“Nobody can know for how long and under what trials his soul can resist before yielding or breaking.” This quote from Primo Levi eloquently describes how it is impossible to know how people would have reacted during the Holocaust and how much pain they could stand. Among the millions of Jewish people killed, there was a special unit of prisoners, the Sonderkommando, that were forced to witness and aid in the extermination of their people. At the time many people thought the Sonderkommando were accomplices in the murder and that they willingly participated in the acts, however, they were just as tortured as the people who were killed. The Sonderkommando had to engage in horrific acts in the extermination camps such as cremating the bodies or burying them in mass graves which berated them till the point that they were shells of their former selves, but they never stopped fighting.
When the Germans declared their dominance over the Jewish race and put them into ghettos and concentration camps it became very evident to them that if they were going
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Some of the men were stationed in the undressing room while others were working at the crematoriums. None of these men were prepared to see the happenings at any point in the extermination camp. Each station had its own trials, emotionally and physically, that the Sonderkommando had to go through everyday. The first group was put in the undressing room and this might seem like the best place to be but truly it was one of the hardest. These men had to watch people from their homes come through and not be able to warn them about what was about to happen in fear that a mass hysteria would ensue. Once they continued onto the gas chambers, this group also had to collect all of the clothes that were left behind. They also were the last ones to see many of these people alive which taxed on them
In the book Night by Elie Wiesel, it talks about the holocaust and what it was like being in it. The Germans were trying to make the German race the supreme race. To do this they were going to kill off everyone that wasn’t a German. If you were Jewish or something other than German, you would have been sent to a concentration camp and segregated by men and women. If you weren’t strong enough you were sent to the crematory to be cremated. If you were strong enough you were sent to work at a labor camp. With all the warnings the Jewish people had numerous chances to run from the Germans, but most ignored the warnings.
Activities in the concentration camp struck fear within the hearts of the people who witnessed them, which led to one conclusion, people denied the Holocaust. Nazis showed no mercy to anybody, including helpless babies. “The Nazis were considered men of steel, which means they show no emotion” (Langer 9). S.S. threw babies and small children into a furnace (Wiesel 28). These activities show the heartless personality of the Nazis. The people had two options, either to do what the S.S. told them to do or to die with everyone related to them. A golden rule that the Nazis followed stated if an individual lagged, the people who surrounded him would get in trouble (Langer 5). “Are you crazy? We were told to stand. Do you want us all in trouble?”(Wiesel 38). S.S guards struck fear in their hostages, which means they will obey without questioning what the Nazis told them to do due to their fear of death. Sometimes, S.S. would punish the Jews for their own sin, but would not explain their sin to the other Jews. For example, Idek punished Wiesel f...
Jews were constantly persecuted before the Holocaust because they were deemed racially inferior. During the 1930’s, the Nazis sent thousands of Jews to concentration camps. Hitler wanted to
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.
In looking back upon his experience in Auschwitz, Primo Levi wrote in 1988: ?It is naïve, absurd, and historically false to believe that an infernal system such as National Socialism (Nazism) sanctifies its victims. On the contrary, it degrades them, it makes them resemble itself.? (Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, 40). The victims of National Socialism in Levi?s book are clearly the Jewish Haftlings. Survival in Auschwitz, a book written by Levi after he was liberated from the camp, clearly makes a case that the majority of the Jews in the lager were stripped of their human dignity. The Jewish prisoners not only went through a physical hell, but they were psychologically driven under as well. Levi writes, ??the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts? We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death?? (Levi, 41). One would be hard pressed to find passages in Survival in Auschwitz that portray victims of the camp as being martyrs. The treatment of the Jews in the book explicitly spells out the dehumanization to which they were subjected. It is important to look at how the Jews were degraded in the camp, and then examine whether or not they came to embody National Socialism after this.
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...
The word Holocaust comes from the Greek language, and is a word that was used to identify a terrifying event that took place in our history, A time we will never forget. During this time period people were burnt and cast into fire. This word is almost a synonym to “death”. A very shocking moment in people’s lives is when they were children and they live during the Holocaust. Children in the holocaust were beaten, tortured and killed in either a concentration camp or death camp. If they did survive they would have died of hard labor, starvation or diseases that were spread in camps. Even though the time of the Holocaust happened in the past, however everything is not as simple as it seems from the first sight.
Living conditions in these camps were absolutely horrible. The amount of people being kept in one space, amongst being unsanitary, was harsh on the body.
As early as age thirteen, we start learning about the Holocaust in classrooms and in textbooks. We learn that in the 1940s, the German Nazi party (led by Adolph Hitler) intentionally performed a mass genocide in order to try to breed a perfect population of human beings. Jews were the first peoples to be put into ghettos and eventually sent by train to concentration camps like Auschwitz and Buchenwald. At these places, each person was separated from their families and given a number. In essence, these people were no longer people at all; they were machines. An estimation of six million deaths resulting from the Holocaust has been recorded and is mourned by descendants of these people every day. There are, however, some individuals who claim that this horrific event never took place.
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
The death camps were mentally inhumane on the prisoners; especially during the first few days because most inmates had some to all of their family taken away and killed. The camps tore families apart and people watched as their loved ones left to be killed. Elie Wiesel talks about the last time he saw his mother and sister and how when he left the train he and the others were forced into groups with, “‘Men to the left! Women to the right’ Eight words spoken quietly in differently, without emotion. Eight simple short words, yet that was the moment when I left my ...
In analyzing the stories which survivors of the concentration camps and their perpetrators have put forth as historical evidence supporting the findings of scholars, one must pose the question: where does fact end and emotional distortion of the subject begin? It is critical to approach this question with great care, so as to note that not all historical accounts of the Holocaust by survivors and perpetrators are laden with emotional input and a multilayered interpretation of the event. In her acclaimed article “Memory, Distortion, and History in the...
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
There is no doubt that the Holocaust is one of the best remembered and most studied genocides in human history. There are very few who would be puzzled by the mention of the Holocaust in today’s world as it’s impacts have been immense and lasting. Many lives were lost during this time, and many atrocities occurred- torture and persecution were pushed past the boundaries of most people’s imaginations. Throughout modern history, the Holocaust has been documented over and over again as the worst genocide- and perhaps even the worst crime- in human history. Many historians have even said it was a unique occurrence that is unparalleled by other crimes in human history. This being said, it is not difficult to argue this statement when observing and analyzing the many components of the Holocaust and of other horrible crimes that have happened.
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.