3 Delivery

1)Why were the prisioners tatooed or marked on their forearms?Does this action have a religeous implication¿Why?
Prisioners were only tatooed in Auschwitz. “Incoming prisoners were assigned a camp serial number which was sewn to their prison uniforms. Only those prisoners selected for work were issued serial numbers; those prisoners sent directly to the gas chambers were not registered and received no tattoos.

Initially, the SS authorities marked prisoners who were in the infirmary or who were to be executed with their camp serial number across the chest with indelible ink. As prisoners were executed or died in other ways, their clothing bearing the camp serial number was removed. Given the mortality rate at the camp and practice of removing clothing, there was no way to identify the bodies after the clothing was removed. Hence, the SS authorities introduced the practice of tattooing in order to identify the bodies of registered prisoners who had died.”
(http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10007056)


2)Who were the kapos?Why did their fellowmen fear these leaders?
"Is a concentration camp prisoner selected to oversee other prisoners on labor details. The term is often used generically for any concentration camp prisoner to whom the SS gave authority over other prisoners." They were feared because they were very tough and without mercy.
(http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10007315)


3)How did SS officers selected their victims?Support your answer

They had SS doctors on duty, to examine the incoming transports of prisoners. The prisoners would be marched by one of the doctors who would make spot decisions as they walked by. Those who were fit for work were sent into the camp. Others were sent immediately to the extermination plants. Children of tender years were invariably exterminated since by reason of their youth they were unable to work.

(http://www.auschwitz.dk/Docs/new_page_3.htm)

Night; 3 Summary

Elie and his father were transferred to Buna a concentration camp. They were incorporated to kommandos which were a group of persons commanded to do an specific job and then they were assignated to a block. They were sent to a medic exam, Elie had a gold crown in his teeth, so he was numbered.
Fortunately they were chosen to form part of the orchestra’s block. They started working in a warehouse of electrical materials; the job was neither difficult nor dangerous.
One day Elie was summoned to the dentist to remove his gold crown, he said he was ill so he was told to come later , but two weeks after the dentist was arrested for stealing the gold he removed, so Elie kept his crown. In another occasion Elie was hit by the man in charge of the block because he was angry and he let go all the anger against the first person he saw (Elie), a French woman help him and told him some courage words. One day a foreman saw Elie’s crown and ask Elie to handed it to him but Elie refused so the foreman search for a reason for Elie to hand over his crown, and hi found that reason in his father, he did not know how to march in step so all the days he tormented his father, until finally he gave in and gave his golden crown to the foreman. Some days before the poles left Elie saw Idek copulating with a girl so Idek punished him very hard. One day while they were working an alarm started to sound and American airplanes passed over them, in this moment 2 cauldrons of soup were left behind in the middle of the street, all were looking anxiously toward them but no one dare to go, the fear was greater than the hunger, but then a boy started approaching but he was shooted. In another occasion the power failed at the central electric plant in Buna, further investigation showed that it had been a sabotage and the persons responsible were hanged.

Night; Second Summary

Elie and his family were sent to a unknown place in train. Everybody is very nervous, and they are very crowded and hungry. Things get worst because there was a crazy woman screaming and that make everyone more nervous.
The wagon stopped and an SS officer told them to get out of the wagon and leave everything, then they were separated, women right, men left and that was the last moment he saw her mother and sisters. Then they were classified into the ones that had good health and could work and into the ones that could not work because of their age or health. The ones that could not work were sent to the chimney. Fortunately Elie and his father had received and advice from an inmate to tell a different age, Elie was told to say that he had 18 years and his father was told to say he was 40, because of that they were choose to work and to live.
They were transferred to a barrack where they would sleep; they were received by old comrades that were sent weeks before to that place .Next morning they were taken to the showers and to pick cloth. Later an SS officer told them they were in Auschwitz a concentration camp and that to live they must work. Next morning they were moved to another camp. They were received by a man who told them some words of hope and they went to sleep. They stayed in Auschwitz three weeks and their objective was to stay away from the transport , to achieve that they had to be mediocre workers and be in good health. Finally they were told that it was their turn to leave so they leave that camp to somewhere else.

Location of some camps

Green:Concentration Camps

Red:Extermination Camps

(http://www.mikekemble.com/ww2/belsen/campmap.jpg)

Differences between a Concentration Camp and an Extermination Camp

"Concentration camps

The concentration camps formed an important part of the Nazi regime’s systematic suppression of Jews, gypsies, political dissident, homosexuals and other groups that were viewed as socially and racially “undesirable” in the Nazi state.

The concentration camps were established with different purposes. For instance, there existed “ordinary” concentration camps, forced labour camps, work- and reformatory camps, POW camps and transit camps.

Their common denominator was the fact that the living conditions were extremely horrible and cruel for the inmates. With very insufficient food, the terrible conditions resulted in the deaths of an enormous amount of prisoners, especially in the work camps.

There were at least 22 main camps distributed all over Germany and Europe, more than 1,200 affiliate camps and Aussenkommandos, and tens of thousands of smaller camps. Many hundreds of thousands of non-Jews and tens of thousands of Jews perished in these camps.


Extermination camps

Unlike the concentration camps, six extermination camps were established between 1941 and 1943 with only one purpose: to exterminate the Jews. A total of three million Jews were murdered in these camps.

The extermination camps can be divided into two groups: the “pure” extermination camps and the combined extermination- and concentration camps.

“Pure" extermination camps:

Chelmno and the Operation Reinhard camps.
Four camps, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka (the Operation Reinhard camps) and Chelmno were all “pure” extermination facilities. Only a few hundred Jews survived their encounter with these four extermination camps.

Combined camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek

Both of these camps were originally concentration camps. In time, however, they were included in the organised mass murder of the Jews, following the construction of gas chambers. Only one in every fourth of the Jews that arrived in these camps was selected for forced labour – the rest were gassed to death immediately upon arrival.

At least one million Jews were killed in Auschwitz and between 60,000 and 80,000 Jews in Majdanek."
(http://www.holocaust-education.dk/lejre/koncudd.asp)

What a is a ghetto?

“During World War II, ghettos were city districts (often enclosed) in which the Germans concentrated the municipal and sometimes regional Jewish population and forced them to live under miserable conditions. Ghettos isolated Jews by separating Jewish communities from the non-Jewish population and from other Jewish communities. The Germans established at least 1,000 ghettos in German-occupied and annexed Poland and the Soviet Union alone. German occupation authorities established the first ghetto in Poland in Piotrków Trybunalski in October 1939.
There were three types of ghettos: closed ghettos, open ghettos, and destruction ghettos.
The largest ghetto in Poland was the Warsaw ghetto, where over 400,000 Jews were crowded into an area of 1.3 square miles. Other major ghettos were established in the cities of Lodz, Krakow, Bialystok, Lvov, Lublin, Vilna, Kovno, Czestochowa, and Minsk. Tens of thousands of western European Jews were also deported to ghettos in the east.”
(http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005059)