How did people survive in camps of the Holocaust?

Answer 1

Thonthon - - you don't :) Unless you manage to hide in a lead refrigerator. - - Thonthon

Big Bomb - - The answer above is only partly correct, in the fact that it depends where you are at the time of a nuclear war. The fact is that if you are living in a large city, such as New York which is more likely to be a primary target in a nuclear strike, then your chances of survival are limited to where and how far from the bomb you are.

One of the biggest challanges to surviving a nuclear Holocaust would be the nuclear fallout and radiation in the air, which would last for thousands of years. Fallout is harmful to all living things. Radiation sickness also occurs to people exposed to high levels of radiation. It has also been witnessed in Chernobyl that mutation can occur to new borns. Two hearts, one lung, a weak nervous system. The risk of Cancer also increases. Fallout shelters can protect populations against these effects.

As mentioned in the answer above, it is possible to be cryonically frozen through the years when radiation and fallout hang in the air, but this extent of technology has not been fully tested, and every human currently cryonically frozen has not been brought back to conciousness yet. - - Big Bomb.

Satyricon- Neither of these answers are correct. There obviously is a major misunderstanding about nuclear radiation and weapons. First off, will humans survive a nuclear holocaust? Yes. How? Same way everything else will. For those of you who don't know the sun happens to be a giant nuclear power plant. Which happens to be the same energy being used during a nuclear explosion or reactor. Coincidentally the radiation emitted from the sun is the same type of radiation emitted from a nuclear explosion. This means radiation is radiation, and the amount of radiation each person can undergo is different. However high doses of radiation can be lethal. Which is why it is recommended to avoid the sun. BUT that doesn't stop one from sun bathing. The point is, if you survive the blast of a nuclear explosion, you could be exposed to double the recommended radiation in a life time, and NEVER see any side effects. Yet your best friend could be exposed to half the recommended amount in a life time and get skin cancer.

Nuclear radiation never has, and never will mutate anyone. Especially into more organs in new borns.

NOTE: This information was summarized from an interview of a Nuclear Engineer of 20 years.

-Satyricon

Answer 2

Most camp survivors were from one of the following categories of prisoners: * Those given office jobs in the camps and others given non-manual jobs. * Those released by the Nazis. * Some of those taken to camps at a very late stage and not held for long. Obviously, those sent to extermination camps, such as Auschwitz II, Treblinka II, Belzec, Chelmno, Sobibor, had almost no chance of survival. Other survivors included those who managed to stay in hiding. Once you were inside a camp, things were grim.

Answer 3

There were no 'golden rules' for surviving but, as with any disaster there were ways that one could have minimised one's exposure [all of this with the help of hindsight]:

- escape: - either physically flee to another state/country/continent, this was problematic when generally countries would surrender refugee Jews more readily than citizen Jews. - or administratively; many people, especially children were given false papers which showed them to be Aryan and they managed to live under occupation as gentiles.

- evasion: - there were many way that were utilised to evade the authorities, people would hide in church/monasteries, orphanages and even people's homes (though this was the most risky) also in the countryside and in the woods.

Once they were captured the chances of survival dropped dramatically, one would always need to find shelter, dry and warmth and above all food, this was often a full time job. If one were to find one's self in the camps, then death was an omnipresent threat, the best thing that one could do was to try to remain as inconspicuous as possible, so as not to attract the attention of the guards, as the attention that they gave was generally negative.

The best way would be to escape from those countries that were affected by the holocaust. Not an easy thing as a safe haven one year may have been subject to Nazi rule the next. Another option was to go into hiding, although this was far more dangerous than escaping. Anne Frank's family escaped Germany for Amsterdam in 1933 only to be threatened again when The Netherlands was invaded in 1940 - they eventually went into hiding but were betrayed and all but one died before the war (and holocaust) ended.