One day a girl named Clara Grossman witnessed her life broken into shambles. She possessed the freedom she wished for, but it was seized out of her hands by Adolf Hitler. She witnessed her own journey first through a ghetto and then the most notorious death camp, Auschwitz. Horrifying scenes and exhausting work left her as a mess. If you were thrown into Clara’s shoes, how would you respond? In 1940, ten years after the Nazis gained authority of Hungary; Hungary established anti-Jewish laws. But four years later, Germany decided to invade Hungary to deplete the last remaining Jewish population in Europe, the Hungarian Jews. At the same time, Auschwitz was becoming an infamous camp where death was a common occurrence. 1.1 million Jews in total were efficiently killed during the Holocaust at Auschwitz. Soon, you will learn the preparations made by Germans to commit genocide and a Hungarian Jew’s experience of the Holocaust.
First, the Germans employed Nazi experts and increased their special squad units. Otto Moll was transferred to Auschwitz to lead the mass murder. (Braham). “Come on, come on, you lazy bastards, get a move on, faster!” Moll would shout to be cruel towards his workers (Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers). The Nazis also hired Rudolf Höss to be commander of Auschwitz (Braham) and Adolf Eichmann to be in charge of the deportation the Hungarian Jews (1944). Also the Special Squad, the Sonderkommando and Canada, were improved drastically by utilizing more prisoners. The Sonderkommando, which operated the crematoriums, was increased from 224 to 860 (Braham). Next, the Canada, which sorted the loot of the gassed prisoners, was increased to more than 1,000 (Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas...
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... home. As a result of learning about the Holocaust, I am propelled to not allow such a thing in history again. If this includes bullying at my school, jokes about a specific race, or even a country’s attempt to exterminate certain people, I will speak up! The effects and conditions the Jews went through are too much and it should never occur again!
Works Cited
Muller, Filip. Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, n.d. 123-133.
"1944." Czech, Danuta. Auschwitz Chronicle 1939-1945: From the Archives of the Auschwitz Memorial and the German Federal Archives. 1989.
Braham, Randolph L. "Hungarian Jews: Preparatory Work in Auschwitz." Gutman, Yisrael and Michael Berenbaum. Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. n.d. 462-463.
Grossman, Clara. Clara Grossman Audio Testimony Midwest Center for Holocaust Education. 26 August 1999. Audio.
"World War II in Europe." 10 June 2013. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 18 March 2014 .
“It is a concentration camp. Here, you must work. If you don’t you will go straight to the chimney” (Wiesel 39). During World War II, the largest and deadliest war in history, Jews were forcefully put into concentration camps to work while the Nazi soldiers benefited from it. If the Jewish prisoners were incapable of working, or refused to work they were sent to the crematorium, a furnace in which S.S soldiers used a deadly gas called Zyklon-B (“Elie and Oprah at Auschwitz (Fixed Repeats)”). Elie Wiesel, the author of the memoir Night, was a victim of the Holocaust (“Elie and Oprah at Auschwitz (Fixed Repeats)”). In the memoir Wiesel describes the pain and suffering he and his
Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault onHumanity. Trans. Stuart Woolf. New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1987.
As common knowledge, people normally recognize the term “concentration camp” and immediately refer to the prison camps the Jews were sent to during the Holocaust. In Corrie Tenboom’s famous collective story of her imprisonment, The Hiding Place, she writes in visual description of exactly how the Jews were treated in these camps. Women were forced to stand naked in front of Nazi guards for not much reason at all and made them feel less than human and animalistic. The people were beaten and killed on a regular day basis. One of the worst parts of these camps were the barbaric gas chambers. Men, women, and children would be fooled and dragged into chambers in groups to stand and be slaughtered by the dozen. Concentration camps are what can be known as the cruelest and most barbaric part of World War II history.
The Auschwitz camp was incredibly big and horrific that it was known as a “death factory.” The death rate of this camp ranged from three to four million people. Closely by ...
"A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust-Victims." A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust-Victims. University of South Florida. Web. 19 May 2014.
It is no mystery that the lives of the prisoners of Nazi concentration camps were an ultimate struggle. Hitler’s main goal was to create a racial state, one consisting purely of the ‘superior’ Aryan race. The Germans under Hitler’s control successfully eradicated a vast number of the Jewish population, by outright killing them, and by dehumanizing them. Auschwitz is the home of death of the mind, body, and soul, and the epitome of struggle, where only the strong survive.
For many years, people time and time again denied the happenings of the Holocaust or partially understood what was happening. Even in today’s world, when one hears the word ‘Holocaust’, they immediately picture the Nazi’s persecution upon millions of innocent Jews, but this is not entirely correct. This is because Jews
“BBC TWO unravels the secrets of Auschwitz.” BBC. British Broadcasting Corporation, 12 Mar. 2004. Web. 4 Mar. 2014
Morrison, Jack G.. Ravensbrück: Everyday Life in a Women's Concentration Camp, 1939-45. Princeton, NJ: Wiener, 2000. Print.
Auschwitz I was built in 1940, as a site for Polish political prisoners. This was the original camp and administrative center. The prisoners’ living conditions were inhumane in every respect, and the death rate was quite high. Auschwitz I was not meant ...
Timothy E. Pytell, (2003). ‘Redeeming the Unredeemable: Auschwitz and Man's Search for Meaning’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17.1 89-113.
Rost, Nico, Concentration Camp Dachau, third edition, translated into English by Captain Bernard R. Hanauer (no date) Comité International de Dachau, Brussels, p. 4.
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.