Imagine watching your beloved hometown being captured by your worst enemy. All the things that you love, being stripped of you one by one. Forced to wear a gold star just because of your religion, and being beat up and mistreated by your fellow neighbors. Sadly, this was just the beginning. As time continued on ghettos where the Jews’ new home.
During the Holocaust, the jews in the Warsaw ghetto faced many hardships. In this paper I will give my input on the jews hardships, and how they managed to survive despise being oppressed by the germans. On November 16, 1940, all the jews in the currently-occupied polish city of Warsaw were forced into a ghetto, which was only 2.4% of the total land mass of the city. To put that into perspective, during that time there was 375,000 jews living in Warsaw. That means a single building housed multiple families of jews.
“At every step, somebody fell down and ceased to suffer.” This quote by Elie Wiesel explains the people that were Giving up after hunger and loss of family and he noticed these things everyday at the camps and lived to tell the tragic story in his book Night. Dehumanization was a major occurrence in the concentration camps which killed off over six million Jews. Lack of food, cramped and exhausting ways of transportation and separation of families during the Holocaust was the worst ways of dehumanizing the Jews and it was going on for years with no help. Food was scarce for the Jews in some areas around World War Two, so every little thing mattered evento the point of killing others.
Fight For Survival There have been many defining moments in history that highlight the brutality that people inflict on one another. One of these moments was the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a horrific event that affected many Jewish families in the 1930s and 1940s. This event is still talked about to this day and continues to be shocking to many people because of the level of cruelty people endured throughout it. In his autobiography, Eliezer, a young Jewish boy who was a victim of the Holocaust, illustrates his personal experience in concentration camps.
During World War II, there was genocide against Jews called the Holocaust. During this time, there were concentration camps where Jews were worked, starved, and beat daily. These camps deeply affected friends and families. Being separated, many never saw each other again. Living in unimaginable conditions and taken from their loved ones, these events had a major impact and changed the lives of those affected forever.
In the concentration camps, the Jews experience multiple forms of torture, including starvation. They ultimately have no purpose in life. They begin to lose value in themselves, to the extreme that, “The bread, the soup—those were my entire
Hundreds of thousands died of exposure, violence, and starvation on these death marches. The Germans were gassing, or working to death, Jews and other ethnic victims in these camps” (The Holocaust 3). The survivors of the Holocaust had to live with the aftermath and rebuild their lives. Millions of the Jews who entered these concentration camps with family and relatives exited all alone at the Holocaust’s conclusion. Kitty Hart Moxon claims, “Many survivors had seen their parents die of starvation, simply disappear or even shot in front of their eyes: the agony of these events would stay with them forever” (How Holocaust Survivors Rebuilt Their Lives After 1945).
Jews were taken from their houses to be sent in concentration camps. More than six million of people went inside there were women, children, and men. Elie Wiesel describes in his book Night that, “They began to walk without another glance at the abandoned streets, the dead, empty houses,the gardens, the tombstones, on everyone’s back there was a sack”(16-17). This explain, how Jews were taken of their own freedom and went to concentration camps. The poem “First they came for the Jews” by Martin Niemoller relates that, “First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew”.
The gates to the ghetto closed. Nobody was allowed to leave.” This shows that they were living in very harsh conditions. There was High Barbed wire fences, no running water which caused disease, a Nazi policeman going through the streets shooting his gun not caring who he kills. Another problem that they face was disease and starvation in the ghetto.
Imagine having to fight for everything, never being able to rest. How would you feel if everything you had ever known was stripped away until you had to fight for your basic necessities? This is what happened in the Holocaust. All Jewish people had to fight for survival and their basic necessities. Even when fighting as hard as they could, most did not survive.
Jewish citizens had to experience this every day, and a variety of other inhumane events both in the Ghettos and in the concentration camps, which led to most Jews suffering from horrendous
They were forced to live in horrible conditions, separated from any non-Jews. These ghettos were used as a control tactic, already putting dehumanization into place by segregating and exploiting Jewish inhabitants as part of the systematic dehumanization orchestrated by the Nazis. Upon their arrival, they are separated from their mother and sister and put into different lines, herded like animals, like they are less than them. They keep
Education, fair for all? I should think so, but only because of the case of Brown v. Board of Education case of 1954, in which, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the "separate but equal" doctrine from the public education system. Due to it's nature, education is one of largest factors for surviving and because of this fact, it was starting to be seen as inherently unfair for those whose children had to deal with the segregation created by the "separate but equal" doctrine. The case brought many unequal points in this doctrine to light for all to see, such as, the segregation of students based solely upon the coloring of their skin, which, had a tedency to slow the educational and/or mental growth of colored children.
These survivors who experienced this event, have been scarred for the rest of their life. We can listen to their stories but we can’t imagine and experienced what they have gone through. For example, Szymon Binke, Hilma Geffen, and Baker Ella, were the survivors of the Holocaust. Szymon Binke was born in 1931 in Poland, his family moved to the city after the Nazi’s invasion. Nazis deported his family to Auschwitz where his mother and sister were gassed, while, Szymon was placed in Kinder block but after sometime he ran away to meet his family in Auschwitz.
In the ghettos, living conditions were very harsh. There were ridiculous rules like “no hands in your pockets” (Altman The Holocaust Ghettos 42). The ghettos could be described as “crowded and unsanitary living conditions” (Blohm Holocaust Camps 10), with six to seven people living in each room (Adler 57). The ghettos were always sealed, with a wall, barbed wire, or posted boundaries (Altman the Holocaust Ghettos 14). Around the ghettos they were always guarded, if any Jew tried to escape, they would be killed (Adler 57).
