Dreaming “the Unspeakable”?How the Auschwitz Concentration Camp Prisoners Experienced and Understood Their Dreams

Abstract

This article explores the dream descriptions submitted in 1973–1974 by former Polish prisoners of the Auschwitz concentration camp in response to a questionnaire sent out by Polish psychiatrists. These descriptions are being investigated as testimonies that represent the Auschwitz inmates’ experiences commonly regarded as “unspeakable.” Not only the dream experience itself, but also the respondents’ attitudes toward and beliefs about dreams are taken into consideration in an attempt to understand the impact of the Holocaust on the survivors. Their general inability of comprehending the Auschwitz and post‐Auschwitz dreams seems to be the most important and significant aspect of their testimonies. The experience of dreams as completely strange and astonishing phenomena is being explained in this article in connection with the respondents’ ability and inability to recover from their Holocaust trauma.

Postmemory dreaming: Nightmares of war in third‐generation descendants of Polish and Russian survivors of World War II

“…The interviewee's dreams in series one are similar to many dreams of former Auschwitz prisoners in a 147‐person sample I investigated (Owczarski, 2023). Many of the inmates also dreamt, even long after the war, that they were chased by the Germans somewhere in forests, villages, or towns and were almost captured.…”

“…My findings confirm that people even as traumatized as the Holocaust survivors rarely had dreams that replayed the trauma without any changes. Their dreams usually incorporated new material, were metaphorical rather than literal, and reflected potential, not actual events (Owczarski, 2023). The survivors did not have to experience particular scenes, for instance, that of Gestapo raids, to dream about them.…”

“…This peculiar cult of victimhood is characteristic, not only of the communist narrative but also of the anticommunist rhetoric of the Catholic Church in Poland and still pervasive in all kinds of Polish nationalist discourse (Zechenter & Prokop‐Janiec, 2019). This account of victimhood is rooted in what I called, following Erich Fromm's (1973, 325–68) thoughts on human destructiveness, the “necrophilic character” of Polish national identity (Owczarski, 2023, 38–40). Due to their uneasy history, at least since the end of the 18th century, the common identity of Poles has been “based on reminiscing about the far past, adoring long dead national heroes, commemorating anniversaries of Polish defeats, calamities, lost battles or uprisings, and generally on funerals, cemeteries, dead bodies, mourning, grief, and despair” (Owczarski, 2023, 39).…”

“…This account of victimhood is rooted in what I called, following Erich Fromm's (1973, 325–68) thoughts on human destructiveness, the “necrophilic character” of Polish national identity (Owczarski, 2023, 38–40). Due to their uneasy history, at least since the end of the 18th century, the common identity of Poles has been “based on reminiscing about the far past, adoring long dead national heroes, commemorating anniversaries of Polish defeats, calamities, lost battles or uprisings, and generally on funerals, cemeteries, dead bodies, mourning, grief, and despair” (Owczarski, 2023, 39). The specificity of the Polish ethos for remembering World War II by emphasizing the victimhood of the whole nation was, however, shaped by yet another factor: the shared need to deny and conceal the involvement of many Poles in the Holocaust.…”