Conditions for the Jews inside the ghettos were appalling. There was no heat, light or running water and food was almost impossible to buy. Hundreds of Jews died of disease and malnutrition. If people tried to leave the ghettos, they were shot by the German guards. Some Jews were separated from their friends and families and tried to manage their lives by scavenging for food. Some Jewish children tried to keep their humanity by carrying on with their education. They would creep out of their homes and attend an organised secret school, despite that education was declared illegal in the ghettos in 1942. From early 1942 thousands of people were taken away from the Ghetto each weak. They were sent by train to concentration camps from which they never returned. Some Jews in the ghetto were anxious of what had happened to their friends and began to hear dreadful stories. They guessed that they had been taken away and killed one by one. The people that were left in the ghettos had heard that the deportations would start again in the spring of 1943 and therefore they took action. They decided to battle instead of dying without trying. They had managed to gain access to a small quantity of ammunitions and the night that the Nazis came to the ghettos they were greeted with pistols and grenades but unfortunately the Jews did not succeed as the Nazis were far to powerful.
Concentration camps had been used by the Nazis since 1933. They sent communists, Jews, people with special needs, the elderly, gypsies and people that were unfit to work there. The biggest concentration camp to ever be built was Auschwitz in Poland. At the beginning of 1942, the camp became first of all the site of the mass murder committed against the European Jews as part of the Nazi plan for their complete destruction. These types of camps not only held Jews but also Gypsies, political prisoners, disabled people, homosexuals and any other group that was thought to be a threat to the Nazi regime. The method used to kill people in the concentration camps was very straightforward. They were worked to death, given very little food- starvation rations and to do back-breaking labour. Most of the people died of malnutrition, filth and neglect. The camps swarmed with various sorts of vermin and rats and also a constant shortage of water for washing, and the lack of suitable sanitary facilities, aggravated their lives even more. The people that were in the camps were giving hard work labour which initially destroyed them. They were given work like levelling the ground, erecting new blocks and buildings, laying roads, and digging drainage ditches. The pace of the work, the starvation and rations of food and also the constant beatings and abuse exacerbated their death rate. The people were given very little food and they began to experience organic deterioration that led them to extreme physical exhaustion that ended in death. “In the course of the final solution, the Jews will be brought to the East for labour. Large labour gangs will be formed, with the sexes separated, which will work on road construction. No doubt a lot of them will drop out through natural wastage. The remainder will have to be dealt with accordingly”. This quotation came from the minutes of a meeting of leading Nazis at Wannsee on 20th January 1942.
Executions were one means of physically liquidating prisoners and people brought from outside of the camps. At first, people were shot to death in the pits near the camps from which gravel had been dug. After this method of death, in 1944 larger groups of people were sentenced to death, and to make their death quicker and to kill prisoners rapidly they were placed in gas chambers. A gas chamber contained several hundred thousand Jewish men, women and children were they were murdered there with poisonous gas and their bodies were later burned. After a few years, more and more Jews were wanted killed, so the Nazis were set about killing Jews in special death camps or by adding gas chambers to existing concentration camps. Heinrich Himmler was put in charge of implementing this “Final Solution”, he was assisted by Reinhard Heydrich. Heydrich had already organised the ghettos and the Einsatzgruppen. He planned the sites of the camps, the methods of killing in gas chambers built to hold 2000 people at once, and the transport, by rail, of Jews from all over Europe. From the beginning of 1942 onwards, the Nazis used special vans. They called them “de-lousing vans” and told the Jews they were going to be cleaned so that they entered the vans unsuspectingly. Once they were inside, the doors were locked and gas was let in through holes in the roof. Soon afterwards large gas chambers were built at a number of concentration camps.
“The railway carriages were unloaded one after another. After leaving their luggage the Jews had to pass in front of an SS doctor, who decided if they were fit to work. Those fit enough were taken off in small groups”. The Jews were told that their belongings were going to be given to them afterwards, but their belongings never reached them. Instead the Nazis searched through their belongings for valuables like gold or anything worthy. The Jews were split into two groups, one group that were unfit and unable to work in the camps and another group that were able to work. Before the Jews were killed in the gas chambers, they were told that they were going to be bathed and deloused. After they got undressed they went into the gas chamber, which was furnished with showers and water pipes and looked like a real bath house. This prevented the Jews to panic before they were killed. “I had visited the Treblinka camp where the commandant used carbon monoxide gas and I did not think this his methods were efficient. So at Auschwitz I used Zyklon B. Another improvement we made was to build gas chambers that could hold 2,000 people” “The doors were screwed up and the gas released through vents in the ceiling. It took from three to fifteen minutes to kill everyone. We usually waited half an hour before we opened the doors. Work then started on removing the gold from the teeth and cutting the hair from women”. This quotation comes from the memoirs of Rudolf Hoess who was commandant of Auschwitz camp.
