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Living conditions in concentration camps essay
Living conditions in concentration camps essay
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Finally moved to United State of America and found a new job as a reporter. My boss wanted me to interview a survivor from the Monowitz-Buna concentration camp. After finally getting in contact with a Survivor of the Monowitz-Buna concentration camp. He told me hia name was Daniel Cohen and he was only a 15 years old teenager when he and his mother were taken by the Schutzstaffel to the camp. He wanted to meet at the place where all of his nightmare comes from; Monowitz-Buna. He wanted me to see what he had to live in and experience while being there. I was nervous and was thinking how this was going to be a touchy subject. Not only because it was the worst thing that happen to Daniel, but also since my family were members of the Schutzstaffel in the Monowitz-Buna concentration camp. While I do not know what this experience will do, since I was never allow to visit a Jewish concentration camp during the time or even after World War Two ended. I do know that spending time in Auschwitz was a profound and challenging experience that will affect me for a long time. This Concentration was established by the Schutzstaffel (SS) in October 1942, located near Oswiecim, Poland. There a German chemical industry called Internessen-Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie (IG Farben) in the concentration. Factory made synthetic rubber and sodium (Na) and synthetic rubber production. This was a working camp (25). I felt anxious about the trip and wondered if I could do it.
Once I
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arrived to Monowitz-Buna, I could see how filthy and there were soldiers still digging and finding bodies for prisoners. It made me sick to my stomach and thinking about how could someone lived like that. I finally found Mr. Cohen, He was by the gate. He said, “This is the last time he saw his mother, Daniel was separated from her.” Daniel does not know if his mother survived or not. He was going to start looking for her. He also said, “His mother was he hero because Daniel kept thinking about seeing her again.” Which kept him surviving the camp. He wanted to talk and walk around the inactive Jewish concentration camp. I said, “What was it like coming to the Monowitz-Buna concentration camp?” He started to tear up and talk about how it was like on the train and getting off of the train. When his mother and him were heading to Auschwitz concentration camp, prisoners were cold, hungry, and above all, thirsty (17,18). Once the train has stopped, prisoners were told to go one way, and some went another way. They were selected on the basis of age, gender and health. Very quickly, all of the healthy, able men are rounded up. The women, children and old men disappear (22,23). That was the last time he saw his mother. Daniel had to strip naked, and his belonging was place into a big pile. Prisoner in striped uniforms who was already there enter, and shave off Daniel’s hair. He stood naked in a room with two inches of cold water covering floor with other prisoners, until the water comes on (23, 24,25). Then Daniel lifted his sleeve and I could see 6-digit number on his arm; 167884. He said, “We were not Jewish, we were criminals. We did not have out name anymore, we were referred to this 6-digit number.” (25,27). Daniel was assign to block 28.
The sleeping arrangement were poor. Their bed was made from thin straw and cardboard, they had old blankets (38). Early in the morning, prisoner are awoken and rush into the freezing cold in order to get morning bread. Prisoners think that the people next to them have a bigger piece of bread they will trade it. But in reality, the piece are almost the same size. In Monowitz-Buna concentration camp, bread is money to prisoners, there a lot of bargaining and trading happening
(39). During our walk, we made it to the IG Farben factory, this is where Daniel was assigned to work at. Daniel had to carry cast-iron supports on his shoulders with another prisoner. He told me a story about when one day when they were carrying one of the support it fall and slice his shoulder open. The German officers sent Daniel to the infirmary called Krankenbau (Ka-be) for his wound ( 45).
There are unexpected aspects of life in the camp depicted in “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlement” by Tadeusz Borowski. The prisoners were able to make very obvious improvements to their lived in the camp, without reaction by the SS officers; the market was even made with the support of the camp. The prisoners actually hoped for a transport of prisoners, so as to gain some supplies. The true nature of the camp is never forgotten, even in better moments at the camp.
These Jews and other people were held in camps for years and barely fed any food. These prisoners barely got 2 meals per day. In the book Night it explains how the prisoners were starved and how they did not get enough food to survive. Many people died from malnutrition in the camps. According to an internet source the prisoners got a quart of watery soup and they would be lucky to find a turnip
Bread in the novel Night by Elie Wiesel is sometimes a symbol for relief. A symbol for a time where Elie, his father, and other prisoners had a time of rest in the harsh conditions. On page 73 Elie and his father have a huge sense of relief it says “So? Did you pass? Yes, And you? Also.” “We were able to breathe again. My father had a present for me: A half ration of bread.” Elie and his father passed the selection meaning that they still have a chance to live and survive. Before they saw each other after the selection they had no idea if they would ever see each other ever again, but when they found out that they both made it all that worry and stress went
The living conditions were appalling. The conditions were OK as a concentration camp, however as more prisoners came, it drastically worsened. There was “overcrowding, poor sanitary conditions, the lack of adequate...
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.
When canvas was scarce, most of the soldiers were forced to make “open-air beds” by piling straw or leaves between two logs and covering up with a blanket. During winter months, basic huts were constructed from wood when it was available.
(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).)
Even when US troops liberated the Buchenwald and Dachau concentration camps, the stories still never made it to the front page of the paper and people still did not believe in the reliability of the stories (Leff 52). In 1943, a survey w...
Living conditions for Nazi prisoners were over crowded. They had to sleep in unsanitary wooden and brick bunks with several others. Prisoners were given a curtain amount of time to use the facilities with no privacy. With little water they had to clean themselves the inmates lived in constant filth. The Nazi’s didn’t care how bad the weather was, the prisoners had to wait long hours during rolls call. Even the dead had to present during roll call. After roll call prisoners were marched to where they would be working at for the day. Some worked in factories, while others worked outside. Hours later they were marched to camp for another roll call.
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
“BBC TWO unravels the secrets of Auschwitz.” BBC. British Broadcasting Corporation, 12 Mar. 2004. Web. 4 Mar. 2014
A survivor of the Holocaust, named Mr. Greenbaum, tells his experience to visitors of the Holocaust Museum. “Germans herded his family and other local Jews in 1940 to the Starachowice ghetto in his hometown of Poland when he was only 12. Next he was transported to a slave labor camp where he and his sister were moved while the rest of the family was sent to die at Treblinka. By the age of 17 he had been enslaved in five camps in five years, and was on his way to a sixth, when American soldiers freed him in 1945”. Researchers have recorded about 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe. “We knew before how horrible life in the campus and ghettos was” said Hartmut Bergoff, director of the German Historical Institute, “but the numbers are unbelievable.
Eighteen million Europeans went through the Nazi concentration camps. Eleven million of them died, almost half of them at Auschwitz alone.1 Concentration camps are a revolting and embarrassing part of the world’s history. There is no doubt that concentration camps are a dark and depressing topic. Despite this, it is a subject that needs to be brought out into the open. The world needs to be educated on the tragedies of the concentration camps to prevent the reoccurrence of the Holocaust. Hitler’s camps imprisoned, tortured, and killed millions of Jews for over five years. Life in the Nazi concentration camps was full of terror and death for its individual prisoners as well as the entire Jewish society.
When I was a child, a very close family friend of ours from Israel, Joyce Kleinman (now Wilner), and her sister Reisi Kleinman (now Greenbaum) entered the Auschwitz concentration camp at the ages of 15 and 12 years old. Years later, Joyce’s son Mike Wilner composed an interview that included his mother Joyce and Aunt Reisi outlining the significant events that led to the survival of both sisters and illustrated the events that took place during the Holocaust in which an estimated 6 million Jews were killed.