Elie Wiesel's History Of The Holocaust

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¨It all happened so fast. The ghettos. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.¨ -Elie Wiesel. Elie Wiesel was a survivor from the holocaust who told his own story through books. According to the book History from the Holocaust, The Holocaust comes from the Greek words ¨holos¨ meaning whole and ¨kaustos¨ meaning burnt, some Jewish people were actually burned whole while they were still alive. The Jew were first put into ghettos, then deported to concentration camps. They were brutally murdered throughout the holocaust and that deeply affected the Judaic religion and the surviving Jewish people after the holocaust. The Holocaust was a tragic event for not only the Jews but for humankind, it is just another example of how cruel people can be. Adolf Hitler did many things to the Jewish people during World War 2, but it all started with the ghettos. The reason ghettos happened, was for Nazis to figure out a plan to essentially kill off the Jewish population, as well as slave labor. As said the book History of the Holocaust, ¨The ghettos provided slave labor for the Nazi War Machine. From the first days of German occupation, in addition to slave labor camps, the ghettos supplied labor for German officers, installations and workshops.¨ - Holocaust History However, the Nazis told the non-Jewish people that the purpose of the ghettos were to protect them from the Jewish people because they had an epidemic illness that was severely contagious and that they did it to help the rest of the world. The ghettos segregated the Jewish population from the rest of the world. Ghettos came in many different sizes and three different types. The most popular type was the closed ghettos. They were highly secured and closed in by either a wall or a barbed wire fence. There were also open ghetto and destruction ghettos. Open ghettos did not have walls, but did have rules on when and who could enter and leave. Destruction ghettos were different, they were only meant to be up for a few days or weeks but some lasted for a few years. In all three types of ghettos, conditions were horrible and extremely unsanitary. Some people even died from how unsanitary they were and it also made it a lot easier for illness to spread with so many people in one small house or apartment. After the ghetto they started to deport people to concentration camps. The beginning of the deportation was a horrible time in Germany and nearby countries. At this point many Jews were already dead. According to the book History of The Holocaust, ¨As many as two million Jews were killed in their own towns and villages, some confined in ghettos where death was by slow starvation was a deliberate Nazi policy, others taken to be shot at mass- murder sites near where they lived.¨ The streets were covered in horror. The Jewish people were being deported to concentration camps, also known as death camps or killing centers. Also according …show more content…
Concentration camps were a horrible place for the Jewish people. According the book History of the Holocaust, ¨Camps set up solely for the murder of Jews.¨ Conditions in these camps were terrible and unsanitary. Many people died because of exposure, starvation, exhaustion and lack of medical attention. The treatment in these camps were horrible. They were physically and mentally abused: they were put into ovens alive and treated physically and verbally like wild animals. They were also extremely hard to find, the United States and other allied nations found the camps but good guessing and accident. The concentration camps are one of the more well known part of the holocaust. People were treated like animals in extremely unsanitary conditions and it was just getting worse as time went on. Just imagine how much worse it would have been if allied nations did not find the camps until later. Now, just imagine the effect on the Judaic religion because of the

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