Laughter in the Holocaust

    Dr. Chaya Ostrower is a professor at Tel-Aviv University in Israel and her Ph.D thesis focused on the varying functions of laughter during the Holocaust. The paper is based on interviews with hundreds of Israeli Holocaust survivors. She divides the main role of laughter into the following: defense mechanism, aggression, sexuality, intellectual and social interactions. Many people have treated the subject of laughter during the Holocaust as taboo, but I think examining this topic would be a great way of revealing the function and importance of laughter.
    On laughter's role as a defense mechanism, Ostrower points out the importance of laughing as a way to deal with the overall traumatic experience in the concentration camp. One interviewee said, "there were many people who died before their time was up because they did not know how to laugh at themselves." An important distinction must be drawn here. Laughter by the prisoners was not aimed at the experiences they were undergoing, after all, there is nothing funny about the concentration camps. Rather, their laughter is directed at themselves and others around them. It helps to divert attention away from the atrocities happening all around them. People who refused to laugh probably had a difficult time understanding why they were subjected to such terrible and inconceivable things. Humor provides insulation against trauma and helps people to cope with it. For the prisoners in Auschwitz, laughing gives them hope and the strength to keep going.
    The various other functions further prove that laughter is an integral part of human existence. It helps people to persevere through madness by reminding them of their humanity. One of the main goals during the Holocaust of the Nazis was to erase the humanity within the prisoners - by humiliating them, by subjecting them to brutal conditions. However, as Ostrower points out, laughter created a sense of community among those who laughed. We consider the capacity to laugh at a joke as a sign of someone being a complete and normal huma being and an integral part of a functioning society. In a sense, the humor and the jokes were perhaps the last connection many prisoners had with the world they once knew.
   Ostrower's paper makes similar arguments to Kessey's quote in the previous post. Both emphasizes the importance of laughter as a way of dealing with the madness and cruelty in the world. Kessey's point that those who could not laugh eventually succumbs to the pressure runs parallel with the point that many during Holocaust died because they were incapable of dealing with the stress.