Survivors also said that social connections, especially talking with soldiers, helped to restore their sense of self in the days and months following liberation. Robert Antelme, a French survivor of Dachau, suggested in his memoir, “The Human Race,” that the need to communicate competed with the need for proper nourishment: “We wanted at last to speak, to be heard. We were told that by itself our physical appearance was eloquent enough.” However, he added that even when they could speak, “it was impossible to bridge the gap we discovered between the words at our disposal and that experience … what we had to tell would start to seem unimaginable.” Survivors were afraid that they wouldn’t be heard, and also that no one would believe them.

Before telling the story of their dehumanization in the camp, some survivors needed liberators to first see them as they had been before the war: as people with passions and professions. Semprún was asked to show Buchenwald to a Jewish-American Army officer whose family had moved to the United States from Germany when he was young. They became friends when Semprún, a philosophy student, referenced Goethe, who had lived not far from Buchenwald. As a gift, the officer took Semprún for a tour of Goethe’s house nearby. Having established their shared appreciation of German literature, Semprún felt able to narrate some of the most painful memories of his suffering.

Levi returned to his family in Turin, Italy, after spending almost nine months in displacement camps. Others remained in the camps for more than a year. Bergen-Belsen, which became one of the largest in Germany, finally closed in 1951, six years after the liberation. Survivors for whom the process of liberation lasted years often had more opportunities to build relationships. Major Heymont took it upon himself to help Landsberg refugees not only improve sanitation in the camp, but also encouraged the publication of a camp newspaper in Yiddish, arrange suitable places for families to live together and locate china dinner plates for a communal mess hall. Irving Lisman, an ambulance driver for the 122nd Medical Battalion, had fabric and sewing supplies imported to the Bad Gastein camp so its inhabitants could make neckties, which were a sign of respect. Captain Hagood wrote to his wife requesting lipstick because, he reported, up to 10 women would share one tube, collectively reclaiming their femininity.

Decades after the war, survivors and liberators sought to reconnect. The 1981 International Liberator Conference held in Washington brought together survivors with 100 Allied soldiers from 14 nations who had taken part in the liberation. Following a rise in Holocaust denial in the United States and around the world, the conference’s task was to collect eyewitness accounts. It also provided opportunities for liberators and survivors to share both the immediate and long-term psychological effects of their experiences. “I couldn’t believe the similarity of the psychological effect shared by these men,” wrote Kenneth Colvin, a liberator of the Mauthausen and Ebensee camps. “Each had suppressed his feelings for about 15 years after the war. Then, the pictures and dreams started to dominate our lives. We all relived the horror and helplessness we felt but would not recognize at the time.”