Devil's Arithmetic And Elie Wiesel

Holocaust Essay : Concentration Camps The Holocaust was an agonizing time for Jewish people and for anyone who wasn’t

considered an Aryan. It lasted from January 30, 1933 - May 8 ,1948. As we know, during the

Holocaust Jews and a various number of other ethnic groups went through some brutal and harsh

conditions. A total of 12 million people died in the Holocaust and 6 million were Jews.The man

who started all of the torture and maltreatment of the Jews was Adolf Hitler.He ordered S.S

officers and the Nazis to strip Jews from their homes, load them up into cattle trains, and take

them to concentration camps where the persecution began. The Jews were very terrified, they

knew that something bad will happen

Some other concentration camps are Bergen Belsen,

Buchenwald, Dachau, and Ebensee.

Auschwitz is the most common concentration camp. Both Hannah from the book The

Devil’s Arithmetic and Elie Wiesel from the book Night went to Auschwitz. Auschwitz Birkenau

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was also known as an extermination camp since many lives were lost there. It was located in

Oswiecim, Poland and had three main camps. They names of these three camps are Auschwitz I,

Auschwitz II, and Auschwitz III. The three camps were used to house prisoners that were forced

to work. Auschwitz Birkenau and Auschwitz III (Auschwitz - Monowitz) were declared to be

independent concentration camps in November 1943 by the S.S. The main camp was Auschwitz

I and was the first to be established near Oswiecim, Poland. It was created to incarcerate enemies

of the Nazi regime, provide a source of forced labor, and to serve as a site to kill small,

Nearly all of the prisoners that participated in the revolt were killed

by the Germans. Auschwitz III was built in October of 1942. Prisoners that stayed at Auschwitz

II were assigned to work at Buna synthetic rubber works. In January of 1945 the S.S started to

evacuate all the prisoners from Auschwitz and its subcamps. The prisoners were forced to march

about thirty miles to Gliwice. According to Wiesel (1986) the character Elie says “ The camp

looked as though it had been through an epidemic : empty and dead.” During relocation

numerous prisoners died because they couldn’t manage to walk in the snowy and frigid weather

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for approximately 30 miles. In fact 3,000 prisoners died on their journey from Auschwitz to

Gliwice. Another concentration camp was Bergen Belsen which was in northern Germany. Bergen

Belsen was a prisoner - of - war camp until 1943. Then in April of 1943 it turned into a

concentration camp. Bergen - Belsen consisted of Jews, political prisoners, Roma