THE YEARS AFTER LIBERATION brought no respite: to this day, the survivors of Dachau, like those of the other concentration camps, continue to be traumatized by their extreme experiences. This trauma became a noticeable feature of survivors’ daily lives, but it also surfaced in their poetry written years or even decades afterwards. Even now, many of the survivors suffer from nightmares, and almost all are racked by feelings of guilt toward those who lost their lives in the concentration camps. A not insignificant number—including Sylvain Gutmacker, Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, and Bruno Bettelheim, who was also imprisoned in Dachau until 1938—were no longer able to bear this trauma and committed suicide, often years or decades afterwards.

Edmond Michelet described his experience of Dachau and its consequences:

Everybody who has been imprisoned in a concentration camp has the right to draw the conclusions he or she sees fit from it. These conclusions are determined just as much by the particular circumstances of an individual experience as by the nature of the person who experienced it.