Cruelty and the Holocaust
...ruelty affected every aspect of the prisoner’s lives. “Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his home, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses…” (Levi 422). The Nazi’s have no shame in stripping men of their dignity and identity, and as the author states (and most prisoners feel), “…hell must be like this…” (Levi 420). And indeed hell is. Webster’s dictionary defines hell as a place or state of misery, torment, or wickedness; that is where the narrator and his fellow comrades are. The prisoners are deprived of nourishing and satisfying amounts of food, their shelter hardly accommodates their body’s need of warmth, and among others, they are also deprived of hydration (water). “Driven by thirst, I eyed a fine icicle outside the window…I opened the window and broke off the icicle but at once a large, heavy guard prowling outside brutally snatched it away from me” (Levi 423). The narrator felt that he was on the bottom—that he had hit the bottom, and was doomed a life of deprivation. But at least the narrator was offered a chance to live life (even though many may argue it is one not worth living). Unlike the “lucky one’s” (who were sent to work camps), many were sent to mass extermination camps. “In number one crematorium’s gas chamber 3,000 dead were piled up…[and] the gas chambers had to be cleared, for the arrival of a new convoy had been announced” (“Auschwitz” 88). The mass extermination of the Jews and the manner in which they were killed is extremely brutal and appalling. But for the Nazi’s, it was a normal, daily occurrence for them to watch the gas chambers steal the breath of thousands—and it didn’t even faze them. The men who ran the gas chambers, such as the “number one crematorium” gas chamber, were trained and conditioned into seeing the Jews as nonhumans. And the killing of the Jews was so regular and ordinary to their everyday life that they didn’t stop to think what they were doing—they were killing people. In the “Auschwitz” essay, a sixteen-year-old girl was found to have survived the deadly, poisonous gas that had been responsible for killing the thousands of others around her. A doctor and kommando men took her body out of the chamber, and laid her down in another room so that the doctor could try to restore her body to physical health. “I laid the body on a bench…I administered three intravenous injections” (89). The story continues to reveal that the doctor’s “…companions covered her body which was as cold as ice with a heavy overcoat. One ran to the kitchen to fetch some tea and warm brother. Everybody wanted to help, as if she were his own child” (“Auschwitz” 89). It is ironic that these men, who kill thousands of people a day, value the life of this young girl. They feel it is necessary to fully accommodate her basic needs, but when considering the mass population of Jews, they wouldn’t think twice to offer any assistance in satisfying the bodies of the millions that find themselves in the gas chambers. Like the narrator of “On the Bottom,” the young girl in “Auschwitz” was also on the bottom—of the “pile”. And even though her physical body literally existing at the bottom of the pile of corpses offered her a brief extension of life, in the end, she had not escaped death; her life ended just as cruelly as the rest of the vic...