Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Welcome to Auschwitz

CECILIE KLEIN-POLLACK

Describes arrival at Auschwitz

“The Holocaust was the mass murder of six million Jews and millions of other people leading up to, and during, World War II”. The homicides took place in Europe between 1933 and 1945. They were organised by the German Nazi party which was managed and directed by Adolf Hitler. Most of the victims were Jewish people. Approximately 7 out of every 10 Jews living in Europe were killed. Almost all of the victims were killed because they belonged to certain racial or religious groups which the Nazis wanted to eliminate. “This kind of killing is called genocide”. The Nazis also killed trade unionists, politicians, teachers, journalists and anyone else who was against Hitler. We will never know exactly how many people died in total but there were millions of victims that were not Jewish, including: Civilians and soldiers from the Soviet Union, Serbs, Catholics from Poland, Homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Disabled people, Polish civilians, Roma and Sinti people, that means Gypsies, and Slavic people. Auschwitz, also known as Auschwitz-Birkenau, was the largest of the Nazi death camps located in southern Poland and opened in 1940. It first “served as a detention center for political prisoners”, however it then became the “killing centre where the largest numbers of European Jews were killed during the Holocaust”. Jews and other Nazi enemies were exterminated using gas chambers, or used as slave labor. By mid 1942. People that arrived to Auschwitz were inspected by Nazi doctors. Those who were considered unsuitable for work, including pregnant women, children and aged people were immediately sent to the showers, which really were gas chambers. “Mass gassing of Jews using Zyklon-B began at Auschwitz”. In  January 27 1945, the Soviet Army entered Auschwitz, they found approximately 7,600 sick, a pile of corpses, hundreds of thousands of pieces of clothing and shoes, and tons of hair removed from the prisoners of war. “According to some estimates, between 1.1 million to 1.5 million people, the vast majority of them Jews, died at Auschwitz during its years of operation” (Auschwitz-History.com).
Cecilie Klein’s testimony: Cecilie was describing her experience when she arrived at Auschwitz. She said they marched them to a huge building that had shower caps, and they were told to undress, and she was young and vain, and she dressed in her best clothes, so she put it nicely together when she undressed, and there came over that Kapo, and she flinged it to the side, and Cecilie said, "This is my clothes." The Kapo said, "Yes, but you won't need it anymore," and she was terribly scared because she didn't know what that meant. Then when they were undressed, they everybody was ordered to stand up on a stool, and they shaved their hair, and their private parts, and they looked, they couldn't even recognize each other once they were stripped, not only of their clothes, but of their hair. Then they were shoved into those showers, and the Nazis first opened the hot water, so they were scalded and as they ran out from under the hot water, they were beaten back by the SS and by the Kapos to go under the showers again, so they opened the ice cold water, which had the same effect, and finally they were out of that shower. Cecilie said each of them was given one garment, which, of course, didn't fit. Some got small, that was too small, some got one that was too large. And she said they only received that one dress.

Cecilie was telling her story in a shocked way, as if she did not believe what the Nazis had done them. I think the theme of this story is that sometimes you have to become stronger to resist. She is narrating how the Nazis treated the people, the majority Jews, that arrived to Auschwitz, the biggest of the death camps in that time. She narrates how the Kapos made them feel as if they were nobodies. They wanted to make them feel as if they no longer had identity by removing all of their hair and their clothes. Cecilie and many others had to stay strong and had to try not to fall apart in that awful place. She also had to lose her family and her dignity, specially when the Kapo threw her nice clothes and told her she wouldn’t need those anymore. But she, and also others managed to endure suffering and eventually got out of there.
In conclusion, this testimony is very important because it is showing the perspective of a woman who lived the experience of being in a concentration camp and not only Auschwitz but several other camps, where she labored in factories. It shows the reality of those death camps, how Hitler and his Nazis treated people like animals and how cruel they were. If Cecilie could survive to that concentration camp, then all of us can hold onto hope. And although Cecilie got lucky enough to get over that and was brave enough to tell her story, some are no longer here to tell their story to the world.


Taken From:

Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Comments (Atom)