Identity, Self and Free Will in Total Institutions

What is it like being inside a Nazi death camp? Is there a sense of free will? How is death conceptualized in such context? How is time, space and others experienced on such a "different planet"? And above all, how is identity and self-perception construed under the extreme conditions and unique reality of death camps? This book presents a phenomenological research that aims to capture the insider's perspective of death camps survivors, and to offer some answers to the above questions and more. Data was collected through in-depth interviews with 20 former death camp inmates. Content analysis was then performed with the purpose of identifying units of meaning, followed by a cross case analysis to prune the number of units and identify key themes. Those key themes were then used in the final stage to constitute the domains of the grounded model that conceptualized the lived experience of Nazi death camp survivors.