Eva Schloss was a Jewish European during WWII who lived in the notorious concentration camp Auschwitz Birkenau. She decided to write her story with the help of Evelyn Kent, at the beginning of her story she talks about what compelled her to write about her story and that after this experience she did not feel any hate towards the nazis but instead lost her faith in mankind. Schloss says “But on the other hand I have do not believe in the goodness of man.”(xii) Auschwitz Birkenau and the other concentration camps where how the nazis thought they would be able to achieve their final goal. She says in the beginning of her story that the only way she survived was through sheer luck. Through Eva’s account we are able to get a perspective that
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Eva shows that this was very true with many gruesome story from her time at Auschwitz. When the Nazis take away Eva’s rights as a human and kills so many of her friends and family she changes. She was not only dehumanized mentally by seeing her friends and family die and be broken down but also physically, the nazis put the Jews to hard work in these camps and barely fed them. They also didn’t clean up and the camps were often riddled in diseases and bacteria. At nights they were also terrified because all of their wooden beds were infested with bed bugs, rats, and other insects, Eva recounts one specific ovation where she woke up to a rat gnawing on her foot. Schloss said “One night I was woken by a peculiar sensation on my feet. I looked down to see a black rat about to gnaw at my flesh.”(97) This just added to the Jews pian at the camps because with the constant fear of being eating alive by rats and bugs they weren’t even able to sleep at night and rest up. Even their water supply was tainted because they didn’t build any sewage in the camp so the water had their own feces in it. They are lucky that one of the Kappos warned them when Schloss says “You will get water but not yet, Don’t drink the tap water. It carries typhus and dysentery.”(61) After a few weeks of being in this terrible place Eva was reduced to merely skin and bones and was basically a walking skeleton. Another way the Nazis were able to dehumanize Eva through her appearance by shaving her head every week. The Nazis say it was to control lice but Schloss says “It was, in fact, a deliberately dehumanizing process that made us look and feel like criminals. (90) Obviously the Nazis were able to come up with many ways to dehumanize the Jews, they did this so much so that some people in the camps started to question if they were human and if death was better than living at
Eva shows that this was very true with many gruesome story from her time at Auschwitz. When the Nazis take away Eva’s rights as a human and kills so many of her friends and family she changes. She was not only dehumanized mentally by seeing her friends and family die and be broken down but also physically, the nazis put the Jews to hard work in these camps and barely fed them. They also didn’t clean up and the camps were often riddled in diseases and bacteria. At nights they were also terrified because all of their wooden beds were infested with bed bugs, rats, and other insects, Eva recounts one specific ovation where she woke up to a rat gnawing on her foot. Schloss said “One night I was woken by a peculiar sensation on my feet. I looked down to see a black rat about to gnaw at my flesh.”(97) This just added to the Jews pian at the camps because with the constant fear of being eating alive by rats and bugs they weren’t even able to sleep at night and rest up. Even their water supply was tainted because they didn’t build any sewage in the camp so the water had their own feces in it. They are lucky that one of the Kappos warned them when Schloss says “You will get water but not yet, Don’t drink the tap water. It carries typhus and dysentery.”(61) After a few weeks of being in this terrible place Eva was reduced to merely skin and bones and was basically a walking skeleton. Another way the Nazis were able to dehumanize Eva through her appearance by shaving her head every week. The Nazis say it was to control lice but Schloss says “It was, in fact, a deliberately dehumanizing process that made us look and feel like criminals. (90) Obviously the Nazis were able to come up with many ways to dehumanize the Jews, they did this so much so that some people in the camps started to question if they were human and if death was better than living at