Eating and Being in the Holocaust

NB: The following is excerpted from Chapter One, “Why Food? A Personal Introduction,” of the author’s unpublished manuscript, Eating and Being: On the Psychosocial Meanings of Food.] As part of the effort, carried out in collaboration with my colleague George Kren, to unravel the psychohistorical factors which made the Holocaust possible, I started ruminating about food as a topic for psychosocial study. Early on, was the occasion at Professor Kren’s home when we were examining a collection of gruesome photographs of Holocaust victims. He was called to the phone, and, wanting a change of pace while I waited, I picked up a gourmet club magazine lying on his coffee table. Glancing through the pictures of blackened red fish, roast beef, paella, and legs of lamb, it suddenly seemed utterly clear that this was no less a pornography than layouts in sex magazines, or the photos of skeletal Nazi victims.

Beneath the horrors of Holocaust testimony there is a latent truth of startling simplicity, namely that it speaks to the nature of our existential condition as being grounded upon the body. Even if it were not so prominent as it is in Holocaust literature, consideration of the body would lead inevitably to reflection upon the significance of food as shaping the condition of body and mind. But food is a central theme. Without exception, Holocaust victim/survivor accounts show that starvation conditions led rapidly to demoralization, and ultimately to dehumanization:

The main thing was to get something to eat and drink. When food was brought in, an excitement ensued which one can otherwise observe only among animals (Bondy in E. Cohen, Human Behavior in the Concentration Camp, 1953, p. 132).

…food was a very favorite topic of conversation. The prisoners would go “dining out” together and exchange recipes for special dishes: Hungarian Jews told me again and again how goulash used to be cooked … these food discussions are called by Rumke “culinary dry screwing” while Frankl uses the term “gastric masturbation” (Human Behavior, p. 132).

For Primo Levi, the worst of the starvation experiences were the dreams:

One can hear the sleepers breathing and snoring…. Many lick their lips and move their jaws. They are dreaming of eating…. It is a pitiless dream which the creator of the Tantalus myth must have known. You not only see the food, you feel it in your hands, distinct and concrete, you are aware of its rich and striking smell; someone in the dream even holds it up to your lips, but every time a different circumstance intervenes to prevent the consummation of the act (Survival in Auschwitz, 1969, pp. 54-55).

The point of these quotations, and countless others that could be cited, requires little elaboration: without a minimally adequate diet, behavior not only deteriorates to a primal level, but the psy-

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chosocial structures essential to a recognizable sense of personhood are first reduced and finally crushed. This is one important reason why many prisoners in the Nazi camps reached such a dehumanized state that they were referred to as musselmänner—prisoners close to death, inmates whose skin was all that held their bones together and whose will had been completely drained from their veins.

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