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Positive effects of prison
Treatment of Jewish People in Nazi Germany 1933-1945
Nazi treatment to jews 1930s
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Starvation was crucial during the Holocaust, which separated you from life or death. This affected most of the prisoners from doing their tasks. In the book Ellie says, “ Bread, soup - these were my whole life. I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time.” Elie Wiesel was starving at some point of every day since he was forced into labor and torture. He talks about how these two items were his whole life, because that's all the food they received. With only focusing on food they must have been in the ultimate stage of starvation. When in the ultimate stage of hunger you become “prone to Muscle spasms and twitches happen when the potassium level becomes dangerously low. Extreme
weakness and paralysis may also happen. When the muscles break down, the nerve cells deteriorate, especially those in your spinal cord area which regulates movement. If the muscles are weak and do not function, you may not move freely at all.” The effects of starvation has a lot of symptoms that affects many parts of your body. Hunger affects your strength, energy, and messes with your mind, which then will eventually get to your memory. Not only can starving affect your memory, but the violence that you endure could change your memories and thoughts.
About halfway through his imprisonment, Eliezer had gotten accustomed to life in a concentration camp. Despite the magnitude of death in every camp Elie was held hostage, nothing was worse than when three people were hanged in front of his eyes. The people were convicted suspiciously without confirmation of their crime; the youngest of which was about a twelve year old boy who was an assistant to one of the Nazi Kapos. After this experience, Wiesel writes, “That night, the soup tasted of corpses.” (65). The author incorporates a metaphor for his feelings and related it to the soup Eliezer was given; the soup did not literally taste like corpses, but this was how he felt because of all the death. The symbolism of his soup tasting like corpses relates to how death was surrounding Wiesel at the camp, and it also represents how he has lost faith in God. There were many places throughout the book in which Elie experiences things that make him question his faith, none more than when he thought there would be no chance of his
Wiesel suggests that,“Toward five o’clock in the morning, we were driven out of the barracks. The Kapos beat us once more, but I ceased to feel any pain from their blows.” (27) This quote reveals that the officers did not care what time of day it was if they felt like punishing the prisoners they did. Elie was at the wrong place at the wrong time and saw something he wasn’t supposed to see and was punished. “A-7713! I came forward. A box! He ordered. They brought him a box. Lie down on it! On your stomach! I obeyed. Then I was aware of nothing but the strokes of the whip” (Wiesel 42). This quote shows the cruel punishment that Elie and other Jews endured in the Holocaust. The Nazi’s were cruel and inhumane to the Jews when it came to feeding them and clothing them during the cold winters. “Mountains of prison clothes. On we ran. As we passed, trousers, tunic, shirt, and socks were thrown at us”( Wiesel 27) “ Such outfits! Meir Katz, a giant, had a child’s trousers, and Stern, a think little chap, a tunic which completely swamped him” (Wiesel 27) This quote shows that the Nazi’s did not care if they got the right size shirt or pants or not they passed them out and you got what you
While obtaining food seemed to be the entire purpose of life for the people imprisoned in the camps, it often killed more people than it saved. Though focusing on food seemed like a logical thing to do when you are being starved, it was not always very effective in helping people survive. There are many situations in the book illustrating how living for the sole purpose of acquiring food—under any condition—could turn out to be lethal.
Imagery is one of the most effective methods Wiesel used in his biography to portray forms of inhumanity. “Not far from us, flames, huge flames were rising from a ditch. Something was being burned there… small children. Babies” (32). In this case, Elie does not wish to live if his eyes were telling the truth. This alone refers to extreme cruelty, describing the inhumanity in which the suppressed races endured inside the many concentration camps. Following several weeks at work in an electrical-fittings factory, Elie quotes a hanging which he remembers quite well. “He was a young boy from Warsaw… The Lagerälteste
The Jews were only fed bread and soup. It gets to the point where everything revolves around food and each person’s own survival. For example, on page 104, Elie’s father claims that the other prisoners were beating him. Elie’s then says, “I began to abuse his neighbors.
Food is essential to basic life. It provides people with the energy to think, speak, walk, talk, and breathe. In preparation for the Jews deportation from the ghettos of Transylvania, “the (Jewish) women were busy cooking eggs, roasting meat, and baking cakes”(Wiesel, 13). The Jewish families realized how crucial food was to their lives even before they were faced with the daily condition of famine and death in the concentration camps. The need for food was increased dramatically with the introduction of the famine-like conditions of the camps. Wiesel admitted that, although he was incredibly hungry, he had refused to eat the plate of thick soup they served to the prisoners on the first day of camp because of his nature of being a “spoiled child”. But his attitude changed rapidly as he began to realize that his life span was going to be cut short if he continued to refuse to eat the food they served him. “By the third day, I (Elie Wiesel) was eating any kind of soup hungrily” (Wiesel, 40). His desire to live superseded his social characteristic of being “pampered”. Remarque also uses his characters to show to how a balanced diet promotes a person’s good health. Paul Bäumer uses food to encourage Franz Kemmerich, his sick friend, “eat decently and you’ll soon be well again…Eating is the main thing” (Remarque, 30). Paul Bäumer feels that good food can heal all afflictions. The bread supply of the soldiers in All Quiet on the Western Front was severely threatened when the rats became more and more numerous.
”Lie down on it! On your belly! I obeyed. I no longer felt anything except the lashes of the whip. One! Two! He took time between the lashes. Ten eleven! Twenty-three. Twenty four, twenty five! It was over. I had not realized it, but I fainted” (Wiesel 58). It was hard to imagine that a human being just like Elie Wiesel would be treating others so cruelly. There are many acts that Elie has been through with his father and his fellow inmates. Experiencing inhumanity can affect others in a variety of ways. When faced with extreme inhumanity, The people responded by becoming incredulous, losing their faith, and becoming inhumane themselves.
Thousands of people were sent to concentration camps during World War Two, including Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel. Many who were sent to the concentration camps did not survive but those who did tried to either forgot the horrific events that took place or went on to tell their personal experiences to the rest of the world. Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi wrote memoirs on their time spent in the camps of Auschwitz; these memoirs are called ‘Night’ and ‘Survival in Auschwitz’. These memoirs contain similarities of what it was like for a Jew to be in a concentration camp but also portray differences in how each endured the daily atrocities of that around them. Similarities between Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi’s memoirs can be seen in the proceedings that
...read. Again, Mr. Wiesel avoided this by deciding to not even try and fight for any food. Although the worst brutality would be knowingly and willing abandoning family members such as mothers, sisters, fathers, and brothers, any family member for that matter. Yes the prisoners had to survive by themselves, but it may help them live through the pain and fear knowing their family is still alive. It most likely helped Elie because no matter what, he always attempted to stay with his father helping keep at least some humanity. Therefore all of this proves that when forced and thrown into horrible situations with cruel treatment decent human beings can come out being not as decent as they were but they do not become brutes whatsoever.
The severe malnutrition of the prisoners of Auschwitz meant that they should not have fasted for Yom Kippur. Although Eliezer Wiesel, a prisoner at the Auschwitz camp, refused to fast in his memoir, Night, since he “no longer accepted God’s silence”, his defiance against God was decisive in his survival of the camp (Wiesel, pg. 69). With the captives of Auschwitz receiving such a limited amount of food, prisoners that chose to fast for Yom Kippur would most likely die of starvation. Even if a fasting Jew did survive, he or she would be dangerously malnourished, numbering their chances of survival. Wiesel’s block leader advised him before his selection to “move your limbs, give yourself some color. Don’t walk slowly, run! Run as if you had the devil at your heels” if he wanted to survive the
(It should be noted that when describing hardships of the concentration camps, understatements will inevitably be made. Levi puts it well when he says, ?We say ?hunger?, we say ?tiredness?, ?fear?, ?pain?, we say ?winter? and they are different things. They are free words, created and used by free men who lived in comfort and suffering in their homes. If the Lagers had lasted longer a new, harsh language would have been born; only this language could express what it means to toil the whole day?? (Levi, 123).)
When Elie learns that the dentist has been murdered and his gold crown is safe for another day, his thoughts immediately turn to the possibility that he can trade the gold for food. "The bread, the soup - those were my whole life. I was nothing but a body. Perhaps even less: a famished stomach. The stomach alone was measuring time." (Wiesel, 52). As the conditions Elie was subjected to start to take a toll on his body, he becomes less human and more animal. Without basic necessities it was impossible for him to be concerned with maintaining a positive mindset, all that mattered was having a surviving body, not necessarily a surviving soul. When German enemies bombed a nearby area, the concentration camp went on lock down. Two cauldrons of hot soup were left unattended, easily in view of all the prisoners. Elie recounts the event, saying “poor hero committing suicide for a ration or two or more of soup…” (Wiesel, 59). Although everyone knew that the man would be shot for leaving his block, hunger and primal instincts led him to abandon all rational. First and foremost, humans are animals, and animals want to survive. When most freedoms are taken away the focus shifts back to these animalist rationales and we abandon the part of us that makes us human. Once the camp has been liberated, Elie
In 1943 or as you may know it as The Holocaust, there were many different ways they executed the people at the Auschwitz camp, including hanging, shooting their heads or even letting them starve to death. But I'm not going to talk about them. This may tickle your fancy or wreck with your emotions after seeing the movie. I'm going to be talking about the Gas Chamber. The Gas Chamber is probably the worst place to be EVER, because you're going to be standing in a grey metal room ,butt naked surrounded by hundreds, even thousands of other people. Everyone is crammed inside the room as Cyclone B (a highly used deadly mixture) was sprayed into the room, causing you to either burn to death, or have to sit around dying slowly over an amount of days
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...
Elie Wiesel was born in Sighet, Transylvania. His parents ran a shop and cared for him and his three siblings, Hilda, Bea, and Tzipora. Early on, the Jewish community of Sighet payed little heed to the stories of what had happened to foreign Jews that were expelled. By the time Germans had entered Sighet, it was too late for the people to escape their fates. At first, they were made to give up all of their valuable possessions and move into makeshift ghettos. Next came deportation of the entire community to the Auschwitz internment camp. The way that the people were piled into cattle wagons was only a precurser of appalling events that were to come. The horror really dawned on Elie when he realized that the large smokestacks that he saw were from crematoriums that were set up to burn the bodies of the thousands upon thousands of Jews that were killed in the gas chamber. Elie paints a portrait of life in the camp, which included hours of back-breaking labor, fear of hangings, and an overall theme throughout the book: starvation. The prisoners were given only black coffee in the morning, and soup and a crust of bread in the evening. The most terrifying aspect of the entire experience was the “selection”, the picking out of those that were to sick, old, or weak to be useful. These unfortunate souls were thrown into the fires. The one constant in Elie’s life was his father, who along with his son and all other prisoners, were later forced to evacuate to trains that would bring them to the Buchenwald internment camp deep in Germany, under the pressure of the Allied forces on the area. The final horrific scene in this book was how the interned, in mass, were forced to run full speed for hours on end, the people that lagged being shot on sight. The story culminated in the death of Elie’s father, and the eventual freedom of the Survivors of these death camps.