The choking smell of smoke and burning flesh fills your nose as you stumble blindly with your family. Screams echo ahead of you and your lungs begin to struggle as coal dust drifts through the air. You squint, trying to see the glow nearing the hundreds of people shuffling beside you. Suddenly, screams break out. Scrambling around the heads of your people, you can just make out a large pit filled with flames and watch as things are thrown into the hole. Soot fills your throat and you begin gasping.
This is Auschwitz.
Background
Auschwitz was established in 1940 in the suburbs of a small Polish city. The camp was created when the mass arrests of Poles increased beyond the capacity of the local prisons. Auschwitz was one of the largest death camps during the Holocaust. All contact with the outside world was forbidden, and barbed wire surrounded the entire camp. Prisoners were only able to sleep on their sides in three rows, laying on straw stuffed matresses. During the day, they worked mainly as slave laborers. However, some had gruesome experiments performed upon them that generally resulted in prisoners being deliberatley put to death. (ushmm.org)
The Typical Work Day
Prisoners at Auschwitz recived three meals a day. For breakfast, they had "coffee," or boiled water with a grain-based coffee substitute. In the afternoon, lunch consisted of about a liter of soup. The soup was so awful that new prisoners could hardly eat it, and if they could they ate it with disgust. Dinner was 300 grams of bread with about 25 grams of sausage. This meal was supposed to cover breakfast as well, but most people ate their whole portion at one time. Work began at 4:30 AM in the summer and 5:30 AM in the winter. Roll call was taken frequently throughout the day, and in the evening prisoners had to bring back the bodies of those who had been killed in labor. Towards the end of March 1942, work was made a minimum of 11 hours a day. This number was extened in the winter and extended in the summer.