Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years In The Gas Chambers

Throughout history, there have been many injustices that have plagued the Earth from King Leopold II, who conquered and killed thousands of innocent Congolese for personal monetary growth, to a Japanese internment camp during World War II. While those events were considered horrific, there was one that surpassed them all. Auschwitz, recognized as the worst Jewish interment camp, has the highest death count of around 1.25 million Jews under the reign of Hitler. Being a byproduct of the Final Solution, Auschwitz was constructed because killing Jews individually was a tedious task. With the integration of internment camps, the ability to commit mass genocide would be much easier since they would be in a more concentrated area. The novel, Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers, written by Filip Müller, recounts the tale of an Auschwitz survivor and the life he and other Jewish prisoners had to endure behind its walls. He stated that Auschwitz was a “terrible accusation against God and humanity” (Müller 1999, x). This novel was written to bring light to tragedies that ensued during and
In the year 1942, during the height of the Nazi regime, Müller, along with thousands of other Jews, were uprooted and dragged into Auschwitz . Being forced into these concentration camps, each Jew was assigned a tedious job that slowly drained the life out of them. During Müller time at Auschwitz, he was forced to work as a gas chamber operator as he unwillingly killed thousands of women, men, and children. Since Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers is written from Müller’s accounts at the concentration camp, the main purpose was to show the struggles and hardships they had to endure during their time at Auschwitz. By highlighting the brutality of the SS troops, Müller hoped to accentuate key factors that lead to Auschwitz, in hopes that history did not repeat