Nazi Atrocties

For this blog, I watched interviews from the Shoah Foundation, mainly those of Erna Anolik, George Gottlieb, Esther Bem, and James Hayes.

It seems like, with the obvoius exception of the millions of deaths, one of the worst causes of the Holocaust was a crisis of identity for the survivors. As Erna discusses in her interview, the whole process of entering a camp seems designed to strip the people of any identity they had. People were shaved, stripped, and given uniforms. In Esther's interview, she talks about how she had to hide her Jewish background from the Germans. As a result, even after the defeat of Germany, she describes how it took years for her to find her own identity again. While I always thought personal identity was something that could never be taken from you, I have also never been in a camp. If something as sacred as your own identity could be stripped from you, then surviving your ordeal is nothing short of a miracle.

Perhaps equally as bad was the seperation of families. Erna also mentions that she was never given work, but volunteered to make deliveries in the hopes of seeing her parents, which never happened. George descirbes an encounter where he asked a guard if he could try to find his mother. The guard responded with a good, swift kick. About a week later, however, the guard gave him a bag with some food in it and twenty minutes to find his mother. He did, but with what she had been through, he barely recognized her. It was the last time he ever saw her.

As if this wasn't enough to deal with, the conditions they were living in were absolutely horrible, as explained by James and numerous others. The stench was unbearable, the dead and sick were crammed in with the living, there was barely any food, and hygeine was essentially non-existent. They were treated like animals, not humans. How people could survive for monthes, even years, in these conditions is absolutely beyond me.

The atrocities committed by the Nazis are quite possibly the worst the world has seen. An entire race of people was nearly eliminated because they were deemed "inferior." It is absolutely essential that the people of this planet do everything in their power to ensure things like this never happen again. This is why it is absolutely essential that attention be turned to current horrors, like what is going on in Rwanada.