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Essay on the life in a concentration camp
Essay on the life in a concentration camp
Thesis about the holocaust
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In “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” the author Tadeusz Borowski describes the systematic dehumanization of the camps and attempts to convey the horror of that places. Borowski uses lively and imaginal language, such as “multicoloured wave of people” and “pours from the train,” to depict how these people get off the train when they arrive the camp. Borowski successfully illustrates dehumanization not of new arrivals but of those who have been the camp. He depictures the ugliness of human in the concentration camp during World War II. Therefore, it seems that for those labor gang working in the camp were apathetic to this situation, and they just upload these Jews from the cattle cars and send them to their death in the gas chamber. …show more content…
The first one is having a mind that does not work normally, that is, ill in one person’s mind. Thus, the phrase “a blind, mad river” implies that these people probably suffer mental shock because of the war. They have no idea why they come here and what will happen next. It seems that they have lost their mind and become crazy. Another one means very angry. This meaning can explain that these people on the train are very angry. They are forced to from one place to another place. They are forced to find “a new bed” or a way to let them continue to survive. It also seems that they have lost humanity in this environment. Based on our knowledge of nature, river is flowing forward and will not stop. Therefore, this phrase “a blind, mad river” combined with the definition of two words implies how dehumanized people can become, regardless of region or race. This river does not know where to go and what it will face next; this river is angry because it cannot stop to take a rest or control the direction to move forward. In consequence, “a huge, multicoloured wave of people” who will be sent to the gas chamber just like “a blind, mad river,” has no chance to recover and no chance to have a breath of fresh air because they cannot control their
The book “A Long Way From Chicago” is an adventurous and funny story. The story takes place at Joey Dowdel’s Grandmothers farm house in the country. Joey and his sister Mary Alice were sent to their Grandma’s house during the summer because their parents had to go to Canada for their work. At first, Joey felt uncomfortable with his Grandmother because he had never met her before but eventually he got to know her and they became close friends.
Out of This Furnace by Thomas Bell Out of This Furnace tells the impressive story of a multigenerational family of Slovakian immigrants who come to the United States in search of a better life in the New World. The patriarch of the Slovak family was Djuro Kracha, who arrived in the New World in the mid-1880s from the "old country. " The story tells of his voyage, his work on the railroad to earn enough money to afford the walk to the steel mills of Pennsylvania, his rejection by the larger mainstream community as a "hunkey," and the lives of his daughter and grandson. As the members of this family become more generally acculturated and even Americanized, they come to resent the cruel treatment and the discrimination they suffer.
Common sense seems to dictate that commercials just advertise products. But in reality, advertising is a multi-headed beast that targets specific genders, races, ages, etc. In “Men’s Men & Women’s Women”, author Steve Craig focuses on one head of the beast: gender. Craig suggests that, “Advertisers . . . portray different images to men and women in order to exploit the different deep seated motivations and anxieties connected to gender identity.” In other words, advertisers manipulate consumers’ fantasies to sell their product. In this essay, I will be analyzing four different commercials that focuses on appealing to specific genders.
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...
Primo Levi’s tales of his labors in “Survival in Auschwitz” connected Marx’s ideas with work under extreme and unique circumstances. In the Lager, workers suffered extreme working conditions, were deskilled in labor, became one with the masses, and were dehumanized. Through Marx’s four estrangements (estrangement of man from the product of his labor, estrangement of man from the act of labor, estrangement of man from humanity, and the estrangement of man from man), it became evident the ways in which the Holocaust is a product of a heightened version of capitalist modernity.
In the story “Carnal Knowledge”, by T. Coraghessan Boyle, Jim is the main character who loves to eat meat. He would love nothing more than to enjoy a dinner of “Beef, mutton, pork, venison, dripping burgers, and greasy ribs”. (1107) However, Jim’s cravings for “Kentucky Fried or Chicken McNuggets” were no match for Alena Jorgensen. (1108) Alena is an obsessive animal rights activist whom Jim met while laying on the beach feeling sorry for himself. When a person has feelings of depression and loneliness it can be very easy for another person to come into their life and change their whole persona.
Throughout a lifetime, one can run through many different personalities that transform constantly due to experience and growing maturity, whether he or she becomes the quiet, brooding type, or tries out being the wild, party maniac. Richard Yates examines acting and role-playing—recurring themes throughout the ages—in his fictional novel Revolutionary Road. Frank and April Wheeler, a young couple living miserably in suburbia, experience relationship difficulties as their desire to escape grows. Despite their search for something different, the couple’s lack of communication causes their planned move to Europe to fall through. Frank and April Wheeler play roles not only in their individual searches for identity, but also in their search for a healthy couple identity; however, the more the Wheelers hide behind their desired roles, the more they lose sense of their true selves as individuals and as a pair.
(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).)
In Tadeusz Borowski’s “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,” the concentration camps located in Nazi Germany that used Cyclone B solution to exterminate large populations of citizens are compared to the religious concept of Hell. Borowski’s descriptions reveal the horrors of the Holocaust, illustrating the narrator’s experiences as horrifying and inhumane. The environment of Nazi Germany is similar to the biblical references of Hell, where individuals suffer horrendous agony and pain induced by a single entity.
“Dead Men’s Path” by Chinua Achebe. In this short story “Dead Men’s Path,” Chinua Achebe gives the protagonist an exciting chance to fulfill his dream. Michael Obi was officially headmaster of Ndume Central School, which was backward in every sense. He had to turn the school into a progressive one, however the school received a bad report when the supervisor came to inspect.
Throughout This way to the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen they mention the theme of torture/guilt. For example, once they arrive at the train station with “ Canada Kommando”, the SS guards tell them to clean out the second cattle car. Tadek mentions how he felt the need to throw up because a dead body’s finger were very close to his. Once the transport arrived, the prisoners were crying out for fresh air and water. They were also kept in the dark about a lot of the things that were going on around them. The prisoners that were being unloaded began asking Tadek what was going on and he simply stated he did not speak polish. Once all the prisoners were unloaded the SS guards orders the Kommando to begin the cleaning up the car. The Kommando climbed
Upon arrival, the people were told of the baths and disinfection that awaited them and ordered them to undress in two huts reserved for this purpose, then they were led into the farmhouse. Individuals suspecting a trick, whose behavior might evoke panic, were discreetly led behind the building and shot in the back of the head with low-caliber weapons. Death of the people inside the gas chamber occurred after a few minutes as a result of internal suffocation caused by the prussic acid halting the exchange of oxygen between the blood and tissues. Those standing near the shafts died almost instantly, those who shouted, the old, the sick and children also died a quicker death. In order to ensure that no one remained alive, the gas chamber was not opened until half an hour had elapsed. In periods when the pressure of incoming transports was particularly intense, the gassing time was shortened to ten minutes. Most of the corpses were found near the door through which the victims had tried to escape from the spreading gas. The corpses, which covered the entire floor of the gas chamber, had their knees half bent, and were often cloven together. The bodies were smeared with excrement, vomit and blood. The skin assumed a pink hue ( Aushwitz Concentration Camp- The Gas Chambers & Crematoria). After they were killed, Sonderkommando prisoners dragged the corpses out of the gas chambers. They cut off the women’s hair and removed all metal dental work and jewelry. Then they burned the corpses in pits, on pyres, or in the crematorium furnaces. Bones that did not burn completely were ground to powder with pestles and then dumped, along with the ashes, in the rivers Soła and Vistula and in nearby ponds, or strewn in the fields as fertilizer, or used as landfill
Simone de Beauvoir, the author of the novel The Second Sex, was a writer and a philosopher as well as a political activist and feminist. She was born in 1908 in Paris, France to an upper-middle class family. Although as a child Beauvoir was extremely religious, mostly due to training from her mother as well as from her education, at the age of fourteen she decided that there was no God, and remained an atheist until she died. While attending her postgraduate school she met Jean Paul Sartre who encouraged her to write a book. In 1949 she wrote her most popular book, The Second Sex. This book would become a powerful guide for modern feminism. Before writing this book de Beauvoir did not believe herself to be a feminist. Originally she believed that “women were largely responsible for much of their own situation”. Eventually her views changed and she began to believe that people were in fact products of their upbringing. Simone de Beauvoir died in Paris in 1986 at the age of 78.
Arthur Ashe once said, “From what we get, we can make a living; what we give, however makes a life.” Such is the case in Nikolai Gogol’s short story The Overcoat. Gogol takes a man without a friend in the world and gives him a new overcoat. The new overcoat represents a new life and a new identity for the man and instantaneously he is much happier. The man, Akaky Akakievich, basis his “new life” upon the love that he gives to his overcoat, and what he feels it gives him in return. Before long, Akaky begins to care more about his beautiful coat and less about the people around him. Thus is the theme of the story. Often material things are more important in our lives than people, resulting in the emptiness of one’s heart and soul. One cannot be truly happy with his possessions alone. He needs more than that. He needs people his life, whom he can call friends.
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.