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Last update - 13:46 01/05/2008 Holocaust Remembrance Day What did concentration camp inmates dream about? By Ofri Ilani, Haaretz Correspondent Tags: Israel, Holocaust, Shoah  On one of the days when Dov Freiberg was incarcerated at the Sobibor concentration camp, he made the decision to kill himself the next day. After evening roll call, he went to sleep on a board on the floor and had a dream. "I dreamed that my mother came to visit me along with little Yankale," Freiberg wrote in his memoirs. Advertisement "She was beautiful. Just like she was during the holidays before the war. She wore an elegant dress and her hair was pulled up, which accentuated her high forehead. The sad look in her eyes was filled with her love for me. I wanted to tell them something, but the words would not come out." "Finally, my mother said that they must go. I wanted to go with them, but my mother, as if she knew what I wanted to say, said that I must stay. 'It's good for you,' she said." Freiberg, who died this month, wrote in his memoirs that following the dream he forgot all his pain and suffering. He often thought of the dream and tried to understand it. "Finally, I reached the conclusion that if my mother and Yankale aren't alive, then my mother came to me to tell me not to join them, not to commit suicide," Erlich wrote. "The dream stopped me from killing myself." Hebrew University student Yifat Erlich is writing her Master's thesis on dreams during the Holocaust. For the paper, which is being researched under the guidance of Professor Yoram Bilu and Dr. Amos Goldberg, Erlich collected hundreds of descriptions of Jews' dreams during the Holocaust that she found in memoirs, diaries, testimonies and more. So what did Jews dream about in the concentration camps and ghettos? As expected, most of the dreams involved family members. In many cases, while the dreamer knew his relative was already dead, in the vision he appeared to him alive. Many prisoners also dreamed of food. Aliza Vitis-Shomron, a survivor from the Warsaw ghetto, told Erlich that, "she saw a bowl of noodles with butter, long hotdogs and a lot of bread. The dream is all about food, even though I had just finished eating my dinner: a thin crust of bread and some coffee water." In her paper, Erlich says that many of the dreams that she read about were documented years after they were dreamed, some of them even decades later, so their 'authenticity' is in question. "When people write of a dream that happened 60 years before, what remains is the dream's story. The dream is already gone. I checked what place the stories of these dreams had in someone's life story," Erlich said. According to Erlich, in the hellish reality of the ghettos and camps, the line between a person's life and their nightmares can become blurred. "People who were in the Sonderkommando (prisoners who were in charge of removing corpses from the gas chambers and incinerating them) said that when the gas chamber opened for the first time it was like a nightmare," Erlich said. "A lot of the prisoners said that when they awoke from their nightmares they did not know if they were alive or dead. The line between life and death, becomes blurred as well." Erlich found many dreams in which a family member tells the dreamer that their salvation is near and they will survive the war. For many of these people, Erlich states, the dream is what drove them to escape or go into hiding. However, in some cases the dreams did not lead to salvation but to death. The author Victor Frankel wrote in his book "Man looks for meaning" about a prisoner at Auschwitz who had a dream that the death camp would be liberated on March 30th, 1944. On March 29th, the man got news that the camp was far from being liberated and fell ill. "On March 30th," Frankel writes, "he became delirious. The next day, he died." Related articles: Son gets Dad's Auschwitz tattoo on own arm With help of Haredim, Yad Vashem IDs another 120,000 Shoah victims Sirens wail nationwide as Israelis honor Holocaust victims Bookmark to del.icio.us   Hamas on the Holocaust Al-Aqsa TV claims Jews concocted the Holocaust. Grasping genocide How a non-Jew in Israel came to understand the Holocaust.   1.   Holocaust Survivors 11:21  |  Rachel L Gottstein 01/05/08   2.   A dream to find identity 12:09  |  A mother 01/05/08   3.   Freedom 14:49  |  Mary 01/05/08   4.   What did concentration camp inmates dream about? 15:51  |  Natallie Durson 01/05/08   5.   Crass Ignorance 18:08  |  eva 01/05/08   6.   Natallie Durson#4 You make me vomit. 18:19  |  S 01/05/08   7.   I would have thought 18:34  |  Made up Name 01/05/08

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