The light at the end of the Tunnel
Created by Luke Oldershaw, Max Kulewicz, Austin Slugg, Sammy Farjani
Introduction
Our artifact,“Light At The End Of The Tunnel” and documentary about concentration camps explore how poorly the undesirables were treated inside the Camps, and the feeling that they felt while inside the camp. Our artifact primarily focuses on two main ideas being darkness and chaos with light sprinkled in the darkness to show how some captives were able to feel “The Light At The End Of The Tunnel”. Our documentary focuses on the history of the camps, where they were located and the horrible conditions inside of the camps.
The Life of the Undesirables
The Nazis, who ruled Germany from 1931-1945, had a horrendous plan to wipe out the European Jews and restore Germany to “glory”. They wanted to kill the Jews to create an Aryan, or “perfect” race of blonde hair, blue eyed white people. Over the course of WWII, the Nazis used concentration camps to hold and kill Jewish people and other undesirables.
The groups of people that were labeled as “undesirables’ ‘ were disabled people or intellectual disabilities like Autism or Down syndrome, gay people, black people, and Jehovah’s witnesses. The Nazis went out of their way to find and send these “undesirables” and especially Jews to the different types of camps to sculpt this Aryan race.
Austin: There were 5 different types of camps: Concentration camps, Death Camps, Forced Labour Camps, Transit Camps, and Prisoner of War Camps. Although there were different types of camps, they were all structured very similarly with many if not all of the camps containing gas chambers made of reinforced concrete as well as many subcamps. Many camps were the size of towns in Massachusetts that we live in today. All of these camps also included a medical center, and a sort of admissions or administration center.
The Concentration camps had three main purposes which were to imprison anyone who posed a threat to the Nazi’s, kill the undesirables and get forced labor out of both groups. Many of the concentration camps were also used to perform medical experiments such as drug testing, testing ways to allow soldiers to survive longer, and also testing if different races reacted differently to disease to in order to prove that jews were “The inferior race”.
The first ever Nazi concentration camp was Dachau, and was opened in March 1933 outside of Munich, right after Hitler declared himself Führer of Germany. Dachau and other early Nazi concentration camps incarcerated 100 to 200,000 Nazi political opponents. After its creation, Dachau also became the reference for all the 44,000 concentration camps that followed.
The first death camp called Chelmo, was opened in December of 1941. In these death camps, an average of 6,000 Jews were gassed every day which achieved the Nazi’s goal of efficient mass murder. They would organize Jews based on if they were able to work or not. The ones who couldn’t work would go to these camps.
Between the reign of Hitler from 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany and its allies created more than 44,000 camps. There was a high death rate among the prisoners inside the camp due to the mistreatment during hard manual labor hours, the malnourishment they experienced while in the camps and the illness and disease that spread throughout the camps frequently.
Auschwitz, one of the most famous labor camps in the world was known for its gas chambers, which incinerated almost 1.1 Million people by the end of the war. Someone who endured and survived this brutal and deadly camp was Harry Getterman, who described the camp as “absolutely crazy. Very very crazy time. 500 people immediately were sent to the gas chambers. There was blood on the walls, the floor, and it was never cleaned. Blood of hundreds.”
The SS and Nazi’s were able to get forced labor from millions of imprisoned individuals to aid in the war effort and for economic gain. Even before the war started, Jewish men were forced to do labor in Nazi Germany in 1937 to make money and make up for the labor scarcity. By 1939 when Germany conquered Poland they had started forcing all Polish males and Jews to do forced labor by sending them to ghettos to create weaponry and other goods for the war.
From 1944-1945, Allied troops began to move across Europe and liberate the camps. First, American forces liberated many concentration camps across Germany, such as Buchenwald, Dachau, Flossenbürg. After that, British soldiers liberated camps across the northern part of Europe, most notably, Bergen-Belsen and Neuengamme. Finally, in January 1945, the Soviet Union liberated Auschwitz.
In 1945 which was the final year of the war, more than half the recorded deaths of the people who the nazi’s considered undesireble in camps occurred which was around 1.3 million people. If the Nazi’s were able to continue growing their death camps at this rate they would’ve been able to exterminate nearly if not all of the individuals they considered “undesirable” completing their “final solution”.
By the end of the war in 1945 over 2.7 Million Jews had been killed in Nazi camps by gas, shooting and disease in the name of “The final solution” to eradicate all Jews and other undesirables to create what the Nazi’s thought would be a perfect race of humans. The Holocaust helped us learn about the many types of concentration camps, as well as of the destruction and deep sadness caused by the Nazis.
We want to create this documentary to memorialize the Jews, disabled people, black people, mentally disabled individuals, gays and Jehovas who were all just labeled “undesirable” and to make sure that an evil event like this would never happen again, and with little survivors left, it is important to never forget the individuals affected and the events that happened.
Bibliography & Resources
“42nd Infantry Division Liberated Infamous Dachau Concentration Camp in 1945.” DVIDS, www.dvidshub.net/news/368498/42nd-infantry-division-liberated-infamous-dachau-concentration-camp-1945.
BBC News. “Auschwitz: How the Death Camp Became the Center of Nazi Holocaust.” BBC News, 23 Jan. 2020, www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50743973.
Book Burning. encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/book-burning.
Chelmno Extermination Camp (Poland). www.jewishgen.org/forgottencamps/camps/chelmnoeng.html.
Forced Labor: An Overview. encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/forced-labor-an-overview.
“Forced Labor in Nazi Germany During World War II.” Encyclopedia Britannica, www.britannica.com/video/180231/Discussion-use-labourers-territories-Nazi-weapons-armaments.
Gas Chamber in the Main Camp of Auschwitz. encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/photo/former-gas-chamber-in-the-auschwitz-main-camp.
“The Ghosts of Auschwitz: Inside Hitler’s Killing Machine.” The Wire, thewire.in/history/ghosts-of-auschwitz-holocaust-nazism-extermination-camps.
“Holocaust | Definition, Concentration Camps, History, and Facts.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 28 Feb. 2024, www.britannica.com/event/Holocaust/Jewish-resistance-to-the-Nazis.
Holocaust Timeline: The Camps. fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/timeline/camps.HTM.
Killing Centers: In Depth. encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/killing-centers-in-depth.
Map – the Concentration Camps. khc.qcc.cuny.edu/camps/map.
Orth-Veillon, Jennifer. “For Some Holocaust Survivors, Even Liberation Was Dehumanizing.” The New York Times, 11 May 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/magazine/for-some-holocaust-survivors-even-liberation-was-dehumanizing.html.
Sullivan, Missy. “Auschwitz Is Liberated.” HISTORY, 26 Jan. 2021, www.history.com/this-day-in-history/soviets-liberate-auschwitz.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Concentration Camp | Facts, History, Maps, and Definition.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 24 Jan. 2024, www.britannica.com/topic/concentration-camp.Wikipedia contributors. “Master Race.” Wikipedia, 30 Jan. 2024, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_race.
Artifact Statement
Our artifact named “Light At The End Of The Tunnel” explores not the real, cold brick walls of the Nazi concentration camps, but it explains and develops the emotions and factors behind the concentration camps into a symbolic piece of art. The three triangles that form the walls and floor of our artifact represent the three main elements/emotions felt in the camps; darkness, fire, and chaos. The fire is shown through the red and gold flames displayed on one of the walls. Darkness is shown through the dark night sky in which they arrived. The lights represent small glimmers of hope through the dark times experienced for every Jew in the concentration camps. The chaos is represented through a mix of darkness and fire, as upon the arrival of the camps, Elie Wiesel noted that the darkness that they arrived on and the fire made for an “organized chaos” which we felt was important to add. Along with the arrival of the camps, the two paths converging represent the Jewish men and women going all to the same place: Hell. The Star of David represents that not all of the Jewish people survived, but their suffering was unjust.
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Personal Reflections
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Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Praesent fringilla porta augue nec pellentesque. Sed nec est a justo elementum tristique. Curabitur non rutrum ex. Integer quis tincidunt dolor, sed tristique odio. Pellentesque mattis imperdiet hendrerit. Cras quis eros at erat cursus porttitor vitae sed turpis. Quisque elementum enim euismod, maximus turpis a, gravida turpis. In eros nunc, scelerisque nec malesuada non, pharetra eu sapien. Sed mauris nibh, lobortis eget mi ac, vehicula bibendum felis.
Title
Name John Doe, Class of 2025 H4
Cool quote here
Authors Name
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Praesent fringilla porta augue nec pellentesque. Sed nec est a justo elementum tristique. Curabitur non rutrum ex. Integer quis tincidunt dolor, sed tristique odio. Pellentesque mattis imperdiet hendrerit. Cras quis eros at erat cursus porttitor vitae sed turpis. Quisque elementum enim euismod, maximus turpis a, gravida turpis. In eros nunc, scelerisque nec malesuada non, pharetra eu sapien. Sed mauris nibh, lobortis eget mi ac, vehicula bibendum felis.
Title
Name John Doe, Class of 2025 H4
Cool quote here
Authors Name
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Praesent fringilla porta augue nec pellentesque. Sed nec est a justo elementum tristique. Curabitur non rutrum ex. Integer quis tincidunt dolor, sed tristique odio. Pellentesque mattis imperdiet hendrerit. Cras quis eros at erat cursus porttitor vitae sed turpis. Quisque elementum enim euismod, maximus turpis a, gravida turpis. In eros nunc, scelerisque nec malesuada non, pharetra eu sapien. Sed mauris nibh, lobortis eget mi ac, vehicula bibendum felis.
Title
Name John Doe, Class of 2025 H4
Cool quote here
Authors Name
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Praesent fringilla porta augue nec pellentesque. Sed nec est a justo elementum tristique. Curabitur non rutrum ex. Integer quis tincidunt dolor, sed tristique odio. Pellentesque mattis imperdiet hendrerit. Cras quis eros at erat cursus porttitor vitae sed turpis. Quisque elementum enim euismod, maximus turpis a, gravida turpis. In eros nunc, scelerisque nec malesuada non, pharetra eu sapien. Sed mauris nibh, lobortis eget mi ac, vehicula bibendum felis.
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