The Holocaust Concentration Camps

11 Million. Consider 11 million people standing all together in one combined group. Now imagine them in fear. Why are they in fear? They’re slowly watching their fellow Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, etc. being killed, ten or twenty or maybe even fifty at a time. Some are burned alive. Some are gassed until death finally kills their immune system. The others take on the cruelest punishment. They’re forced to work in concentration camps where they are split up from their family and children. Children who couldn’t work were forced to death, some mothers coming along with their children if they refused to cooperate with giving their kids up. We ask ourselves, what made these men so cruel to tear poor families away and to also kill those that they deemed didn’t fit in society? What made it their decision to decide who belonged and who didn’t? The start of the Holocaust began with something simple, a boycott on April 1st, 1933 (Rosenberg). Nazis demanded all Jewish businesses be boycotted immediately, but that was the lesser of the evil about to come. Slowly but surely life got worse for the Jews, eventually excluding them from public life, arresting and sending them to concentration camps, making them wear the Star of David
However there were some survivors, one including David Wolnerman (Kilen). David Wolnerman was just 13 years of age when he entered the concentration camps, but he did something that saved his life. “Wolnerman, then 13, noticed that the old, young and sickly were in a line to the left. When Mengele asked his age, Wolnerman said, ‘I am 18.’ Mengele pointed his stick to the right. The left line was eventually sent to the gas chambers” (Kilen). Wolnerman realized that if he said his correct age, he would be put to death immediately. Wolnerman survived the concentration camps and was eventually freed by American soldiers on April 29th, 1945