These camps were more than relocation camps. People died at these camps under extreme work conditions and being gassed. Survivors are proof that Jews were gassed and worked to death. Jews kept diaries and letters explaining the harsh conditions they were put under by the Nazis. Some survivors had family members or close friends that were gassed in the chambers. Deniers say that they died of natural causes or due to illnesses caused by being moved from their homeland. These illnesses were not just caused by being moved, but were also caused by poor living conditions they were kept in. Auschwitz was capable of holding 150,000 prisoners at a time, but was severely overpopulated with about 230,000 prisoners at once. People slept in feces and even sometimes dead bodies (Holocaust
World War II (WWII) began September 3, 1939 and Concentration camps began in 1933 (Concentration camps.) Concentration camps are camps, mostly Jews and they are made to work and very little food is given to them, also the Jews live in sheds with other people of the same gender (Concentration Camps.) Auschwitz opened in 1940 it was the only largest Nazi concentration camps, death camps in Southern Poland (History Staff.) Also, in the article was about Josef Mengele did medical experiments (History Staff.) In the book Auschwitz by Dr. Miklos Nyiszli was about a doctor who did “Scientific Research” on the prisoners and was very few of the workers who were able to get out of the gas chambers and survived the Holocaust (Nyiszli.) For example Dr. Miklos Nyiszli was one few that was an assistant to Dr. Josef Mengele (Nyiszli.) Surviving a concentration camp was difficult for people and only one option was to stay alive and fight.
6.5 million Jews were sent to concentration camps during the holocaust. Jews were put through a lot during the holocaust, from the time they got picked up to the time they were brutally killed. The holocaust has to be the most horrific and cruel true story known to man. The Nazis had no heart or sympathy for the Jews. The Nazis thought and felt they were better than the Jews and that they were a disgrace to mother earth. Germans put the Jews through Hell and back. The stages of the holocaust was that the Jews would be picked up, then sent to the ghettos, then lastly to the concentration camp to be tortured and/or killed
Eighteen million Europeans went through the Nazi concentration camps. Eleven million of them died, almost half of them at Auschwitz alone.1 Concentration camps are a revolting and embarrassing part of the world’s history. There is no doubt that concentration camps are a dark and depressing topic. Despite this, it is a subject that needs to be brought out into the open. The world needs to be educated on the tragedies of the concentration camps to prevent the reoccurrence of the Holocaust. Hitler’s camps imprisoned, tortured, and killed millions of Jews for over five years. Life in the Nazi concentration camps was full of terror and death for its individual prisoners as well as the entire Jewish society.
At first the concentration camps were advertised and the Jewish race could go there if they wanted. The advertisements that were displayed were merely illusions. They appeared to be great places, but in reality, they were terrible. The advertisements showed jobs and a lovely community. There were also showings of a bunch of recreational activities for families, children, and adults. The place was too good to be true.
When a person's faith is also an alternative for their culture and morals, it proves challenging to take that sense of security in that faith away from them. In Night, Elie Wiesel, a Jewish student living in Sighet, Transylvania during the war of 1942, uses his studies in Talmud and the Kabbalah as not only a religious practice but a lifestyle. Elie and his fellow civilians are warned, however, by his Kabbalah teacher who says that during the war, German aggressors are aggregately imprisoning, deporting, and annihilating millions of Jews. When Elie and his family are victim of this aggression, Elie realizes how crucial his faith in God is if he is to survive the Holocaust. He vows after being separated from his mother and sisters that he will protect he and his father from death, even though as death nears, Elie gradually becomes closer to losing his faith. In the end, to Elie's devastation, Elie makes it out of the Holocaust alone after his father dies from the intense seclusion to malnutrition and deprivation. Elie survives the Holocaust through a battle of conscience--first by believing in God, then resisting his faith in God, and ultimately replacing his faith with obligation to his father.
One of the best sources of information about the Holocaust is from someone who survived it, and we were lucky enough to hear 103 year-old Marko Feingold speak in Salzburg, Austria. The theme of his story was faith, and that eventually good people will be rewarded for their actions. I found an interview with him from 2012 where he describes his story in more detail. Marko was born in Vienna and moved with his brother to Italy in 1932, but was arrested by the Nazis in 1938 while he was visiting his family (Treves-Tchelet). He was weakened by the hard labor and was deemed unfit for work (Treves-Tchelet). He would have been killed by the gas chambers, but the chambers were not built yet and he had to get sent to Dachau and eventually to Buchenwald
After reading the short story Ten Hours I found many differences and similarities to real life Concentration Camps, but first, if you don’t know about history research shows that you will be “Lost in Time.” As we all know Concentration Camps started in between 1933 and 1945, Also in the short story Ten Hours it takes place in 1942.
In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, as in the holocaust, evil trumps all good. According to Dictionary.com, the definition of evil is “morally bad or wrong.” The entire book consists of events that are morally bad or wrong, so much so that it hides the little bit of good that can be found. Most of the evil comes from the Nazis, who treat the Jews inhumanely. No one should be treated the way they were treated, which is practically the definition of evil.
A few people survived the concentration camps. It was never promised they will see their family again. Most families were split up when they were taken away to the concentration camps. Some camps were split up by gender. They didn’t care if you were married or if you had kids. If you had kids under 12 years old you weren’t going to see them again because kids were automatically sent to death chambers.
In 1933 the first concentration camps were formed almost immediately after Hitler became Chancellor and was control given of the police through Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick and Prussian Acting Interior Minister Hermann Goring. Used to torture captured enemies, these “camps” held about 45000 people until the 1933 when they were greatly due to the Reichstag fire in the same year. Only around 3000 prisoners remained in the camps when Heinrich Himmler took full control of the police and started using the camps to torture the “racially undesirable elements” such as prisoners, Jews, homosexuals, and many other people groups. In the World War 2 time period, the numbers of camps exploded to more than 300, as many of the “undesirable elements” were mass-incarcerated, generally without judicial process.
Jews way of living while in a concentration camp was a harsh time. They died of many different causes. For example: Starvation, Diseases, gas chamber, shot, burned to death, beat to death, or put to working hard labor. Some lived without the knowing of what was happening to their family members because they were at a different camp. For a fact, every jew lived in fear while they were locked up at a camp. They never knew when there time was to come. The more they showed fear the more harsh the Nazis
The Nazis did not want people in the Concentration Camps with bad behavior because they could most certainly cause some type of riot. People with a bad attitude were most likely killed in the gas chambers right away to prevent them from hurting other people, starting riots against other parts of the Concentration Camps, and breaking out in fights over nothing. Some people were killed too because of the way they looked. Overweight people killed too because they would just slow down most of the work in the Concentration Camps and Death Camps (“Downing”).
“Concentration camps (Konzentrationslager; abbreviated as KL or KZ) were an integral feature of the regime in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945. The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy” (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum).
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...