Ferne Pearlstein, the director of The Last Laugh, a documentary about the role of humor among Jews during, and after, the Holocaust, told The New York Times that while doing research for it she and her team “found that humor was not uncommon — and was used as a coping mechanism in a situation of almost unimaginable horror, as a means of self-defense, a counterattack for people who had few, if any, other ways of fighting back, and even as just simple diversion.”
One Auschwitz survivor, Renee Firestone, said in the film that she could not help but see the bleak irony after the infamous Nazi physician Josef Mengele told her during an examination: “if you survive this war, you better have your tonsils removed.”
“The instinct to laugh shows that we were still human beings while in the camps,” Ms. Firestone explained. “This inner sense of humor is what kept me alive.”
And it isn't anything new. If we were to go back even further and take a look at, for example, the bubonic plague of the 14th century (also known as the Black Death), we would discover that humor was important then as well. While the disease killed large parts of the population of Europe, it also spawned the pointed satire of the Church and other authorities in “Decameron,” by Boccaccio. The classic concerns a group of young people who flee pestilence-ridden Florence for a series of villas in the countryside.
So don't worry about releasing a chuckle when scrolling through these pics. It’s natural to be amused by some of them.
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