Boxcar Horrors Amid The Holocaust

The concentration camps were horrible, they were a work from sun up to sun down place. The S.S. officers dehumanized the jews by treating them like animals, taking away their identities, and reducing their rights to almost nothing. In the Jewish concentration camps there were many things that were harsh on the jewish. One of these things was transportation. All of the Jews had to get put in cattle cars and shipped to camps.

One way the Nazis dehumanized the Jews is by treating them as animals. They were forced into atrocious accommodations. Tightly packed cattle cars transported them from place to place. Eliezer states on page twenty-two of Night by Elie Wiesel, “The Hungarian police made us climb into the cars, eighty persons in each one.” Everywhere they went, they were met with filthy conditions. The transitions were brutal along with nearly everyone and everything else they encountered.

All these car companies that evidently took part in the use of forced labor and inevitably profited from the entire concept actively denied having took part during the Second World War (Dobbs 1) undoubtedly because they did not want any negative advertisements that might affect the reputation of their company name. These inmates were imprisoned in camps and resided in baracks, where they were forced to live in very bad and inhumane conditions. Those from Concentration camps were constantly observed by SS soldiers in order to keep them under strict authority. These ‘ready to use’ prisoners were then sold or loaned to companies for money in return. Thousands of these laborers died caused by this unreasonable concept. The companies involved in

One of the ways the Nazis dehumanize the Jews is packing them into cattle cars. “Lying down was out of the question, and we were only able to sit by deciding to take turns. There was very little air” (Wiesel 15). The Nazis do not care about the Jews because they force the Jews into miniscule

Throughout the entire novel the theme of dehumanization is particularly evident in both the prisoner workers and the transport prisoners. The Nazi guards are said to have “beefy” (pg. 41) faces, while an S.S. officer is described as having a “rat-like smile” as she “sniffed around” (pg. 41) the ramp. Prisoners are referred to as “standing around like sheep” (pg. 48). Starving Greek prisoners are compared to “huge human insects” (pg. 35). Even the transport trucks are called “mad dogs” (pg. 41). Everyone is treated and processed like livestock. “Trucks drive around, loading up lumber, cement, people” (pg. 34), is yet another example of how a human life was lowered to that of a mere object. A corpse is simply a “mound of meat” (pg. 45), and dead babies are carried out of the transport “like chickens, several in each hand” (pg. 39). The poisonous compound Cyclone B used to kill the prisoners was “an effective killer of lice in clothing and of men in gas chambers” (pg. 29).

In the mid 1930s heading into the the mid 1940s, The Nazis created harsh living conditions for Jews living in Europe. The Nazis, lead by Adolf Hitler, were an right wing group that took control of Germany and eventually expanded to the other European countries around them including Poland and Austria. Using the Nuremberg laws in 1935, the Nazis began removing Jewish people from everyday society. Four years later in 1939, Jews were forced to live in Ghettos that were overcrowded and barely maintained. Not long after in 1945, The “final solution” was implemented. Innocent Jewish men, women and children were shipped in train cars to Concentration camps. The conditions in these train cars were brutal. Passengers would go days without water, food

The deporting of people into extermination camps was carried out by cramming people into cattle carts attached to trains.

Elie and his family were packed into cattle cars and taken to Auschwitz. As the train arrived, they saw smoke rising from chimneys and were assailed by the horrific smell of burning flesh (Wiesel, 2008).

While some managed to escape and go into hiding, others were captured and sent to labor camps. While a large quantity of Jews were killed upon arrival, others were evaluated and sent to work. The Jews were starved, beaten, or killed and set on fire to make space for more Jews. All of their valuables had been taken away from them for the Nazi’s greed. They were put in blue striped Joseph Mandrowitz spoke of his journey while travelling to Auschwitz,

Primo Levi, in his novel Survival in Auschwitz (2008), illustrates the atrocities inflicted upon the prisoners of the concentration camp by the Schutzstaffel, through dehumanization. Levi describes “the denial of humanness” constantly forced upon the prisoners through similes, metaphors, and imagery of animalistic and mechanistic dehumanization (“Dehumanization”). He makes his readers aware of the cruel reality in the concentration camp in order to help them examine the psychological effects dehumanization has not only on those dehumanized, but also on those who dehumanize. He establishes an earnest and reflective tone with his audience yearning to grasp the reality of genocide.

another way victims of the Third Reich were killed. The prisoners, guarded heavily, were treated brutally and many died from mistreatment or were shot. Prisoners were transferred from one ghetto or concentration camp to another ghetto or concentration camp or to a death camp” (A Teacher's Guide To The Holocaust). Even though Hitler sent people on Death Marches to kill them off in a torturous way, Death Marches were one of the methods to kill of witnesses of the crimes the Nazis committed. Some people had to walk on the death marches and they had to walk for miles and miles. Also, sometimes these people had to walk to trains and had to ride in trains with many people squeezed together on a long horrible ride to killing centers.

The Germans used these to transport Jews from the Ghettos directly to the concentration camps.

Inmates resembled skeletons and were so weak they were unable to move. The smell of burning bodies was ever present and piles of corpses were scattered around the camp. However, you could be “saved” from the crematoria to be used as test subjects to cruel experimentation and used as lab rats for any experiment the scientists wanted to conduct. Later in the war, extermination camps were built. These were specialized for the mass murder of Jews using Zyklon B to ensure a painful, long, and torturous death. The bodies would then be thrown into the fire and all clothes, teeth, and shoes would be sent to pursue the German war front. At max efficiency, 20,000 people would be killed in the gas chambers a day. As the red Army approached near to liberate the Jews in concentration and extermination camps, SS officers sent prisoners on a death march across hundreds of miles, where they ran with no food or water, no matter the weather, until they reached the closest camp. SS officers proceeded to blow up the camps to hide the genocide from the

Deportees were unaware of the horrid conditions of the camp. They were allowed to pack clothes and other necessary items, but upon arrival they were stripped from their belongings. Survivor Elie Wiesel described this as being stripped away from his life. Elie arrived at Auschwitz with his family intact, but upon arrival they were separated by gender. “His mother and younger sister perished, his two older sisters survived. Elie and

The Jews had been starved while being detained in forced labor camp. Those who weren’t fit to work were killed and cremated. The most eye-opening description of the Jewish peoples’ state in the concentration camp came at the very end of the book. After being freed, Wiesel looked in a mirror for the first since his arrival at the camp. Wiesel described his reflection as a “corpse” and stated “the look in his eyes… has never left me.” (Wiesel 115). Not only had the Nazis carried out a brutal campaign on the Jews’ physical being, but they had also infiltrated deep into their psyche. Upon arrival at camps, all Jews’ were forced to hand over all of their clothes and wearing matching uniforms. After that, the prisoners’ were sent to the barber. Wiesel described the process, stating, “[The barbers’] clippers tore out our hair, shaved every hair on our bodies.” (Wiesel 35). After this process, every Jew was tattooed with a number. This process lead to the ego-death of every prisoner. They were no longer people: they were numbers. Nothing differentiated one Jew from another, besides the numbers tattooed on them. This horrendous act could only be classified as psychological torture, carried out by monsters who had lost control of their own