Imagine you are in a camp. Not just any camp, but a camp where you are forced to work all day. This is what was happening during the Holocaust. In 1930, Hungary fell under the Nazi party’s influence. In 1940, Hungary joined the Axis powers. Hungary started putting anti-Jewish laws and decrees into place. There were 825,000 Jews in Hungary in 1941. Germany wanted Hungary to deport Hungarian Jews. Hungary decided not to because of political reasons. They wanted to avoid direct involvement in the war. As the Allied forces gained control on the warfront, the Axis powers were starting to lose. Hungary tried to negotiate peace with the allies. The thing Germany did to stop Hungary from doing this is they occupied Hungary in 1944. In the May of 1944, Hungarian Jews were put on trains and deported to concentration camps, most being sent to Auschwitz. The Jewish population in Hungary was reduced to 255,000. In the spring of 1942, Auschwitz became the largest death camp for Jews. More than 1.1 million men, women, and children lost their lives at Auschwitz. Most were Jews. Adolf Eichmann was in charge of the deportation of Hungarian Jews in 1944. Also in 1944 between May 14 and July 9, about 440,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The Germans had many plans for improvements. They had an agreement with railway officials in Budapest. These officials had provided 111 trains (Czech). The Degesch Company also helped improve Auschwitz by sending 462 pounds of the gas Zyklon B on March 8 (Czech). “In mid-May 1944, when the mass transports of Hungarian Jews start arriving in Auschwitz, the young, healthy, and strong Jews of both genders are dispersed for a time as so-called deport prisoners to various barracks at Birkenau, but a...
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...or the current conditions in the United States. I never had to go through what these Jews had to go through. The people who lived during the Holocaust should always be remembered and I know that I will never forget about the Holocaust for as long as I live.
Works Cited
Braham, Randolph L. "Preparatory Work in Auschwitz." Berenbaum, Michael and Yisreal Gutman. Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. n.d. 462-463.
"1944." Czech, Danuta. Auschwitz Chronicle 1939-1945. New York: H. Holt, 1989. Document.
Grossman, Clara. Clara Grossman Testimony Midwest Center for Holocaust Education. 26 August 1999. Video.
Müller, Filip. Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1999.
Vago, Lidia Rosenfeld. "One Year in the Black Hole of our Planet Earth: A Personal Narrative." Offer, Dalia and Lenore J. Weitzman. Women of the Holocaust. 1999. 273-277.
Being confined in a concentration camp was beyond unpleasant. Mortality encumbered the prisons effortlessly. Every day was a struggle for food, survival, and sanity. Fear of being led into the gas chambers or lined up for shooting was a constant. Hard labor and inadequate amounts of rest and nutrition took a toll on prisoners. They also endured beatings from members of the SS, or they were forced to watch the killings of others. “I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach. The stomach alone was aware of the passage of time” (Night Quotes). Small, infrequent, rations of a broth like soup left bodies to perish which in return left no energy for labor. If one wasn’t killed by starvation or exhaustion they were murdered by fellow detainees. It was a survival of the fittest between the Jews. Death seemed to be inevitable, for there were emaciated corpses lying around and the smell...
Nearly all of the deportees who were sent to the centers were instantaneously guided to the gas chambers to die, except for a select few who were chosen to be sonderkommandos. Over two million Jews were murdered inside killing centers either by smothering with poison gas or by shooting with guns (Killing Centers ). The gas-van was a product of the Third Reich; it consisted of a van with a gas-tight cabin attached on its understructure used to kill victims by the motor-exhausts led into that cabin (The Development of the Gas-Van in the Murdering of the Jews). The Germans executed over 150,000 people at Chelmno between December 1941 and March 1943 and then again in June and July 1944 by means of gassing vans (Killing Centers ). The Germans also found the use of gas chambers to be more effective and usually killed thousands of people daily. Within minutes of being inside a gas chamber, pris...
At the start of Adolf Hitler’s reign of terror, no one would have been able to foresee what eventually led to the genocide of approximately six million Jews. However, steps can be traced to see how the Holocaust occurred. One of those steps would be the implementation of the ghetto system in Poland. This system allowed for Jews to be placed in overcrowded areas while Nazi officials figured out what to do with them permanently. The ghettos started out as a temporary solution that eventually became a dehumanizing method that allowed mass relocation into overcrowded areas where starvation and privation thrived. Also, Nazi officials allowed for corrupt Jewish governments that created an atmosphere of mistrust within its walls. Together, this allowed
Epstein shows the process that the majority of Jews were being put through, such as the medical examinations, medical experimentations, gas chambers and crematoriums. Medical examinations were used to determine if the Jews were healthy enough to work. Dr. Mengele used the Jews as “lab rats” and performed many experiments such as a myriad of drug testing and different surgeries. The gas chamber was a room where Jews were poisoned to death with a preparation of prussic acid, called Cyclo...
Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz. New York: Classic House, 2008. Print.
We need to remember the Holocaust because of all the Jewish people who died and the people who tried to save them. In the book “Book Thief”, the family risked their lives to help one of their friends who was Jewish. If the Nazis found out about the Jewish person in their basement they would take the whole family to the death camp with the Jewish friend. Also in the “Boys who challenged Hitler”, a group of boys who lived in Denmark, risked their Life’s to save Jewish people by putting them on rafts to float over to Sweden. They did that because Sweden was a free country and the Nazi’s did not have control over them.
Buergenthal, Thomas. A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy. New York: Little, Brown, 2009.
First of all, to get a proper understanding of the events in my book, I did some research to paint a picture of the holocaust. The reason that the Germans started the holocaust a long time ago was because they believed that the Jewish people were minions of the devil, and that they were bent on destroying the Christian mind. Many Christians in Germany were also mad at them for killing Jesus in the Bible. Throughout the holocaust, Hitler, the leader of Germany at the time, and the Nazis killed about six million Jewish people, more than two-thirds of all of the Jewish people in Europe at the time. They also killed people who were racially inferior, such as people of Jehovah's Witness religion, and even some Germans that had physical and mental handicaps. The concentration camp that appears in this story is Auschwitz, which was three camps in one: a prison camp, and extermination camp, and a slave labor camp. When someone was sent to Auschw...
Ofer, Dalia, and Lenore J. Weitzman. Women in the Holocaust. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. 1. Print.
Dwork, Deborah, and R. J. Van Pelt. Holocaust: a History. New York: Norton, 2002. Print.
The Holocaust, one of the most devastating moments in history. Hitler’s mass genocide of Jews and other ethnicities had left a scar in the world that would never truly heal. During a time of death and destruction, one camp held the title for most fatalities. The Auschwitz concentration camp, one of the most infamous places during the Holocaust with its bloody history forever etched into the mind of its survivors and future generations to come.
Bard, Mitchell G., ed. "Introduction." Introduction. The Holocaust. San Diego: Greenhaven, 2001.
"A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust-Victims." A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust-Victims. University of South Florida. Web. 19 May 2014.
The Holocaust was one of the most tragic and trying times for the Jewish people. Hundreds of thousands of Jews and other minorities that the Nazis considered undesirable were detained in concentration camps, death camps, or labor camps. There, they were forced to work and live in the harshest of conditions, starved, and brutally murdered. Horrific things went on in Auschwitz and Majdenek during the Holocaust that wiped out approximately 1,378,000 people combined. “There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.” –Fidel Castro
Primo Levi: Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996) [first published as If This Is a Man], p. 86.