The Nazi Camps And The Stalinist Gulag Essay

During the Holocaust, people in the Nazi’s custody were treated as less than human. According to “Jakob’s Story”, the Nazi’s gave their prisoners little food and only one meal a day. Jakob writes “we ate one meal a day and it consisted of soup with potato peels; scraps of food from the SS” (Blankitny, paragraph 17). Here one can see that the Nazi’s looked down upon their prisoners and treated them as less than

In the early 1930s, the residents of the picturesque city of Dachau, Germany, were completely unaware of the horrific events about to unfold that would overshadow their city still today. The citizens of Dachau were oblivious that their city was going to become the origin of concentration camps and of the Holocaust, the mass murder committed by the Nazi s in World War II. Dachau Concentration Camp, which would soon be placed on the edge of their community, would serve as a model for all Nazi extermination camps. This perfect prototype of a Nazi killing machine has come to represent the start of the horror-filled Holocaust and the Nazi's determination to achieve a perfect society during World War II.

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

Night and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich express the potential horrors of humanity’s immense capacity for extreme cruelty. Both took place in mid-twentieth century Europe and exposed the hardships of life in forced-labor camps: Wiesel’s in various concentration camps, Solzhenitsyn’s in Gulags. It is important for human populations to be aware of these tragedies so as to not commit the same atrocities again; therefore, this essay will explore each with regards to shared or different themes included and the messages presented. Both of these books are important due to their influential and informative nature regarding the horrors of their respective historical times. Night by Elie Wiesel and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr

The Holocaust was one of the world’s major tragedies. If you were a Jew the Nazis would take you to concentration camp and you would have to do everything they said, you would get your head shaved, and be treated awful. Millions died. They would choose Jews to take to the gas chamber, usually the weakest and most unhealthy ones because they weren’t much good to work anymore. “Yolen, Jane. The Devil's Arithmetic. New York, NY, U.S.A.: Viking Kestrel, 1988. Print.”

The Holocaust was part of most infamous events in our modern world history, World War II. Night by Elie Wiesel shows one of the horrific lives lived in a concentration camp. This book brings insights including ways and effects of dehumanization and also effects on the antagonist’s followers.

Everyone experiences emotional and physiological obstacles in their life. However, these obstacles are incomparable to the magnitude of the obstacles the prisoners of the Holocaust faced every day. In his memoir, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, illustrates the horrors of the concentration camps and their mental tool. Over the course of Night, Wiesel demonstrates, that exposure to an uncaring, hostile world leads to destruction of faith and identity.

In the camps, the prisoners were continuously being persecuted and there were always selections going on as well. The selections would determine whether you were valuable to them or not. If you weren’t, you were killed and if you were, you continued to work. All of these things caused the Jews to be in a state of hopelessness and apathy while always being quite anxious too (Gutman, 1). With

The Germans in charge of coming up with a sufficient means of transportation had a heavy sense of superiority in that their prisoners were lower than animals. They had only tried to maintain the cheapest, most efficient method of transit of the Jews to their concentration camp. The deportees who survived were left with a scarring imprint of this trip, as it was the first branch of their torture, for most, the rest of their lives. After two interviews with two different survivors, it is inferred that the same approach was used for all the prisoners being transported to their destination of their demise. The people who were forced to endure this dehumanizing means of transit underwent a complete stripping of humanity that foreshadowed their ultimate

“The camp looked as though it had been through an epidemic: empty and dead” (47); even when there is a break in between the horror and pain of working for Nazis in concentration camps and suffering from hunger, it is dead, empty and inhuman; this meaningful passage about the complete and utter truth of concentration camps comes from a memoir, Night, by Elie Wiesel. Vocabulary in this passage, is nothing short of exemplary, the words completely compliment the message being shared in this quote. Elie Wiesel describes the atrocious Buna camp as if it were through an epidemic, an outbreak, rendering people empty and dead due to starvation, lack of sleep, and over exertion. This paints a complete and thorough visual of how he viewed concentration

Primo Levi, in his novel Survival in Auschwitz (2008), illustrates the atrocities inflicted upon the prisoners of the concentration camp by the Schutzstaffel, through dehumanization. Levi describes “the denial of humanness” constantly forced upon the prisoners through similes, metaphors, and imagery of animalistic and mechanistic dehumanization (“Dehumanization”). He makes his readers aware of the cruel reality in the concentration camp in order to help them examine the psychological effects dehumanization has not only on those dehumanized, but also on those who dehumanize. He establishes an earnest and reflective tone with his audience yearning to grasp the reality of genocide.

Preying on the desperation of Germans, Hitler was able to convince his fanatics to target minorities like the Jews and impose the harshest punishments. The brutality exhibited during the Holocaust became possible through the manipulation of the masses and the crushing of the individual. In Man’s Search For Meaning, Viktor Frankl recalls the brutality of the Capos, who were fellow prisoners: “Often they were harder on the prisoners than were the guards, and beat them more cruelly than the SS men did” (Frankl 22). The dire state of life in the camps lead to the stripping of individuality of the Capos and ultimately, their dehumanization. Not all who suffered in the camps were overcome by the oppression of the

The book, Survival in Auschwitz, depicts the story of an Italian Jew in a a concentration camp with unfathomable conditions. The prisoners here are treated as animals and pieces, their primary task to serve the German officers. The SS officers, and all the other men in a position of authority at this camp, try their very hardest to break the souls of the captives and reduce them the number tattooed on their arm. While the Nazis try to destroy the men in many ways throughout the course of this novel, the two things that demonstrate their dehumanization most strongly, are? the process the prisoners undergo upon arrival at the camp, and the way the selections of who will live or die are carried out.

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

The Gulags of the Soviet Union have been compared to the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, but in reality they were worse. The Gulags were isolated prison camps peppered across Siberia. Death, torture, and disease raged within their walls, while endless work went on outside. Gulag personnel were cruel and unfeeling, using terrible punishment methods and playing senseless games that cost prisoners their lives. Political enemies of the Bolshevik party made up a significant portion of the prisoner population, with most sent to the infamous camp system Kolyma. Liberation was painfully slow, but by 1960, all of the Gulags were gone.