Concentration Camps Walking In Their Shoes
By P. Nixon
SIX MILLION. Six million innocent Jewish people in the span of twelve years were killed for senseless reasons in the most horrific genocide in all of human history. Many of these people were killed with their families at their homes and did not have to endure the thought of what would happen next. These were the lucky ones. They did not have to go through the hellish and dehumanizing experience of the Nazi concentration camps. 2.7 million of these Jews were taken from their homes, seperated from their families, and deprived of food and decent conditions and instead had their nightmares rendered into life as they were murdered through exhaustion, and asphyxiation by gas. No one truly survived these camps. If you made it out, a part of your soul died with what you left behind and you can never erase that, and we never should. We should always remember what happened from 1933-1945, if only to stop anything remotely similar from happening in the future. We must always remember, and the only way to truly do this is through getting a sense of what these men, women, and children went through. Could you have survived the Holocaust?
First Impressions
"Men to the left, women to the right!" These eight simple words were your greeting into the concentration camps. Such simple words had such power that split families forever, never to be seen whole again, and yet somehow in this hell of a world this was not the most terrifying part of the these peoples' entrances. The most terrifying thing was not even seen at first, instead it was smelled. A scent of death and burning human flesh lay in the air like a film. It was unavoidable and repugnant, as death's arms wrapped around them. The source of this stench, a smokestack, a smokestack laced with the stolen destiny of infants and the longed rest of the old. There was no hope as people alike witnessed such horrors and were stripped of their clothing, and identity and instead labeled with a number that left them with nothing. Forevermore, those in the camps could no longer look at themselves and see who existed before. Now, they could only see a facade-- a hollowed out shell of themselves-- with nothing to live for.
Labor and Starvation
Concentration camps were dehumanizing and involved a struggle for survival against a system designed to annihilate an entire species. This struggle was no more visible than in the everyday conditions these people went through.Working conditions were extreme for those low in the hierarchal system established by the Nazis where the most desirable of Jews were granted better jobs, and the least desirable were granted more physically demanding jobs.