Book Review: I Am David Very Much Reflects Gulag Life

In both Elie Wiesel’s, Night and the excerpt from Rudolf Vrba’s, I escaped from Auschwitz, a sense of desolation and callousness loomed throughout each biography. The figurative language and diction in each autobiography illustrate the camps to be horrific and dismal. Wiesel’s creates a powerful tone of despair through vividly harrowing imagery. When describing the conditions of the camp prison life, Wiesel uses exaggerated painful imagery to produce the atrocious experience, and create the hopeless tone. To express the weather was cold and fierce Eliezer claimed the “glacial wind lashed us like a whip”(Wiesel 77).

They were only fed “eight hundred calories” (Document B). Starvation is a very physically demanding torture method, especially if you are working from sun up to sun down with very physically demanding labor. Because your body isn't getting enough energy from food, it essentially starts eating you from the inside out. It is dangerous if left untreated and many prisoners die from it. Another physically torturous thing they did was when they were doing something called, “Zeile Appell “, which was from the poem “Saving the Children” by “Frieda Singer”, which was a roll call in a camp that was called Theresienstadt Concentration Camp.

While in these camps, the prisoners were treated like dogs. They were punished harshly, sometimes without reason. Weisel uses imagery to help us imagine how brutal these beatings were. When Weisel saw his Kapo with a young Polish girl, he was whipped publicly twenty five times. The Kapo said, “An ordinary inmate does not have the right to mix into other people's affairs. One of you does not seem to have understood this point. I shall therefore try to make him understand clearly, once and for all." (Pg 57) This same Kapo also beat Weisel in order to release pent up aggression, seen when Weisel says, "One day when Idek was venting his fury, I happened to cross his path. He threw himself on me like a wild beast, beating me in the chest, on my head, throwing me to the ground and picking me up again, crushing me with ever more violent blows, until I was covered in blood." (Pg 53) Along with having to deal with these cold hearted beatings, the prisoners were also malnourished and starving. Food was scarce, and what little food there was to be rationed was inadequate in the face of the hard labor they were forced to do. In one example, the prisoners were forced to run to an abandoned village, away from their camp and the approaching Russians. Anyone who fell behind or stopped running was either shot or simply trampled by the other prisoners. With these conditions, death seemed

What torture is so horrible that death becomes a dream? Night, a spine-chilling memoir, is about a young Jewish boy and his survival in the Holocaust. The author Elie Wiesel was one of the many Jews who were sent to concentration camps and one of the very few who left. Survival is an idea we don’t often think about, but people in concentration camps can only think about their survival. His accounts throughout the memoir show that true survival isn’t just meeting your basic needs, it is something much more difficult and demanding to “truly achieve”.

In fact, the lack of providing nutrition to Jews caused individual disruption: “At that moment in time, all that mattered to me was my daily bowl of soup, my crust of stale bread. The bread, the soup- those were my entire life” (Wiesel 52). The desperation was penetrating as each soul depended on the small rations of food given in the concentration camps. The admiration of an extra ration was something that all Jews longed for. In any case, they would do anything in order to receive a wholeness of satisfaction. Furthermore, starvation destroyed each individual: “I was nothing but a body, perhaps even less: a famished stomach. The stomach alone was measuring time” (Wiesel 52). The Jews were forced to think that they had no other choice but to rely on the support and hospitality of the Nazis. Their only motive to live was under the fear of death and the unknown. Unsatisfying nutrition breached each individual and made them desperate for change, which often led to their brutal

This is one of the first situations in the book that exemplifies going through a hard time. In this case the concentration camps, can change who you are as a person even after you have already developed your own

One of the most brutal mistakes made by Stalin was the creation of a GULAG. It is difficult to give a precise characterization of its purpose. The aim of this work is to answer the question, “Can we generalize why certain people were able to survive the Gulag more than others?” To survive the Gulag, many prisoners had to fight with others for food, shelter, and simple medical care. Certain prisoners went into religious and intellectual meditations to preserve at least the appearance of intelligence. The survival required willpower, strength of mind, skills, mercilessness, and a lot of luck.

Wiesel talks about how as the days go on they continue to work very hard, yet the amount and quality of the food that they are given decreases. He says “We went to work as usual, loading heavy stones into railway wagons. Rations had become even more meager” (Wiesel). The prisoners are doing very strenuous work that surely takes a lot of energy, but the people are not being fed enough to sustain this lifestyle. Later in the passage, Wiesel mentions some other conditions that the prisoners endured during their time at the camp. “We had risen before dawn, as on every day,” he stated, “We had received the black coffee, the ration of bread. We were about to set out for the yard as usual” (Wiesel). This is not a healthy way of living, especially with all the hard work that these people were doing. These horrible conditions that the people lived in while at the camp is an example of dehumanization in its purist. By forcing the people to do strenuous, physical labor against their will shows that the guards do not care about the well being of the people. By not properly nourishing them it shows that they did not care if the people suffered and died, which takes away the prisoner’s sense of personal identity and morality. Many guards did not even think of the prisoners as people. To them, they were just animals that were there to work for them, similar to

According to Hilberg, concentration entailed the segregation of the Jewish community from the rest of the population. Their economic ties would as well be cut or restricted. Concentration entailed the containment of the Jews in special houses where they lived in poor conditions to prove to them that they had been subordinated. The concentration was also another tool used to engage them in forced labor leaving them under the control of the Nazi who controlled the manner in which food would get into the concentration camps. Completely cut off from the society and without money, the Jews were now defenseless and at the mercy of the Nazis. Spiegelman account had it that the Jewish prisoners would be forced to live in tents in the autumn cold weather feeding on crusts of bread. The Polish prisoners were better placed in heated cabins and were assured of two meals per day. Vladek had been put in the concentration camp after killing a German soldier whom he was forced to carry for burial. Although it was cold, Vladek would go to the river to bathe as a control measure to the lice that were making the life at the camps to be difficult. Vladek was, however, hopeful that he would leave the camp that was characterized with forced hard labor that could be equated to flattening mountains. In a dream, he dreamt with his grandfather who told him there could be chances of getting released in the day

     The prisoners are further degraded because they simply do not have enough to eat. They become very haggardly and often have difficulty in judging each other?s age. Acquisition of a sufficient amount of food becomes a daily struggle, and for those who do not rise to the occasion ultimately parish. After a certain time period, it is impossible to survive unless you become an ?Organisator, Kombinator, or a Prominent? (Levi, 89). Levi writes, ?We have learnt the value of food; now we also diligently scrape the bottom of the bowl after the ration and we hold it under our chins when we eat bread so as not to lose the crumbs? (Levi, 33). A prisoner could only survive on a normal ration for around 3 months at best. Starving to death was not the main reason to acquire an adequate amount of food. The selections had to be avoided. If a prisoner was too weak to work, he was destined for the gas chambers.

Were it a testimony to the rigors and cruelness of human nature, it would be crushing. As it is, it shatters our perception of man and ourselves as no other book, besides perhaps Anne Franke`s diary and the testimony of Elie Wiesl, could ever have done. The prisoners of the labor camp, as in Shukhov?s predicament, were required to behave as Soviets or face severe punishment. In an almost satirical tone Buinovsky exclaims to the squadron that ?You?re not behaving like Soviet People,? and went on saying, ?You?re not behaving like communist.? (28) This type of internal monologue clearly persuades a tone of aggravation and sarcasm directly associated to the oppression?s of communism.

When they arrived at the camps they all had to shave or cut their hair, switch their clothes out and completely get rid of their human dignity. According http://www.theholocaustexplained.org/ks3/the-camps/daily-life/journeys/#.Wc5La0t97rd their daily routine consisted of waking up early then they did Appell, which is roll call. During roll call they had to stand in rows for hours, without moving, and in all weather. For breakfast, they drank coffee or herbal tea, for lunch they ate watery soup and if they were lucky, they could have turnip or a potato peel, then for dinner they ate a piece of black bread, a small piece of sausage, and some marmalade or cheese.

In the prison camps the food and water they ate and drank were full of waste and were not nutritious. For food they ate pickled beef, salt pork, corn meal, rice and bean soup. People in general need fruits and veggies and prisoners

The feeding of the prisoners was a major issue in the concentration camps during the holocaust. The jewish prisoners were fed three times a day in the concentration camps, those three times were morning, noon, and evening. (living conditions, labor and executions) It wasn’t the amount of food given a day that was an issue the nutritional value that the Nazis had for the concentration camps. (living conditions, labor and executions) When the Nazis would feed the prisoners they gave the less physically demanding workers one thousand three hundred calories per day and gave the ones who engaged in hard labor one thousand seven hundred calories per day. (living conditions, labor and executions) This was an issue because after several weeks on such starvation in the camps, most prisoners began to experience what is called organic deterioration that led to the well known “Muzulman” state. (living conditions, labor and executions) This was when the prisoners ended being so tiny, extreme physical exhaustion, and soon ended up in death. (living conditions, labor and executions) In march 31, 1942 the WVHA established a minimum working day of 11 hour in all concentration camps. Labor in some concentration camps was the way of destroying prisoners, they worked them until they died. (living conditions, labor and executions) The prisoners usually labored in various sectors of

The conditions of the camp were unbearable. The prisoners were barely fed, mainly bread and water, and were cramped in small sleeping arrangements. "Hundreds slept in triple-tiered rows of bunks (Adler 51)." In the quarters that they stayed, there were no adequate cleaning facilities or restrooms for the prisoners. They rarely were able to change clothes which meant the "clothes were always infested with lice (Swiebocka 18)." Those were sick went to the infirmary where also there were eventually killed in the gas chambers or a lethal injection. The Germans did not want to have anyone not capable of hard work to live. Prisoners were also harshly punished for small things such as taking food or "relieving themselves during work hours (Swiebocka 19)." The biggest punishment was execution. The most common punishment was to receive lashings with a whip.