We discussed many aspects of how food has affected humanity throughout history through social, political and economic change. We briefly touched on hunger and starvation during World War II, mostly about the Minnesota Starvation Experiment here at the U, but we didn’t go into great detail about how much this starvation took a toll on people more directly affected by World War II in Europe, specifically, the people in the concentration camps and those lucky, or unlucky, enough to survive long enough to make it to liberation. I chose to write about this topic as my “How could you have left this out?” because I truly wondered how something this big and this significant in our world history could’ve been left out of this class. The Nazi’s used food in the concentration camps to further dehumanize a group of people different from them simply for the fact to show that their political ideology and “Aryan race” were superior to their own. This simply blows my mind.
World War II is a key part of virtually every history class in school. The horrors of the concentration camps are discussed: the gas chambers, the experimentation, the working until you drop dead, the skeleton people that were somehow still living (Tress). Yet, we don’t go into depth about how those skeleton people make it through the Holocaust, and still have issues with food to this day. We only seem to care about what happened during the war, not what happened after and how it has affected people ever since.
In Brooks article, she uses her sources about what nurses saw and dealt with after liberation to show just how ravenous these prisoners at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near Celle, Germany were. The nurses started using intravenous and intranasal hydrolysates (Brooks, 2962; Collis, 815; Lipscombe, 314; Cornell & Russell, 50) to help the prisoners get nutrients back into their bodies, but the patients had such terrible cases of PTSD that they thought the nurses were injecting them with benzene, like the doctors would do before they would be sent to the gas chambers (Brooks, 2962; Jones, 11). Prisoners that were strong enough to get up and feed themselves would go and steal the rations of prisoners who still weren’t strong enough to fend them off (Brooks, 2962). A nurse named Anny Pfirter recalled how a patient she was helping treat dropped her spoon while she was eating and Anny picked it up, wiped it off and gave it back to her. The patient was utterly confused by this act of kindness that she repeated it just to see if Anny would do it again, which she did. The patient said “The nurse stoops down… for me,” (Brooks, 2963; Pfirter, 9-10). This woman was so used to being treated like less than a human by the Nazi soldiers that she was taken aback by the fact that she was treated with humanity. These people were fighting with each other over food, that there was plenty of, to stay alive simply because that’s what they were used to. They were treated more like wild dogs by the Nazis’s than human.
Favaro, Rodella, and Santonastaso (2000) discuss the effects that this starvation had on these survivors long after their time in the concentration camps. His study looks at people who had survived death camps such as Mauthausen, Dachau, and Auschwitz and how their eating habits were currently and if their time in these camps had affected said habits. Over 50% of the subjects lost more than 40% of their total body weight in these concentration camps, while 33% of the subjects reported going on binges at some point in time, and 43% of the survivors sometimes felt as though ‘food controls their life’ (Favaro, Rodella & Santonastaso, 464-465). Their findings confirm their hypothesis that among subjects that had lost a great deal of weight during their internment in the camps, their risk of developing recurrent binge eating at some point in their lives was higher than among other subject (Favaro, Rodella & Santonastaso, 465). In their clinical observations, they also observed the fact that survivors have specific attitudes and behaviors towards food, as many of them ate in a “defensive position” with their arms around the plate and their head lowered (Favaro, Rodella & Santonastaso, 465). These people are still afraid of what someone could possibly do to their food that they feel the need to protect it and keep it close.
There is also a correlation between starvation and a higher chance of getting cancer, osteoporosis or osteopenia in people who survived death camps and ghettos. In a study done by Marcus and Menczel, female Jewish Holocaust survivors were compared to female Jews from Europe not involved in the Holocaust. They found that 54.8% of the Holocaust survivors had osteoporosis and 39.7% had osteopenia, while the control group had 25% with osteoporosis and 55% had osteopenia (Kueper et. al., 3). One of the Holocaust survivors with severe osteoporosis at the time of this study had multiple compression fractures in her spine as well a lateral fracture that she obtained by sneezing (Kueper et. al, 4) .
All of this information shows us how much starvation had an effect on the survivors of the Nazi concentration camps. These people went through all kinds of trauma, some that they could even pass down to their children in their genes through a phenomenon called epigenetic inheritance (Tress), yet they don’t want to discuss their trauma from starvation and malnutrition because they can’t unwrap it from their other stress and traumatic exposures that they went through in the camps (Tress). These traumas changed the way the survivors thought of food altogether. They’re afraid to throw away food, even if its gone bad, they buy and store extra food and have increased anxiety when there isn’t any readily available food (Tress; Sindler, Wellman, & Stier, 3-4). The Nazi’s used food to mentally traumatize and dehumanize the Jewish people to prove that they were more superior to them. They forced them into these ghettos and concentration camps to prove to the Jews that they had absolute power over them as they controlled everything about their lives during the war. They controlled how much they ate, what they did, how much sleep they got, and even when they died. I think this is something very important that we should have discussed more in depth about in class as this shows just how far racial superiority and genocide can go and how it affected generations of people.
Annotated Bibliography
Brooks, Jane. “‘Uninterested in anything except food’: the work of nurses feeding the liberated inmates of Bergen-Belsen.” Journal of Clinical Nursing, vol. 21, no. 19pt20, 2012, pp. 2958–2965., doi:10.1111/j.1365-2702.2012.04149.x.
This journal article is being used to criticize how nurses didn’t get the recognition in the historiography of World War II for everything they did that helped the prisoners at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after it was liberated on April 15, 1945. It discusses all of the difficulties and horrendous things these nurses witnessed at the camp and how they handled feeding the approximately 40,000 starving people at the camp. The author discusses nurses how the prisoners went after the food, some dying because they ate too rich of food too fast after not having really any food for a week and how one of the most important jobs was giving back the prisoners humanity to them after being dehumanized by the people in charge of the concentration camp.
My paper will really benefit from this criticism in a number of ways. It honestly shows how inhumane and non-human these prisoners were treated during the war and how this affected them for weeks after liberation. It will also help me show that starvation isn’t just not having food for a while and then being fine once you eat again. It is a onslaught of health issues that affect the body for weeks after finally having access to food, but then eating too fast and too much food can actually kill you after going so long without a proper amount of food. It will also help show that this is something that should have been discussed more in lecture, and not just briefly mentioned in passing.
Favaro, Angela, F. C. Rodella, and Paolo Santonastaso. “Binge Eating and Eating Attitudes among Nazi Concentration Camp Survivors.” Psychological Medicine, vol. 30, 2000, pp. 463-466, PILOTS: Published International Literature On Traumatic Stress
This study hypothesizes how the effects of starvation in concentration camp survivors has caused a higher chance of binge eating than in a control group. The write-up addresses what the scientists did in the study to help them reach their findings and what those findings were. It also very briefly mentions the Minnesota study here at the University of Minnesota in the introduction to the report that we touched on in class.
The study will help me show in my paper how seriously the concentration camps lack of food for the prisoners have affected people to this day in their eating habits and in their day to day lives. It will also help me prove the point that this has affected the diets of the prisoners, how it has taken control of their lives, and how the Nazi’s used this to push their political ideology that Jews were inferior to the “Aryan race”.
Kueper, Janina et al. “Evidence for the Adverse Effect of Starvation on Bone Quality: A Review of the Literature.” International Journal of Endocrinology 2015 (2015): 628740. PMC. Web. 12 Dec. 2017.
This “review” discusses a lot of information that scholars and scientists have about starvation and malnutrition and how it has affected large numbers of people throughout history. It also discusses how your body responds to starvation and what it breaks down in order to try and stay alive. It uses animal studies, starvation in unborn babies of women currently enduring famine, bulimia and anorexia to show how these people and animals were affected in the long term in their bones because of starvation.
This article will be helpful to my paper in the fact that it discusses specific incidences of how immediate effects of starvation affected the prisoners bones and what health problems it lead to in the future. It will help show that starvation is something that affects a person’s body long after starvation has ended and how it also affects them socially as if they are unhealthy, they can’t be living a full, fun life if they are too sick to enjoy it.
Tress, Luke, et al. “For many Holocaust survivors, effects of wartime starvation still a plague.” The Times of Israel, 3 May 2016, 10:28pm, www.timesofisrael.com/for-many-holocaust-survivors-wartime-starvation-still-a-daily-torment/.
In this newspaper article, a journalist with The Times of Israel interviews a Holocaust concentration camp survivor in New York City, organizations for survivors leaders and other experts surrounding the ongoing effects of malnutrition and starvation during the war. The author uses the knowledge of these experts and results from important scientific studies to help show how lasting an effect the malnutrition and physical and mental trauma in concentration camps has affected people that were there.
These statistics, expert opinions and personal experience in this article will be good evidence for my paper. The stats will really help paint a picture of how the malnutrition, trauma and starvation have had an effect in every aspect of the survivors lives to this day and how this is something that they have to live with for the rest of their lives.
Originally published 15.10.2019