the rmeakabl and the remembered

The Remarkable and the Remembered

World War II, millions of people, ranging from doctors and lawyers to peasants were transported to prison camps spread through-out Europe. The Soviet Gulag was a massive network of prison camps stretching from the west side of the Soviet Union all the way to the east side. The most notorious camp in the Gulag was known Kolyma. Kolyma was in the far northeastern corner of the Soviet Union, only a couple hundred miles away from the United States (www.gulaghistory.org). The prisoners of the gulag were a wide variety of people. There were Soviet officers, soviet citizens, and people of many other races and religions. The Nazis had their own version of the Gulag. They were known as concentration camps. In these camps, most infamously, were millions of Jewish families from many countries who had been captured by the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police. However, there were also a slew of other people brought to the concentration camps like, Gypsies, Social Democrats, Communists, and homosexuals. About 20,000 of these camps were created in countries like Austria, France, annexed Poland, Belgium, and Germany. In 1945, when the Allies liberated the concentration camp networks, experts estimate that around three-quarters of a million people had died as a result of inhumane conditions of the camps (www.ushmm.org).

A major theme of both books was the idea of humanity or the lack there off. The prisoners in both the Nazi concentration camp and the Soviet Gulag networks were stripped of everything that made them human. The Soviets and Nazis cut the prisoners hair, took the clothes off their back, replacing them with prisoner uniforms, and replaced their names with numbers. All of these things were done to demorali...

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...ing political parties there. Another thing that I learned from reading “Surviving Auschwitz” was the prisoners’ ability to acquire and trade goods between themselves. With such stringent and constant supervision, it amazes me that the prisoners still found a way to set up a sort of “black market” of their own. This illustrates beautifully the human ability to survive and improve our condition, even in the most unforgiving of environments. Quite honestly before reading, “Man is Wolf to Man”, I did not know that the Soviets even had prison camps. I also did not know the extent to which the Soviet army and government victimized their own people. The fact that many of the people in the Soviet Gulag were Soviets is astonishing to me. It baffles me to think about how any ruler of any nation could imprison his or her own people and wreak havoc on them for years and years.