Westerbork Migration

But we’ve gotten sent to Auschwitz on the 3rd, I’ve been hiding this journal; making sure to not get caught. Anyway, the daily routine at Auschwitz every day were being awakened by a German prisoner who served as the block or barrack captain. And guess who it was? It was onkel Berel! He looks way different now, he looked more tired and scrawny. His once brown eyes is now filled with darkness and sadness. He woke us at 5:00 or 5:30 each morning. We slept on straw beds stacked three high and about three feet wide and three feet long. We were told to get out of the barracks as fast as we could. We lined up and everybody was counted. Then we stood there and did absolutely nothing for quite a

The next few moments of my life after my arrival to Auschwitz happened in rapid succession and yet I know if I live a hundred years I will never forget a single second. Although I don’t know if I will live. We didn’t know the place to which we came, but I know only too well what it is

I had trained as a tailor and had left home before we were deported, when I went to work four miles away on a ranch. It was taken over by the SS, so suddenly I found myself working for them. In May 1943 they lined us up one day and told us to empty our pockets. If they found even a single zloty in anyone’s pocket, they were shot on the spot. We were transported to Majdanek, which was only 19 miles away – a torture camp in the true sense of the word. For 500 metres there were just ditches full of bodies, legs, heads. We were deported to Auschwitz four weeks later. We arrived in the early morning and they gave us a bed, a real shower, they cleaned us well with disinfectant and shaved us. After that they gave us striped uniforms and tattooed us. I was given the number 128164 on my left arm and from that point on I was a number, no longer a name.

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.

I know that when I woke up I could smell the blood and rotting bodies in the air. The camp was quiet there was no one there. The camp was in a secluded wooded area and I could tell it had just rained. I looked in all of the women’s barracks to see if their was anyone still alive. At the look of each barrack with all the women and children lying their dead my heart sank deeper. I couldn’t wrap my head around how there was around a hundred thousand people staying there and I was the only known survivor. Before the war they all had families and jobs and now they lay here at my feet dead. I couldn’t bear to see the looks of anguish of the faces so I stopped looking. There was no food anywhere and I was exhausted. The soldiers thought everyone here was dead so they weren’t coming back so I had to find a way to escape. I started to walk into the woods. I ate some of the plants and berries along the way and tried to kill some smaller animals for meat. I finally made it out of the woods into a farmer's fields. Luckily, the farmer was Jewish and let me stay in his barn. He and his wife snuck food out to me as much as they could. Once I had regained my strength I left them, I was causing them more trouble than I was worth. I was sixteen years of age and ninety-three pounds. My shot wounds were starting to heal and I was starting to mentally recover. They told me the safest place to go was Israel. I took off with a sack of food a pair of shoes and two sets of clothes and the prayers from those two

The noise kept getting louder and louder and then bam! The smoke from one of the Nazis gun flew off as my little sister lays dead on the floor of my apartment living room.   I see blood drip from her inner thigh, as her eyes become heavy like lead and then finally they became too heavy for her to keep open.  My mother and father both sob into each other’s arms and look horrified as their little girl is no longer in their presents.  I was in shock, my little Alyssa was gone forever.  The tears in my eyes became heavy like my little sister’s dead eyes.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl tells the honest story of his own experiences as an inmate in a concentration camp during World War II. In his book, Frankl answers the question “How was everyday life in a concentration camp reflected in the mind of the average prisoner?” (Frankl, 2006, p. 3) He describes the physical, emotional, and psychological torment that he endured as well as the effect that the camp had on those around him. He breaks down the psychological experience as a prisoner into three stages: the initial shock upon admission into the camp, apathy, and the mental reactions of the prisoner after liberation. He highlights certain emotions experienced throughout the time in the camp such as delusions of reprieve, hope, curiosity, surprise, and even humor.

“Death wrapped itself around me till I was stifled.” Elie Wiesel was a young boy, only 15 years of age, when he encountered the tortures of the largest concentration camp, Auschwitz. Another Auschwitz survivor, Susan Pollack, experienced the horrors of her family being taken away right before her eyes (Connolly) .The life stories of Elie Wiesel and Susan Pollack are two examples showing the graveness of the mass butchery and abuse the Auschwitz prisoners endured, therefore portraying their immense joy when they were liberated by the Soviet soldiers on January 27,1945 (Wiesel 92).

It’s 1941, the smell is fowl, the scene is horrifying, and there’s so much fear in the air. There are thousands of innocent people just like me here kept as prisoners. They are being forced to stay here and work because they are considered as Jews. They have been separated from their loved ones and they have the fear they may not be reunited. These poor people are fighting for survival and are barely alive.

To begin, Auschwitz was one of the major concentration camps run by the Nazi’s the Holocaust. At Auschwitz, the Nazi’s were able to murder over a million Jews in gas chambers without detection for most of the Holocaust. Thus, I am going to tell the stories of those who survived Auschwitz in order to provide remembrance and to highlight what I am learning in class. This is due to the fact that many people do not realize that what happened at Auschwitz was horrific. For example, people saw their family die right in front of them, people were beaten for no apparent reason, and people were striped of their identity. Also, by telling the stories of the survivors I am allowing the reader to remember that the Holocaust affected so many people and

"It's 1943, why do you ask?". Suddenly I feel cold inside, the realization is chilling. I've been a prisoner of the Nazis for almost a year.

One day we woke up to guards brutally pounding on our door. I was the first one up, but my dad didn’t let me open the door. When he went to the door the guard grabbed him and pushed him outside. The guards rushed inside and told us all to get outside immediately. We went outside the nazis made us start walking to the train station. Once we arrived at the station the nazis made all the jews cramp into small cattle carts. This process took about two hours. Once in awhile you would hear gun shots. That was usually the officers shooting at a Jew who was trying to escape. After all the Jews got on the train my family and I prayed that we would all stay together. After what it seemed like forever we arrived in a town called Rzeszow. There My family and the rest of the Jews were forced to live in a ghetto. The ghetto was small but at least I was able to stay with my family.

“We’ll be fine honey… don't give up we'll see eachother again I promise”, my mother said as they pulled us apart into different rooms. Her voice was shaken, we had been been sent to Auschwitz and during the trip here she cried and pleaded the entire time. As if they would suddenly have sympathy for us… during our entire time here there was not one commander that at least seemed to have any sympathy or remorse for us… they actually seemed to be enjoying our suffering. My mother was gone now and I, along with a few other dozen of us were escorted to another room. We had just been examined by the doctors and the people who I was with were mainly young girls. Many with their mothers… they all looked at me as if I was some lost puppy. I could

The concentration camps were opened, those responsible were put on trial, and the testimony of the survivors was heard. Accept for some, these terrors never ended, and they would never truly escape the horrors of the Holocaust. For some survivors, what they endured was so traumatic it would leave a painful and lasting imprint on their psyche for the rest of their lives. Trauma can be debilitating forcing painful memories and terrifying dreams upon the survivor again and again, “insistently and against their will” (Caruth 6). Even if the survivor manages to repress these painful memories, or seemingly overcome them, they often rush back as prevalent as ever, as if it had never gone away.

September 13th, 1939, was a very special day for me and my wife Alzbeta. It is the day of Rosh Hashanah, the first day of the jewish calendar. The only problem was, we couldn’t celebrate with our family and our friends from Nozyk Synagogue, due to us being fearful of the Germans invading Poland. It was more of a day of sadness; I was going to have to enlist in the polish army soon to fight the germans on the front lines. My grandfather had died in the great war during the battle of the somme, and my parents didn’t want me to suffer a similar fate. Unfortunately for them, my country needed me, and I would have to go whether I wanted to or not.