Terror Of Auschwitz Essay Research Paper The — страница 2

worked. The Jews would be herded into these rooms and the doors would lock. Then vents in the ceiling would open and granules of Zyklon B would be released. Within 15 minutes, they would all be dead. Thirty minutes after they died, authorities would open the doors and let it air out for two or three hours. Then they would send in slaves to remove the bodies, taking them to the crematorium. The prisoners chosen for the ‘life’ line may have had the worst fate though. The conditions at Auschwitz were unthinkable. Prisoners slept six people to a bunk, which was made for two. These bunks rose 6 feet high, sometimes with so much weight on the tops of them, they would collapse and kill all the ones underneath. Sleep was impossible for most though, beds were hard plank boards, over

crowded and infested with lice, ticks and bed bugs. The rats were so bad that if a prisoners died in the middle of the night, the rats would have eaten him to the point where recognition was impossible. Every morning prisoners had to stand or squat for hours at a time for roll call. They also had to bring out the bodies of anyone who had died during the night and hold them up to be counted. Then they were sent off to work. Work was long hours of hard labor building more barracks, adding to the camp, or going off to the German factories. The Nazis rented out slave labor very cheaply to the industries in the area. Some had a lunch of cabbage stew, but those away on work crews did not. After work was another roll call, lasting for hours. The living holding up the bodies of those who

had died while working. Dinner for the prisoners was rotten meat, stale bread, and ‘coffee’ made of warm, dirty water. Those who had missed lunch were also given cold pulpy cabbage stew that had been poured at noon. Prisoners were supposed to be broken and dehumanized. The Nazis shaved all their body hair and took all their possessions. They were allowed 15 minutes every day to use the lavatories. All 1,500 prisoners (per bunker) had 15 minutes to go to the bathroom with no privacy whatsoever in the mornings before work. They weren’t allowed to go while they were at work, and if they did, the punishment was so severe that few survived it. The ‘Hospital’ was dreadful. The prisoners referred to it as the crematorium waiting room. If one didn’t heal fast enough to suit

the authorities, they gave him an injection of phenol to the heart or they sent him to the gas chambers. There wasn t any medication. The only advantage to the hospital was that one could spend his last few days lying down rather than working. Many were sick but afraid to go to the hospital. As a result, typhus and diarrhea were an epidemic. The SS was corrupt. They would select the best rations for themselves and then sell the stolen goods on the black market. The prisoners got whatever was left, no matter how meager or rotted it was. SS officers however were fat and pig like. They had parties where they were served pork sausages, potatoes, and vegetables by the women prisoners. The professional criminals (burglars, murderers, rapists) at Auschwitz were entrusted with special

jobs. They were called ‘kapos’. It was the kapos job to wake prisoners in the morning, beating them with sticks if they didn’t move fast enough. They also administered some of the punishments, floggings and beatings mostly. Kapos were also not required to do the menial slave labor. Punishment at Auschwitz was sever and biased. If an SS officer didn’t like a particular prisoner for some reason then that poor prisoner was tormented and beaten until the SS was satisfied, usually when the prisoner died. They had many ways of punishing people. You could be beaten, flogged (75-100 lashes), or just plain shot. They were creative and came up with many torments just to amuse themselves. They might make you stand holding rocks over your head for one of the long roll call and shoot

you if you drop them. The SS might also force you to beat or torture your friends or family. The worst thing they could do to you however was send you to Cell Block 11. Cell Block 11 was a torture chamber. There were ’standing’ cells, four feet square that prisoners were packed into, sometimes twenty at a time. These cell had no room to lie down or even sit. The ventilation consisted of two inch squares covered over with heavy wire mesh to deter escape attempts. Many people suffocated, after being left in them for hours or days at a time. Even if you did survive a standing cell you still had to go to work that day. Cell Block 11 also contained starvation cells. These cells accommodated fifty people or more. Prisoners were put here to die if one of them attempted to escape.