Holocaust Lost Hope
Carly Underkoffler
Dr. Brendon Corcoran
English 338-401
April 19, 2011
The Holocaust: Death by Lost Hope
"If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all." - Martin Luther King
The Holocaust was a horrific genocide in which the Nazi party systematically exterminated millions of Jews, homosexuals, mentally retarded persons, and others, on the pretense of ‘purifying’ the German race. The Nazis put a great deal of thought and consideration into the creation of concentration camps to create demeaning and lethal places of extreme desperation. No other genocide has been nearly as creative in the methods it used to torture and exterminate …show more content…
a group of people from the inside out. The death camps were especially efficient with breaking down prisoners, both mentally and physically. In Primo Levi’s novel, Survival in Auschwitz he gives detailed accounts of the brutal environment, the mass starvation, and other physical hardships of the famous death camp, Auschwitz.
The premise of Auschwitz along with other concentration camps was to exterminate all those who inhabit it, in a tremendously torturous way at that. Prisoners of the death camps were forced to comply with difficult work orders while given intensely poor conditions to labor in. The root of these conditions began with depriving the prisoners of basic human needs such as food and water. Since the prisoners were forced to strenuous work their diet was extremely important to provide them with energy required for the work ahead of them. In the C.A.N.D.L.E.S. museum in Terre Haute, Indiana there are images of the rations of food that each prisoner was given. According to the posters at the museum each prisoner was given a chunk of bread, coffee, some sort of inedible soup or gruel and on occasion a slice of salami and margarine for the bread. With these insignificant portions of food it was no wonder why the prisoners became exhausted so quickly. Levi explains that even water was a scarce commodity at Auschwitz. Eva Kor, an Auschwitz survivor who runs the C.A.N.D.L.E.S. Holocaust museum recalls how her family would have to pay the guards on the train with everything they had to have some water, only to have the water dumped over their heads. She noted that no matter which way they held their cups they could never catch any of the water, and that was before they had even arrived to the camps. The deprivation of food and water was a common Nazi tactic that would be present through the prisoner’s entire stay at an internment camp.
Food and water were not the only essentials that were taken from the inhabitants of the camp but clothing, possessions, and even hair were taken along with other necessities the enslaved innocent had once required. Levi describes his arrival at Auschwitz: “We ask many questions but they each catch hold of us and in a moment we find ourselves shaved and sheared. What comic faces we have without hair!”(Levi 23). The innocent’s clothes were taken and replaced with undistinguishable uniforms making prisoners of each of them. What’s more, these uniforms were designed to be particularly uncomfortable, especially the shoes. Levi writes, “Death begins with the shoes; for most of us, they show themselves to be instruments of torture, which after a few hours of marching cause painful sores which, become fatally infected.”(Levi 34). The prisoners were forced to wear wooden shoes while they proceeded to slave every day in the death camps listening to the barking orders of Nazi officials. Levi explains how within only a few hours a prisoner’s feet would be blistered and infected. The Nazi’s main goal was to achieve the total exhaustion and ultimate agony of those inside the death camps, and they were successful. Prisoners welcomed the relief of work with open arms even in the most terrifying of situations. In Primo Levi’s novel, when the camp was enduring an aerial attack the prisoners were more than welcome to the idea of a bombing if it allowed them if it meant even just a moment of rest, “When the earth began to tremble, we dragged ourselves, stunned and limping, through the corrosive fumes of the smoke bombs to the vast waste areas, sordid and sterile, closed within boundary of Buna; there we lay inert, piled up on top of each other like dead men, but still aware of the momentary pleasure of our bodies resting” (Levi 119). Rest, proper diets, and appropriate clothing were the necessities for prisoner’s physical health, but health was not a requirement at the concentration camps; the only requirement for the prisoners was death.
While methods such as these were used to run down the prisoners of the concentration camps physically, other tactics were being employed to weaken them mentally. The Nazi officials used every tactic to demean prisoners; one way was by neglecting to refer to them as people. They regarded them as something less than that, “for them we are ‘Kazeti,’ a singular neuter word” (Levi 120). It would be unacceptable to starve a human and force them to labor for hours on end under such terrible living conditions, but that’s the way a Kazeti deserved to be treated (or so they thought). Murdering those referred to as objects made killing innocent prisoners easier for the Nazi officials by detaching any human relation between them and the prisoners in addition to mentally ruining the prisoner. In a way, it seems that the Nazis were simply putting the Kazetis in their place. An important part of this was trying to redesign the prisoners to fit the status of scum which they were assigned. As mentioned before the prisoners in the death camp were mandatorily shaved and sterilized before entering a death camp. The process that they were forced to endure was more humiliating than it was painful. Levi describes the procedure, “Finally another door is opened: here we are, locked in, naked, sheared and standing, with our feet in water – it is a shower-room.”(Levi 23). Not only have the men been stripped of all possessions, family and friends, they are then ordered, like the slaves they had become, to stand naked within two yards of each other and give up their clothes. The Nazi’s ensured that the life of a Kazeti was nothing more than a humiliating disgrace.
To combat the humiliation and mental destruction from the Nazi’s, hope became an important virtue for camp prisoners.
Levi writes, “I believe that it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today; and not so much for his material aid as for his having constantly reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror; something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth surviving.” (Levi 120). In the end Levi only needed a small glimmer of hope to carry on, something that the Nazis had attempted to extinguish since his arrival to the camp. Levi expresses how efficient the Nazi’s were at breaking down the mentality of prisoners and how persistently they worked deprive the prisoners of any hope of survival. Levi found that food and water became only a couple of basic necessities for the prisoners and that hope was just as an essential part of his survival. In order to survive the camps, the prisoners needed hope; to hope, they needed only the smallest glimpse of a possibility to return to normal life after the camp. With no hope there is little survival, with no survival there is only
genocide. Genocide can be defined as, “acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) however I believe that genocide is much more than terminating a people, but also eradicating an entire peoples hope. The Nazi’s humiliated their prisoners, taking everything including their hope for safety, security, and survival. Before they ever killed anyone the Nazis had begun a grave injustice. They had attempted, and in large part succeeded, to deprive an entire group of people of the very thing that gave them the will to live. Genocide is the complete termination of a person’s emotional state by revoking the hope of an entire people before any murder committed, and the Holocaust did exactly that.
Bibliography
"CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center - Biography of Eva Kor - Survivors." CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center - Home. Web. 01 May 2011. <http://www.candlesholocaustmuseum.org/index.php?sid=26>.
Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz. New York: Classic House, 2008. Print.
Phillips, Edward. "Preventing Genocide - What Is Genocide?" United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Web. 29 Apr. 2011. <http://www.ushmm.org/genocide/take_action/genocide>.
Dr. Brendon Corcoran
English 338-401
April 19, 2011
The Holocaust: Death by Lost Hope
"If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all." - Martin Luther King
The Holocaust was a horrific genocide in which the Nazi party systematically exterminated millions of Jews, homosexuals, mentally retarded persons, and others, on the pretense of ‘purifying’ the German race. The Nazis put a great deal of thought and consideration into the creation of concentration camps to create demeaning and lethal places of extreme desperation. No other genocide has been nearly as creative in the methods it used to torture and exterminate …show more content…
a group of people from the inside out. The death camps were especially efficient with breaking down prisoners, both mentally and physically. In Primo Levi’s novel, Survival in Auschwitz he gives detailed accounts of the brutal environment, the mass starvation, and other physical hardships of the famous death camp, Auschwitz.
The premise of Auschwitz along with other concentration camps was to exterminate all those who inhabit it, in a tremendously torturous way at that. Prisoners of the death camps were forced to comply with difficult work orders while given intensely poor conditions to labor in. The root of these conditions began with depriving the prisoners of basic human needs such as food and water. Since the prisoners were forced to strenuous work their diet was extremely important to provide them with energy required for the work ahead of them. In the C.A.N.D.L.E.S. museum in Terre Haute, Indiana there are images of the rations of food that each prisoner was given. According to the posters at the museum each prisoner was given a chunk of bread, coffee, some sort of inedible soup or gruel and on occasion a slice of salami and margarine for the bread. With these insignificant portions of food it was no wonder why the prisoners became exhausted so quickly. Levi explains that even water was a scarce commodity at Auschwitz. Eva Kor, an Auschwitz survivor who runs the C.A.N.D.L.E.S. Holocaust museum recalls how her family would have to pay the guards on the train with everything they had to have some water, only to have the water dumped over their heads. She noted that no matter which way they held their cups they could never catch any of the water, and that was before they had even arrived to the camps. The deprivation of food and water was a common Nazi tactic that would be present through the prisoner’s entire stay at an internment camp.
Food and water were not the only essentials that were taken from the inhabitants of the camp but clothing, possessions, and even hair were taken along with other necessities the enslaved innocent had once required. Levi describes his arrival at Auschwitz: “We ask many questions but they each catch hold of us and in a moment we find ourselves shaved and sheared. What comic faces we have without hair!”(Levi 23). The innocent’s clothes were taken and replaced with undistinguishable uniforms making prisoners of each of them. What’s more, these uniforms were designed to be particularly uncomfortable, especially the shoes. Levi writes, “Death begins with the shoes; for most of us, they show themselves to be instruments of torture, which after a few hours of marching cause painful sores which, become fatally infected.”(Levi 34). The prisoners were forced to wear wooden shoes while they proceeded to slave every day in the death camps listening to the barking orders of Nazi officials. Levi explains how within only a few hours a prisoner’s feet would be blistered and infected. The Nazi’s main goal was to achieve the total exhaustion and ultimate agony of those inside the death camps, and they were successful. Prisoners welcomed the relief of work with open arms even in the most terrifying of situations. In Primo Levi’s novel, when the camp was enduring an aerial attack the prisoners were more than welcome to the idea of a bombing if it allowed them if it meant even just a moment of rest, “When the earth began to tremble, we dragged ourselves, stunned and limping, through the corrosive fumes of the smoke bombs to the vast waste areas, sordid and sterile, closed within boundary of Buna; there we lay inert, piled up on top of each other like dead men, but still aware of the momentary pleasure of our bodies resting” (Levi 119). Rest, proper diets, and appropriate clothing were the necessities for prisoner’s physical health, but health was not a requirement at the concentration camps; the only requirement for the prisoners was death.
While methods such as these were used to run down the prisoners of the concentration camps physically, other tactics were being employed to weaken them mentally. The Nazi officials used every tactic to demean prisoners; one way was by neglecting to refer to them as people. They regarded them as something less than that, “for them we are ‘Kazeti,’ a singular neuter word” (Levi 120). It would be unacceptable to starve a human and force them to labor for hours on end under such terrible living conditions, but that’s the way a Kazeti deserved to be treated (or so they thought). Murdering those referred to as objects made killing innocent prisoners easier for the Nazi officials by detaching any human relation between them and the prisoners in addition to mentally ruining the prisoner. In a way, it seems that the Nazis were simply putting the Kazetis in their place. An important part of this was trying to redesign the prisoners to fit the status of scum which they were assigned. As mentioned before the prisoners in the death camp were mandatorily shaved and sterilized before entering a death camp. The process that they were forced to endure was more humiliating than it was painful. Levi describes the procedure, “Finally another door is opened: here we are, locked in, naked, sheared and standing, with our feet in water – it is a shower-room.”(Levi 23). Not only have the men been stripped of all possessions, family and friends, they are then ordered, like the slaves they had become, to stand naked within two yards of each other and give up their clothes. The Nazi’s ensured that the life of a Kazeti was nothing more than a humiliating disgrace.
To combat the humiliation and mental destruction from the Nazi’s, hope became an important virtue for camp prisoners.
Levi writes, “I believe that it was really due to Lorenzo that I am alive today; and not so much for his material aid as for his having constantly reminded me by his presence, by his natural and plain manner of being good, that there still existed a just world outside our own, something and someone still pure and whole, not corrupt, not savage, extraneous to hatred and terror; something difficult to define, a remote possibility of good, but for which it was worth surviving.” (Levi 120). In the end Levi only needed a small glimmer of hope to carry on, something that the Nazis had attempted to extinguish since his arrival to the camp. Levi expresses how efficient the Nazi’s were at breaking down the mentality of prisoners and how persistently they worked deprive the prisoners of any hope of survival. Levi found that food and water became only a couple of basic necessities for the prisoners and that hope was just as an essential part of his survival. In order to survive the camps, the prisoners needed hope; to hope, they needed only the smallest glimpse of a possibility to return to normal life after the camp. With no hope there is little survival, with no survival there is only
genocide. Genocide can be defined as, “acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) however I believe that genocide is much more than terminating a people, but also eradicating an entire peoples hope. The Nazi’s humiliated their prisoners, taking everything including their hope for safety, security, and survival. Before they ever killed anyone the Nazis had begun a grave injustice. They had attempted, and in large part succeeded, to deprive an entire group of people of the very thing that gave them the will to live. Genocide is the complete termination of a person’s emotional state by revoking the hope of an entire people before any murder committed, and the Holocaust did exactly that.
Bibliography
"CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center - Biography of Eva Kor - Survivors." CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center - Home. Web. 01 May 2011. <http://www.candlesholocaustmuseum.org/index.php?sid=26>.
Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz. New York: Classic House, 2008. Print.
Phillips, Edward. "Preventing Genocide - What Is Genocide?" United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Web. 29 Apr. 2011. <http://www.ushmm.org/genocide/take_action/genocide>.