Treblinka: The World's Mistake

Wiesel uses the emotional trauma and inhumane experiences of survivors to explain how effective Treblinka was as an example in his speech.Throughout the Second World War, any of the poor, unfortunate souls who were sentenced to concentration camps would have lost their dignity, personal possessions, and most importantly, their loved ones. Those who believed that America would save them were wrong. The tragedy of the S.S. St. Louis was America and Cuba’s first ruling on Jewish immigrants hoping to flee from Europe. America, England, and France should have foreseen the oncoming storm that would be Hitler’s blitzkrieg against all of Europe. The entirety of this era full of hate, murder, fascism, and nationalism, should have never began in the first place.

The world should have been more in-tuned with the major events of the 1930’s such as Hitler’s election as Chancellor of the Reichstag, Kristallnacht, and the boycott of Jewish businesses. Because of the war, the camps, and the mass murders, Germany was ground zero for Jewish civilians. Hell on Earth became a reality in Treblinka. Jews were branded like slaves and lost their identities. Mothers were forced to leave their children, and thousands of families were separated. To wake up one day with your mother and have her marched into the gas chambers the next, never seeing her again or even saying goodbye, would be traumatizing and cruel beyond belief.

By explaining the sad, yet undeniably true facts about the concentration camp Treblinka, Wiesel spoke of how far the Nazis were willing to go in order to exterminate the Jewish people. During the year 1942, under the orders of “Operation: Reinhard”, Treblinka opened it doors to the thousands of Jewish masses being crammed inside, su...

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...on Churchill could give was that the city was a “ center of communications through which traffic is moving through to the Russian front and to the Western”. By the end of the war, countless cities were left in ruin. Dresden is one of the many examples that show how little the allies cared for European culture.
At the end of the war, while the “Red Army” stormed across the Eastern front racing to Berlin, the officers at Treblinka begun to make daring steps to “cover their tracks”. By destroying buildings, killing the remaining Jews, and burning all records, Nazi soldiers hoped to hide all evidence of the atrocities being committed within the camp.

Works Cited

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum, n.d. Web. 12 Dec. 2013. teaching-about-the-holocaust/common-questions#answer 8>.