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Updated: Jul 23, 2025

The Social Dimension of Stress: Experimental Manipulations of Social Support and Social Identity in the Trier Social Stress Test
Published on: November 19, 2015
Preexisting social ties among Auschwitz prisoners support Holocaust survival
Matěj Bělín1, Tomáš Jelínek2, Štěpán Jurajda1
1Center for Economic Research and Graduate Education of Charles University and the Economics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Praha 1, 111 21, Czech Republic.
Abstract:
Survivor testimonies link survival in deadly POW camps, Gulags, and Nazi concentration camps to the formation of close friendships with other prisoners. To provide evidence free of survival bias on the importance of social ties for surviving the Holocaust, we study individual histories of 30 thousand Jewish prisoners who entered the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on transports from the Theresienstadt ghetto. We ask whether the availability of potential friends among fellow prisoners on a transport influenced the chances of surviving the Holocaust. Relying on multiple proxies of preexisting social networks and varying social-linkage composition of transports, we uncover a significant survival advantage to entering Auschwitz with a larger group of potential friends.
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