Boxcar Horrors In The Holocaust

Boxcar Horrors

" The journey to the camps began with a train ride, with Jews packed into pitch-black rail cars, with no room to sit down, no bathrooms, no hope." (Lombardi). This is a quote from a book a man wrote about his time in Auschwitz when he was young. Up to 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, an awful event led by Adolf Hitler and his army based in Germany, the Nazis. One of the horrible things about the Holocaust was the boxcars taking the victims to the camps. Some things that made the boxcars in the Holocaust so bad are; the size of the boxcars, the conditions in the cars, and the deaths that occurred on the journey to the concentration camps.

The cars that the Nazi's transported the victims in were not big enough to hold all of them. The dimensions of a boxcar that was used to transport the holocaust prisoners had the dimensions of 26'2" by 8'10" and a height of 7'4".

According to a man helping rescue the prisoners of the camps, “In each of them the floor of the car was covered with dead, emaciated bodies. In some of these cars there were more than enough to cover the floors.” (THE 45TH INFANTRY DIVISION). This would be horrifying for the people who didn’t die in the cars, owning to the fat that they were in a car with a decomposing body for days, sometimes even weeks. This would be traumatizing for any person of any age, especially children. “This authentic 15-ton freight car is one of several types that were used to deport Jews. Its cramped interior would have held 80 to 100 people. Deportation trains usually carried between 1,000 and 2,000 people whose crushing weight slowed the speed of travel to about 30 mph, greatly prolonging the ordeal.” (The Holocaust: Railway Car). This decrease in speed made it severely painful for the already sick, and those who had to watch their relatives die. (The Holocaust: Railway Car); (THE 45TH INFANTRY