Imagine one day waking up and leaving your family, your house, your possessions, and your life behind. You do not know where you’re going, or how long it will take to arrive at a destination. You are thrown into a cramped, small space with hundreds of strangers; some dead and some dying. It’s hard to stay positive in a situation like this. You have no clue what it is going on. You are on your way to the most deadly and most well known concentration camp. Its name is Auschwitz. The thought of ever leaving this place is the only hope that you and those have around you, and chances are slim. Auschwitz, also known as Auschwitz- Birkenau was located in Oswiecim, Poland. It was the largest and most deadly concentration camp . The camp was …show more content…
Upon arrival the Nazi doctor will split the people into groups of men, women, old, sick, young and healthy. On the left there were young men that were going to be put to work and to the right were sick people, disables people, children and elders whom would be put to death. Women and men cry as they say their goodbyes, never knowing when they will see one another again. Everyone is thirsty, hungry and tired, but most of all, afraid. Those who arrived at the concentration camp Auschwitz were greeted with a metal sign that read “Arbeit Macht Frei”- “Work Makes You Free”. This sign was one of the many lies that Nazis used to convince the Jews and many others that they were only being used for their …show more content…
Once they arrived they were not treated with dignity. At the camp the prisoners were stripped naked into a stripped uniform which was too thin for the cold, shaved the prisoners heads, tattooed a number on his or her arm; which represented their new identity, and was given wooden shoes that would often get stuck in the mud. The prisoners were woken up by a siren, imagine hundreds of people running out in time for selection. Selection is time when the Nazi decided who were ready to be killed. For breakfast they were given 10 ounces of bread with a small piece of salami or one ounce of margarine, tasteless coffee, with no sugar.They worked for about 11 or 12 hours daily. For lunch they were served a soup with a quart of water with a few carrots and rutabagas. The final meal was bread with rotten salami or margarine and jam. The camps had no heat or running water and only a few toilets that they could only use for 10 seconds. One must ask permission to use the toilet and if the Nazi guard did not let you use the toilet then you needed to use your food/ water bowl. When it was time to go to sleep the prisoners lay 10 in one bed and each person had to lay sideways in oder to fit. There were many different insects that could caused diseases such as bed bugs and lice. They also hd to sleep with bowl or cup to prevent them from being stolen by other prisoners. Many times a prisoner woke up to find someone in their bed dead. Each person got a bowl
Imagine people who don’t trust you, like you, or care about you, asking you and your family to leave home for the safety of others. You don’t know when or if you are getting back. That seems pretty unfair and rude, right? Well, that is exactly what happened to Japanese Americans during WWII, except they weren’t imagining it. With forces of the Axis on the rise in the 1940’s, America was struggling to keep everyone safe. National security was at stake, so the United States acted poorly to reverse problems. During WWII, the Japanese Americans were interned for reasons of national security because the war made the U.S. act foolishly, the U.S. government didn’t trust them, and the U.S. also didn’t care about them.
Thousands upon thousands of innocent Jews, men, women, and children tortured; over one million people brutally murdered; families ripped apart from the seams, all within Auschwitz, a 40 square kilometer sized concentration camp run by Nazi Germany. Auschwitz is one of the most notorious concentration camps during WWII, where Jews were tortured and killed. Auschwitz was the most extreme concentration camp during World War Two because innumerable amounts of inhumane acts were performed there, over one million people were inexorably massacred, and it was the largest concentration camp of over two thousand across Europe.
Being confined in a concentration camp was beyond unpleasant. Mortality encumbered the prisons effortlessly. Every day was a struggle for food, survival, and sanity. Fear of being led into the gas chambers or lined up for shooting was a constant. Hard labor and inadequate amounts of rest and nutrition took a toll on prisoners. They also endured beatings from members of the SS, or they were forced to watch the killings of others. “I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time” (Night Quotes). Small, infrequent, rations of a broth like soup left bodies to perish which in return left no energy for labor. If one wasn’t killed by starvation or exhaustion they were murdered by fellow detainees. It was a survival of the fittest between the Jews. Death seemed to be inevitable, for there were emaciated corpses lying around and the smell...
The living conditions in the camp were rough. The prisoners were living in an overcrowded pit where they were starved. Many people in the camp contracted diseases like typhus and scarlet fever. Commonly, the prisoners were beaten or mistreated by
Imagine the worst torture possible. Now imagine the same thing only ten times worse; In Auschwitz that is exactly what it was like. During the time of the Holocaust thousands of Jewish people were sent to this very concentration camp which consisted of three camps put into one. Here they had one camp; Auschwitz I; the main camp, Auschwitz II; Birkenau, and last is Auschwitz III; Monowitz. Each camp was responsible for a different part but all were after the same thing; elimination of the Jewish race. In these camps they had cruel punishments, harsh housing, and they had Nazi guards watching them and killing them on a daily basis.
The prisoners were ordered to do many horrific things in this camp. Plaszow was the most common forced labor camp for Jews located in Krakow
Viktor Frankl’s life in the concentration camp was full of misery. He had to work long hours, sometimes with no help. He describes one such event, when he had to build a tunnel under a road to allow for a water pipe. He worked like a slave until he was told to stop. As he wrote further, he shared his knowledge in psychiatry. In once instance, he wrote, “The condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute” (Frankl P.6). He experience this very scenario in the death camps as he saw countless being murdered everyday. He says that everyone thought that things
Following the beginning of the Second World War, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union would start what would become two of the worst genocides in world history. These totalitarian governments would “welcome” people all across Europe into a new domain. A domain in which they would learn, in the utmost tragic manner, the astonishing capabilities that mankind possesses. Nazis and Soviets gradually acquired the ability to wipe millions of people from the face of the Earth. Throughout the war they would continue to kill millions of people, from both their home country and Europe. This was an effort to rid the Earth of people seen as unfit to live in their ideal society. These atrocities often went unacknowledged and forgotten by the rest of the world, leaving little hope for those who suffered. Yet optimism was not completely dead in the hearts of the few and the strong. Reading Man is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag by Janusz Bardach and Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi help one capture this vivid sense of resistance toward the brutality of the German concentration and Soviet work camps. Both Bardach and Levi provide a commendable account of their long nightmarish experience including the impact it had on their lives and the lives of others. The willingness to survive was what drove these two men to achieve their goals and prevent their oppressors from achieving theirs. Even after surviving the camps, their mission continued on in hopes of spreading their story and preventing any future occurrence of such tragic events. “To have endurance to survive what left millions dead and millions more shattered in spirit is heroic enough. To gather the strength from that experience for a life devoted to caring for oth...
How do you judge the atrocities committed during a war? In World War II, there were numerous atrocities committed by all sides, especially in the concentration and prisoner of war camps. Europeans were most noted for the concentration camps and the genocide committed by the Nazi party in these camps. Less known is how Allied prisoners were also sent to those camps. The Japanese also had camps for prisoners of war. Which countries’ camps were worse? While both camps were horrible places for soldiers, the Japanese prisoner of war camps were far worse.
“Get of the train!”. Hounds barking loud and the sound of scared people, thousands of people. “Now!”. All sorts of officers yelling form every angle. “Stop!” an officer was yelling at a kid who was frantic and scared. He wasn't listening and took one step more, and then he was shot. You ask yourself where you are. “Hell” Another officer shouts who overheard your soft breath. Auschwitz was a very brutal camp as soon as someone would step off of the train. Most people would not last anymore than an hour at this horrific camp.
The Auschwitz complex was located in Poland and was composed of three main camps (Auschwitz). Auschwitz I, the central camp, was constructed in 1940 and covered approximately 15 square miles (Auschwitz). Auschwitz II, Auschwitz- Birkenau, was constructed in 1941 and became the extermination camp of the Auschwitz complex. In 1943, four large crematorium buildings were constructed (Auschwitz). The Auschwitz-Birkenau crematoriums were the targets of the proposed bombings during WWII. . Auschwitz III was constructed in 1943 and was primarily a labor camp (Auschwitz). These camps composed the largest and most infamous Nazi death camp.
Living conditions in these camps were absolutely horrible. The amount of people being kept in one space, amongst being unsanitary, was harsh on the body.
As World War II occurred, the Jewish population suffered a tremendous loss and was treated with injustice and cruelty by the Nazi’s seen through examples in the book, Man’s Search for Meaning. Victor Frankl records his experiences and observations during his time as prisoner at Auschwitz during the war. Before imprisonment, he spent his leisure time as an Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna, Austria and was able to implement his analytical thought processes to life in the concentration camp. As a psychological analyst, Frankl portrays through the everyday life of the imprisoned of how they discover their own sense of meaning in life and what they aspire to live for, while being mistreated, wrongly punished, and served with little to no food from day to day. He emphasizes three psychological phases that are characterized by shock, apathy, and the inability to retain to normal life after their release from camp. These themes recur throughout the entirety of the book, which the inmates experience when they are first imprisoned, as they adapt as prisoners, and when they are freed from imprisonment. He also emphasizes the need for hope, to provide for a purpose to keep fighting for their lives, even if they were stripped naked and treated lower than the human race. Moreover, the Capos and the SS guards, who were apart of the secret society of Hitler, tormented many of the unjustly convicted. Although many suffered through violent deaths from gas chambers, frostbites, starvation, etc., many more suffered internally from losing faith in oneself to keep on living.
Mr. Wiesel had intended this book to describe a period of time in his life that had been dark and sorrowful. This novel is based on a survivor of the greatest Holocaust in history, Eliezer Wiesel and his journey of being a Jew in 1944. The journey had started in Sighet, Transylvania, where Elie spent his childhood. During the Second World War, Germans came to Elie and his family’s home town. They brought with them unnecessary evil and despair to mankind. Shortly after young Elie and thousands of other Jews were forced from their habitats and torn from their rights of being human. They were sent to different concentration camps. Elie and his family were sent to Auschwitz, a concentration and extermination camp. It would be the last time Elie sees his mother and little sister, Tzipora. The first sights of Auschwitz were terrifying. There were big flames coming from the burning of bodies and the crematoriums. The Jews had no idea of what to expect. They were not told what was about to happen to them. During the concentration camp, there was endless death and torture. The Jews were starved and were treated worse than cattle. The prisoners began to question their faith in God, wondering why God himself would
If This Is a Man or Survival in Auschwitz), stops to exist; the meanings and applications of words such as “good,” “evil,” “just,” and “unjust” begin to merge and the differences between these opposites turn vague. Continued existence in Auschwitz demanded abolition of one’s self-respect and human dignity. Vulnerability to unending dehumanization certainly directs one to be dehumanized, thrusting one to resort to mental, physical, and social adaptation to be able to preserve one’s life and personality. It is in this adaptation that the line distinguishing right and wrong starts to deform. Primo Levi, a survivor, gives account of his incarceration in the Monowitz- Buna concentration camp.