Why Are Some Peoople Able to Survive Longer Than Others? Essay

The quality of life on the Relief camps were horrible .Majority of the men working on these camps were broke and tired farm boys. These men were treated like salves. They would receive 20 cents a day for manual labor. A few of their tasks would include: widening a trail, putting in a culvert, or cutting and stacking wood. These jobs were very physically demanding and stressful on the body. The camps were run by the Department of National Defence, so the workers were under “army law”. So, the people in charge could say or do whatever they wanted. An 18 year-old who experienced a relief camp said “{We} were treated like dirt”. The only semi-positive thing about these relief camps were that they kept the workers well

In the autobiography, Night, the prisoners obtained resilience from their family, hope, and will to live. Resilience is the ability to recover after something bad happens. Firstly, the protagonist Eli, obtained his resilience from the idea that he and his father would survive together. The novel, states, “The idea of dying, of ceasing to be, began to fascinate me. To no longer exist. To no longer feel the excruciating pain of my foot. To no longer feel anything, neither fatigue nor cold, nothing. To break rank, to let myself slide to the side of the road… My father's presence was the only thing that stopped me” (Wiesel 86). Eli wanted to give up badly so the pain can stop, but his dad stopped him. The idea that he and his dad would be together

The Survivor by Terrence Des Pres discusses how prisoners survived in poor living conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto. He defines a survivor as, “…any man or women striving to keep life and spirit intact – not only those who returned, but the hundreds of thousands who stayed alive sometimes for years, only to die at the last minute.” He describes the experience in the Ghetto where it was possible to survive with the collective efforts of others, which is the opposite of how Primo Levi described it. Survivors experienced help from each other such as gifts of food from friends and family. People were willing to give up their valuables for the better of others. With these little gestures people felt better and more rich about their experience which helped lighten the mood in the Ghetto.

Throughout history man successfully found a way to survive in the most harsh conditions even, when all odds were against them. In Ellie Wiesel's memoir Night, Ellie and his father find a way to survive in the most difficult conditions. In the concentration camps Ellie and his father spends years in the face of death, basic survival prevailed over the moral teachings of society.

The prisoner population expanded rapidly, reaching 110,000 by the end of 1945.” (Jewish Virtual Library, pg. #1) To explain, Buchenwald was liberated the year of 1945 which was also when the Holocaust ended. Forced labor was one of the things that the Jews had to deal with, meaning they were either sent into factories and work for the SS or they were sent to go build sub-camps. All the prisoners that were forced to labor were all young and strong men. The living conditions of the camp were terrible. The prisoners lived in places called barracks, which were beds made out of wood. The barracks never had mattresses or anything to lie on besides the wood. There were about 3 prisoners that stayed on one barrack. Most of the time there were no room for prisoners to sleep so you would have to sleep on top of people in the

Many people believed that the Jews would never survive the concentration camps. However, the Jews managed to stay alive physically and spiritually by working with all the strength they could muster, making the best with the rations they were given, believing in family’s promises, and having faith that they would be free once again. Therefore, people should always stay strong even when it seems like all hope is lost.

There were many methods of survival for the prisoners of the holocaust. In the book Night, the three main ways the prisoners tried to survive were on faith, family, and food. All testing one's endurance and self-preservation.

Unfortunately, there was little discussion of the psychological effects of solitary confinement in the medical literature during the first half of the twentieth century. As evidence accumulated during the nineteenth century that solitary confinement produced a very disturbing incidence of insanity, physical disease, and death; the system fell into disgrace and therefore had changed from an open rather optimistic experiment in social reform into a hidden secretive form of punishment and control. When reports found that “brain washing” of American prisoners of war in Korea were taking place it caused a devastating psychological

Camp life changed the prisoner’s life as a person by having them do jobs that the Kommandos didn't want to do. At the camps the prisoners experienced starvation and harsh conditions. They changed as a person by having hope in some situations and then losing hope at times. Some of the time they had to be up at five in the morning and run. When they changed to other camps they had to take baths in petrol and hot showers to become disinfected. After that they ceased to be men.

Survival is being willing to do anything, defying all odds, to make it through a situation no matter how hopeless it seems. An example of survival in our own world today, is the people in the Philippines. Although the people in the Philippines didn’t experience a holocaust, they are still struggling to survive after a super typhoon ripped apart their lives. One of the most intense battles for survival in our history is the Holocaust, where Nazi Germany persecuted the European Jews. Two of the greatest survival stories during the Holocaust are the stories of Anne Frank and Gerda Weissman Klein. Both, Anne Frank and Gerda Weissman Klein’s horrific experiences during the Holocaust exemplify their outstanding courage to try and

The Survivor by Terrence Des Pres discusses how prisoners survived in poor living conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto. He defines a survivor as, “…any man or women striving to keep life and spirit intact – not only those who returned, but the hundreds of thousands who stayed alive sometimes for years, only to die at the last minute.” He describes the experience in the Ghetto where it was possible to survive with the collective efforts of others, which is the opposite of how Primo Levi described it. Survivors experienced help from each other such as gifts of food from friends and family. People were willing to give up their valuables for the better of others. With these little gestures people felt better and more rich about their experience which helped lighten the mood in the Ghetto.

     The prisoners are further degraded because they simply do not have enough to eat. They become very haggardly and often have difficulty in judging each other?s age. Acquisition of a sufficient amount of food becomes a daily struggle, and for those who do not rise to the occasion ultimately parish. After a certain time period, it is impossible to survive unless you become an ?Organisator, Kombinator, or a Prominent? (Levi, 89). Levi writes, ?We have learnt the value of food; now we also diligently scrape the bottom of the bowl after the ration and we hold it under our chins when we eat bread so as not to lose the crumbs? (Levi, 33). A prisoner could only survive on a normal ration for around 3 months at best. Starving to death was not the main reason to acquire an adequate amount of food. The selections had to be avoided. If a prisoner was too weak to work, he was destined for the gas chambers.

Were it a testimony to the rigors and cruelness of human nature, it would be crushing. As it is, it shatters our perception of man and ourselves as no other book, besides perhaps Anne Franke`s diary and the testimony of Elie Wiesl, could ever have done. The prisoners of the labor camp, as in Shukhov?s predicament, were required to behave as Soviets or face severe punishment. In an almost satirical tone Buinovsky exclaims to the squadron that ?You?re not behaving like Soviet People,? and went on saying, ?You?re not behaving like communist.? (28) This type of internal monologue clearly persuades a tone of aggravation and sarcasm directly associated to the oppression?s of communism.

What was at issue was not whether the prison environment as too harsh or too aseptic, too primitive or too efficient, but its very materiality as an instrument and vector of power, it is this whole technology go power over the body that the technology of the ‘soul’ - that of the educationalist, psychologists and psychiatrists - fails either to conceal or compensate, for the simple reason that it is one of its tools. (TBOTC, Foucault, pg. 28)

In addition to this, in the mindset of the day, if someone was suspected of anti-Bolshevik activities, they were automatically guilty. The investigator would look for anything he could find that could possibly make the person guilty at all. Sometimes the investigator would take up a random piece of literature, say it was bad, and have the suspect shipped off, even if the “incriminating” evidence was something as benign as the children’s story Goodnight Moon. The investigator would not be the one to tell the suspect what he was even accused of; he would just take the “evidence” and people would soon kidnap the suspect and toss him in a cattle car to Siberia, which was cramped with a mass of other convicts. When the prisoners reached the Gulag, an official there would take everyone’s valuables and toss the convicts into cramped cells. The interrogation could start at any time. For some the interrogations were that day, and for others it never came and their lives were lived out in the dirty cells. When and if the interrogator got a confession out of someone, a prison sentence was read out and the convict was sent off to the actual Gulag.