Personal Narrative: Becoming A Holocaust Survivor

On January 3, 2009 around 11:00 PM the phone rang with what I thought was exciting news about my newly born sister, Tristyn ,but quickly turned to horror. I could heard the fright in my dad's shaken voice as he told me Tristyn had to go into immediate heart surgery because she needed a stent to open up the blood flow to her heart. Being eight at the time the only thing I could think about was how she might not make it. My dad said to me “look after your sisters, and tell them nothing about the surgery”, which terrified me more than before. I knew I needed to be brave and take charge of the situations for my sisters. Bravery is something I learned for a situation I never knew would happen.

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

I am and SS officer. I was stationed at Auschwitz. More Jews were coming in every day. There were eighty to a cattle cart. There were so many families that had to go separate ways from one another. I had killed mothers and the babies and weakest of the men that couldn’t work. It was horrible, I do say. If I could say no I would never do it again. I loved my country and Hitler at the time, so I was willing to do whatever it took to get noticed. I was then stationed at a woman’s concentration camp. They all had gotten shaved, had no gold teeth, and had had tattoos on their arms. It was their identification code. They were so skinny it was just skin stuck to the bones. They looked like corpses, but alive. I wonder how many died soon after.

The concentration camps from World War II are part of a painful and tragic incident that we have learned about in school for many years. And while we are taught the facts, we may not fully understand the emotional impact it had upon the humans involved. Upon reading Night by Elie Wiesel, readers are given vivid descriptions of the gruesome and tragic behaviors that the Jews were forced to endure inside he treacherous concentration camps. Among all of the cruelties that the Jews were exposed to, a very significant form of the callous behaviors was the demoralization of the prisoners. Each inmate was given a tattoo of a number, and that tattoo became their new identity within the camp. Every prisoner was presented with tattered uniforms that became

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

The officers scream, “Faster you tramps, you flea-ridden dogs…”(Wiesel 85). As the prisoners run themselves sick, the officers are shouting invective statements to them. The Jews are treated as if they are animals, but they do not care, they cannot do anything about it. They can not escape the camp. They are trapped like animals inside the brutal entrapments. With the SS officers dehumanizing the Jews by treating them like property, the Jews begin to lose hope to ever get out. Once they become a prisoner, mentally, they are a prisoner for

There are lots of books about the Holocaust, and what it was like to be in a concentration camp as a Jew, or what it was like being an SS officer during that time, but barely any focus on what is was like to grow up in the Holocaust as a civilian onlooker to the war. In The Book Thief by Markus Zusak he tells the story of Liesel Meminger who travels to a foster home in Munich Germany, and experiences what it’s like to live in a war. She deals with rations, knowledge limited to the learnings of what Hitler wants the children to know, survival of the fittest, and the reality of death around her. With the Hubermann family, and her best friend Rudy, Markus takes us on a journey that shows that life as a child in Nazi Germany is difficult when

My father said I was safe here in Paris. But after the Nazis came, nobody was safe. I am the youngest of three children in my Jewish family. My Polish father was a former officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army, which is amazing. I grew up speaking French just like my sisters did. Mom says it’s safer in Paris than in the poor town she grew up in. But everyone on the street just stares at me as if I were a curse. I tried to talk to them but they wouldn’t listen. I would have told my parents about how the people looked at me if I had the courage; I was too embarrassed. The school that I went to was special, funded by the Rothschild family, my parents said. My dad reassured us by telling me that we would be safe away

The guards were responsible for medical help and starvation. The survival time span in less than two months. They were forced to work on hitler's underground. They didn't feed the prisoners during the winter.

One of the many important and most memorable incidents of World War Two would be the Holocaust. During the Holocaust, the Germans who were known as the Nazis, considered the Jews to be “enemy aliens”. As part of this, the Nazis thought that “Aryans” were a master race. Therefore, they decided to destroy the Jewish race, and created genocide. The Jews were put into unbearable torture at many concentration and death camps. In fact, 6 million Jews were killed in this incident; however, there were many victims who survived this anguish. One of the many survivors was Simon Wiesenthal, who survived the Nazi death camps and began his career as a Nazi hunter.

In the article, it states, “Inmates were always hungry.  Food consisted of watery soup made with rotten vegetables and meat, a few ounces of bread, a bit of margarine, tea, or a bitter drink resembling coffee.  Diarrhea was common.  People weakened by dehydration and hunger fell easy victim to the contagious diseases that spread throughout the camp”(17-18).  The Nazis built suffering into Auschwitz by giving their prisoners very little food, and starving them.  By starving, they purposely tortured the prisoners by making them starve and turn on each other, taking away their trust, and making them become very sick, and wish to be dead.  Lastly, the work given to the prisoners in Auschwitz Birkenau caused them to die from exhaustion and they would be worked until they died.  Many prisoners were worked to death and died of natural causes.  If any of them were too weak or ill to be working, then they would be murdered in the gas chambers.  In the article, it states, “Some inmates worked as forced laborers inside the camp, in the kitchen, or as barbers, for example.  Women often sorted the piles of shoes, clothes, and other prisoner belongings…  Those who were too ill or too weak to work were condemned to death in the gas

The necessity for “increased utilization of female labor contradicted the image of women as childbearer and mainstay of the family,” and the German need to maintain this backwards social policy, necessitated the hesitant continuation of foreign labor. As the Nazis gained more territory, they often had procedures in place to utilize prisoners-of-war in order to fuel German wartime industry. Herbert explains that throughout the height of German dominance over the European continent, “the regime invested considerable efforts in bringing more and more mass transports of laborers to Germany” especially from more eastern states (pg. 150-151). As the war began to turn against the Germans, the horrible conditions prisoners-of-war generally lived in degraded even more. By 1943, living conditions in eastern camps had degraded to the a point where the “mere theft of a few potatoes, [meant] hungry eastern workers [were] executed in extremely brutal fashion” (pg. 168-179). Many foreign workers desperately attempted to escape the unlivable conditions of German labor camps, with 33,000 foreign workers per month bolting out of the German clutches (pg. 180-181). German dependance on foreign labor during both the rearmament and the intra-war periods, as well as their resistance to amend

-Glenn Meade What would you do if you were drug out of your home, put in a camp and forced to either work or die? What would your life be like? In concentration camps, even the slightest disobeying of the very strict rules could get a prisoner killed, or tortured. Even the children were punished, and sometimes for no reason at all. The everyday routine in these prisons was hard and brutal, with severe suffering every day.

Within a few hours we became brutally aware of reality: the forced labor, the experimental operations on young girls, the transport noirs, individual and mass executions, the ill being, “put out of their misery,”, the dogs, the beatings, and the gas chambers (Tillion p.5). Ravensbruck was torture and misery for every living soul in the camp, no matter which nationality or religion. The labor concentration camp was a living nightmare for the females that were kept there to be used as slaves or guinea pigs.

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