Its amazing how concentration camps and ghettoes were like that .  and how some people survived that.  Concentration camps which were different then they ended up being, and ghettoes which around a lot longer then most  people realize, played a important part in Hitler's and the Nazis Final Solution.  Even thought most of Europe paid no attention to what was happening, there were a lot of people who saved the Jews.  
 
Concentration camps and ghettoes were extremely scary places to live in.  Ghettoes were in European city's  they were there to separate the Jews from the Christian population.  The Nazis used the ghettoes as a way to keep the Jews in one place.  Containing Jews in the ghettoes was not Hitler's idea.  For a long time the Jews had faced persecution.  They were forced to live in designated areas. The Nazis established a total of 356 ghettoes in Poland.
 
The life in the ghettoes was wretched.  Full of sickness, shooting, starvation, stealing, and begging.  Even in those horrible conditions many ghetto dwellers resisted dehumanization (being less human, easy to kill).  Education was still very important.  Parents still taught all their children even thought it was illegal.  The Nazis finally came up with the Final Solution.  In 1942 after the Wanssee conference.  There was one ghetto called the Warsaw ghetto.  it was located in Warsaw Poland.  
There was many concentration camps around Europe.  One of the first is Dachau. Concentration camps were used for mostly  people the government didn't like. For example prostitutes, gypsies, mostly people the Germans thought didn't belong.  There is one camp called Terezin.  This camp was not  a  extermination camp like so many others.  But it was a way station to all the other camps and ghettoes.  Dachau was a crematorium constructed to get rid of all the body's.         
A lot of camps had gas chambers. There is one camps I have never heard of. It's called Chelmno.  It was an extermination camp in Poland.  Auschwitz -Birkenau is the best known of all the killing centers.  They were forced labor camps.  Auschwitz became a location for medical experiments.  (One way to kill people) .      
There were certin groups at the camps, 1- you would go to the gas chambers.  2- you would do slave labor, and 3- you would be experimented on/.  Nobody really knows how many people escaped the death camps. The estimate  2.1 to 2.5 million were killed by gas, and about 330,000 were deaths from other causes.  At Birkeny "only" 160,00 Jews were killed.  In Jan 1945, Germans evacuated 58,000 prisoners who couldn't walk.  Not a lot expected to live thought that.  Nearly 3,000 survivors of different  nationalities were questioned about what happened.     
Of there evidence the report estimated 4,000,000 people had died between 1941 and 1945.  the dead included people from the Soviet Union, Poland, France, Belgium, Holland, Czechoslavokakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and even Italy and Greece.  When the Russians liberated, they saw so many things.  Like teeth, hair, ect.  It was to revolting to even look at.  When you look back on that happened, or your just  finding out what happened.  It's hard to thin that they survived all that, they were all so strong.   
Who saved the Jews.  There were a lot of people who saved Jews.  Like peasants, nannies, aristocrats, clergymen, and many more.  The rescuers saw Jews as human being, not as enemies.  They were able to except and see people who were different.  Rescuers believed that one person could make a difference.  The rescuers had at least one thing in common.  Resourcefulness, courage, and persistence.  Children followed in the their parents footsteps, and saved many lives.  Sometimes all you had to do to be a rescuer was leave food by a ghetto fence.  Or the most dangerous was hiding a Jew in your house.      
There are many stories about how people saved Jews.  Like the one about a woman named Gitta Bauer, who saved a half -Jewish woman for nine months.  One woman named Dr. Eva Fogelman talks about Hitler's 12 year reign in "Conscience and Courage" .  She talks about how evil was rewarded and good acts were punished.  How "in this mad world most people lost their bearings" It was so brave of them to have done that. 
Many people were saved and escaped from the Nazis. Here's an example, Elizabeth Abegg was a German Quakerwho saved Jews furing WW11.  She would be a rescuer.  Anna and Jaruslav helped Herman Feder, a Jewish man who escaped from a train on his way to a death camp.  Then there were two people who saved quite a few Jews.  Another one is Irene Gut .  Irene was a teenager when the Nazis attacked Poland.  She helped a group of Jews that worked in a laundry room.  She gave them some extra food and blankets, then she told them to go work in the kitchen. 
She saved the people, Franka Silberman, Henry Weinbaum, Moses Steiner, Marian Wilner, Joseph Weiss, and a lot more saved by her.  She did so much to help people survive.  Irene Gut was born May 7 1922 in a small village in eastern Poland.  Before she was attacked by the Nazis, she went to a nursing school in 1939.  There, she was attacked raped and sent to a hotel to work for Nazis.
Oscar Schindler was a man of paradox in the beginning.  He was not a wonderful man to be around.  He drank, smoked, gambled, and had many mistresses.  But all of the sudden, he changed.  He made it in his journey for riches, but by the end of the war, he spent all his money on helping 1,300 Jews stay alive.  He saved them by making them work in his factory.
There were no beating,  starving , or killing at anytime.  Schindler was making a lot of money, but no one starved.  It became a haven for the Jews.  As the brutality of the war got worse, he tried to protect the Jews, and it became more active.  The conditions were bad for the Schindler, as well as his workers.  But in the end it all turned out all right.  In the end, Schindler and his family moved back to Argentina.   
Did he really help those People?  Why would Schindler spend all his money and risking his life?  But like one of the survivors said "I don't know what his motives were... but I don't give a damn.  What's important is, he saved our lives."  Oscar Schindler died in 1974.  He was buried in Israel.    
It's hard to tell were some Jews went after the war, but they know that some Jews went to the United States, some stayed in the country the were born in.  Quite a few immigrated to Palestine, which became Israel in 1948.  The reasons why the state of Israel was born is because of the holocaust.  Some countries in the United Nations and Trueman believed that the Jews needed a homeland, so that the horrors of the holocaust would not happen again to the Jews, and they would have a country to call their own, and from which they could seek help.

 

 

Megan Raney

Holocaust Project

Rossville Jr. High,

April 2005

Bibliography