The Torturous Journey

To begin with, a single railway car weighed between 10-15 tons (“The Holocaust”), the total length of a single car was thirty one feet or 9.6 meters. Inside, the length of the floor was approximately twenty six feet and two inches long (or eight meters). The height of the train from the bottom of a rail wheel to the top of the railway car was fourteen feet (or 4.3 meter); however, the inside of the car, measured from the middle of the railway car, was only about seven feet and four inches or 2.2 meters. The width of a train car was about thirteen feet or 9.6 meter (“German Railways”).

The Torturous Journey Furthermore, the victims of the holocaust were told that they were being taken to larger labor camps and were forced onto railway cars.

People being transported suffered from extreme conditions, suffering from the heat of the summer and the biting cold from the winter. There was nothing but a bucket filled with water and sometimes a hole in the middle of the car, these were the only places where prisoners were able to relieve themselves. However, with so many people in just one train car, it was almost impossible to make your way to the bucket to relieve yourself which caused most people to soil their clothes. Almost half of the people held in each car died at the end of their journey. Furthermore, a transport from the Greek island of Corfu to Aushwitz-`Birkenau lasted about eighteen days. When the train finally arrived at the camp, the guards opened up the railway cars and found everyone dead of either starvation, dehydration, or suffocation

The word “evacuated” was used instead to hide the prisoners in oblivion and not cause any panic. More than 1,500 trains were organized and used to transport their human loads to concentration camps (“The Holocaust Museum”). However, there was about forty-four parallel tracks that led to the Auschwitz station alone. Many of the young, sick, disabled, or elderly prisoners were the first to die from the disgusting and inhumane conditions inside the cars (“Deportation and Transportation”). “The S.S killing squads could not deal with individually murdering so many people. So the Nazis began shipping victims off to more “efficient” death camps.” (“Deportation”) Unfortunately, many Jews and other targeted people that were transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau were murdered. Either from overwork, ill-treatment, diseases, or lack of food and water, eleven million people were killed. Unfortunately, 1.1 million of the 11 million were children and only 6 million were Jewish (“The