Peter Gay: Survivor Of The Holocaust

Peter Gay states he does not believe he is a ”survivor” of the Holocaust because his family fled Berlin before they could be subjected to the horrors of the concentration camps. While he did live in a Nazi controlled Berlin for six years he writes that his family was never individually persecuted during this time. Gay and his family were in the minority of refugees who had a successful journey out of Germany and to a safe place, in his case, America. He does not write his book like he is building up to the moment where his whole life was changed when he was hauled off to the concentration camps. While his life did change, it was not the same as if he had survived the camps. When describing his childhood, he does not say that his family was “typically Jewish.” He describes his mother and father as not looking like you would expect a typical Jew w look, and his family never really practiced their religion. There is an inference that if people didn’t know the Frölhich family …show more content…
He writes that he hated Germans and would not have anything to do with their culture or people, a similarity many survivors must have felt after the war had ended. He writes his autobiography with the sense of disengagement from the other Holocaust survivors. He describes his childhood as being fairly simple with the underlying tones that things were becoming difficult for the Jewish population in Berlin with each year, but with there being no great calamity to his life. Of course everything changed. He had to leave his home and the city he grew up in. His faith in Germans was corrupted for longest time, and his struggle to live in places that did not want refugees. Peter Gay, like his father, never claimed to be a survivor of the Holocaust, but that didn’t mean they were not victims of the oppressive Nazi