Introduction
The murder of more than six million Jews by Germans and its collaborators during World War 11 in the camps is a shameful blot on the history. This is a topic unlike any other in history and an example of complete failure of humanity. The Germans clearly regarded Jews less-than-human creatures that were to be destroyed. Nazi Germany established about twenty thousand camps between 1933 and 1945 to imprison millions of victims, serve as temporary way stations and killing centers for mass murder. The essay looks into the life at Nazi Death camps through the eyes of 12-year-old Elie Wiesel, the poor Jew in the town of Sighet, which is now the modern-day Romania.
Eliezer Wiesel and his Jewish family live in poverty but are deeply religious. Despite cautions about German intents towards Jews, Eliezer’s family and the other Jews keep on living in a small Transylvanian town. Life for them is pretty normal until the serenity of their lives is threatened by Nazi aggressors who force them to live into supervised ghettos, surviving on minimal food and water. The complete Jewish population, including Wiesel and his family is sent to concentration camps. Eliezer is alienated from his mother and younger sister, in a camp called Auschwitz but remains with his father.
Before departing the Jews to the camps, they are searched and not allowed to keep valuable items, and are forced to wear a yellow star. With only one bag of belongings allowed, the Jews are driven to an unknown destination. In Wiesel’s words 1, he would never forget that first night in camp. The little faces of the children and their bodies turning into wreaths of smoke is going to haunt him forever. He felt that those flames were consuming his faith forever.
____________________1Elie wiesel's 'night'. 2003. Deseret News2003.
The nocturnal silence snapped at his will to live, and those moments seem to murder his God. He survived Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Buna and Gleiwitz camps and has ensured though his writings that the world never forgets as to what happened to the Jews.
According to Henry Friedlander, another holocaust survivor 2 like Wiesel, remembers with shudder those heinous crimes that went on in those concentration camps. The number of these camps increased at a fast pace with the number of prisoners. The prime aim of putting up these camps was to kill the Jews and exploit slavery. The healthy Jews were saved from the Gas chambers, and selected for labor. The weaker, ill and the older were the first to get the gas chambers. By 1942. These camps had already turned into a massive slave labor empire.
Eliezer and his dad work in a warehouse for electrical equipment. He sees his father being beaten and reflects on how inhumane the concentration camps made him. He witnesses hangings and feels that the food at camps tastes of death. He wonders angrily at God and why isn’t He coming forward to help them. He thinks now that man is stronger than God. The prisoners dread the selection process where they are made to undress and inspected to make selections for the next group selected for death. He is devastated when he comes to know that his father is on that list. However, he is relieved when he finds his father is still alive. Death is all around them and it is even worse in the winters. They are marched to another camp and often go for days without food. Eliezer’s father has become very weak. He sees other sons leaving their old and weak fathers behind or killing their own father for a piece of bread.
At Buchenwald, Eliezer sees the ground covered with corpses. He doesn’t want his father to sit down and rest as he feels he would face death like others, and give in to death.
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2 Henry Friedlander.1983. The Nazi Camps. Critical Issues of the holocaust. 222-232
His father soon gets ill, suffering from dysentery and Eliezer thinks that he is not going to survive anymore. In the morning, he finds his father’s body is gone. After a couple more months, with the Allies are approaching, the Germans start moving thousands of prisoners 3, blowing away the camps. An underground resistance movement keeps Eliezer and others in the camp safe. Eliezer seems to have lost all his individuality, and felt that he was just a number, a view shared by Friedlander. The forced labor camps in the East were both small and larger in size and set up in Poland and Baltic States. While some of these camps were tolerable, others were the worst concentration camps. Word War 11 changed the nature of these camps that were now used for mass murder and became a large empire of slavery. The culmination of the war also brought the collapse of the concentration camp system. Unable to evacuate all the camps and kill the prisoners, due to the fast approaching Allies, the inmates were forced on undertaking long journeys. The death marches took heavy toll on the human lives, killing o more than one third of them. Killings in those camps were public and watched by the civilians. Murder by Gas chamber was introduced under the Euthanasia program. A series of lectures 4 by Christopher Browning examine the character of the German police and what made them to carry out the destruction of Jews. In case of Nazi Germany, one has to shift the focus a bit. It is essential to look into the mindset of the Police who became Holocaust Perpetrators. There are interviews of German Police officers who were not a part of those killings and torture of Jews.
______________________3 Radner, Susan G. 1996. Night by Elie Wiesel. Cambridge: Radical Teacher.4 Browning, Christopher R. 2000. Nazi policy, jewish workers, german killers. New York: ambridge University Press
There are incidents where the German Police officers refused to shoot at escaping Jews and some of them even committed suicide. There is still significant minority of the German Police officers at the camps who were not a part of the shooting of Jews.
What emerges from the above studies and experiences is that there was a difference among career police and reservists. The ordinary German policeman did not go to the East with the intention of killing policeman. These men complies with the policies of the regime more due to the situational factors rather than ideological.
BIBLIOGRAPHYBrowning, Christopher R. 2000. Nazi policy, jewish workers, german killers. New York: Cambridge University Press.Elie wiesel's 'night'. 2003. Deseret News2003.Henry Friedlander.1983. The Nazi Camps. Critical Issues of the holocaust. 222-232
Radner, Susan G. 1996. Night by Elie Wiesel. Cambridge: Radical Teacher.
