  |
|
|
|
"The End of the World"© Meg Greene Malvasi
"The wagon doors were torn ajar. The shouts were deafening. SS men with whips and half-wild Alsatian dogs swarmed all over the place. Uncontrolled fear brought panic as families were ruthlessly torn apart. Parents screamed for lost children and mothers shrieked their names over the voices of the bawling guards."
- anonymous survivor of Auschwitz Beginning in 1942 the Nazi regime stepped up its campaign for the "Final Solution." In addition to the Mobile Killing Squads and the formation of Jewish ghettos, there was the deportation of thousands of Jews to one of the hundred or so concentration camps located throughout Nazi Europe. Some of these camps were "labor camps" in which the Nazis engaged in "extermination through work." What it meant was literally working the inmates to death. Several camps gained special notoriety. These were the "death camps": Dachau, Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek-Lublin. One leader of the SS explained the purpose of these camps: "We have come to the grim decision . . . that [these] people [the Jews] must be made to disappear from the earth." To 15-year-old David Rubinowicz, a young Jewish boy living in Poland, the fulfillment of this purpose had entirely different implications. As he confided in his diary, "the end of the world will soon be here." "The trains started. When our turn came we were locked in a cattle car so crowded we had to sleep standing up. After four days the doors opened. Soldiers yelled 'Raus! Raus!' (Hurry Up! Hurry Up!) We were in Auschwitz." - Gloria Lyon, age 14, Auschwitz survivor Like the adults, the children, too, were hauled to the camps. By now, many were homeless and orphaned. Who knows how many saw family members and friends murdered before their very eyes? Others were rounded up with adults, separated from their families, and shoved into railroad cattle cars until there was no more room. The cars has no seating, no bathrooms, and only small slats for ventilation. They were unbearably hot in the summers and freezing cold in the winters. The only food provided was what the prisoners had taken for themselves.
|
|
|
|
