Placing people in concentration camps has become an increasingly popular practice since the beginning of the 20th century, and finding yourself in one is an unfortunate circumstance, usually not of your own making. It is likely that you were placed there because someone intolerant objected to your race, ethnicity, or political/religious beliefs. Know that you have been earmarked for rough treatment, living on the bare minimum necessary for existence (or less), harsh labor, humiliation, possibly torture, and eventually death. However, all is not lost. Though life will seem bleak and isolated, there is a good chance that someone is trumping your cause before the UN or the president of the USA or before anyone who might possibly be able to help you. If you are lucky and smart you have a chance of surviving this ordeal. Here are a few techniques that may help you outlive your captors.

Want to Live

The will to survive is a powerful determinant of actual survival. Rolling over in bed and dying for lack of interest in living is not just a romantic notion from literature—it happens in real life, albeit not usually that dramatically. Studies have shown that death rates rise after religious holidays and important family events, like births or weddings. Elderly or ill people often will themselves to live to see or participate in such events, and afterward lose this propulsion.

Like the subjects of these studies, you’ll need a reason to live. Having a goal or purpose to existence is a tremendous impetus to survival. Unlike the people in the study, though, you don’t want to choose a goal that is so easily reached. If you can fulfill your purpose without leaving the concentration camp there is always the danger that you might, and lose the drive around which you are building your life. If you make it your purpose to ensure the survival of a loved one, for example, and the loved one passes away, you will no longer have a purpose in existing, compounding your natural grief at the occurrence. Making it your goal to eat a bowl of cherry ice cream in your favorite restaurant or to outlive a particularly nasty soldier, while more selfish, area more long-term and therefore better for this purpose.

Feel Community, Help Others

Caring for another person isn’t an inherently bad idea, though. Psychologist Victor Frankl, who survived the German concentration camps of World War II, noted that prisoners who cared and shared were more likely to survive than those who fought tooth and nail for their own existence.

At first, this seems counterintuitive. After all, a concentration camp is as dog-eat-dog a location as they come. Whatever someone else eats you don’t eat, and the more effort your partner expends at labor, the more energy you can conserve by free-riding. But reality isn’t like that. People need to care and give, to receive and be cared for. They need to feel needed. Behaving like a wounded animal deprives humans of an important aspect of their humanity and reduces their chances of survival. Being deprived of a social network is fatal to the innately social human; that is why solitary confinement is so devastating. Camaraderie in suffering eases the pain, and knowing that you someone to rely on and who relies on you is comforting. A passing glance at the stories of Holocaust survivors will reveal that they all retained a sense of community and several friends. Self absorption is the beginning of the end.

Be Optimistic

One problem with self-absorption is that it makes everything so depressing. You remember the good old days before your captivity and can’t help comparing the you of then to the you of now. Happy people are proven to suffer fewer diseases and live longer than unhappy people. Additionally, while nobody likes a sourpuss, upbeat individuals are more easily accepted to a group and given physical and social support.

So, how to be cheerful when life is miserable? Well, the misery is in a general way, so accept it as your status quo. So any slight improvement is something to be excited about. You aren’t dead yet, and there are many miniscule but heartening reasons for that. For starters, you have some friends you know care about you. Maybe you got a potato in your dinner stew or maybe you were issued a pair of prison trousers that actually fit. Possibly roll call was shorter this morning or the weather was less unpleasant than usual or your work detail overseer stepped away to rendezvous with his girlfriend and you were able to rest. Perhaps you heard a bird sing or remember a line of poetry. Or, despite your increasingly prominent skeleton, you don’t have trouble falling asleep at night like some people do. Keep focused on the nice things in life and try not to dwell on the unpleasantries. It might be difficult but aren’t you worth it?

Don’t Internalise the Prisoner Mentality

The Stanford prison experiment demonstrated that within 24 hours in the role of prisoner, however undeservedly, people will become meek, submissive, ___. Jane Elliott’s blue-eye brown-eye experiment similarly showed that subjects of discrimination will rapidly begin to behave like second-class citizens.

For a concentration camp prisoner, this is not all maladaptive. Your captors will grab any opportunity to torment you, so you don’t want to stand out except for ingratiating reasons. At the same time, you msut retain your dignity. Your captors will try to dehumanise you to reduce your will to live and make it easier for them to justify their abuse. It is essential that you retain your humanity. Even when subject to humiliating treatment, remember your self-worth in the big wide world, and even among your friends. Remember that is they who are subhuman for their cruelty. You have not tainted yourself with such repulsive behavior, and because you remain committed to the welfare of others, you are actually a great person, a sort of superhuman.

Don’t slip into the mindless obedience routine, as tempting as it may be. Create a feeling of ascendancy and rebellion by perpetrating small, undetectable acts of disobedience. There are boundless opportunities for you to earn food, privileges, or even rank in a concentration camp. The guards are notoriously open to bribery and your fellow prisoners will be running a brisk black market for goods and services. Grease up a strategic guard. Establish yourself in a black market niche. Take advantage of any hole or leniency in the system. Remember those friends you remain committed to? Put your heads together and plot a raid on the kitchen. Just be careful to avoid detection. If your captors cannot personally identify the perpetrators of a misdeed they are likely to punish random prisoners instead. Whether the random prisoner is you, someone you care for, or a total stranger, you don’t want their death on your head.

Escape or Rebel

If you’re located near a border of if you are under the auspices of a nation too powerful for the UN or USA to start up with, you might want to consider attempting a rebellion or escape. Escapes are rarely successful and rebellions even less so, but if you have nothing to lose, give it a shot. An escape or rebellion is best attempted early on before participants are sapped of strength and will.

Some things you might want to keep in mind: tunnels and hiding in the woods are among the less successful forms of escape, while adopting the disguise of a camp guard and walking out the front gate is a moderately more successful technique, if you can carry it off. Rebellions need to be carefully coordinated to divide the camp chain of command and should preferably not include plans to storm a machine gun tower. Also, remain suspicious of all your fellow conspirators. One of them is bound to be informing on you in return for reward. If you can identify the stool pigeon(s) early on you can feed him or her a steady diet of false information and save your operation. Don’t expel the informant from your group; camp authorities will only embed a replacement.

Though concentration camp inmates are emaciated and glassy-eyed, they have a surprisingly low rate of suicide. Some are simply the living dead, already too far gone to muster the willpower to finish themselves off. Others still cling to life with a desperate hope. And still others actively live, driven by purpose and determination. If you follow these tips you will belong to this last group, and enjoy an elevated chance of survival and the opportunity to make a difference in the lives of your fellows.