In first place by not being a Jew. Jews had the least probability of survival of all due to the fact that they would undergo a selection and most would be immediately sent to the gas chambers. out of ten Jews only one was selected for work, the remaining nine would be immediately killed.
Secondly, by being a woman. Women are less likely to die of starvation (it’s actually an evolutive trick to grant better survival chances to the human population). But if you were a Jewish woman you were less likely to be selected for work, so it was a double-edged opportunity.
Third, hope to land in a “better” lager. Some lagers were sensibly worse than others. Just let’s ignore the “death camps” like Sobibor or Treblinka, which were solely aimed at killing jews. Most others were work camps or multifunction compounds. In some of these living conditions were slightly better, but this could be enough to make the mortality rate drop by several points. At Dora-Mittlebau about 2/3 of the inmates survived, at Majdanek less than half survived, at Auschwitz only about 1 in ten survived.
Four, find a job and hope it’s a good job. Inmates who had a job would receive more food, would often spend at least part of the day in a shelter. Not all jobs were equally good. If you ended up in Mauthausen you could be sent to work to the quarry where you were extremely likely to die on the “stairs of death”. In other cases, though, work could protect you quite well: of the nearly 200 Ditch women ordered to the Agfa commando (the München-Giesing - Agfa Kamerawerke satellite camp of Dachau) only two died. Occasionally, the factories around which satellite camps were created took pity of the inmates and actually helped them, or even just preferred to keep their workers n decent shape to make them work better. Probably the most famous example was Oskar Schindler.
Five, be part of a community. Religious people as well as political prisoners tended to create communities by ideology or faith and nationality. Members of these communities took care of each other, protected each other, helped each other survive. Besides, such communities would organize clandestine religious functions, political debates, classes, which had a great role in keeping the inmates mentally healthier.
Six, have a useful skill. Painter Aldo Carpi survived because the guards hired him to make portraits; Gisella Perl, Adélaïde Hautval, Hadassah Bimko survived because they were doctors and were put in charge of the reviers, the lagers’ “clinics”; Wilhelm Brasse and Francisco Boix were photographers tasked with taking mugshots of the prisoners; Anita Lasker-Wallfisch played with the Aushwitz orchestra; Primo Levi survived because he could speak some German and was a chemist, which gained him a good job in one of the labs of the Buna factory.
Seventh and last, be lucky.
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