Concentration Camp Torture

According to the texts and eyewitness accounts, the Holocaust had horrendous effects on the people who lived through it. During this time Jews were being rounded up and put into concentration camps by order of the German government. Writings and testimonies from survivors of the Holocaust are around even to this day. According to these sources, Holocaust survivors suffered tremendously since they were treated as less than human , they lost loved ones, and were constantly abused.

During this time, the people of Germany were trained to believe that there are other human beings that were of lesser quality than them. People like Adolf Hitler, wanted all the Jews eradicated. He was able to convince enough people that Jewish people are to blame for Germany’s loss of World War I. Hitler enlisted the help of men from Germany to help persecute all the Jewish people. The Jews got treated like their life was worthless and insignificant compared to the Christian Germans. The discrimination done to the Jewish people was more than just simple acts of violence. The Germans truly believed that the Jews deserved this punishment. The dehumanization done during the Holocaust affected the life of many people. One life in particular is Eliezer Wiesel. In his frightening novel Night, Eliezer Wiesel shows how the Nazis degraded millions of innocent people. He shares his experiences in a Jewish death camp called, Auschwitz. In this best selling novel he tells how he was demoralized into something that was less than human. He did not even recognize himself by the end of his journey. “When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy… Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion or political views, that place must-- at that moment-- become the center of the universe” (Nobel Peace Prize). Through his book and his participation in the Jewish community he wants to ensure that

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

Have you ever heard of the nasty, disgusting, and horrible conditions that jews had to suffer with in concentration camps during the Holocaust? Lice and fleas are a big part of conditions in concentration camps, another horrible condition in the camps are diseases and sanitation, lastly another awful condition in concentration camps is mass murder and starvation. Many people died in concentration camps during the Holocaust because of the environment the jews had to live in and deal with, and many families were split and torn apart because loved ones of theirs had died because of the horrible conditions in the camps.

The Jews had been starved while being detained in forced labor camp. Those who weren’t fit to work were killed and cremated. The most eye-opening description of the Jewish peoples’ state in the concentration camp came at the very end of the book. After being freed, Wiesel looked in a mirror for the first since his arrival at the camp. Wiesel described his reflection as a “corpse” and stated “the look in his eyes… has never left me.” (Wiesel 115). Not only had the Nazis carried out a brutal campaign on the Jews’ physical being, but they had also infiltrated deep into their psyche. Upon arrival at camps, all Jews’ were forced to hand over all of their clothes and wearing matching uniforms. After that, the prisoners’ were sent to the barber. Wiesel described the process, stating, “[The barbers’] clippers tore out our hair, shaved every hair on our bodies.” (Wiesel 35). After this process, every Jew was tattooed with a number. This process lead to the ego-death of every prisoner. They were no longer people: they were numbers. Nothing differentiated one Jew from another, besides the numbers tattooed on them. This horrendous act could only be classified as psychological torture, carried out by monsters who had lost control of their own

In the mid 1930s heading into the the mid 1940s, The Nazis created harsh living conditions for Jews living in Europe. The Nazis, lead by Adolf Hitler, were an right wing group that took control of Germany and eventually expanded to the other European countries around them including Poland and Austria. Using the Nuremberg laws in 1935, the Nazis began removing Jewish people from everyday society. Four years later in 1939, Jews were forced to live in Ghettos that were overcrowded and barely maintained. Not long after in 1945, The “final solution” was implemented. Innocent Jewish men, women and children were shipped in train cars to Concentration camps. The conditions in these train cars were brutal. Passengers would go days without water, food

Over the course of history, many people from many nations dehumanized the Jews. In the book Night, Jews were treated as if they were not humans. When Dr. Mengele sorts Wiesel and his father in Birkenau, Wiesel says that “[they] did not know, as yet, which was the better side, right or left, which road led to prison and which to the crematoria” (Wiesel 32). When being questioned by Dr. Mengele, he only asks only for his age, health, and profession to seek whether Wiesel would be a good candidate as a slave or should be exterminated immediately upon arrival in the crematorium. The doctor does not stop to consider that Wiesel is a human being. Throughout Europe, many Europeans refused to help Jews, in fact, more Germans killed Jews than saved them (Gutman and Schatzker 227-228). Hitler was not alone in massacring millions of Jews. Once the Nazi regime rose to power, their first step was to wipe out all traces of the Jewish nation (Gutman and Schatzker 39-40). After the Holocaust, anti-Semitism was nevertheless strong and many Jews did not want to return home. For example, Jews from Poland were still dealing with pogroms, such as the progrom in Kiele in 1946, where at least 42 Jews were killed (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). Jewish communities such as Lodge, Poland were destroyed. Homes that were not destroyed were stolen by neighbours and locals. Children that survived were often left orphaned and those who went into hiding did not remember their parents (The Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program). Because of the dehumanization Jews faced from leaders and fellow citizens,

According to article five of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights article five, “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” (United Nations Department of Public Information ). In the novel Night, Elie Wiesel narrates his story as a young Jewish boy during the Holocaust. The captured Jews were sent to concentration camps where they received the absolute worst forms of torture, abuse, and barbaric treatment. The diabolical treatment has clear physical effects, but it also ventilates psychological changes on those that are unfortunate enough to encounter it. However, these transfigurations to their complexion and righteousness cannot be accredited to the weakness of the Jewish adore, but rather to the remorseless treatment they received. Elie Wiesel, in his novel Night, exhibits the brutal torture and punishment he receives, in order to display just how horrendous the German Nazis’ dehumanization of the Jews was.

The merciless starvation was a constant factor at the concentration camps. The inmates received a daily ration of soup and bread, but that was it. They were also forced to work daily on these empty stomachs, as if the starvation wasn’t bad enough on it’s own. “The bell announced that we were dismissed. We went to fetch the evening meal: bread and margarine. I was terribly hungry and swallowed my ration on the spot. My father told me, “You mustn’t eat all at once. Tomorrow is another day…” This quote is a perfect example of relentless work and merciless starvation.

2. On page 12, the narration changes. Why might it be necessary for someone else to begin telling Janie’s story now?

Stealing everything they have, treating them like animals, and taking their lives. These are all examples of dehumanization that millions of Jews experienced during the Holocaust. The book, Night, by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, provides an overview of Elie’s experiences during the Holocaust, and there were a multitude of ways that Elie and his inmates were dehumanized. It all started in 1944, when Elie and his family were deported from their home in Sighet and taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp. When they arrived, they had to leave their possessions on the train and went into the concentration camp where all of his family except his father were murdered. Elie and his father were dehumanized even more by looking just like

Throughout time, Jewish communities have been treated with immense hate and exclusion from other cultures because no one accepted their religion. Coming to the time before WWII, events like Kristallnacht demonstrated the despise for Jews that dwelled inside the general population of Germany when the Germans went to Jewish houses and stores to burn and destroy them. In the course of WWII, they were harassed, abused, tortured and ruined, as all of their business stocks and assets were taken away. During the expanse of this horrific battle, Jews were forced to live in designated areas known as concentration camps where they had to overcome obstacles such as hunger, freezing temperatures, and the loss of precious family members. These camps were used to fulfill Hitler’s intent to annihilate the Jewish population from the face of the planet and this dangerous idea was called “purify the country”. In total, there were about 25 of these camps built where 6 million Jews died, including 1.5 million children. Auschwitz was a camp which was responsible for 1 million deaths alone, and this is the camp where Elie Wiesel was first sent to endure the hatred of the Nazis. This camp changed the way Elie Wiesel viewed the world because he saw and experienced things that will stayed with him forever. He was transformed into a new person who neglected his religion, failed to protect the one he held dear to him, and put his

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

Nazis put people in concentrations camps because Hitler hated certain types of people. A concentration camp is a small place where a large number of people are held where they have to work and they are murdered. This led to a big conflict and a mass murder. They lived in bad conditions like wooden stable barracks that were very uncomfortable and very crowded small areas. The Jews had very bad sleeping conditions too. At the concentration camps there were many sicknesses that killed people. They were starved and weak because they did not have enough to eat. Jewish people were killed in many different disgusting ways, if they didn’t die from sickness.

Night showed me the variety of everything, I learned the variety of different kinds of camps, different work stations, and different ways of torturing people. The camps mainly were work camps but Auschwitz was a death camp; you either are fit enough to work or you die. They ran 20km in freezing cold weather, the SS guards got tired out and were replaced before the Jewish people got a break.