brother killed, going back to his village after the war. We were all crying. Then my friend and her brother told me they'd never heard his story before. Not, I know now, that unusual.

I also know lots of people who are Second Generation - children of holocaust survivors. I've seen amongst my friends that there are certainly effects that go from generation to generation - guilt, sense of responsibility. A particularly powerful book on this is The War After, by Anne Karpf.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

09:50 / 28.07.02

The fact is that the majority of people who died in the camps were Jews.

Yes-- six million of them. Other groups comprised a further three million, however; I think it's important to remember them too, no?

13:18 / 28.07.02

That's what I was trying to get at. Apologies for offense caused, Mirror.

14:58 / 28.07.02

am i right in thinking that the german government still hasn't officially apologised/compensated the gay people who were put into the camps?

and bill - i thought the british were the first to use concentration camps, in the boer war.

i've known two jewish people who lost family in the camps. one was deeply affected by it, said she thought about it every day, the other barely mentioned it, although he quietly learnt a lot about his family and his jewish identity - maybe that's how he dealt with it.

15:23 / 28.07.02

I thought 'we' were the first to use them in the twentieth century, and that their Spanish inventors used them in the Nineteenth. But I'm not sure. We wiped out 1/6th of the Boer population though...

15:24 / 28.07.02

Mordant C@rnival writes, Other groups comprised a further three million, however; I think it's important to remember them too, no?

Of course. But my point is that remembrance is not a mutually exclusive thing: one doesn't marginalize the suffering of one group by remembering the suffering of another. As the Buddha points out, no one has a monopoly on suffering.

Bill Posters writes, That's what I was trying to get at. Apologies for offense caused, Mirror.

Understood, accepted.

15:51 / 28.07.02

SFD: The German cabinet called for an official apology to be issued to gay survivors of the concentration camps in 1997. The problem with issuing this has been compounded by the fact that a law issued in 1998, governing official responses and reparations to victims of nazi persecution, does not include homosexuals in it's remit. Considering that this autumns elections will most probably result in an ultra-conservative government coming to power in Germany, it seems unlikely that this law will be amended anytime soon...

Interesting to note is that a law issued during the Nazi government (paragraph 175) was not repealed until 1969, and that many homosexuals were persecuted and imprisoned in post-war Germany under this law until it was revoked...

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

16:45 / 28.07.02

Don't know any Holocaust survivors (though the next book on my list is a Primo Levi bio), but when I was a kid, my dad was a vicar. One of the churches he was vicar of, in East Chinnock in Somerset, had new modernist stained-glass windows put in by a German guy who'd been shot down in the area during WW2, and had been treated well, and, to repay the favour, as he was a stained-glass bloke (whatever the name for that job actually is), gave the church completely new windows for free. We went to visit him in Germany. He was cool.

I know that's different- it was a guy doing his job getting shot down by other people doing their job, and therefore not really pertinent to the turn the thread's taken. But it goes with the initial post, so there you have it. It was just a nice story, I guess.

10:53 / 29.07.02

Mm, my family have the same thing - a German mate who got shot down and had to work on their farm during the last years of the war. My Dad's dad died in the war, and I was struck by the fact when we went to visit this guy in Munich that for all we know, it coulda been him who killed Grandpops. Most unlikely of course, but not impossible. It's an odd feeling to eat cake with a man who might have killed one's grandfather and used to be a wicked Nazi. And I don't think it is irrelevant to the thread really. The other side of the equation's interesting too, if a bit weird.

11:01 / 29.07.02

Janina:

"My grandad just damn well lived with it but he had a proper survivors spirit, he applied his sense of humour to that part of his life and used to tell me (and my brother) stories about a dancing bear that they took around Scotland with them. That's pretty much my whole knowledge of army life, guys with guns and a dancing bear."

Sounds like my own grandad who spent much of the war in a Japanese POW camp. According to my mother he only showed outward signs of having been affected by the experience in the first 5 or 6 years after his return; things like going violently mad at the children if they wasted so much as a crumb at the dinner table etc. I always knew him as an incredibly friendly, energetic, entertaining man. He'd happily reel off stories of the war and the camp - ranging from the funny to the horrific - but only if you asked him. He was very religious, though, sentimental too. I think that helped him a lot both during and after the war. He believed that God give him a vision, during a disease induced fit, of a happy family after the war, a sort of promise of what he'd have if he managed to survive.

13:17 / 29.07.02

My grandmother, as a little girl, was in one of the first concentration camps - the ones the British built to keep the Boers in.
She grew up, married a Catholic German aristocrat, and moved to Hamburg in 1933. My grandfather died under "mysterious circumstances" in a state run (read: Nazi) sanitarium. (He was placed there by his family because you'd have to be mad to turn up having started a family with a grotty African farm girl).
In the years following his death, plenty of those family members wound up in camps themselves, although some joined the army instead. Almost all of them lost their land.
My grandmother's diary has a chilling section about a distant cousin (I haven't met anyone from that branch, I don't think) winding up in a Russian arena. The family lived in Czechoslovakia, and when the Russians marched in, they took over the local sports stadium and... used local women for sport. My grandmother (technically an Allied citizen, since she was born in what had become a British colony) got her out, nursed her back to health (warm goat's milk), but she was never quite the same again. The diary doesn't mention her ultimate fate, just that she got well enough to return to her family who had fled elsewhere.
Other than that, I've seen wrist tattoos on old Jewish men, but that was years ago, when I was in elementary school, during some sort of class lecture or something.

Hmm. My confirmation sponsor, an auto mechanic, refused to work on Japanese cars because in WWII, he'd be taken prisoner by the Japs and, apparently, not treated very well. I don't know any more than that. He wasn't in the Bataan Death March, I don't think, but was fighting in the South Pacific theater.

Weird. I don't know anyone who was a Vietnam POW. I mean, I probably do, but I don't know who, since they're not telling.

14:12 / 29.07.02

I've met a group of British POWs that were kept by the Japanese, as the firm I used to work for handled their claim against the Japanese Government.

Also, my Uncle was kept in a Gulag style camp when the Russians pushed the Germans back through Poland in WWII, but can't talk about it(The Russian camps never seemed to get much publicity - probably because no British or US troops were involved).

16:13 / 29.07.02

...and because, at the time, they were our allies.

16:20 / 29.07.02

grant wrote: My grandmother's diary has a chilling section about a distant cousin (I haven't met anyone from that branch, I don't think) winding up in a Russian arena. The family lived in Czechoslovakia, and when the Russians marched in, they took over the local sports stadium and... used local women for sport.

You know, there's a part of me that really doesn't want to know but my curiousity has gotten the best of me. Or is there no explanaition in the entry?

Weird. I don't know anyone who was a Vietnam POW. I mean, I probably do, but I don't know who, since they're not telling.

Me as well. Although I've met plenty of vets that told me what the VC did to American POW's. Not surprisingly, it was pretty horrible. Maybe it takes awhile. I saw a story on how survivors of the USS Indianapolis are only now telling their story to others (including their immediate families) as it was classified for a good number of decades.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

17:27 / 29.07.02

...is there no explanaition in the entry?

I think we can guess.