Jewish Humor in the Holocaust: Humor as a Survival Strategy

By: Lázaro Droznes

Narrated by: Iris Bahay

Through humor, the Jewish people were able to preserve their dignity and feel that they were still human beings, despite all the Nazi attempts to destroy in them every vestige of humanity.

Jewish humor is a way of processing pain and suffering. In that magical moment in which the flash of a joke appears, hunger disappears, the soup kitchens, forced labor, typhus, the dead on the sidewalks, the black market, meal cards, deportations to the East, and the endless sufferings experienced for one reason only: to be a Jew.

Humor could transform pessimism into optimism. Resignation into hope. Present into the future.

Through humor the Jewish people have performed their supreme work of sabotage: survival. It has prevented their weaknesses from being stronger than their strengths.

Humor is the secret weapon of the Jewish people. The Nazis have not understood it because the Nazis have not had a sense of humor. German is similar to Yiddish, but without a sense of humor.

Humor before, during, and after the Second World War has been a space of freedom in hell where it was possible to be optimistic and leave pessimism for better times.

The people who do not laugh are dead before they die. The Jewish people have known how to laugh to survive.

Every day there was only one thought: just one more day. In those dark days when the future was no longer what it had been and where everyone expected tomorrow to have a better future, humor was the key to enable survival.

In this book you will find a series of phrases, jokes, and monologues that portray vividly and unforgettably those sinister days of the Holocaust, where one people tried to exterminate another through industrial procedures.

The jokes allow you, through a smile, to exercise your memory, avoid forgetfulness, and make sure that the story does not happen again. Neither to the Jewish people nor to any other.

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