The Holocaust was a terrible time period where six million Jews were killed. The year is 1940, many Jews are being taken out their homes. World War II is just heating up. Hitler and his Third Reich are trying to take over the world. One of their biggest assets in the war would be setting up concentration camps. When Auschwitz first started, it was made for prisoners of war and political prisoners. Before 1943, it was made up of mostly poles. It is in Poland near Oświęcim. They put the camps away from civilization. When it started taking in Jews, the camp started to fill up quickly. They had to turn the one camp into three different ones. On November 22, 1943, they formally split the camps up. The camps were now named Auschwitz 1, Auschwitz 2 Birkenau, and Auschwitz 3 Monowitz (“KL …show more content…
They slept in very crowded spaces. They were lucky if they got to sleep on straw-stuffed mattresses. The barracks where they lived were very dirty. They didn’t have bathrooms until 1944. Also, they were filled with rats and lice. The prisoners had to do some pointless work there. It was very hard labor. They started their work-day at 4:30 in the Summer, and 5:30 in the Winter. The minimum time a prisoner had to work would be 11 hours a day. If a prisoner was unable to do the work or had an illness, they would be in line to be sent to the gas chamber. Only 20% of Jews were kept alive to do labor. If someone was assigned to the Penal Company, then they usually did two times the work and harder work than any other prisoner. The health of the prisoners at Auschwitz had very bad health issues. One of the issues was nutrition. They got three meals per day. In the morning they got half of a liter of coffee/tea. For lunch, they got half of a liter of soup. For supper, they got 300 grams of black bread and 25 grams of sausage. If a prisoner was showing signs of self-starvation, he was called a Musselman and could be sent to the gas