by Debra Rich Gettleman

If you haven’t broken out of your pandemic isolation mode, you might want to rethink your penchant for privacy.

A recent study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), looked at 30,000 Jewish prisoners of Auschwitz-Birkenau who were transported from the Theresienstadt ghetto (now a part of the Czech Republic) and discovered that loners were actually the first to die in Nazi Concentration Camps.

While we are all aware of anecdotal evidence suggesting that social ties are beneficial. This recent study painstakingly examined records of all 30,000 prisoners. The lead author of the study, Stepan Jurajda, an economics professor at Prague’s Charles University, was quoted in the Wall Street Journal saying the researchers, “looked up information on every single one of these prisoners, including names, ages and addresses, and who traveled from the Theresienstadt ghetto to Auschwitz-Birkenau. And they found out whether these people survived the war.”

Research showed that 10% of The Theresienstadt ghetto prisoners landed in Auschwitz knowing another prisoner. The connections could have been neighbors, co-workers, or just someone traveling on the same transport. It didn’t matter how deep or long-standing the connections were. Any social ties increased inmates’ chances of surviving by a third.

Women especially did well by maintaining social bonds. Even inmates who shared the same  weekly magazine had a greater chance of making it out alive. In the same Wall Street Journal article, Jurajda shared, “The more people in the crowd you knew, the greater your chances of survival.

So go back into the world and build your social network. Whether it’s the woman next to you at Zumba, your favorite barista at Starbucks, or the Uber driver who gets you to the airport,  according to this study, your best chance of survival depends on developing and maintaining even the weakest social bond.