The result of rationing food led to the death and disease which proves the ineffectiveness of many labor camps. There would be many deaths because of starvation, but thousands more of prisoners would then enter the system to replace them. The same problems occurred during the collectivization period in the late 20’s and early 30’s, and millions of people would because of starvation and lack of food. Those who over-fulfilled the plan in the Gulag system would receive special food, but rewards like these treat these prisoners as less than humans whose only purpose is to accomplish the work the government has given. Many diseases affected the prisoners, and this prompted Mochulsky to require a crew full of guards to relook over the inspections
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
Food depravation is a method that people use to affect the human spirit in a negative way. In the story Maus by Art Spiegelman, food is used to make the prisoners weak. For example, at the concentration camp Art’s dad is talking to his fellow prisoner Mandelbaum “I spilled most of my soup too. When I asked for more, they BEAT me" (Spiegelman pg. 29). This affects the human spirit because when people typically ask for more food, they don't get beaten. Food is also used as a currency in the camps. In this scene, Art’s dad is talking to the gestapo and the gestapo wants Vladek to fix his boot; “Can you fix this? I’ll give you a day’s ration of bread. For a day’s ration of bread I can fix anything! Next day I had the boot ready for this gestapo….Hmm. He left the boot and went without one word. And he came back with a whole sausage. You did a good job” (Spiegelman pg. 61). Food is used as currency because in this case Vladek had a skill of fixing boots and his reward for doing a good job was a whole sausage. This shows how valuable food is in the concentration camps. In the story Farewell to Manzanar, food is also used to destroy the human spirit. Jeanne, the author, is being fed by the staff at the camp and her meal was ".... scoops of canned Vienna sausage, canned string beans, steamed rice that had been cooked too long, and on top of the rice a serving of canned apricots. The Caucasian servers were thinking that...
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.
The Soviet system of forced labor camps was first established in 1919 under the Cheka; however, in the early 1930’s camps had reached outrageous numbers. In 1934 the Gulag had several million prisoners. The prisoners ranged from innocent pro-Bolsheviks to guilty Trotsky’s. Conditions were harsh, filthy, and prisoners received inadequate food rations and poor clothing. Over the period of the Stalin dictatorship many people experienced violations of their basic human rights, three in particular were Natasha Petrovskaya, Mikhail Belov, and Olga Andreyeva.
Leave me alone! It's a phrase often times used by teenagers around the world. During teenage years, many people fight to be left alone. They find comfort in being without the company of others. Many of them grow out of it and learn to deal with social interaction in a positive way. But some of them, don't. Instead they alienate themselves from society further. “The Hunger Artist”, by Franz Kafka, and “The Secret Society Of The Starving”, by Mim Udovitch feature the few people that prefer to stay in isolation. They illustrate the true extent that many are willing to go to be alone. They supplement each other. “ The Hunger Artist” helps us to see how far Anas, otherwise known as anorexics, are willing to go to stay isolated from a community that is their own.
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
Food was one of the only things people craved in the concentration and labor camps. The struggle of never having enough food to fill your belly was the most common struggle throughout the camps. “The angel of death… was hunger” (“Starvation Rations” 1). In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, a man practically killed himself when he crawled out of a role call line to get to a pot of soup (“Nutrition” 3). People would get to a point where they would do almost anything just to get a bite of food. This explains the reason why people used bread as a form of currency inside the camps (“Nutrition” 2). People would sell their clothes in the middle of winter just to get someone elses slab of bread. “We didn’t know any news of what was going on, and we didn’t think about anything else. Just food. Dreaming about food.” (“Starvation Rations” 4). Hunger was the most common disease (“Meals” 1), it became one of the most commonly treated illnesses inside the camps. Food was the most valuable thing you owned once you entered the labor or concentration camps. Starvation killed about half of the victims of 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).)
People say that the Stalin’s Great Purges could otherwise be translated as Stalin’s Terror. They grew from his paranoia and his desire to be absolute autocrat, and were enforced the NKVD and public show trials. When someone went against him, he didn’t really take any time in doing something about it. He would “get rid of” the people that went against industrialization and the kulaks. Kulaks were farmers in the later Russian Empire. (“Of Russian Origin: Stalin’s Purges). There were many reasons as to what caused the Great Purges but the main one seems to be Stalin. He believed that the country had to be united under the circumstances that he becomes the leader if it was to be strong. The Soviet Union was industry was weal and in the decline, obviously lacking the capacity to produce enough meal and heavy machinery for the imminent war.
Health and diseases also had an incredibly large impact on the outcome of the battle of Stalingrad and is also a factor as to why the German’s were so ineffective. Due to the mass amount of deaths due to bleeding out. German officials had developed a tactic in which stated that the German soldiers were to restrict from eating before fighting. This was developed as restricting would reduce the amount of blood loss if a soldier were to become injured. This tactic weakened the German soldier’s immune systems and caused many of their soldiers to die due to malnourishment. The deaths that related back to malnourishment hastily came to light, causing German officials to desperately try to refeed their soldiers; prompting the deaths of many German
Did you know that rats roamed inside some of the beaten down concentration camps. This relates to my topic because it shows how the living conditions were. Furthermore, this also relates to my topic because it shows the harshness and or disgust. Concentration camps were filthy and had terrible living conditions. They also had a bad purpose. Concentration camps are terrible about how they were started and what it was like to live in them.
In Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi describes his time in the concentration camp. The depiction of Auschwitz, is gruesome and vile in the Nazi’s treatment of the captives being held, but especially in the treatment of its Jewish prisoners. A key proponent to the text is Levi’s will to live which is shown in various places in the text, however a thematic element to the will to live is the reference to Inferno by Dante. In particular, the Inferno aids Survival in Auschwitz in by adding another layer of context to the prisoner’s condition, which resembles hell, and Levi’s will to live paralleling the character, Dante.
Griffin Riley 2/20/14 176. ANIMAL FARM Animal Farm teaches about communism because of its characters. Napoleon was based on a famous Russian dictator named Joseph Stalin. The next character is named Snowball, who is based on Leon Trotsky because he was another Russian leader. Between these three characters, I will show the relationship between the animals and real life communism.
The Europeans had bad concentration camps. They would barely feed the prisoners, and would work them to the bone. “Before being sent to a camp, a captured prisoner of
Chinese labor camps were created in the 1950s by the Kuomintang as a way to get free labor out of Chinese civilians. When civilians were sent to prison, some would stay in prison and others would go to the labor camps. Prisoners were sent to the labor camps as a way to become reformed through a system they called, “re-education through labor.” In the 1950s, prisoners were sent to Chinese labor camps in order to get a “re-education through labor” and hopefully, come out of the system as better and more productive members of society; but after learning about the Laogai system more in depth, they have not become better and more productive members of society. There were approximately 350 Chinese labor camps . The Kuomintang would sentence Chinese civilians who had committed minor offenses and could be reformed to become a better person for the society. The camps that the prisoners had to live in were very unsanitary. Diseases spread like wildfire and their diets were horrendous. Although no one had spoken up and tried to stop the labor camps, the Laogai system violated The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).