Holocaust: Point of View of Reporter

Stench!1

The stench of death.2

That is what you smell as you step onto the soil of the Auschwitz concentration camp. A feeling of remorse and grief. Barren and dead. An atrocity.3

The Jewish people, prisoners of Nazi Germany, look as if skeletons. The walking dead. Their heads shaved, bones visible, so fragile and weak. If you were to touch them they might break.4

The conditions inhumane, forced to work and if failed to do so, beaten and even worse killed. The foul odor in the air comes from the crematory, where those who are killed are burned. Bodies upon bodies, burning in the flames. Flesh melting. Has the world been so blind to let something this catastrophic and inhumane to happen? To be persecuted just because of your beliefs? Crammed into cattle cars and blocks like animals. Given rags to wear, watching family members beaten, unable to do anything.5

Helpless.6

Children slaughtered. Faces of angels hanged in gallows, their weight not allowing them a clean break, but a slow painful death. Sons turning on fathers, for food and the need to survive. 7

Then there are selections that occurred. People, as if animals, letting someone decide if you are worthy of living, as if they had the power to decide that! In these camps death was a friend for many prisoners, and freedom was only a dream.