The Struggles of Holocaust Victims

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AP

(AP Photo/HO)

Dulce Solis Hernandez, Writer

The people that were victims of the Holocaust endured a tremendous amount of suffrage and pain solely because they had different religious beliefs and customs from the Nazis and because the Nazis classified Jews as a race needing to be extinguished. The Holocaust remains to be one of the most heartbreaking and devastating moments in history. According to ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA,  the genocide of around 6 million European Jews which was about two-thirds of the Jewish population at the time from- 1941 to 1945- in Europe was caused by Nazi Germany and obviously Nazi supporters/ followers.

 

One of the things that victims of the Holocaust had to go through was being worked to literal death. The Nazis from the concentration camps believed that an ill and weak worker was better than no worker at all. So, because of that, the prisoners were worked until they eventually died of exhaustion and malnourishment. This occurred to the point where they were so emaciated, they were skeletal. It appeared as though they were just a creature of bones and flesh rather than a living human being with emotions, feelings, beliefs, and morals.

 

Their freedom was taken away by not being able to follow or practice their own religion or believe in their own faith. Some even started to think that their god was not real because they didn’t believe that He would let something as horrific as this happen to them. This caused some of them to lose hope in their faith and their god.

 

They were also being completely dehumanized. They were treated like wild animals and went through a grand amount of trauma until they were pretty much lifeless beings. Nazis wanted to exterminate as many of their opposing political, racial and religious enemies as possible. To do that, they rose to power and took complete advantage of that, deporting the Jews into the ghettos where they would live from that point on until they were sent to the extermination work camps. After they had served their labor, they were sent to the gas chambers or they traveled to the killing centers by train or cattle car.

Although it is a very sensitive topic to not only talk about to also read, we as a society should learn and inform ourselves about these things from history. It’s important to acknowledge what has happened in the past so that it doesn’t get repeated over and over again. We shouldn’t be the ones to forget this tragedy that has affected and is still affecting millions of people to this day.