Holocaust Paragraph

When people think of what happened during the Holocaust, their minds usually turn to concentration and death camps. Although the camps do play a huge role in the outcome of the Holocaust, it was not the only hardship that the Jewish people had to face. First, Hitler began taking privileges away from the Jewish community. The History Place Holocaust Timeline states that by 1938, most Jewish rights were long gone. At that point, Jews were already being deported to concentration and death camps. These people were taken (sometimes violently) from their homes, and forced to board a freight train. With days of travel, no food, and no room to even sit down on the train, several people died before the train arrived at the camp. Perhaps they were they lucky ones, for the ones who dismounted the train had no idea what terrors were to follow. Louis Bulow says that after getting off the train, germans examined each Jew. Some were told they would be getting and led to large buildings. The ‘showers’ that the prisoners were led to were in fact, large gas chambers. After undressing and given a piece of soap, the giant doors were shut, and the gas was released. Within twenty minutes everyone inside the chamber was dead. Those who had been fortunate enough to avoid the gas chambers were immediately put to work, most of them perished. According to 'Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race' website, the Nazis at the camps conducted awful medical experiments on the prisoners. This is shown in the novel 'Night' by Elizer Wiesel, Elie undergoes an operation without anesthesics "They had not put me to sleep" (Wiesel, 75). They viewed the Jewish as people who could just be disposed. One experiment that the Nazis did was they put people in the freezing cold, to first, establish how long it would take to lower the body temperature to death and second, how to best resuscitate the frozen victim. Over 6 million people died, and several were very near-death when the Americans finally came to release the prisoners from the death camps.