Holocaust - Life in the Ghetto

The Holocaust

Life in the Ghetto

Can you imagine being a Jew living through the Holocaust? The Holocaust, also referred to as the Shoah, was a genocide during World War II in which Nazi Germany, systematically murdered some six million European Jews, around two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe, between 1941 and 1945 (History.com). The Jewish during the Holocaust were discriminated and killed. They had a curfew and only could purchase from certain stores. They also started to get deported into Jewish “reservations” also known as the concentration camps. A concentration camp is a place where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labor or to await mass execution. The term is most strongly associated with the several hundred camps established by the Nazis in Germany and occupied Europe in 1933–45, among the most infamous being Dachau, Belsen, and Auschwitz.

In 1933 is where all the restrictions on the Jews started. In that year there were random attacks on Jews and their property. The police and courts no longer protected Jews. The Nazi also banned kosher. In 1935-38 Jews no longer allowed to vote and lose German citizenship. They were also banned from parks, restaurants and swimming pools. Jews were excluded from cinema, theatre, concerts, exhibitions, beaches and holiday resorts. Then Kristallnacht occurred November 9th, 1938. A night of terrible violence in Germany. German and Austrian Jews are murdered, burnt and shop windows destroyed. Thousands of Jews are arrested. In 1941, Jew over 6 had to wear a yellow star of david with Jew written on it. This was to make them look like an outsider, to basically isolate them and dehumanize them. In 1942 is when they started to get deported to the concentration camps. (British library )

Genocide at concentration camps was initially carried out in the form of mass shootings. However, the shootings proved to be too psychologically damaging to those being asked to pull the triggers. The Nazis next tried mass killing by blowing victims up with explosives, but that also was found unsuitable. The Nazis settled on using gas chamber. Stationary gas chambers could kill 2,000 people at once. Once in the chambers, about one-third of the victims died immediately, though death could take up to 20 minutes. At a lot of concentration and extermination camps, the Nazis began to do medical experiments on their prisoners, which included placing subjects in pressure chambers, testing drugs on them, freezing them, attempting to change eye color by injecting chemicals into children’s eyes, and other surgeries that were often done without anesthesia.All the Nazis’ enemies imprisoned at Auschwitz were given special badges to mark them out: yellow stars for the Jews, a brown triangle for Roma , a pink triangle for gay prisoners, a purple triangle for Jehovah’s witnesses, a black triangle for people who were deemed “asocial elements” (mentally ill, pacifists, prostitutes), and many more marking out each minority. While being in the concentration camps they were discriminated and dehumanized (Thegospelcoalition.org).

“About 200,000 inmates of the camp between 1940-45 survived. Out of a total of about 7,000 guards at Auschwitz, including 170 female staff, 750 were prosecuted and punished once Nazi Germany was defeated.The