Murder to Massacre; My 10th grade English report. (4 years ago)
The holocaust was a horrible event of the 1940’s. The most horror was brought on by the concentration camps. The Jews were convinced that they were going to a work camp that would improve their lives. It ended up being a place of where most thought their life was at the end. The concentration camps went from life to the living dead. The worst of all the camps was, Auschwitz.
Auschwitz was the biggest of all the camps. It was so big that it had to be divided into three huge sections with more than fifty sub-camps. It was also the main camp of all of them. It was the biggest symbol of the holocaust. Auschwitz was the German name for Oswiecim, a town in southern Poland. The three camps that it was built into were Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II (Birkenau), and Auschwitz III (Monowitz). Auschwitz had a doctor for its camp, or an “Angel of Death,” he was known has Dr. Mengele. This doctor normally attended to the children, mostly the twin sets, they were only of the age five. The children, after being experimented on, were killed and dissected. One of the vastest experiments used on these children was eye change. Dr. Mengele would inject chemicals into their eyes to see if it would change their eye color, most of the time it didn’t work. He was also the chief provider of the gas chambers. When a block of women were infested with lice, he gassed all seven hundred and fifty women in the block, thinking that would solve it.
The Jews of the Holocaust were told that they were going to have a better life, that they would have work and that they would be able to have a better life for their families. The Jews were able to be pointed out and not considered as a different type of family heritage because of their stars. During World War II, Jews were branded with the yellow star of David as a symbol of hatred and scorn. The star is formed by two interlocking equilateral triangles that form a hexagram. In September of 1939, the German forces defeated the Polish army in two weeks. Jews were ordered to register all family members and relocate to major cities. More than ten thousand Jews from the countryside arrive in Krakow daily. They were transported from their homes to the ghetto. After being there for a couple weeks, trains came in and took them too the “work camps.” The trains only had so much room and there was nowhere for them to go to the bathroom, mind you they were in the trains for days at a time. When they got to the camps it looked liek a better life. There was a place for the children to have a kindergarten center, and they could see other people working in the camps. Little did they know what was really happening in those places. When they got to the camps, there was a selection. The selection consisted on figuring out who was good enough to work and not work. They would select from the sick and the healthy, the old and the young. The old and sick were considered as people who could not work. They were sent to the crematory, otherwise known as the gas chambers, and killed. If you were sent to the gas chamber, you were told that you were going to get a nice shower, which at that point of time the Jews needed because they hadn’t had one in weeks. So they would have to take off their clothes and they were all gathered in the gas chamber. IN the opening of the gas chambers there was a gas that was seeping in. This gas was known as Zyklon B. Zyklon B is a powerful insecticide which serves as a carrier for the gas hydrocyanic acid (HCN). HCN is extremely poisonous to humans. Zyklon B transported the death of two hundred and fifty Jews at a time. It was established by the Nazi Regime.
Auschwitz had the largest total prisoner population. It had to be divided into more than a dozen sections. There was camp families for women, men, gypsies deported from Germany, Austria and the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and a camp for Jewish families from the Resienstadt Ghetto. Auschwitz also contained the facilities for the killing center. Birkenau on the other hand was a vernichtungslager or in other words extermination camp. There were seven different gas chambers in this camp for the extermination of Jews. There wasn’t a concentration camp for women in Auschwitz until March of 1942. The amount of prisoners that were aloud to be held went up to thirty thousand. June 25, 1942 there was a British newspaper that read about the mass murders of the Jews in the gas chambers. There were more than just gas chambers, there was also gas vans. The gas vans had the same meaning of the chambers, except the fact that the prisoners were given hope that they were going to a hospital to get better.They thought they were going to be out of the concentration camps for good. By November of 1944, 1.5 million Jews, tens of thousands of gypsies, and soviet prisoners of was were murdered. Most of the concentration camps were controlled in the Third Reich, by the WVHA or economic administrative main office.
Since Auschwitz was so big and could not hold all of its prisoners in one camp, it made more camps to be sub camps of it. The most famous of them was Birkenau. At least ninety percent of Auschwitz’s prisoners died in Birkenau. Birkenau is not only the most known sub camp of them all but it was the largest. In Birkenau at least six-thousand inmates died daily. Between May 14 and July 8, 1944 four-hundred and thirty seven, four-hundred and two Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz in one-hundred and fourty-eight trains. This was probably the largest single mass deportation during the holocaust. The first news brought up about the concentration camps to the outside world was in 1942, by two Poland escapees from Auschwitz. Birkenau was not exposed to the world until years later by three Jewish camp escapees that reached Slovakia. In Auschwitz alone, four-million people died. IN 1944 there was a revolt. One gas chamber was blown up with explosives smuggled in from a nearby armaments factory and another was set to fire. Two-hundred and fifty escaped but got shot along with two-hundred who were involved. The camps were liberated by the Soviets in January 1945. The SS began destroying the installations, killing surviving inmates and those who were fit to walk, marched to Germany. When you hear the word march you would think steps that are insanely huge or hard, but march in this case scenario meant running. running until you couldn’t run anymore. Basically, running until you were dead. At least every forty miles that you ran, you would have to find shelter somewhere in the snow, and if you were lucky you would wake up and be alive. Most people died of hypothermia. The Jews by then had been through so much that most of them didn’t even have that much feeling, so if they woke up next to a dead loved one, they wouldn’t make any kind of emotion towards them. They would just continue on with their journey like the rest of the group, because if they didn’t they would get shot for disobeying.
The 1940’s were so horrifying. What would you do if you were a Jew that lived there in that time in history? Do you think that you would still be living? How would you feel when your family left you and you never got to see them again? If you really think about it, you come to a thought of wondering; How do the survivors go on with their lives? Everyday they would have memories of the holocaust and those memories would never go away. It just goes to show how sick people can be just to reach a goal they want. Millions of people had their life taken because of a man who wanted the perfect Aryan race, but didn’t get it!
