Nightmare

How to cite: Kępiński, A. Nightmare. Bałuk-Ulewiczowa, T., trans. Medical Review – Auschwitz. August 10, 2018. https://www.mp.pl/auschwitz. Originally published as “Koszmar.” Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim. 1971: 54–58.

Author

Antoni Kępiński, MD, PhD, 1918–1972, Professor of Psychiatry, Head of the Chair of Psychiatry, Kraków Academy of Medicine. Survivor of the Spanish concentration camp Miranda de Ebro.

The number of recollections of concentration camp experiences, and documentary and scientific studies on the subject is growing year by year and giving us a better insight into the atmosphere of concentration camps. Though anyone who has not experienced “it” personally will still feel a bit like Gudrun in Gawalewicz’s1 memoirs. She asked if concentration camp prisoners had bedside lamps. And thanks to the “goodness” of the human memory, even survivors no longer have a fresh picture of life in the concentration camp in their memory—it comes back only in their dreams—but merely a faint reflection. Moreover, they do not have the means to communicate their experiences, which are incommunicable within the normal range of human language. Even if they were to describe life in the concentration camp and their experiences there as clearly and as suggestively as they could, they would still not be able to get their message across to recipients any further than the words which everyone understands, but which cannot communicate the full meaning of the concentration camp experience, so the most essential moments of life in the concentration camp would still belong exclusively to the person who went through them. They would be incommunicable to others.

There is one word which is generally used to describe the concentration camp—it was a nightmare. What is a nightmare? The Oxford English Dictionary gives the following basic definition: “A frightening or unpleasant dream; a very unpleasant or frightening experience or prospect.”2 When we are asleep about once every hour and a half we have a spell of low-voltage electroencephalographic wave activity combined with rapid eye movement. If we are woken at such a moment, we will be able to say what we were dreaming about. If woken at any other time, in general we will no longer be able to relate our dreams, because after a very short time we forget what we were dreaming about. So scientists assume that this characteristic type of EEC activity and rapid eye movement during sleep are the external symptoms of periods of dreaming. The rapid eye movements are believed to be caused by the sleeper observing the images in his or her dream. On the whole (but not exclusively) these images tend to be visual. Certain observations seem to suggest that if it were not for stimuli coming from the outside world forcing us to stay awake and engage in activity, we would be having dreams at regular intervals throughout the day, and that the intensity of our dream experiences could well be bigger than what we experience when we are awake.

We have always been curious about our dreams and what they mean. People have tried to interpret dreams as indications to what will happen in the future, and psychoanalysts have examined dreams to discover our innermost complexes and the deep structure of the human personality. Artists have interpreted dreams to enhance the imaginative aspect of their work; psychiatrists have studied dreams to learn more about psychosis, and so on. Alas, not very much of our experience of dreams leaves a permanent record in our memory, just as we don’t remember much about our very early childhood, though that does not mean that our dreams have no effect on our waking life. Perhaps they are more significant than is generally assumed, and as we learn more and more, perhaps the psychology of dreams will become as important scientifically as the psychology of early childhood. We know that our memory does not keep a reliable record of significant facts, and sometimes things we have forgotten about turn out to be far more important for our development than what we remember.

Some of the few dreams that stay in our memory are ones we call nightmares. If we remembered all of our dreams the number of nightmares would be bigger. We don’t know what goes to make up a dream, whether it’s only a reprocessed version of what we have experienced in waking life, or whether the content of our dreams occurs in a way which is to a certain extent autonomous, as certain dreams recur irrespectively of the particular individual’s experiences and in diverse cultural environments and periods of history, in what Jung has called archetypes.

A nightmare is primarily an uncanny, unnatural dream. The situation, characters, and the whole setup it presents is so very unlike what we experience in real life as well as in our other dreams that its extreme “otherness” is frightening in itself. The horror is connected with the dreamer’s sense of helplessness, which in fact attends every dream as an inherent property of sleep as such. However, in a nightmare the sleeper’s powerlessness is enhanced due to the nightmare being very far removed from ordinary reality. If everything you encounter differs so much from the normal situation, you will very likely lose your way and the possibility of planning a way to handle the situation; you will be helpless in the face of the strange situation. During a nightmare you are fighting for your life, because the fundamental property of nightmares is that they entail an absolute threat.

The intensity of the anxiety a nightmare brings is enhanced by the subject’s feeling of helplessness. In a nightmare everything happens automatically, beyond your control, like a horror film you are in but have no means to influence its script. When the nightmare comes to a crescendo and you try to get out of it you suddenly realise it was only a dream, and you awake. You wake up completely worn out, your heart is beating madly and you are sweating, but you are relieved that it wasn’t real.

So the basic properties of a nightmare may be defined in four points: its uncanniness, the dreamer’s helplessness, the nightmare’s absolute threat, and its automatic course. These are also the four main characteristics describing the experiences of concentration camp inmates.

Prisoners felt the uncanniness of the concentration camp as soon as they entered it. Most went through “a short-lived psychological reaction marked by depression, a feeling of anxiety and horror, helplessness, a sense of isolation and bewilderment, loss of appetite, and insomnia.” As happens during a nightmare, some prisoners had intense vegetative symptoms, “such as polyuria, diarrhoea, shivering, excessive perspiration, and sometimes nausea or even vomiting.” Just as sometimes those who experience a nightmare try to fight it off by telling themselves it was only a dream, so too the defence mechanism concentration camp prisoners resorted to was derealisation—telling themselves that it was all unreal, only a nightmare. According to Teutsch it was a fairly rare phenomenon, 5% of the survivors he examined said it had happened to them; while Cohen claimed it had been quite typical.

It goes without saying that the reality of the concentration camp was so distant from freedom that anyone who found themselves in a concentration camp must have suffered a severe shock. Of course those who had already been through a Gestapo prison were in a sense inured to their new surroundings, and in general their first reaction was somewhat milder. Even people who come into contact with concentration camps in a very indirect way by visiting a museum on the site of a former camp, viewing photographs of camps, reading survivors’ recollections etc., react in a similar way, though far less intensely, nonetheless they may still experience a shock, anxiety, depression, and a sense of unreality.

An untypical situation always triggers a state of anxiety, which may be called “disintegrative” because it is caused by the disintegration of the pattern of interaction which the individual concerned has established with the social environment. A person’s pattern of social interaction helps them anticipate forthcoming developments and plan ahead. Although we are always coming up against something new and unusual, and hence the pattern of our social interaction is constantly being disturbed and built up anew, we are never in a situation where whatever is new is so novel, never encountered before, that we have to start from scratch; there are always some things about it we have come across before, so we are never absolutely nonplussed. Yet there is a certain cut-off point to our tolerance for the unusual, for things we are not accustomed to, beyond which we experience a panic reaction—fear and helplessness. And there is mutual feedback—our panic blocks our volitional actions, while the inability to act aggravates our anxiety. This is hardly the place to digress into a discussion of disintegrative tolerance (viz. tolerance to the unusual). Certainly factors such as a person’s innate disposition and the degree to which they have learned to cope with unusual situations, helping them to be more flexible in their reactions and able to adjust more easily, the general efficiency of their nervous system etc., all have a part to play. Individuals who have sustained organic damage to the central nervous system have a lower tolerance threshold, and a new situation may bring about a Goldstein catastrophic reaction in them. Impairment of the central nervous system in old age makes disintegrative tolerance go down, so we say that “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

The “welcome ceremony” which accosted the Zugang (new arrival) to the camp increased his or her bewilderment and sense of helplessness. If one did not managed to get over this condition, the result was turning into a mindless, manipulated automaton and ending up as a Muselmann. Physicians who have survived a concentration camp say that neuroses and psychosomatic disorders vanished under camp conditions. We may put forward a hypothetical explanation for this: for those inmates the eradication of their lifestyle prior to the concentration camp was beneficial, because its structure had been pathogenic. Moreover, the sudden emergence of a biological threat may have mobilised them for action, displacing their neurotic stagnation and instability.

Concentration camps served as centres of destruction; they were an important part of the plan to eliminate all that posed a threat to the “magnificent German race.” Being under a constant, boundless threat was a fundamental feature of concentration camp life, and it is still a mystery how anyone could have survived it. “A diet designed along the guidelines set down for concentration camp inmates and fed to rats under laboratory conditions,” writes Kowalczykowa (1961: 58–60), “brings about symptoms typical for hunger disease in the tested animals already by the end of three months, even if administered in unrationed quantities.” Yet hunger was only one of many afflictions concentration camp prisoners suffered, and not all of them said it was the first one they thought of. A scrutiny of the experiences reported by survivors suggests we need to revise some of the opinions hitherto prevalent in medicine, which appear to have put too much stress on physiological and biochemical factors at the expense of underrating the psychological aspect. Many inmates were more direly oppressed by the utter disrespect of their human dignity, the loss of their nearest and dearest, and the want of moral support from fellow-prisoners, than by the physical ordeals and privations. Most survivors and authors on the subject concur that what determined a prisoner’s chances of survival was the resolution to live, the trust that sooner or later the concentration camp would come to an end, and the prospects for reliance on colleagues and friends for help. Most prisoners who cracked up perished.

In life-threatening situations the first law of biology, the struggle for survival, becomes especially powerful and significant. In concentration camps it could assume drastic proportions. As Sterkowicz has written, “it’s easy to be noble in auspicious conditions, but much harder at the point of death.” In his recollections of Sachsenhausen Professor Brzezicki said of himself and his colleagues, “After a month the varnish slowly started to peel off each of us.” It seems self-evident that in the concentration camp you could not keep to the rules of conduct applicable in normal conditions, hence the difficulties with moral assessment, especially of those who did not survive. Nonetheless, for all the brutalisation and focus on the biological aspect of life in the concentration camp due to the fact that food and death were the only things that really mattered, while everything else was expunged—to survive the camp to a certain extent you had to wrest yourself free from the grip of the mighty law of surviving at all costs. Those who succumbed completely to this law forfeited their humanity, and more often than not with it went their chances of survival. One of the human traits needed to survive the camp was the ability to put up inward resistance to all that was going on around you and establish a world of your own, in your dreams of the future or your reminiscences of the past, or—more realistically—in a friendship, by helping a fellow-inmate, by attempting to organise life for yourself in a way that differed from the life of the camp, and so on. This was the only way to escape the automatism of camp life. When implemented at their maximum intensity the laws of biology turn the human individuals into automata; under the first law, that is the law of self-preservation, they cease to exercise self-government and come under the rule of hunger, pain, and fear of death; and under the second law, propagation of the species, they are ruled by the sexual drive. In the concentration camp the second law was relegated to a position of minor importance in view of the imperative need to keep the first law. The paradox was that the struggle to survive, which was the normal reaction to the tendency in the camp to deal out death and destruction, enhanced the individual’s sense of being an automaton, helpless in the face of its biological needs; yet automatism was one of the features of the nightmare rampant in the camp and contributing to the annihilation of the individual. Hence in a way the law of self‑preservation ran counter to itself. An individual who could not defy it and keep the hunger and desperate anxiety under control, put up with the pain, who could not think even for a short while about something other than what was vexing him or her right at that moment—such an individual sealed his or her own fate, turning into a powerless creature robotically striving to remain alive, but rapidly dissipating the available energy and sinking into the Muselmann condition.

The camp’s macabre scenery, contempt of human dignity from the very first moment, physical and moral torture, hunger, pain, fear of death and the hardly describable sum total of concentration camp misery—all this made every prisoner feel completely powerless, at least at the beginning, until he or she grew indifferent to it all and worked out some sort of concentration camp individual modus vivendi. And at any rate the attitude the camp’s authorities took a priori to prisoners was to treat them like automatons whose working potential was to be utilised and exhausted down to the last spurt of energy and total collapse. Subjected to a massive amount of external pressure and overwhelmed by the ghastliness of the world around them in the camp, the prisoners were compelled to admit the view of themselves that was thrust on them, and turned into robots under remote control, pushed along, beaten and abused, blindly following orders and only wanting to satisfy their most rudimentary needs. If they could not bring themselves to resist the external pressure and see themselves in a way different from how their oppressors saw them, they were soon on the downslope to fulfilling the oppressors’ plan: they turned into Muselmänner and died in wretchedness. The profanation of death was one of the characteristic features of concentration camp life. Respect for death and those who have died is a characteristic of every human culture, an expression of the human longing for immortality. The concentration camp inmate, who had officially ceased to be human, had to be deprived of this aspect of his or her humanity as well.


Nightmare Phantasms. Marian Kołodziej

The automatism in the camp was connected with its masters and the structure which they imposed on their subjects. From the point of view of the masters the ideal way of organising the camp was to turn its subordinates into flunkeys blindly following orders. To achieve this, they had to be brainwashed, conditioned to accept the structure which was to be implemented. Once the brainwashing was done the automatism of the camp’s power structure would snowball into action. Anything that stood in the way of that power structure would have to be destroyed. The only ethical criterion for the assessment of value would be whether or not the order was carried out. The picture of the world was simplified: only things that agreed with the structure the camp’s masters had imposed were good, and everything that stood in opposition to the structure was bad. The destruction of all that was “bad” licensed the discharge of the aggressive tendency latent in every human being, and the rate of annihilation avalanched. Anything that did not fit into the structure was bad and had to be destroyed. Destroying it was an act of virtue.

Although there might have been no real threat to the life of someone who accepted the required ideological structure, his or her life was reduced to the first law of biology: “I shall overcome or be overcome.” This pseudo‑biologisation (“pseudo-” because it was based on a false concept of the world) led to the brutalisation of life, turning it into a nightmare struggle to survive, an inescapable nightmare; people were drawn into it just as the sleeper is inescapably drawn into a nightmare. Both parties, oppressors and oppressed alike, were sucked into the satanic machinery of destruction. The former could not resist it because they were obsessed with the idea of the Herrenvolk and bound by obedience to their masters; and the latter could not stand up in defiance because they were being crushed by it. For both the motto “I shall overcome or be overcome” became the guiding principle—on the grounds of a real biological threat for the prisoners, and for their oppressors on the grounds of an imaginary threat based on a false ideology. Both groups lost their original identity: the prisoners were prevented from being themselves by the automatism which had reduced their lives to a biological struggle for survival; the oppressive functionaries were held back by the automatism of the ideology imposed on them which they had accepted.

To survive the camp you had to wrest yourself free, at least in part, of this nightmare, and repudiate its four fundamental features—its uncanniness, the feeling of helplessness, the biological threat, and the automatism. There were two mechanisms that played a key part in this, inhibiting your emotional sensibility, and retrieving at least a vestige of the old structure of your life.

“Within the first three to six months of their confinement in the concentration camp, writes Teutsch (1964; read the article online here) “most of the survivors I examined had become desensitised, unresponsive to the diverse traumata they experienced in the camp.” He quite rightly points out that if this kind of emotional desensitisation were to occur in normal life it would be treated as a pathology, but in the camp it was “an adaptive phenomenon which helped prisoners survive in the ambient conditions, protecting them from cracking up, breaking down and perishing.”

Anything that offered prisoners even the faintest reminiscence of life beyond the concentration camp gave them a chance to escape the overwhelming reality just for a while and to be themselves, not enthralled automatons. It was the first step to the recovery of their inner freedom. A trace of human feelings, sympathy, meeting a friend from the time before your confinement, dreaming of the future, attending the lectures delivered by the professors held in Sachsenhausen—all these things restored the old structure of your life. Becoming indifferent to what was really going on around you, and responsive to whatever restored the normal pattern of your life gave you a chance to survive; it kept prisoners from sinking into the status of automatons and saved their humanity.

A key aspect of being a human is the human capacity for choice and decision‑making, something automatons do not have. Destroying this human property was one of the aims of the way life was organised in the concentration camps—it was the first step on the road to the destruction of the human individual, the next step was simply the biological destruction. Survivors’ stories seem to say that the opportunity to make plans, take decisions, and engage in volitional activity emerged within groups of prisoners. On his or her own a prisoner felt powerless, but in a group of fellow-inmates one became more self‑confident. “Yes we can” came ahead of “yes I can.” The leeway indispensable for volitional activity of any kind was first and foremost a collective leeway, and only later did it become an individual attribute, once the individual prisoner had won the support of fellow-inmates and no longer felt crushed by the concentration camp machinery, once he or she had collected enough strength to stand up to it.

In his recollections the Viennese psychiatrist Viktor Frankl (1965) emphasises the importance of the “group therapy” conducted in the concentration camps. Once political prisoners made up the majority of the junior staff of the camp hospital at Auschwitz, it appears to have dispensed treatment relying not so much on medications and surgery, but more on its friendly and humane atmosphere. There are many references in survivors’ accounts to a close connection between a patient’s physical condition and their psychological and mental well‑being. In many cases a patient’s chances of recovery depended on whether they could recover their humanity. Another point which corroborates this is the fact that friendships made in the concentration camp have withstood the test of time. The relationships many survivors entered at the time with fellow-inmates are still so strong that they may be considered fundamental reference groups. These groups played a crucial role in prisoners’ ability to resist the nightmare of the concentration camp.

A nightmare usually leaves a vestige in the subject’s psyche. Even once it was forgotten what the nightmare was about, for a while one will feel exhausted, upset, and depressed. A psychosis, especially of the schizophrenic kind, tends to leave a similar tell‑tale sign, usually one that is longer‑lasting. Disorders of this kind may take the form of a nightmare experienced in the waking state. The type of changes psychiatrists observe in patients who have gone through a psychosis is similar to the personality changes observed in concentration camp survivors, entailing depression, distrust, and irascibility.

We don’t know how far our waking life is just the fulfilment of our dreams; neither do we know whether the nightmare concentration camp prisoners went through during their confinement had been dreamed by some or many of them before they were sent to the camp. At any rate the materialisation of that nightmare has left a permanent mark on the history of the human species. That vestige may turn out to have a beneficial effect if the memory of the concentration camps makes us repudiate war and its false prophets, and renounce it for all time.

Translated from original article: Kępiński A. Koszmar. Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, 1966.

Notes
1. Adolf Gawalewicz, 1916–1987, jurist, writer, member of the Polish underground, Auschwitz‑Birkenau survivor (prisoner no. 9225), later also interned in KL Buchenwald, KL Mittelbau‑Dora, KL Bergen‑Belsen. One of the contributing authors of Medical Review – Auschwitz. Read his articles online: The waiting room to the gas and Some reflections on Auschwitz‑related ethical problems
2. See the relevant entry in The Oxford English Dictionary for reference.

References

1. Aserinsky E., Kleitman N. A motility cycle in sleeping infants as manifested by ocular and gross bodily activity. Journal of Applied Physiology. 1955: 8–11.
2. Brzezicki E. Socjopsychopatia a „Kazet-Lager" Sachsenhausen. Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim. 1963: 77–83.
3. Cohen E. A. Reakcja początkowa na osadzenie w obozie koncentracyjnym. Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim. 1965: 28–31.
4. Frankl V. Psycholog w obozie koncentracyjnym. Warszawa: Pax; 1962. Original German edition: Trotzdem Ja Zum Leben Sagen: Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager. Wien: Verlag für Jugend und Volk; 1946. English edition: Man’s Search for Meaning. New York: Beacon Press; 1959.
5. Frankl V. Higiena psychiczna w sytuacji przymusowej. Doświadczenia z zakresu psychoterapii w obozie koncentracyjnym. Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim. 1965: 24–28.
6. Gawalewicz A. Numer wraca do nazwiska. II: Prolog ludzkiego życia. Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim. 1965: 123–134.
7. Goldstein K. The Organism: A Holistic Approach to Biology Derived from Pathological Data in Man. New York: The American Book Company; 1939.
8. Kowalczykowa J. Choroba głodowa w obozie koncentracyjnym w Oświęcimiu. Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim. 1961: 58–60.
9. Leśniak R. Poobozowe zmiany osobowości byłych więźniów obozu koncentracyjnego Oświęcim‑Brzezinka. English version online: Post‑camp personality alterations in former prisoners of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim. 1965: 13–20.
10. Orwid M. Socjopsychiatryczne następstwa pobytu w obozie koncentracyjnym Oświęcim‑Brzezinka. English version online: Socio‑psychiatric after‑effects of imprisonment in the Auschwitz‑Birkenau concentration camp. Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim. 1964; 17–23.
11. Oswald I. Sleeping and Waking: Physiology and Psychology. Amsterdam and New York: Elsevier Publishing Company; 1962.
12. Nightmare. Entry in Oxford Dictionary online (accessed 7 Aug. 2018).
13. Sterkowicz S. Obozowe sprawy życia i śmierci w retrospekcji lekarza. Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim. 1963: 97–101.
14. Teutsch A. Reakcje psychiczne w czasie działania psychofizycznego stressu u byłych więźniów w obozie koncentracyjnym Oświęcim‑Brzezinka. English version online: Psychological reactions to psychosomatic stress in 100 former prisoners of the Auschwitz‑Birkenau concentration camp. Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim. 1964: 10–17.

We use cookies to ensure you get the best browsing experience on our website. Refer to our Cookies Information and Privacy Policy for more details.