Opposing Views Of Auschwitz-Birkenau By Helga Weiss

Auschwitz, specifically the branch Auschwitz-Birkenau, was the largest of the Nazi concentration and extermination camps. A concentration camp was a place where diverse groups of people were imprisoned and slowly eliminated due to intentionally harmful circumstances, making survival unfeasible. A direct extermination center was a place where Jews and other groups of victims were exterminated, through the use of gas chambers. Most of the prisoners who were sent to the Auschwitz complex died in Birkenau. The two perspectives of Auschwitz-Birkenau that I will be analyzing are a diary entry from Helga Weiss, a Holocaust survivor and the other from a website created by the Memorial and Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Each source displays a different

The manner in which Weiss describes the living conditions within the concentration camps is terrifying. She uses words such as “horrid,” “filthy,” and “awful” to create a mental image in the reader's mind, so they can envision what she went through and the pain she felt. Helga and her mother experience endless nights of hunger and distress, and could not do anything about it. They were helpless. Brought to the camps only for one sole purpose -- to die. Contrarily, the Memorial has a different take on explaining the living conditions within Birkenau. Instead of including the emotional state of the prisoners living in the terrifying conditions, the Memorial explains the physical structure of the camp itself. Stating, “Two types of barracks, brick and wooden, housed prisoners in the second part of the camp, Birkenau.” (Memorial, Para. 4) This website goes into great detail giving explanations, similar to the one above, about the capacity each barrack can hold, the type of material each barrack is made of, and what each barrack contains inside of

Although each source is similar in explaining the food that prisoners consumed, however again the way in which The Memorial explains this horrendous place is distant and meaningless. Helga Weiss has so much emotion towards the food that was given. Food was the only thing that kept Weiss and her mother going. Even though the food was not pleasant, the prisoners still ate every single scrap of it because they were starving. She writes, “Each bunk received a pot with scrapings in it. They said that we’re new here so there was no more left for us. I was utterly miserable. If that’s how they’re going to feed us, then it’s the end for us. Although it wasn’t at all edible—cold, thick, and bitter—we forced it down.” (Weiss, Para. 25) No matter how awful the food they were given was, every single prisoner forced it down one way or another. Contrarily, on their website, the
Memorial refers to the prisoners as “organisms,” saying “the combination of insufficient nutrition with hard labor contributed to the destruction of the organism”(Memorial, para. 2). That quote indicates how even though this site is German based, the German people are still disturbed about this part of their history. The prisoners were fed the bare minimum. Three meals a day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. This section of the website goes into explicit detail of the nutritional aspect for the