One Survivor Of Auschwitz example essay topic

Imagine being forced by total strangers, no different than yourself, to leave your home and everything in it behind. You are then pushed onto a train packed with other people. After a long train ride you are taken off the train and the women and children are put in one group. The people who can perform the tasks that these strangers need done are put into another group. The women and children who were told that they would be given a shower are never to be seen again. Two of these camps are Auschwitz and Dachau.

There the SS officers treated these poor people inhumanly. Auschwitz is located in Oswiecim, Poland it was established on May 26, 1940. The Auschwitz complex was divided into three major camps: Auschwitz I, main camp or Stamm lager; Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, established on October 8, 1941 as a 'Vernichtungslager' (extermination camp); Auschwitz or Monowitz, established on May 31, 1942 as an 'Arbeitslager' or work camp. This camp was liberated January 27, 1945, by the Soviet Army.

(The estimated number of victims: 2.1 to 2.5 million. This estimated number of death is considered by historians as a strict minimum. The real number of death is unknown but probably much higher, maybe 4 million) (jewish gen. org n. pag. ). In Auschwitz there was a "doctor" name Josef Mengle.

He performed gruesome experiments on people in the camp. He is most famous for his experiments on twins. He would remove organs or body parts from one twin and put them one the other to see what would happen. Mengle did not only experiment on twins though, he would inject prisoners with lethal chemicals just to see how they would react to them. One survivor of Auschwitz is Richard Sufit.

He was born in Paris, France on September 16, 1925. Sufit was arrested in 1944, detained in Dancy, France. He was then moved to Auschwitz-Birkenau on June 30, 1944. There he was tattooed with roll number: A 16866.

He worked at Buna-Monowitz and took part in the Death March to Gleiwitz, then to Buchenwald where he was freed by the Americans on April 11, 1945. The people who appeared too weak to walk or ill were placed in trucks. In an other wagon, two or three wagons in front of ours, some prisoners had tried to escape during the journey. They jumped from the wagon just before the German border and tried to hide in the forest. But the train had stopped and all these prisoners were captured by the SS. Some were immediately killed and all the prisoners, dead and alive, were placed back in their wagon.

Upon our arrival at Auschwitz, we have seen the survivors placed in a group apart from the others. We " ll never see them again (Sufit). During the Auschwitz Death March the temperature was below zero. Only a few lucky ones had over-coats. Prisoners that fell from exhaustion were shot to death. A prisoner marching in an outer row would see a bloody body every 40 or 50 yards for miles.

Some of the prisoners were able to use confusion to escape. Twenty-one year old Sara Erenhalt Horne 3 and a group of other women were able to do just that. One night, a few of the SS officers stopped for the prisoners and themselves to get some sleep. The women slept in a barn owned by a priest.

The next morning the seven women stayed in the barn and hid there for three and a half weeks (Feldman 278-279). The prisoners of this camp were treated very poorly, and their only crime was, for the most part, being of the Jewish faith. "Pronounce it as though you were clearing something nasty from your throat... Dachau.

My first inkling that this pleasant Bavarian village would become a word to chill the blood, came from the terrible odor as my passenger and I disembarked from our little two-seater Stinson L-5". Chuck Ferre e, a Holocaust witness and liberator, was there.