Reading Trauma: The Shattering of the Self in the Concentration Camps—Objectification, "Like Dead," and Regression

The Nazi concentration camps were a place of terror, violence, and murder, inmates being brutally stripped of their self-identity and humanity from the very moment of their arrival. This article examines the process and feeling of the "shattering of the self" prisoners experienced by analyzing three of the descriptions/images by which it is commonly depicted in the testimony literature: human objectification, "like dead," and infantile behavior....