Concentration camps sometimes preserved freedoms destroyed in wider society

Evidence

Even under the conditions of totalitarian terror, concentration camps sometimes have been the only place where certain remnants of freedom of thought and discussion still existed. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2535

Categorization

• QUESTION: Arendt is famously ambivalent here — is this a genuine paradox about totalitarianism or a retrospective romanticization citing Rousset and Ciliga? Worth chasing in later chapters where she argues camps destroyed all individuality.
• XREF: This paradox about freedom existing only under extreme repression echoes in Agamben’s state of exception and in discussions of internal exile.