Life in the concentration camps during the Holocaust was horrific for the victims of the Nazi regime. For instance, the victims of the concentration camps faced inhumane conditions, extreme suffering, and constant fear of death. These camps, established by Nazi Germany, were originally intended for political prisoners but were later used to imprison and exterminate any people that the Nazi Party considered to be ‘undesirable’. In general, this group consisted of: Jewish people, disabled people, homosexuals, political prisoners, and other persecuted groups. By the early 1940s, the concentration camps were a central aspect of the Nazi regime’s ‘Final Solution’, which was the plan to systematically annihilate Europe’s Jewish population.
WHAT WAS THE HOLOCAUST?
The Holocaust is one of the most important events of the 20th century and is perhaps the most significant genocide in human history. A genocide is a mass killing of a group of people for ethnic, religious or racial reasons. The term ‘holocaust’ refers to death by fire in reference to the way that people were executed during the event. It unfolded during the reign of Adolf Hitler in Germany and the major events of World War II. During the Holocaust, which occurred from 1933 to 1945, over 11 million people were executed. In total, 6 million were Jewish people, while the other 5 million included several other groups, including: disabled people, homosexuals, communists, Soviet and Polish prisoners of war, gypsies, and other religious and ethnic minorities.
LIFE IN THE CONCENTRATION CAMPS – SUMMARY
In general, concentration camps were labor camps in which generally healthy men were sent to labor for the Nazis. Whereas, children, the elderly, the sick and other groups were commonly sent to their deaths in a death camp (extermination camp). The prisoners were shipped to the camps, by train, from the ghettos, such as the one in the city of Warsaw, Poland.
Upon arrival, prisoners were stripped of their identities, belongings, and even their names. For instance, the prisoners were often given numbers that were sometimes tattooed on their arms. As stated above, families were often separated, and those deemed unfit for forced labor, including children, the elderly, and the sick, were immediately sent to gas chambers in death camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, and Sobibor. Those selected for forced labor endured long hours of brutal work in factories, quarries, or construction projects under armed guard by Nazi SS soldiers.
The most famous concentration camp, which also had a death camp, was Auschwitz. People in concentration camps often died from disease, starvation and poor treatment due to the horrible conditions in which they were forced to live, including: overcrowding, lack of running water, lack of heat, lack of food, tiring and difficult labor, and mistreatment by Nazi guards. For example, the barracks for the prisoners were sometimes, literally, old horse sheds that the Nazis converted for humans by building crude bunk beds in the horse stalls. The bunks were built four levels high and the prisoners were forced to sleep with 3 to 4 people per level. A barrack typically held over 400 people inside. Illnesses like typhus, tuberculosis, and dysentery spread rapidly in the cramped conditions, and there was little to no medical treatment provided.
The cramped conditions were made worse by the lack of heating and sanitation. Each barrack was typically fitted with a coal-fired stove that struggled to properly heat the wide space of the barrack, especially on cold winter nights. For sanitation, the barracks would usually have a container in a stall on the end, but there was no running water or flushing toilets. As well, the stall did not offer any privacy from others in the barracks. Later, the Nazis had the prisoners construct a series of bathhouses and toilet barracks but these were not much better. Here the prisoners could wash, which they had previously been unable to do, and go to the washroom, but they still lacked privacy. The toilet barracks was literally a concrete bench with several dozen holes cut in the top. All the while, the prisoners were forced to labor for the Nazis for 12 to 16 hours per day. The work was labour-intensive and consisted of several different types of tasks, including: constructing more barracks, prison expansions, or work in factories producing goods for the Nazi war effort.
For clothing, the prisoners were made to wear striped outfits and old worn out shoes which offered little in the way of warmth or comfort. All of this was made worse by the food that the prisoners were provided with. In the mornings, they were given a kind of tea or coffee, which was their only breakfast. For lunch, they were made to eat a watery soup and for dinner they were provided a hard piece of bread. The lack of nutritious food, mixed with the tiring work caused starvation among many of the prisoners. As well, this combined with the poor sanitary conditions to cause the spread of infectious diseases which also caused the deaths of many. In all, life in the concentration camps was horrendous and the prisoners faced hardship on a daily basis.
