Death Marches During The Holocaust

The conditions that the Jews and other were put through were super horrible. They were forced into boxcars that didn’t have anything in them and they wondered where they were and where they were going. They stood in the boxcars for days with no food or water to keep them alive. (Joseph)(Source 3) Along their way to the concentration camps they were exposed to harsh weather. In the summer it was scorching hot and in the winter it was freezing cold. Since they were shoved amongst each other they suffered from suffocation. Along their journey many young and old died along the way (“The Holocaust”)(Source 2). Inside the boxcars there was no windows or anyway to breath. It was also very unsanitary because of the abundance of people in them and they didn’t have any water to at least wash themselves with. All they could do was stand there in the dark and wait (Joseph) (Source

It all started by the French administration being replaced from Jewish to German. On July 16, 1942 4,500 French police began the mass arrest of Jews. Jews from France, Germany, Austria, Poland, the Czech Republic and Russia were arrested. The detained were taken to the Winter Stadium called the Velodrome D’Hiver. They were kept in terrible conditions with no food, water or sanitary facilities. After all the arrest S ome Jews were deported to the concentration camps of Pithiviers, Beaune-la-Rolande and Auschwitz. Most of the people deported were sent to Auschwitz and murdered. Every two or three days about 1,000 Jews were sent to Auschwitz. By the end of September 1942 near 38,000 Jews had been sent to Auschwitz from France (Vashem).

January 24, 1945, the SS officers were taking all prisoners of Auschwitz on death marches so that they would all die quicker. Many who would go on these marches would not survive because they would run for miles without rest.

“If a jew was even suspected on not complying with the laws, it could lead to beatings, arrests, imprisonment, or even death.” (Pg 18) In Bergen-Belsen, the Jews that died of typhus and other diseases would be burned or buried in mass graves. (Pg 2) While at the camp, cattle cars would be brought to take jews for the east. These transports averaged 1,000 people but some had more than 3,000 Jews.

Lastly, both the Death March Articles and the Children’s Poetry show the power of indifference and the victims of the Holocaust. The Death March Articles go deep into the true horrors that the prisoners of the concentration camps had to go through and endure. During these death marches: “The SS guards had strict orders to kill prisoners who could no longer walk or travel.” (Death March Articles 3). The death marches during the Holocaust were some of the most horrific events in human history.

After being forced out of their camps because the resistance was gaining ground, they were commanded to run on feet all the way there.Personally, it seems that the soldiers were expecting them to endure impossible standards. The book quotes, " An icy wind was blowing violently. But we marched without faltering."(85). If there was any question to how the Jews mustered up enough strength and will to survive, this was it. After all, they've been through the worst conditions, and they stilled showed grit to survive. They marched on for hours with no breaks. I can't contemplate the soreness, bruises,and aches they endured. The Jews have exceeded past physical exhaustion and not to mention mentally. In the minds of the depressed prisoners, essentially they were running towards death and injury, but still prevailed. If I was in that situation, I couldn't imagine the type of feeling I would be in. Adding in cold, thirstiness, hunger and damage from unhealthy running can easily make one choose the easy way out. The road was not easy, but

During the Holocaust, when Jews were taking masse to concentration camps, the sole focus within the camps was the utility of members. Healthy Jews were to be used routinely for labor. Sickly ones were far more likely to be executed on the spot. Jews were hanged in the center of the camp and left there for days. Others including their family members and lifelong friends would be forced to walk past their bodies again and again. During this tragic time many

Nazis have taken over. You an your family have been sent away to suffer in a concentration camp because you're Jewish. This is what happened during the Holocaust. Millions of Jews died because of the violence, work, and living conditions in these camps.

In early 1930’s one of the darkest times in history, a worldwide depression had hit Germany. Adolf Hitler conducted a slave raid throughout the Soviet Union during World War II.

The prisoners mainly traveled on foot but most of them die from starvation and exestuation. The prisoners would be marched on foot part of the way, and then crowded onto trains, where they were given food and water. There is an estimate of 100,000 Jews that have died while on the death marches. The prisoners that the Nazis thought were unfit for slave labor in Germany was not taken on the death marches. The death marches lasted up to weeks, sometimes even months. During the time, thousands dies from starvation, diseases, and the cold. Some of them were shot along the way and some was recused by the neutral diplomats.

The Holocaust was a terrible time where Jews and many other people lost their lives, families, and friends. It was also a time where Jews and many other people were forced to live in Concentration Camps. Concentration Camps are brutal places where if you didn’t work, you would die. As the Germans say “arbeit macht frei”,” work makes you free”. Along with this the people at these camps were barely given any food to eat, and were kept in terrible conditions. These conditions included sleeping on wooden shelves, never taking showers, and never being able to change clothes. This may not sound to you, but after a couple of weeks, everyone in these camps started to get less and less healthier every day, and unfortunately people started die every

They then were taken in cattle trucks to different destinations. During these long walks ‘Death Marches’, people who lagged behind the majority of prisoners were shot. Many of them died from exhaustion. Epidemics, such as typhoid and dysentery were some of the main causes of deaths in the POW camps. Mass shootings, were soldiers shot, one at a time a guard would be called up to shoot. Executions, were not done in the POW camps, they were transferred to a separate area and killed there. Uncleanliness, malnutrition, pneumonia were some other reasons the Prisoners of War died in the 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

The reason why the death march happened was because the Germans never liked the Jews and all they wanted was to make them suffer for long days. They wanted to get rid of them, but in a very harmful and slow way and they came up with the Death March. (“Bataan Death March” Atomic).Germans were the ones that came up with everything to get rid of them all so it could only be them. (“Death Marches”).

The Holocaust was a very tragic time in the 1930s. Many people were against the Nazis during that time. There were many different types of resistance during the Holocaust. Spiritual and cultural resistance were some of the types of resistance in the ghettos and in the camps. There was also armed resistance. Chiune Sugihara was one of the many people who were formed part of a form of a resistance and helped the Jews escape. He was a Japanese council, gave out transit visas for the Jews to escape, and saved about 3,500 Jewish live.