Making Connections: Dehumanization
Theme: The Dehumanization of Victims, Death and Detachment
Course Work: “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen”
Borowski, Tadeusz. "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen." The Norton Anthology of World Literature. 3rd ed. Vol. F. W. W. Norton, 2012.
Tadeusz Borrowski’s “This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen” offers a dark and detailed perception into the environment and setting of the Auschwitz concentration camp. The camp is portrayed as a place of dehumanization where any sense of goodness, and honor are suppressed by each man and woman’s will and desire to survive. Dehumanization is making one seem less than human and hence not worthy of humane treatment. The most intense moment of
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the less than human view of the Nazis is when the first train car arrives. One soldier has the duty of counting the people, “with a notebook” (Borowski 701) until they reach the trucks capacity, “he enters a mark” (Borowski 701) The people being sent to the work camps “will receive serial numbers 131-2, for short” (Borowski 701) The people of Sosnowiec-Bedzin are merely a number to the Nazis. A single word or action cannot dehumanize, but a constant stream for days, months or even years will truly do the damage. The Nazis choose to see the people they unload from the trains as less than human, they have made some prisoners process the trains.
Henri a prisoner views the “cremo” transports as means to have nourishment, and states” They can’t run out of people, or we’ll starve to death… All of us live on what they bring” (Borowski 696) The transports refer to the trains as “cattle cars” (Borowski 699), the people are “inhumanly crammed” (Borowski 700) and monstrously squeezed together” (Borowski 700). There are children “running all over the ramp, howling like dogs”; and the Nazis treat them as such. The word “Holocaust” from the Greek words “holos” (whole) and “kaustos” (burned) but since 1945, the word has taken on a new and horrible meaning: the mass murder of 6 million Jews by the German Nazi regime during the second World War. Jews were an inferior race, an alien threat to German racial purity and …show more content…
community. Literature: The Shawl Cynthia Ozick makes one feel the overwhelming sense of hunger, sheer exhaustion, and helplessness within the characters as Rosa, her infant Magda and a 14-year-old girl Stella. They are forced to march to a concentration camp. We experience the dehumanizing results of the Nazis' actions, which denied these characters their basic rights. We cringe at a mother's challenge of saving her infant from the enemy's hands. Through Rosa, we feel the struggle of having no milk for Magda to nurse, so “Magda took the corner of the shawl and milked it instead.” (Ozick, par. 3) Only the shawl has protective powers, and it gains a magical status as it provides "milk of linen,"(Ozick, par. 3) nourishing the “infant for three days and three nights.” (Ozick, par. 4) Stella was jealous of Magda and took the shawl away from her. Magda that had not spoke in a long while was found outside on her stick legs wondering in the camp arena. She was yelling Maa…Rosa did not know what to do, grab Magda or go find the shawl. So, Rosa ran back inside the barracks to find the shawl which Stella “was heaped under it, asleep in her thin bones.” (Ozick, par. 10) As Rosa got closer she saw that Magda was on the shoulders of a guard and he was not coming in her direction. He was getting closer to the electric fence with the child. The guard had thrown Magda at the electric fence, “Magda’s feathered round head and her pencil legs and balloonish belly and zigzag arms splashed against the fence, the steel voices went mad in their growling, urging Rosa to run and run to the spot where Magda had fallen from her flight against the electrified fence.” (Ozick, par. 12) Rosa knew if she screamed she would be shot, if she moved she would be shot. So, she took Magda’s shawl and “filled her own mouth with it, stuffed it in and stuffed it in, until she was swallowing up the wolf’s screech and tasting the cinnamon and almond depth of Magda’s salvia; and Rosa drank Magda’s shawl until it dried.” (Ozick 12) This short story by Cynthia Ozick reflects the dehumanization others had at the concentration camps. At times she thought that Stella wanted to eat Magda. Rosa slept with Magda under her thigh and hoped she would not smother her at night. A mother that at times wished that her child would die so she would not have to hide her another day. The constant torture of not having enough to eat to even provide milk for your starving child. Art: Gassing by David Olere Figure 1 Gassing by David Olère. A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, New York. The dominant color is a blue of the same shade as the Zyklon-B pellets. The Zyklon B is the hydrogen cyanide in the form of small tablets, used by the Nazis for killing concentration -camp prisoners. It is in question if David Olere was able to witness the gassing of people or if this was his imagination. Usually the light was kept off in the gas chamber. David Olere was imprisoned at Auschwitz from March 2, 1943 to January 19, 1945. After his return home from France Olere began to recreate the hell of the camps in works of art that are painful to look at. The works of Olere repelled people rather than attracted. It is easy to understand why one would turn away and refuse to look at what her saw with his eyes in the camp. He felt it was his moral obligation. Art is sometimes hard to understand, but this says it all. Young to old yelling or screaming out in desperation for help. Skulls, and skeletons in the corners of past victims. Babies clinging to their mothers. A parent attempting to cover the eyes of a young child. In reading on the Holocaust, it appears the lights where kept out during the gassing. Without being able to see humans dying, one would not have to admit to killing people, just eliminating numbers, further dehumanizing the task which they were doing.
Music: Never Again by Disturbed
The lead singer for Disturbed is David Draiman, he comes from an Orthodox
Jewish family. He has many relatives living in Israel, including his brother and
grandmother, and felt he needed to write about the Holocaust. It is said both of his
grandparents on his mother’s side were survivors of the camps. He realized the last of
his generation of survivors were about to be lost.
This song is about the holocaust and how the Jews were treated. It uses
comparisons in the song such as beast or captures which referred to the Nazis. He
uses this song to remind us of the pain, torment, and suffering that occurred in these
camps and makes his point extremely clear that he will never let something like this
happen again. The desire for genocide in the beginning of the song was Hitler’s hatred
towards the Jews.
Lyrics
They have a frightening desire for genocide
They wouldn't stop til what what was left of my family died
Hell-bent on taking over the world
You couldn't hide in the shout of conformity
We can't forget how we were devastated by the beast
And now we pleaded with the captors for release
We were hunted for no reason at
all One of the darkest times in our history All that I have left inside Is a soul that's filled with pride I tell you never again, oh In a brave society Didn't end up killing me Scream with me, never again Not again A generation that was persecuted endlessly Exterminated by the Nazi war machine We will remember, let the story be told To realize how we lost our humanity You dare to tell me that there never was a Holocaust You think that history will leave the memory lost Another Hitler using fear to control You're gonna fail this time for the world to see All that I have left inside Is a soul that's filled with pride I tell you never again, oh In a brave society Didn't end up, killing me Scream with me, never again Not again All that I have left inside Is a soul that's filled with pride I tell you never again, oh In a brave society Didn't end up killing me Scream with me, never again, oh For the countless souls who died Their voices fill this night Sing with me, never again They aren't lost, you see The truth will live in me Believe me, never again Film: Inglorious Basterds
In Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account, to say that Auschwitz is an interesting read would be a gross understatement. Auschwitz is a historical document, a memoir but, most importantly an insider’s tale of the horrors that the captives of one of the most dreadful concentration camps in the history of mankind. Auschwitz, is about a Jewish doctors, Dr. Nyiszli, experience as an assistant for a Nazi, Dr. Mengele. Dr. Nyiszli arrived at Auschwitz concentration camp with his family unsure if he would survive the horrific camp. This memoir chronicles the Auschwitz experience, and the German retreat, ending a year later in Melk, Austria when the Germans surrendered their position there and Nyiszli obtained his freedom. The author describes in almost clinical detail and with alternating detachment and despair what transpired in the
" The journey to the camps began with a train ride, with Jews packed into pitch-black rail cars, with no room to sit down, no bathrooms, no hope." (Lombardi). This is a quote from a book a man wrote about his time in Auschwitz when he was young. Up to 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, an awful event led by Adolf Hitler and his army based in Germany, the Nazis. One of the horrible things about the Holocaust was the boxcars taking the victims to the camps. Some things that made the boxcars in the Holocaust so bad are; the size of the boxcars, the conditions in the cars, and the deaths that occurred on the journey to the concentration camps.
Throughout the Nobel Peace Prize award winner Night, a common theme is established around dehumanization. Elie Wiesel, the author, writes of his self-account within the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz. Being notoriously famed for its unethical methods of punishment, and the concept of laboring Jews in order to follow a regime, was disgusting for the wide public due to the psychotic ideology behind the concept. In the Autobiography we are introduced to Wiesel who is a twelve year old child who formerly lived in the small village of Sighet, Romania. Wiesel and his family are taken by the Nazi aggressors to the Concentration camp Auschwitz were they are treated like dogs by the guards. Throughout the Autobiography the guards use their authoritative
The brutality the Germans displayed in the 1930s through the 1940s was utterly horrifying. In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, the author’s harrowing experience is shared. The Holocaust is worldly known as being one of the largest genocides in history, but not many truly understand what it was like to live through and witness. A lot of people had their life taken away whether figuratively or literally and many discovered so much loss that they became unphased by it after a while. Many who encountered the cruelty and merciless of the Germans have passed but a few remain that live to tell their story to the world and try to explain the feelings that coursed through them during the genocide and even now. Wiesel, who lived in Auschwitz for
The sullen narrative This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen poignantly recounts the events of a typical day in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. The author, Tadeusz Borowski, was Polish Holocaust survivor of Auschwitz, the series of death camps responsible for the deaths of the largest number of European Jews. Recounted from a first-person point of view, the novel unfolds at dawn as the unnamed narrator eats breakfast with a friend and fellow prisoner, Henri. Henri is a member of Canada, the labor group responsible for unloading the Jewish transports as they arrive into the camps. They are interrupted by a call for Canada to report to the loading ramps. Upon the arrival of the transport, the narrator joins Henri in directing the prisoners to either life, in the labor camps, or to death, in the gas chambers. In reality the path is neither one of life or death, rather it is routing prisoners to inevitable death or immediate death. Regardless of how many times he is asked, the narrator refuses to disclose to the transport prisoners what is happening to them or where they are being taken. This is camp law, but the narrator also believes it to be charitable to “deceive (them) until the very end”(pg. 115). Throughout the day the narrator encounters a myriad of people, but one is described in great detail: a young woman, depicted as being unscathed by the abomination that is the transport. She is tidy and composed, unlike those around her. Calmly, she inquires as to where she is being taken, like many before her, but to no avail. When the narrator refuses to answer, she stoically boards a truck bound for the gas chambers. By the end of both the day and of the novel, the camp has processed approximately fifteen thousand p...
When the author of Night, Elie Wiesel, arrives at Auschwitz, the Jewish people around him, the Germans, and himself have yet to lose their humanity. Throughout the Holocaust, which is an infamous genocide that imprisoned many Jewish people at concentration camps, it is clear that the horrors that took place here have internally affected all who were involved by slowly dehumanizing them. To be dehumanized means to lose the qualities of a human, and that is exactly what happened to both the Germans and the Jewish prisoners. Wiesel has lived on from this atrocious event to establish the dehumanization of all those involved through his use of animal imagery in his memoir Night to advance the theme that violence dehumanizes both the perpetrator and the victim.
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
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...
According to Merriam-Webster, a holocaust is a destruction involving widespread death, specifically by fire. In 1943, World War II was at its’ peak. At that time, Jewish people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet prisoners of war, and homosexuals were all herded like cattle into concentration camps by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi army. Hitler’s goal was to form what he believed to be a “superior” race known as Aryan. Hitler believed that the Aryan race (blond hair and blue eyes) was “superior” to these groups of people. According to Hitler, “When human hearts break and human souls despair, then from the twilight of the past, the great conquerors of distress and care, of shame and misery, of spiritual slavery and physical compulsion, look down and hold out their eternal hands to the despairing mortals. Woe to the people ashamed to grasp them!” Here, Hitler illustrates how the Aryans are “conquerors” above the “despairing mortals”. The Nazi party was led by Adolf Hitler, a manipulative and cruel dictator. Although John Boyne describes the appearance of the prisoners in Auschwitz, he leaves out significant details when describing Berlin’s setting in 1943, what the Auschwitz Concentration Camp was like, and how the people in the camps were treated.
Grenville, John A.S. “Neglected Holocaust Victims: the Mischlinge, the Judischversippte, and the Gypsies.” The Holocaust and History. Ed. Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998. 315-326.
The tragedies of the holocaust forever altered history. One of the most detailed accounts of the horrific events from the Nazi regime comes from Elie Wiesel’s Night. He describes his traumatic experiences in German concentration camps, mainly Buchenwald, and engages his readers from a victim’s point of view. He bravely shares the grotesque visions that are permanently ingrained in his mind. His autobiography gives readers vivid, unforgettable, and shocking images of the past. It is beneficial that Wiesel published this, if he had not the world might not have known the extent of the Nazis reign. He exposes the cruelty of man, and the misuse of power. Through a lifetime of tragedy, Elie Wiesel struggled internally to resurrect his religious beliefs as well as his hatred for the human race. He shares these emotions to the world through Night.
In his book This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen, Tadeusz Borowski shows how the conditions and situations that the prisoners were put through made them make a choice that most humans never face. The choice of compassion and concern for ones fellow man or only loving and caring for one’s self. This may sound harsh people, but after seeing, hearing, smelling and feeling the things they did in camp, it was the only way to survive physically and mentally. The narrator in the book makes the decision numerous times and suffers from these choices as he
Schwartz, Leslie. Surviving the hell of Auschwitz and Dachau: a teenage struggle toward freedom from hatred.. S.l.: Lit Verlag, 2013. Print.
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.
Primo Levi was an Italian Jewish Anti-fascist who was arrested in 1943, during the Second World War. The memoir, “If this is a Man”, written immediately after Levi’s release from the Auschwitz concentration camp, not only provides the readers with Levi’s personal testimony of his experience in Auschwitz, but also invites the readers to consider the implications of life in the concentration camp for our understanding of human identity. In Levi’s own words, the memoir was written to provide “documentation for a quiet study of certain aspects of the human mind”. The lack of emotive words and the use of distant tone in Levi’s first person narration enable the readers to visualize the cold, harsh reality in Auschwitz without taking away the historical credibility. Levi’s use of poetic and literary devices such as listing, repetition, and symbolism in the removal of one’s personal identification; the use of rhetorical questions and the inclusion of foreign languages in the denial of basic human rights; the use of bestial metaphors and choice of vocabulary which directly compares the prisoner of Auschwitz to animals; and the use of extended metaphor and symbolism in the character Null Achtzehn all reveal the concept of dehumanization that was acted upon Jews and other minorities.