A couple months later, I’m wearing the same clothes as a came in and I feels like I have no sense of smell. Another day at my job, but instead of fixing pipes that allows gas to pass through and into concentration camps, but instead I am stuck fixing cell doors. Some people I know, but some others are starting to give horrible dreams. What I have noticed is I’m not fixing cell doors in my area, I am fixing some cell doors on the other side of the camp where the children sleep. As I pass the gate that separates the adults from kids, I have noticed that these children aren’t doing the same work we are, they are all busy digging holes and these guards are turning them into hard working people. It was somewhat nice to see that they were doing some …show more content…
As I am walking back to my cell, I hear this odd noise, I follow it towards the back of the camp and I see my son, fighting for his life. As I try to run to him, two guards come out of nowhere and grab me by my arms and as I watch these guards punch my son over and over again. After the first guard punches him I got loose and run to my son, push the guard on the floor and start punching over and over again. After 10 minutes 20 guards come pull me off the guard and take me back to my cell, as I am being dragged away I look at my son and I am saying to myself what did I just do, I just put myself and my son in more danger. When I get put in my cell, my neighbor on the right of me says are you alright, what happen. I saw my son and he was being punched over and over again and I had to do something about it, but now I think I just made things worse I put myself and my son in more danger. As I pick myself back up, I lean on the cell door talking to my neighbor and as I started talking to him I felt less scared and more confident. After talking for more than 45 minutes I have decided to worry more about my son then I did myself because he needs to live longer than me even if I live or die. I wish I could see my son one more time because I think I just showed all the guards that I’m not afraid of them and that I would sacrifice my life to let the punishment fall on my hands instead of my
Just like you I had once fallen for all of the propaganda going around Germany. An old teacher I used to know named Kantorich had filled my and many of my classmates heads with patriotic reasons to why we should join the army. We eventually gave in to this crazy man and signed in. From the very first battle I have been in all I have been around is horror, bodies tangling into unnatural shapes, blood and tears everywhere, along with watching close friends of mine die horrible deaths. One of my classmates named Joseph Behm was the most reluctant to give into Kantorek’s pressure, he died a very slow and horrible death. Another close friend of mine had received a leg wound and, after treatment, took a day or two to realize that he had his leg amputated. Soon after, he had died also. I have been around many horrific battles where I have found myself diving into unburied graves to just stay alive. Over and over again I see men turned into a mush of blood and splintered bones and I wonder when it will be my turn to get it. Tobacco and card games seem to be my only salvation to maintain my sanity. The only hope that I have seen demonstrated out of any of my fellow soldiers has been scarce talk about who will do what after the war. I personally feel that my peers and I have had the rest of our lives stolen from us. Even if I do get out of this nightmare I realize that I have no established life to come back to, my old hobby in poetry has escaped me as it seems that all of this awfulness has made me a hardened man, ignorant to all of the old interests that I had.
As I walk to the store to pick up snacks for the next half of the super bowl, I am trying to make it quick. I finally arrive at the store and quickly get my two favorite items, skittles and an ice tea. Thinking to myself that this is all I need, not knowing that it would be my last meal. On the walk back home, I have a feeling that I am being followed. I speed up. I turn around to find that a grown Hispanic man, mid-age, and heavily built is in fact, following me. In my head, I just want to make it home safely. Every move I make, he makes the same moves. Finally I turn around, quite nervous, to see if there was a problem. Next thing I know, we are on the ground fighting. Here I am, seventeen years old, up against a man in his thirties. As we fight, I know that this situation isn’t going to end well. Last thing I remember is being shot in my stomach. While I lay in the grass taking my last breaths, all I could think is “Why me”?
Imagine when you were a little child, your whole family was taken from you by people who forced themselves into your country and took you to a concentration camp. While you were at this camp you watched your family members starve to skin and bone. As a young child you saw people shot on the spot, babies head’s bashed out and young mother’s separated from their young children. When the Americans finally came to liberate you you immediately want to celebrate with your family members but learn that they are all dead. You spend the rest of your life living with the thought that your whole family is dead and it is all the Nazis fault. How would you feel to know that some of the surviving Nazis are still out there living a free life and getting away with all of the crimes they help put in motion?
As philosopher George Santayana famously states: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” If no person ever knew what went on in those concentration camps, then the same situation will occur again in the future. Having lived in Europe for six years, I have had my share of visiting numerous World War II landmarks including those trecherous concentration camps. I have seen firsthand the sites where millions have been tortured relentlessly. I have seen huge rooms filled with real human hair, shoes, and briefcases.
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...
Knowing myself, I know that in many of these scenarios I would not have been able to be as strong as these people are, and that I would have given up. Places in the book that show how strong many of these people are include when they first get there and can see babies being thrown into the fire yet keep going, when everyone had numbers tattooed on them, and when Elie’s block was running to the new camp. When the men are separated and sent to the left, the path that they have to take to the barracks leads them past the crematorium. Within the fire pits they are walking towards are children and babies being thrown into the fires to burn (Wiesel 32). Upon seeing this, I would have found a way for me to end my life, just so that I did not have to witness it happening anymore; I definitely would not have been able to handle a situation as such, which proves the people in this camp are stronger mentally than I may ever be.When everyone gets a number tattooed onto them, this is the exact moment that everyone lost their individuality (Wiesel 42). They had their names taken away from them, and they were no longer themselves, but a number. I can not stand the idea of just being a number and not being myself, so for this to happen to me, I probably would have cracked and gone insane. I consider myself to be a pretty tolerant person, but you can not take my name or who I am, and that is what they
[The guards here believe that] the tougher, colder, and more cruel and inhuman a place is, the less chance a person will return. This is not true. The more negative experiences a person goes through, the more he turns into a violent, cruel, mean, heartless individual, I know this to be a fact
“Babies! Yes, I did see this, with my own eyes…children thrown into the flames.” This is a quote from Ellie Wiesel’s memoir Night which takes place in Nazi German concentration camps, Auschwitz and Buchenwald, in 1944–1945, at the height of the Holocaust. There are not the right words to describe what happened during this period of time, it was horrendous, however we cannot change what happened and that is why we should be sure that history never repeats itself.Never again shall we accept a leader similar to Hitler, or accept anything like what he did to those he deemed abnormal, and never again shall we watch silently and knowingly instead of helping as our neighbors are taken from their homes and tortured.
Wars have essentially been the backbone of history. A war can make or break a country. As the result of war, a country can lose or gain territory and a war directly impacts a countries’ economy. When we learn about wars in schools we usually are taught about when they start, major events/ battles, and when they end. It would take a year or two to cover one war if we were to learn about everything. One thing that is commonly overlooked and we take for granted, is prisoners of war. Most people think of concentration camps and the millions of Jews that suffered when prisoners and war are mentioned in the same sentence. Yes it is terrible what happened during WWII, but what about our troops that were captured and potentially tortured trying to save the Jews? How did they suffer? Being captured as a prisoner of war is just an on the job hazard. In this paper I will explain what POWs went through and how it has changes between countries, and I will only scratch the surface.
To begin with, people were treated very poorly during the Holocaust. “Throughout existence of the camp, the authorities there treated Jews with the most ruthless, and often quite refined, cruelty. SS men regarded a Jewish life as the least valuable of all. To the greatest possible extent, Jews fell victim to starvation. People would get up to 200 calories a day. Hard labor, constant harassment and abuse, and various kinds of cyclical extermination operations.” People would get to eat soup each day in a camp with one slice of bread. In addition to that, “Prisoners were incarcerated without observation of the standard norms applying to arrest and custody; labor camps; prisoner of war camps; transit camps; and camps which served as killing centers, often called extermination camps or death camps.” “Prisoners were also made to kill other prisoners. They were forced by the Nazis to do it.” If prisoners were forced to do something and they didn't do it they would get tortured even more and some prisoners would even get killed. In conclusion, “Prisoners were required to wear color-coded triangles on their jackets so that the guards and officers of the camps could easily identify each person's background and pit the different groups against each other.”Also Prisoners were forced to sleep up to three people a bunk. You would get one blanket, one pair of shoes, and a shirt, and pants. No matter how cold or how warm it was that
Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany established more than 40,000 camps and other incarceration sites that killed the elderly and children as if they had no purpose. Leon Leyson was one of the few to survive and retell his whole story to us through the book “The Boy in the Wooden Box.” Leon would’ve never been able to tell us his story, but he had perseverance. Leon had a lot of perseverance at a young age because he understood what was going on around him. Having a positive is the best response to conflict, especially in time of war.
Did you know that at this moment, numerous innocent prisoners are being forced to work for no pay and are held captive as punishment for crimes of their relatives? This is because of North Korea’s labor camps, also known as political prisons. In these camps, prisoners are denied all of their basic rights and are given the minimal amount of food, clothing, and other necessities. Shin Dong-hyuk was born in one of these camps, and he tells his story in his biography, Escape From Camp 14. The book talks about the horrible living conditions inside the camp. It also talks about the harsh punishments, distrust, and snitching. Of North Korea’s three social classes, the prisoners in these camps are at the bottom. Accordingly, these prisoners are treated
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.
We were at this new camp for a year or two when we received the news. Policemen showed up in their clean uniforms one morning right after we all got our rations. There were thousands of them. They barged into the camp, with weapons handy, fought and arrested the officers that ran this camp. I’m not sure what happened back at Auschwitz, the other camp, but I couldn’t believe my eyes.
It all started one hot summer morning at sunrise, July 5th 2012 around 3 am the day after the 4th of July holiday. I was awakened by the crying and screaming of my family over me yelling at me “Get UP FUNMI PLEASE”! And as I jumped up startled and shaking wondering what’s going on walking into my, mother’s room seeing a rainfall of tears fall down her face, she then tells me with the most hurtful voice ever “YOUR BROTHER HAS BEEN SHOT AND KILLED”! I completely went into shock as, I could feel my heart drop I started to panic badly wishing, and praying, and hoping saying to myself I wish that someone would pinch me, and wake me up from this terrible dream. The news I had gotten at that moment felt so unreal never would a day go pass in, which I would have thought about going through a loss of one of my siblings this soon.