Treblinka Thesis

Over 6 million people of the Jewish faith were killed during the Holocaust. An estimated 600,000 survived the concentration camps. Many people don’t understand how concentration camps affected one psychologically or spiritually. There are many authors that wrote about their experiences during the Holocaust and its effect on them. Two authors that show how the Holocaust effected them spiritually are Viktor Frankl and Elie Wiesel. Both authors show a very different way of the Holocaust’s effect on their spiritual life and their religious beliefs.

Dehumanization is the process of depriving a person or group of positive human qualities, according to the dictionary. Throughout Night it shows a lot of dehumanization examples. It would take hours to name all of them. Some of the ways dehumanization was showed in Night was all of the abuse, having no identity except for a number, and the hunger they felt because they would only get one meal per day.

Did you know that eleven million people died in the holocaust? Six million of those people were Jews. The Jews were captured and taken to concentration camps because the Nazis simply hated them. Concentration camps were made to kill off all of the Jews. They did this because they saw them as a problem to Germany. I am researching about concentration camps. The two things that I am writing about is why concentration camps were established, and what the Nazis did to the inmates in concentration camps.

Dehumanization is the process in which a person is deprived of their human qualities. The Nazis often used this practice on the Jews and other victims of the Holocaust as these people were stripped of their humanity, and many examples of this can be found in the memoir Night by Elie Wiesel. “Humanity? Humanity is not concerned with us. Today anything is allowed. Anything is possible, even with these crematories…”(Wiesel 15). This quote showcases the absence of humanity in concentration camps. The Nazis valued the lives of the Jews so little that they threw the Jews into fires and gas chambers without any regard that those were human lives. The prisoners were denied of their basic human right, life. They were no longer humans, but instead they were corpses. While some Jews’ lives were immediately taken by the Nazis at the entrance to the camps, the ones who stayed alive were who suffered

During the time Hitler was beginning to rise to power, a huge population of Germany was supporting the newly coming leader Adolf Hitler. Little did they know the horrible devastating mass murder of the Jewish people Hitler called “The Holocaust”. The Holocaust started on January 1933 and ended on May 8, 1945. The Holocaust was made purposely to eliminate the Jews and any other person and religion that got in Hitler’s and the Nazis way. Many ways were used to kill and eliminate the Jews, one of the most brutal ways was when Nazis would shove prisoners of the concentration camps or the death camps and slowly heat them to death. Concentration camps were camps where Jews would be worked and barley fed. Sometimes they would be even starved to death, many prisoners would also often be hung or shot in front of prisoners so the prisoners wouldn’t try to escape from the concentration camp. While on the other hand if anyone got sent to death camp it meant they were there for one reason and one reason only, to die. Inside the death camps were usually huge ovens Jews would be cooked alive in, there would also be giant chambers that Nazis filled with people and spread

Night, written by Elie Wiesel, is a memoir about his life as he goes through the Holocaust. Eliezer goes through many situations that cause him, and other Jews, to be dehumanized by the Nazis. The three levels of dehumanization are physical, mental, and emotional. Eliezer was affected by all three. Never in his whole life did he imagine that this would happen to him or his family.

These camps were called death camps and their sole purpose was the annihilation of any Jews that were brought to them. The gas chambers were disguised as showers. This was a cruel mind trick that fooled many Jews into going into the “showers.” Sometimes cold water would actually fall out of the spouts. The water only lasted a few moments. Nazis started using a gas called Zykon because bullets were to expensive. Mobile killing vans were sealed on the inside and had pipes running from the exhaust to the inside of the van. Inside the different camps Jews worked. The Nazis planned this so that the Jews would pay for their own deaths. Jews were transported from camp to camp by cattle cars, trucks, or what the Nazis called Death Marches. On these Death Marches Jews were expected to walk miles each day to the next camp. They were given very little food and slept on the ground. Some Death Marches lasted weeks. The reason they were called Death Marches is because many Jews died on these marches. (Rogasky, Barbara Smoke and Ashes: The Story of the Holocaust) The Nazis had planned this all out. An entire state bureaucracy was created with the task of make sure everything went smoothly as they killed over 6 million Jews and 5 million other undesirables. Undesirables were homesexuals, POWs, Gypsies, and Poltical Prisoners. The Nazis developed the technology and

Many people do not think of the Holocaust as 12 appalling years full of unforgettable tragedies. The Holocaust is not normally spoken about every day, but the amount of pain and terror during those eventful years should not be abandoned. The Jews were always referred to as animals and not as human beings. Germans used many forms of dehumanization and neglect. If it was not labor and abuse the other alternative was the crematorium. Not only were Jews treated with such disrespect, but many of them were sent to the ovens to get burnt. The ovens were a place where Jews were forced to suffer through a slow and agonizing death.

In the years of the holocaust millions of people died. Including those of war prisoners and Jewish citizens. Several concentration camps were to blame because of this. Even though most did not live to the liberation there were a few lucky ones who survived and lived to tell about their experiences. Elie Wiesel spent his childhood in Auschwitz concentration camp, surrounded by death and misery, but managed to keep his head up and persevere through it. Alfred Wetzler and Rudolf Vrba escaped right past the guards and gates to freedom, risking everything. Many more survivors gathered up courage and escaped or be determined enough to live through it.

One emotion that is clearly drawn out in the reader in Night is shock. experience this feeling in the following passage, which describes when Moshe the Beadle returns from being taken by the Nazis. He talks about what happened to him and the rest of the Jewish people taken. “There it stopped. The Jew had to get out and climb into lorries. The lorries drove towards the forest. The Jews were made to get out. They were made to dig huge graves. And when they finished their work the Gestapo began theirs. Without passion, without haste, they slaughtered their prisoners.” (4).This paragraph shows how brutal the Nazi soldiers were towards the Jewish prisoners, even from the very beginning. This paragraph also shows that some of the Jewish people

During the second World War there many camps establish throughout both the U.S and Europe; these camps where consisted on concentration camps and internment camps which were both made for the purpose of imprisoning or holding many people. We learned of the concentrations camps from the book; Night by Elie Wiesel. This story is a first person account of the life within the confines of a concentration camp from the eyes of Elie himself. Both concentration camps and internment camps were terrible, unethical places during the war, but the suffering caused by them was not enclosed to the camps themselves.

About 200,000 people that passed through the Auschwitz death camp during the Holocaust managed to survive. However, that number pales in comparison to the 2.1 to 4 million people slaughtered in that very same camp. Elie Wiesel, the author of Night, became one of the seemingly lucky survivors of this horrifying genocide. In this novel, Elie describes the agony he went through while going from one concentration camp to the next attempting to escape death. During the Holocaust, the Nazi’s treated their prisoners as vermin that they needed to immediately dispose of. Within the concentration camps, they put the strong willed to use before the prisoners met their predetermined fate. Elie, along with the rest of the prisoners, acquired numbers tattooed on their forearms upon arrival to compliment

During the Holocaust, Jews were robbed of their identities and their humanity in countless ways. The Holocaust was conducted like an experiment about how many ways a person could be dehumanized, then killed. It is hard to understand how people could do such horrific and inhumane things to other humans. It doesn't seem humanly possible to put innocent human beings through such terrible physical and emotional pain. The Nazis deprived concentration camp inmates of their natural human rights, and of any other humanity they had left in them.

In the 1940’s the Germans wanted to take rights and terminate the Jews. Some people tried to save Jews and help them by hiding them in their houses. Germans put over 6 million Jews in concentration camps and made them do work without pay, little food, and water. Women and very little children often got sent to gas chambers upon arrival. Jews usually work in the camp and did outside labor like factories, construction projects, farms or coal mines (Vashem). They walked miles to get to their work. If they did not corporate they were shot on sight. 11 million Jews were killed in the holocaust(Rosenberg).

2.8 million Jews were killed in Poland. All were numbed with terror and fear of what would happen next. Pause and think for a moment. What did they feel? What did they fear? Oh wait, you can’t because you would never understand or feel what happened to them and how the Nazis treated the Jews. Instead, those people were persecuted and murdered for nothing more than being who they were. The Holocaust means “great or wholesale destruction by fire” (“Holocaust”), and in the book Prisoner B-3087 by Alan Gratz, a boy named Yanek (age 7) discovers the horror of being a Jew under Hitler’s rule. He and his family mixed with other families worked and lived in camps and ghettos for many years (Gratz 36-43). The Holocaust was the darkest