Holocaust: Terrifying truth

On today’s article, we are going to talk about something that shocked the world during the 40’s, and still does: the Second World War, but more specifically, the holocaust. This, taking as a point of reference, a novel by Imre Kertez, called “Fatelessness”. Even though this novel is an invented story, we can appreciate that certain things between this one and what historically speaking happened are amusingly related. Consequences of the Nazi ideology, within the suffering this way of thinking brought to Jewish people are few of themes presented in the novel. This is basically what the following text will be about.

Watching images of the “Auschwitz” concentration camp is something very sorrowful, and also hard to believe. The first thing that comes to your mind when you do this is: Who would be able to do something like this? What is even more impressing is that actually not a small amount of people survived to this extreme confinement. Such as our fiction character, Georg, who survived to this unfair imprisonment. Although this encouraging fact, the whole period of the holocaust is, unfortunately, one of the most remarkable cases of genocide. But, how did this happened? The answer to this question can be found in history, just a few years ago.

When Adolf Hitler rose to power, minorities, such as the Jewish community, thought the worst. Everybody knew Hitler’s ideology of racism and anti-Semitism because of his book, “Mein kampf” (my struggle). This book, with autobiographical content, was published in 1925, in order to express his thoughts and conclusions. After invading Poland years later, in 1939, the war was unleashed, and within, Hitler’s plan about minorities. He ruled that every Jewish was suppose to wear a yellow star. He also dictated that Jewish, and gypsies, between others, should live from now on, on some class of semi-detached houses, that were built on special places, away from what Nazi called ”normal society”.  These places were Jews were supposed to live without basics conditions and small spaces were called “ghettos”. We can appreciate in the book I already mentioned, that Georg actually lives in a ghetto. The lack of space is evidenced in some passages of the book, in which he meets and shares a lot with his neighbours. The Nazi regime continued acting under this ideology of racism, and this is appreciable on events such as the “night of the broken glass”, in which Nazi forces destroyed Jewish shops, because they didn’t wanted them to participate on the Nazi economy. But the most important event was the declaration of “the final solution”. This was, sending as much Jewish as possible to concentration camps with only one purpose: massive extermination of people. One of the most remembered camps that where created with this end was the Auschwitz concentration camp, already mentioned at the beginning. People who unfairly was designated to being killed at a concentration camp like this one, should suffer a painful dead, inside a gas chamber. “Fatelessness” actually shows us the obligated evict to this camps, over the Jewish community. First, we appreciate Georg’s father departure, and after a few chapters, Georg’s departure. We can take a brief description of what the concentration camp he arrived was like: “They led us into a maze of gray buildings, ever farther inward, before we suddenly debouched onto a huge open space strewn with white gravel- some sort of barracks parade ground, as I saw it”.

This is the beginning of the real story. The presence of death, but more important, the struggle for survival. The consequences of this way of thinking were horrible: six million people were killed by the Nazi regime. Jewish people were lead to the main yard of the camp, for the first selection, where they separated Jews on two groups: the “useful” ones, and the rest. This last group, formed by women, children and older people, were sent to the “showers”, the name that guards gave to the gas chambers. This people died, hoping to have some water after an exhausting journey. The other ten percent who were selected, was sent to heavy work, after being marked with a number. This people (after a few months) were at the point of starvation, because of the poor conditions they were exposed at. This lead a lot of prisoners to death during work, or to commit suicide. When war was about to finish, and the German empire was falling down, authorities from the third Reich in charge of concentration camps forced prisoners that left to walk to nowhere, with the only objective of killing everyone left. This, to erase as much as possible evidences of massive murder, or genocide. Even though all this horrible events, people survived, maybe because of their will, or because of their strength, but under my point of view, it is the will for living.