PASZEK 1 Jake Paszek May 18, 2017 Period 6 Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life. Literature Circle #9 – Artistic Adventurer Book: Night by Elie Wiesel “I am a survivor of a concentration camp. My eyes saw what no person should witness: gas chambers built by learned engineers. Children poisoned by educated physicians. Infants killed by trained nurses. Women and babies shot by high school and college graduates.” - A letter from a Holocaust survivor Adolf Hitler’s concentration camps and Joseph Stalin’s gulags have similar conditions and atmospheres. A gulag is a system of labor camps maintained in the former Soviet Union from 1930 to 1955. The definition of a concentration camp is a place where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with in adequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labor or to await mass execution. In concentration camps and gulags the detainees lived in heinous conditions. Detainees in gulags and concentration camps did hard core manual labor. The prisoners went through deplorable conditions such as extreme climates, hard physical labor, low food rations and unhygienic living conditions. “We were masters of nature, masters of the world. We had forgotten everything-death, fatigue, and our natural needs. Stronger than the cold or hunger, stronger than the shots and the desire to die, condemned and wandering, mere numbers, we were the only men on earth.” (Wiesel, pg. 83) This quote explains the heinous conditions that Elie …show more content…
The Jews of Auschwitz and detainees of gulags lived through the sub-zero temperatures of Poland and Russia, starvation, and death. There was nothing else the Nazis and Russians could take away from