Punishment In Terezín

What they did at the camps was not pleasant they would kill half the people there. If you were sick they would shoot you and leave you there to die. They made you work 24/7 at the camp Auschwitz (“Auschwitz”).

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.

The prisoners managed to survive physically by enduring labor with lots of tenacity. In the document, it states, “There the Jews are unloaded and examined for their fitness to work by a team of doctors, in the presence of the camp commandant and several SS officers. At this point anyone who can somehow be incorporated into the work program is put in a special camp” (Doc. A). This quote shows that those who appear fit to work

Although it was not the only concentration camp it was a place where they did experiments with a lot of the prisoners. For example they tried out medication to see the reactions, to see if salt water was drinkable. They also used gas chambers which they crowded as many inmates as they could fit in there tricking them they were going to be free as soon as they took a shower, but what it really did was intoxicate them with Zyklon-B and they died. Afterward there was not many to speak of what had happened so the rest really believed that they were going to become free. So many orders from a solder at one point a man jumped onto the electric fence to take away his life instead letting the solder humiliate him. When it had started to know what was happening in the camps they stopped it immediately the US liberated the Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1945 . They sent some death trains, Dachau had 141 trains that held 3,000 dead

Depending on the camp, prisoners were assigned different kinds of duties, where some stayed inside the camp, working on a variety of different jobs from administration task to heavy manual labor. Most of us worked outside in one of the many factories, construction projects, farms, or coal mines.

Jews were moved into concentration camps between 1930 and 1940 depending on when the camps opened and most were kept until death (Byers 26). The 1940 death camps were located mainly in Poland (“Concentration” par. 4). In these concentration camps men and women were worked too hard, beat, and killed by Nazis (Byers 23). Concentration camps were places used for torture and murder of men, women, and children (Byers 13). The Dachau concentration camp was located in the city of Dachau and was not used for criminals but for placing people in “protective custody” (Byers 23). The beds were made of wooden planks, had no light or heat, had small rations of food, and beat with clubs and wet towels (Byers 23). Anne Byers, author of The Holocaust Camps, stated, “Conditions were harsh and treatment was brutal” (Byers 23).

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

(UN) One of the most prevalent jobs that the residents were forced to do was to drag heavy blocks of stone about for 12 hours a day. (Weisel 66) Other laborious jobs done from morning until night were chopping logs in a forest, hauling rocks in a quarry, or working in a factory for the German war effort. (Slave Labor) By far one of the worst jobs, though, was being a worker in the crematories. This meant that for the whole day, the workers would throw bodies into the ovens and watch as they burnt to ash. (Weisel 33) These horrible, pointless jobs were aimed at degrading the residents with the harsh conditions, eventually leading them to

Their jobs depended on their nationality, how fit they were, and how loyal they were to the Nazi soldiers. “Within the camps, the Nazis established a hierarchical identification system. Prisoners with a higher social status within the camps were often rewarded with more desirable work assignments such as administrative positions indoors. Some, such as the kapos (work supervisors) or camp elders held the power of life and death over other prisoners” (Daily Life in Concentration Camps). If prisoners weren’t in that type of classification, they were given harsher and more demanding tasks. For those who were in such demanding assignments, they had a higher mortality rate. The higher the death rate, the happier the SS soldiers were for not having to kill them themselves and just have the other prisoners take care of the dead

The hospitals in Auschwitz were very inferior, and they were never clean. The people that were ahead of the hospitals and infirmaries oversaw the executions of Jews. Prisoners would say that they sat in overcrowded rooms in shirts darkened with filth. Most often they sat naked and lay on pads full of excrement, urine, and puss. Fleas and lice filled the hospital premises. In addition rats would gnaw on the limbs of the dead, and they attacked the weak or the ones that were unconscious. Patients received smaller rations than the ones working. The ones with fever would suffer torments of thirst. The prisoners that were likely to continue to work after a short time were treated better in hospitals. But the ones that were terminally ill to them they would act like they weren’t there. In 1943-44 the prisoners started to take care of the sick but their efforts quickly shot down, because the ones very sick they would be sent to die in the chambers. On July 28, 1941 a special commission sent 575 chronically ill, disabled, and elderly were sent to a mental institution to do a test with

Most of them worked 12 to 14 hours shift in the large quarry and later also harvested wood from the forest for the fuel which will be used for the open-air crematoria in Treblinka II. However, beginning in July 1942, Jews and non-Jews were separated, and women mainly worked in the sorting barracks while men worked at the gravel mine. (Deportation to and from the Warsaw Ghetto) They did not have work uniforms and if they lost shoes, then they were forced to work barefoot or scavenge them from dead prisoners, and the water was rationed. Due to this horrible condition, about half of them died there from exhaustion, hunger and

The overcrowding and the horrible hygienic conditions did not help stopping the spread of epidemic typhus. Lice was also a large problem in the camp that spread easily and tortured the prisoners. The doctors at the camp would compose medical experiments on Polish women where they would use them as guinea pigs to simulate battlefield wounds to the legs, or would inject them with sulfanilamide. Most of the women that were tested on were either killed in the process or murdered afterward, and the lucky ones who survived were severely crimped or scarred. Pregnant women who were in the camp either had abortions implemented on them or if they were Jewish, would be sent to the gas chambers.

The jobs of the Jews were appalling they worked for 12 plus hours then went "home" (which wasn’t really home it was cramped dilapidated place with many people living their) sleep and try to get food. If you were something higher in the hierarchical chain you got good jobs like a supervisor and got more food. Most of the jobs were in factories making synthetic rubber or mining all day. That is what the prisoners in the camps did in their day to day life. -https://www.ushmm.org/outreach/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007732

Auschwitz - Birkenau was a concentration camp built in nineteen forty controlled by the nazi party, built five months after germany invaded poland. The camp was selected to be used a death camp in february nineteen forty because of the location near another death camp called Birkenau. Auschwitz was intended to be a short term holding camp until the prisoners could be shipped to the gassing facility at nearby birkenau. “Although prisoners were supposed to be there for less than a month, in nineteen forty one the camp housed over eleven thousand prisoners, by the end of the year the camp housed around eighteen thousand prisoners.” ( Deem 7). The camp was run by Rudolf Hoss, the first commandant at Auschwitz. The camp had a gate in which new prisoners entered which bore a phrase “ Work will set you free”. In the beginning prisoners were instructed to run through the gates in groups of five and the ones who couldn’t keep up were shot.

The prisoners were put to work making radio equipment, flash lights, and stripping crashed airplanes. The prisoners were very hungry. The Camp had two sections. One section was for the political prisoners who opposed Hitler and the Nazis. The second section was used for jews.