Survivor In The Concentration Camps example essay topic

"The Shawl", a story by Cynthia Ozick, is a compelling story of the horrors in concentration camp by the Nazis, during World War II. The story, told from the perspective of an omniscient narrator, concerns three Jewesses; Rosa, her infant daughter Magda and her adolescent niece Stella forced to live in these death camps. Although, Ozick was born and raised in the United States, she managed to blend fiction with biography that evokes palpable accounts of holocaust survivors in this uncontrollable and traumatic situation. "The Shawl" is splendidly written and conveys a tremendous tragedy of lives and dreams shattered. Alan R. Berger, in his critical analysis, writes "a unique story because it directly confronts the horrors of a death camp experience". (Berger 302) Among these experiences are the unspeakable torture, disease and starvation the Jews are force to endure.

Held captive in concentration camps, the Jews know they are inevitably doomed. The thought of escape is totally diminished, while in the presence of electric fences and cold-blooded SS guards. In the story, "The Shawl", Ozick describes an electric fence surrounding the camp where Rosa, Magda and Stella are forced to live their seemingly last days. Electric fences were a freighting and common reality in Nazi concentration camps. These fences are charged with enough voltage to stop a human heart the instance it is touched. "Sometimes the electricity inside the fence would seem to hum" (Ozick 334).

This haunting sound, Ozick describes, is the result of an incredible amount of amperage being forced through the wires by the dangerous surge of voltage to create a lethal barrier. As recalled by Erna F. Rubenstein, a survivor of her incarceration by the Nazis, "How can anyone think of escaping with all the electric wires around and hundreds of SS guards all over the camp". (Rubenstein 91-92) To these innocent prisoners, death is an anticipated and unavoidable truth. Women are deceived by their monstrous oppressors during the Nazi rule.

They are told the food is medicated to prevent them from inconveniently menstruating during captivity and transportation. But, the harsh reality is, it is a result of starvation that prevents the women from menstruating, as their bodies fight desperately to conserve itself and its precious energy. In "The Shawl", "Stella did not menstruate. Rosa did not menstruate" (Ozick 332).

This is evident as the female prisoners are forced to consume the only food offered by their captors and told it is medicated. Some women prisoners believe it is engineered to rob them of their womanhood completely. In the memoirs of Rubenstein, who lived through this wretched ordeal, she writes, "we were told it had some medication in it to stop us from menstruating". (Rubenstein 125) Nonetheless, because of their severe hunger, the women indulged in their meager offering of rations and even relieved; what woman would want to menstruate, living under these conditions?

As recalled by Rubenstein, "We didn't menstruate, and what a blessing it was under those circumstances". (Rubenstein 125) Jews are faced with a daily unfathomable torture; death by starvation. The prisoners are given minimal rations, enough to keep them alive until they have reach their final destination; the concentration camps, and then, ultimately, to their deaths in the gas chambers. Magda succumbs to marasmus, a condition of chronic undernourishment occurring especially in children and usually caused by a diet deficient in calories and protein. The appearance is a belly bloated with air. Ozick describes, in unsettling detail, Magda's condition, "It was fat with air, full and round" (Ozick 332), as a result of her severe malnutrition and hunger.

Both, Rosa and Stella are grossly emancipated in the story. As Stella is described, "Her knees were tumors on sticks, her elbows chicken bones". (Ozick 332) Rosa's and Stella skeletal features are visible at this point. "The weight of Rosa was becoming less and less; Rosa and Stella are slowly turning into air".

(Ozick 333) In another account, Golly D., a holocaust survivor, offers chilling details of her badly emancipated condition. You know, when you die from hunger your legs fill up with water. Under your eyes you fill up with water, and you become virtually become stiff. I could not lift my feet higher than two inches off the ground anymore. I could not move my arms.

And I had seen many die, and I realized when I saw my legs that is the end. (qtd. in Green and Kumar 192-193) Unimaginable torture is to die by starvation. Their thinning bodies slowly showing the shadows of their skeleton. As Rubenstein, a holocaust survivor, shares her terrible ordeal, "Yes, starvation is another cruel way of dying; the body dies, inch by inch, day by day, and yet one lives". (Rubenstein 167) Ozick describe the unbelievable environment of filth and sanitary pollution of the barracks where Rosa, her infant Magda and Stella are forced to reside: "excrement, thick turd-braids, and the slow stinking maroon waterfall that slunk down from the upper bunks, the stink mixed with a bitter fatty... ".

(Ozick 334) There isn't a language with the words to describe the horrid and unlivable conditions, as reported by a survivor in the concentration camps. "The camp was over crowded, the hygienic conditions were poor, and inmates were ill fed, ill clothed and ill shod". (Dwork and van Pelt 218-219) As a one of the result of these inhuman living condition, the barracks became a breeding ground for disease carrying vermin especially lice. The prisoners are driven mad, including Magda, because they are all infested with head and body lice, "when the lice, head lice and body lice, crazed her so... ". (Ozick 332) "There were very many lice...

". Andrzej Rabin, a holocaust survivor, witnessed "The lice fell on the floor and formed a layer about 50 cm across under the clothes". (qtd. in Dwork and van Pelt 219) The Jews, in their purposeless suffering, are drained of the fight for life, no feeling inside, ambition gone, love evaporated from them. They are empty and without pity. Ozick writes, "They were in a place without pity, all pity was annihilated in Rosa, she looked at Stella's bones without pity". (Ozick 332) This is the feeling, the dead reality, of these prisoners. There is a transformation into something different from human-being that had taken place.

As Rubenstein recalls, "The bodies felt empty. There was nothing left inside. No feelings, no desires, not even tears". (Rubenstein 146) For many prisoners this feeling of obscurity is born on the death march. Nazi guards force the prisoners to march to undisclosed destinations for weeks and months at a time. The prisoners are offered very little food, no protection from the frigid cold weather and, most of the time, without adequate footwear to protect the prisoner's feet.

Werner R. offers disturbing details of his experience in one of these marches, It was cold. It was bitter, bitter cold. It was subzero temperature there. That was bad. And as we got up, there were people sitting there.

They couldn't move anymore. They were just frozen, you know, half-dead. So this whole bedraggled group was marching, and people were dying left and right, you know. It was just-it was absolutely-and there was nothing you could do. I mean, if you tried to help somebody, you would stay there.

It was totally hopeless. And so you stopped, and then we marched on a little bit, and there were people staying there, and as we marched off, you heard so many people with a gun shooting these people who stayed behind. (qtd. in Greene and Kumar 184) The Jews had suffered a dehumanizing, brutalizing force of evil, to refuse to be abased to the level of animals, to live through the torment, to outlive the tormentors in their lives. We try hard to imagine the terrible torture, the murderous Nazis, and the starving, skeletonizing bodies the Jews had to forcefully endure. But, it is impossible. This catastrophic event, in history, is beyond imagination. It is shame that we sometimes take for granted our own breath.

This tragedy can teach us to recognize how fragile all life is. We need to look closely, hear and hold the stories of the people who lived this catastrophe and never forget it. The suffering of the Jews may have saved us all of an unseen evil. Merely to give witness by one's own testimony was, in the end, to contribute to a moral victory. Simply to survive was a victory of the human spirit. Work Cited Berger, Alan R. "The Shawl" Short Stories for Students.

Detroit: Gale, 1998. Dwork, Deborah and Robert Jan van Pelt. Auschwitz; 1270 To The Present. New York: Norton, 1996. Green, Joshua M., and Shiva r Kumar, eds. Witness; Voices from the Holocaust.

New York: Free, 2000. Rubinstein, Erna F. The Survivor in Us All; A Memoir of the Holocaust. Connecticut: Archon, 1983.