The life of a prisoner was tough. The life of a prisoner was harsh. They had no respect. I think I could’ve survived a day living in a concentration camp. Do you think you could? This passage is about the daily life of a prisoner in a concentration camp. This is your chance for you to read the struggle.
The SS guards woke up the prisoners. The SS guards were short for Schutzstaffel. (History.com Staff) These guards started out as guards for Adolf Hitler and other Party Leaders. Then they were made police officers. It finally came down to them being concentration camp guards. Although you had SS guards some guards weren't. They were known as Kapos. (Gary M. Grobman) Kapos are prisoners that had been chosen by the Nazi´s. They help to keep the prisoners in order but that doesn’t mean they got out of the normal daily routine. You were still a prisoner. They get up and put their shoes on and
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They are given the same watery soup that they received at lunch. When dinner is over the prisoners return to their barracks. A barrack was a room with beds for a mass number of people. The prisoners slept on straw beds. There were five prisoners to a bunk with just one blanket. The barrack is not heated. If one prisoner moves all five have to move in the same direction. It goes in the same cycle the next day. (Extract from the trial of Anton Kaindl, former commandant of Sachsenhausen Death Camp)
So the life of a Jew or prisoner had a very rough life living in a concentration camp. Could you imagine the pain that the guards went through? They had to watch people die and suffer. But they didn´t know what was going on at the time so they just done it so they could be paid. But this topic has taught me a lot about what the jews and other religious groups had to go through. So the Jews and other groups went through a lot but this was a huge time in history but I am very glad that I could be apart of the
There are unexpected aspects of life in the camp depicted in “This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlement” by Tadeusz Borowski. The prisoners were able to make very obvious improvements to their lived in the camp, without reaction by the SS officers; the market was even made with the support of the camp. The prisoners actually hoped for a transport of prisoners, so as to gain some supplies. The true nature of the camp is never forgotten, even in better moments at the camp.
The Holocaust will forever be known as one of the largest genocides ever recorded in history. 11 million perished, and 6 million of the departed were Jewish. The concentration camps where the prisoners were held were considered to be the closest one could get to a living hell. There is no surprise that the men, women, and children there were afraid. One was considered blessed to have a family member alongside oneself. Elie Wiesel was considered to be one of those men, for he had his father working side by side with him. In the memoir Night, by Elie Wiesel, a young boy and his father were condemned to a concentration camp located in Poland. In the concentration camps, having family members along can be a great blessing, but also a burden. Elie Wiesel shows that the relationship with his father was the strength that kept the young boy alive, but was also the major weakness.
The Nazis were separating people, (mostly Jews) those on the left were sent to Auschwitz to be gassed, while the people sent to the right were sent to a forced Labor Camp. While Jack went to the side going to a Labor Camp, his mother and brother were sent to Auschwitz to be gassed. “To the Nazis, he became prisoner 16013 and spent the next three years at seven concentration camps.”(npr.org) In the first camp, the prisoners worked in a granite quarry. Jack mentioned the camp having no beds and the food as soup made out of grass. Then came the last concentration camp, and then finally liberation. "We didn't know anything, only on the morning when we woke up and the Nazi flag wasn't flying and the guards weren't there." (npr.org) Once realizing they could leave, Jack and a friend grabbed an abandoned military wagon and started on their journey of
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.
Imagine having to live behind the close fences of a concentration camp and endeavor for survival. From January 30, 1933 to May 8, 1945, the Holocaust was the methodical, bureaucratic, state-supported mistreatment and homicide by the Nazi administration and its colleagues. Specified by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, approximately six million Jews were butchered due to the Nazis blaming them for Germany’s failures. The Jew’s experiences range from the release of extreme propaganda, opening of concentration camps, Kristallnacht, their civil liberties dwindling away, and what the remaining prisoners had suffered through to survive the end of the war.
Later on, the Gustapo, police, had found them, and they were sent to a camp. It was a mild camp, a mere waypoint. There was food, schools, and alright barracks. They were then selected because of their criminal status to go on to Aushowitz, an execution camp. Men and Women were seperated whenever they first got to the camp. Then the elderly and children were divided out. Those people, the ones who couldn't work, were sent to the gad chambers to be killed.It wasn't long before Anne and Margot contacted Scabbies, a contagious disease that slowly eats away at the skin infected. Once it was apparent that they were sick, Anne and Margot were sent to Bergen-Belsen. Mrs. Frank was left alone at Aushowitz. She died soon after. To put it simply, she was strucken with grief. Bergen-Belsen also housed Anne's frien...
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.
“A typical concentration camp consisted of barracks that were secured from escape by barbed wire, watchtowers and guards. The inmates usually lived in overcrowded barracks and slept in bunk “beds”. In the forced labour camps, for
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
For those who survived the unimaginable experiences from concentration camps have come out with extraordinary stories to tell. These survivors share their stories through abundant amounts of literature ranging from diaries, novels, and documentaries. Their testimonies allow us to know the truth and what really occurred behind closed doors; history was developed. The book called The Survivor by Terrence Des Pres describes stories of what men and women had to endure while being held in a Nazi concentration camp. The world to which “survivors speak is very much a part of their condition as witnesses. They speak for someone, but also to someone, and the response the evoke is integral to the act they perform” (Pres 41). Holocaust survivor Viktor E. Frankl describes a time where he would be laying in his bunk while overhearing another prisoner having a nightmare but wouldn’t wake them up because “he knew that no matter how bad the dream might be, the reality was worse” (75).
No other place has there been a pressure so large on a group of people to change and the entirety of the people resisted than the concentration camps of the holocaust. An excellent account of a life lived in the concentration camps is the novel “Survival in Auschwitz” by Primo Levi. This novel tells the story of an Italian chemist, who is Jewish, that is captured by the Germans while he is helping a resistance force. After his capture he is sent to Auschwitz ran by the S.S., the most brutal concentration camp of the holocaust. In his first day there he spouts one of the most influential quotes, “Man is bound to pursue his own ends by all possible means, while he who errs but once pays dearly." (1.3) The camp was all about survival, all he worked for, all he gave up, and all the things he had to do to survive in the camp, he did for the small shred of hope that if he survives he would make it out of that god forsaken hell hole. The ideological pressure of the world was telling Levi to give up, there was no hope in trying, just die; but, Levi saw that hint of hope and without a thought, his mind and body latches onto that small strand of hope and never let
The overall goal of correctional facilities can be broken down into three main functions which are retribution, deterrence, and rehabilitation of the inmates. Today, there is much debate on rather private or public prison admiration is best to suit those goals. In a private prison the inmates are contracted out to a third party from either local, state, or federal government agencies (Smith 2012). Public prisons are where the government themselves house and supply the inmate’s basic needs with no third party involved. However, a large portion of the argument of private verses public prisons is over, which is best in achieving those goals more efficiently.
Dachau and its sub camps were awful places in general, but living as a prisoner in these camps was even worse, just as the marches were. The physical characteristics that made up Dachau and its sub camps were horrifying. The prisoners that had to face the extreme conditions of camps were certainly not oblivious to everything that was happening. Marches were a significant part of prisoners’ lives during the later parts of World War II. Lives of prisoners during World War II were horrendous throughout. This was the life Max most likely endured after he left th...
for youngsters who have a long history of convictions for less serious felonies for which the juvenile court disposition has not been effective” (qtd. in Katel).
For most people, survival is just a matter of putting food on the table, making sure that the house payment is in on time, and remembering to put on that big winter coat. Prisoners in the holocaust did not have to worry about such things. Their food, cloths, and shelter were all provided for them. Unfortunately, there was never enough food, never sufficient shelter, and the cloths were never good enough. The methods of survival portrayed in the novels Maus by Art Spieglmen and Night by Elie Wiesel are distinctly different, but undeniably similar.