Imagine being freezing cold, tortured, and famished while undergoing excruciating labor and struggling to stay alive. (Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz.) Primo Levi survived the Holocaust as a prisoner in one of the concentration camps. Levi’s survival in Auschwitz which directed him toward his outstanding career as a chemist, compelled him to write numerous, informational books about the Holocaust, and led him to commit suicide at the age of sixty-seven.
Viktor E. Frankl Man’s Search for Meaning Psychology – Jan Belcher Christopher Chileshe 09/29/2006 Table of Contents Introduction 2 The Development of logotherapy 2 Empathy to Viktor Frankl 4 Conclusion 6 Bibliography 9 Introduction Viktor E. Frankl born in Vienna in 1905 was a psychiatrist who lived through the First and Second World War. During the Second World War, when he was approximately aged 35-40; he was separated from his family and taken to a concentration by the Nazis. In December 1941, he married Tilly Grosser. In1943 the Nazis took his wife and his parents. Shortly after in1944 he was transported to Auschwitz and later to Kaufering and Türkheim, He was liberated on April 27th 1945 by the US Army.
On April 15, 1945, British troops entered Bergen Belsen. They liberated some 60,000 prisoners, many of whom were close to death. During the first weeks after liberation, close to 500 people in Bergen Belsen died every day by starvation and Typhus. From liberation day until June 20, an estimated 14,000 people died from the terrible conditions that had been inflicted on them by the Nazis during the war. Between April 18 and April 28, the dead were buried.
After work one day Paul saw his grandfather dead at his chair, he had starved. All of Paul’s extended family lived in one room, for four years. They worked in a slave like factory; Paul recollects that his salvation from Auschwitz might have been his passive outlook on life. By 1942 only Paul, his mother, and an uncle were left from all his extended family. In the cars he recalled being shoved in with 80 other people when the train cars were to fit only 20 people.
Comparison Paper Filip Muller, a Slovakian Jew, was born in Sered, Czechoslovakia, in 1922. In April, 1942 he was forcibly evacuated to Auschwitz I concentration camp with thousands of other Jews. Muller, like many others, was used as forced labor for about a one month period during which his health declined. One day he and his bunkmate, afflicted by thirst, sneaked to a feeding area and illicitly stole several drinks of tea. Caught in the act, the two men were beaten by Nazi guards and then assigned to Auschwitz's Sonderkommando, a group of inmates forced to work at corpse disposal through burial or, much more commonly, cremation.
Everyone was at his discretion. A prisoner in Plaszow was lucky if he survived more than four weeks. Collective punishment became frequent, torture and death were daily events. In 1943 on Yom Kippur Goeth and his SS-men took 50 Jews from the barracks and shot them. Goeth killed prisoners as a sport.
In the end of Job’s story he is rewarded with double everything he had lost before and had a happy life until his mid 100’s. Holocaust victims suffered everyday with trying to escape the Nazi’s torture. For the majority of inmates the suffering of Auschwitz was soul-destroying. Primo Levi, author of “If this is Man” a memoir of Levi’s 11 month stay at Auschwitz, stated it this way in imagining what the Nazis might say to their victims: “‘We, the master race, are your destroyers, but you are no better than we are; if we so wish and we do wish, we can destroy not only your bodies but also your souls, just as we have destroyed ours’ (Levi 1988, 53–4). Levi’s suicide seemed to demonstrate that the reach of the Nazis was unlimited.
Coffin ships were mostly filthy and disease ridden, The Star was no different, on the 5th day of the 20 week voyage 4 steerage passengers die of typhus. The majority of steerage passengers had dysenyary, scurvy or famine dropsy while about 15 had all three. Word goes around that there are things missing from the first class passengers and some one has sawed through the loser foredeck gate bars. The crew soon discovers that there is a hack saw missing from the kitchen, the saw was stolen by pius mulvey. The 6th chapter in this novel is a letter from the hisband of mary duane, a nanny to one of the first class
Hitler deliberately expressed his hate toward Jews and gave ample warnings, as it was all written down in his autobiography “Mein Kampf”. In 1935, the introduction of the Nuremberg Laws stripped German Jews of their citizenship and civil rights. Jewish rights were steadily restricted, as in many cases Jewish political and intellectual leaders were the first to be sent to concentration camps. The Night of Broken Glass, on November 9, 1938 lead to the death of approximately 100 Jews, while other 30,000 were sent to concentration camps. Jewish businesses along with almost every synagogue in Germany were damaged or completely destroyed.
SS Officers only gave the prisoners one ration of bread and soup a day. If you were not killed by a Nazi, you most likely died of starvation and dehydration. Many deaths were forced, many had a slow, grievous death, many deaths could have been prevented. "Over there. Do you see that chimney over there?...Over there will be your grave...You will be burned!