Holocaust The Cut for Survival Was Made on the Second Hand

Survival in the Holocaust concentration camps meant something different for every human being who lived as a prisoner. And it meant the same. Survival meant enduring dread, fear, pain, starvation, exhaustion, and debasement. Survival required ever increasing degrees of physical, mental, and emotional adaptation and tolerance. Survival meant ever-increasing extremes of degradation in every realm -- degradation of faith, hope, strength, standards. And survival meant being lucky at every turn, in every moment, with each breath. In And The Sun Still Dared to Shine, Peter Scheponik wrote about surviving and survival. To those who are free, the words are the relatively same. To those featured in the poems "Afterlife," Love Photos," and "Punishment," the cut made between surviving and survival happened on the second hand.

The hands of the Nazis doled out cruelty and held chance loosely, as in a game. To a Nazi, taking life was easy and expected. To give life back again, after "everything went black/blacker than the swastikas / and boxcar journey / blacker than the night sky […] a sinking blackness that / seemed liked death" (lines 9-11, 14 -- 15) was part of the game that caused "SS sneers" (line 19) and, one would assume, laughter and derision. Pleasure was derived from returning a Jew to the unbearable state of surviving and to the...

The point of the game was to signal to the prisoners that their survival was based on the irrational moves of their opponents, and that the prisoners had no control over the outcome. When a clever "guard raised his arm / and aimed the gun" (lines 3-5) but instead "the wooden plank / whacked from behind" (lines 6 -7), did Scheponik intend the similarity to counting coup, this demonstration of Nazi cruelty rather than native bravery? A warrior, whose dignity was robbed through the counting of coup, survived all the same. Surviving in the death camps required the minute and repeated tapping of the store of one's bravery. The chance of survival increased when fear was contained and panic squelched. In this poem, the prisoner, who stood bravely waiting for the bullet, "closed his eyes" (line 2) until, surviving in the "salvation of unconsciousness / […] he opened his eyes" (lines 17-18), to again face his fate.
Scheponik reminds the reader that some of the bravest of the surviving were very young children. In "Punishment," he portrays the brutality exacted on a child "for eating a crust of bread / during roll call" (lines 21 -22). The child is punished for trying to survive and survives by enduring the grueling physical punishment. By force of will and intent to survive -- by not giving in or…