The Auschwitz Escape Analysis

Luke Loeffler

Ackerman

Period 4

3 December 2017

The Auschwitz Escape Summaries

Jacob Weisz was a reserved, compliant seventeen-year-old German Jew. His family’s house and savings had been taken from them in 1933 when der Führer, Hitler, rose to the position of Chancellor. That’s when Jacob’s uncle, Avi, stepped in to help. Jacob, his sister, and his parents moved to Rubensstrasse, a small town 250 miles away from the German capital. However, Avi began to sense danger as the Nazi forces grew. Jacob began to hear arguments between his father and his uncle, Avi begging for his family to move with him to a safe country. But Jacob’s father was ignorant of the world around him and took no heed to the warnings. Finally, when Avi was taking

As Jacob opens one of the cars, he finds Avi in it. When Avi exited the car, however, he was pummelled in the chest with bullets from a German officer. Jacob was tossed into the train again and the door was shut. With no way to get out and everyone he knew dead, Jacob was devastated. He was heading to Auschwitz. On the train, he met an old man whose son Jacob had saved during the train attack. He explained to Jacob that he could no longer go by the name “Jacob,” as the Nazis would realize he was in the Resistance when his name was not found in their records. Jacob was to take the name of the man’s son, Leonard Eliezer. When the train arrived at Auschwitz, everyone was filed into a line and sent either left or right. Jacob and his “father” were separated as Jacob was sent to the right. He was very quickly exposed to the inhuman conditions at Auschwitz. Within hours of being there, he had witnessed many deaths caused by the fences, beatings, and other reasons. After eating the “food” there, he realized why so many people looked like living skeletons and were starving to death. His mental notes of tiny things that would get you killed by the Nazis kept growing larger and larger. That night, sleeping on a single bed with two other Jews, Jacob’s hopes were lower than ever before in his life. But he convinced himself of one thing. He would

He had no idea what that entailed but decided it was better to work hard and prove his worth than being beaten to death. Gruder, the Nazi leader of his sleeping block, explained that all the jobs had kapos, who wore green triangles. These, Jacob would soon learn, were the real slave masters at Auschwitz. They were still prisoners, but they had proven their loyalty to the camp leaders. As he made his way over to where his work would be, a kapo recognized him as Avi’s nephew. Panicking, Jacob denied this but was taken through a side alley to a large building called Canada. There, the man told Jacob about how his uncle was a hero among many of his connections around the camp. He introduced himself as Leszek Poczciwinski and explained that he has many friends working in various positions inside and outside of the camp. He then explained that the job of the Sonderkommandos was to remove the corpses from the gas chambers. Seeing Jacob’s confused expression, he told him about the terrible truth about what was going on in Auschwitz. He also told Jacob that everyone who was sent to the left side when they arrived at the camp was immediately killed in the gas chambers. Letting this all sink in, he finally explained how the Nazis number one priority was to keep what happened at Auschwitz a secret from the outside world. Leszek did not wear the yellow triangle signifying being a Jew; instead, he wore a red