Book review: Owczarski, W. (2023). Dreaming in Auschwitz: The Concentration Camp in the Prisoners' Dreams. Cambridge Scholars Publishing
- Authors
- Publication Date
- Oct 17, 2024
- Source
- International Journal of Dream Research
- Keywords
- Language
- English
- License
- Unknown
- External links
Abstract
In his book “Dreaming in Auschwitz: The Concentration Camp in the Prisoners' Dreams”, Wojciech Owczarski, a Polish professor of literature at the University of Gdansk, Poland, explores dreaming during the Second World War through the lens of the first-person accounts retrospectively written in the 1970s by Polish Auschwitz concentration camp survivors. The book is based on the accounts of survivors that were stored in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and translated into English in 2015, and offers an unprecedented access to the beliefs, desires, sufferings, and hopes of the inmates, as revealed through their dreams. The book takes an interdisciplinary approach to the dreams recalled decades after WWII, and dreamt especially during the imprisonment in Auschwitz, ranging from quantitative content analysis to the anthropological dream interpretation practises to the personal meaning the inmates gave their dreams. While numerous books have been written about WWII and the Holocaust, dreams have not featured in the centre stage. In dream research, posttraumatic dreams have certainly been of great interest, but even amongst studies on how war experiences have been reflected in the dreams of veterans and civilians, the material covered in the book offers a unique perspective to the Nazi occupation and oppression. The inner worlds of the concentration camp prisoners, as revealed in their dreams, are witness testimonies to the most unspeakable events of history but they also show how hard hope is to abolish from the hearts of people. Although we only have the accounts of survivors, there is no reason to believe that those who did not survive would have dreamt differently or would have held different beliefs related to dreams. Thus, this book that is based on the first-person descriptions of dreams dreamt by Polish Auschwitz inmates during their imprisonment at Auschwitz concentration camp and after liberation, can be considered to reflect the inner worlds of all those who were subjected to the most unspeakable horrors during the war. The many excerpts from the original dream descriptions, and the book itself, pay tribute to the men and women who survived, or perished at, the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Nazi regime.
