Created by Vinny Hogan, Remy Csendes, Romir Vishwanath, & Bryce Nash

Introduction

Our artifact is titled “The Unforgotten tragedies”. We wanted to name it this because of the many tragedies that happened in these camps including starvation, deaths, and diseases. These death camps can not slip through our history so we wanted to capture the horrendous things that happened in these death camps.

The Concentration Camps

In 1933, during the end of the Weimar Republic Era, Adolf Hitler and his followers, the Nazis, surged into power and gained support very quickly from German citizens. Germany was in shambles as a result of WW1 and Hyperinflation from all of the war reparations Germany was forced to pay. As problems arose in Germany, Hitler gave the Germans someone to blame for every one of these issues: Jews. Hitler went to the extent of blaming Jews for Germany’s defeat in WW1. Jews were now the target of hate crimes and discrimination all around Germany.

After the death of the previous German president, Hindenburg, on August 2nd, 1934, Hitler acquired full control of the country. He was able to do this since he was previously appointed chancellor by Hindenburg, and After he died, Hitler joined the President and Chancellor role together and created the role known as the Führer, also known as “leader”. In this position he gained total dictatorship and controlled every citizen with no regards to rights or freedom. Jewish people slowly lost their freedoms through anti-Jewish laws known as the Nuremberg laws which were put into place by the nazi government. After these laws were set up, Jews had almost no rights at all and were being persecuted daily. The idea of taking away the rights of the Jewish was apart of hitlers master plan called “the final solution.”

The final solution was an operation that Hitler and the Nazis created. This operation’s goal would be the mass murder and extermination of all Jews in Europe. One of the Nazis first steps of this plan was establishing Ghettos. The first ghetto was created in 1939, and it was required for all Jewish people and other undesirables near the area to be moved there and separated from the rest of the German citizens. These enclosed neighborhoods were guarded by SS, who were the elite nazi guards. The Jews lived in the ghettos being controlled by the delusions of lies, uncertainty, and fear. There was barely any food and water, Jews were harassed and abused by SS soldiers, and people would spend from two months to a year and a half in these horrible places.

After living in the ghettos, Jewish people were transported to many different camps around Nazi occupied Europe. They were forced onto railcar trains and locked inside with little to no windows. The Jews spent about 3 days in the dim light of the train and were crammed with almost 80 to 100 people in each car, while the SS would stay in guard posts that were behind the cars. The time the Jews spent on the trains was horrendous. For Jews to relieve themselves, there was a bucket that was used as a toilet in each car. The toilet produced a putrid stench that contributed to the unacceptable air quality in the railcars. The only source of ventilation was a small opening on the roof of some cars that was just large enough to fit one’s head out of. The Jewish people used this hole to pop out of the railcars one at a time and take turns for a short breath of fresh air. On the trains people would be pushed to the edge of insanity and many tragically died from suffocation. Sometimes, when the trains stopped in some German towns, citizens would throw food into the cars through the opening. However, this caused an unintended consequence. Those on the trains would start physically attacking each other and doing everything in their power to get a small piece of the bread or sandwich that was tossed inside. A man named Herman Roth who was a Jewish person during these terrible times, was crammed into one of these trains and recalled a moment that shows how inhumane these trains were,

“Everybody was jumping and scratching each other’s eyes and head just for a few crumbs”

On these trains, Jews were surrounded by corpses and would witness people die right in front of them which made them realize the most important thing was to survive. Herman was a witness of this “every man for himself” mindset when he saw other people in front of him, risking death over a piece of bread.

For those who did make it, when they finally got out of the trains they were at a concentration camp. There were two main types of nazi camps. There were men and women forced labor camps, and there were death camps. These two types of camps are very different from each other. Death camps were killing centers designed to exterminate the most people with minimal resources. On the other hand, the purpose of the forced labor camps, or concentration camps was to keep all of the imprisoned Jews in one place and use their labor to produce supplies for the war. Despite these camps mainly being used for labor, they were very deadly. People died by the thousands every day in nearly unimaginable conditions. The scarce source of terrible food, illness ridden throughout the camps, the dirtiness of the living areas and watching loved ones die lead to the theme of pure hopelessness.

Herman Roth, a survivor of these horrible camps, had an exceptionally hard time with this. He was a boy accompanied by his father in these camps. His father was the only person that would take care of him and calm him in the terrible conditions they were in, but sadly his father died and was taken away

“And then they picked him (Herman’s father) up and took him. You couldn’t have a funeral but at least I could walk behind his body when the morning pickup came”

This crushed Hermans soul and hurt him significantly. The Nazi’s dehumanized these camps terribly. Taking away one’s father without a care or feeling about who it would affect. Murdering someone with no way for anyone to memorialize him. These camps created a nature where death was normal and one wouldn’t bat an eye at someone losing their life.

Another factor to the horrendous camp life was the hierarchy among the prisoners at the concentration camps. Prisoners could become kapos who were assigned as guards to supervise the forced labor, which allowed them to gain power among others and lead other prisoners. There were more kapos at the camps than German SS guards.

When the prisoners first arrived at the camps they gave up anything they had carried with them and went through a process called “selection.” The word, “selection” is a euphemism the Nazis used for separating the healthy Jewish people that can work at labor camps from the Jewish people that don’t fit the physical requirements. Selection happened multiple times after the arrival as well. The Jews that aren’t able to work are taken to a death camp.

The forced labor camps were often located right next to a death camp to make this easier. When they reached the Death camps, another euphemism was used. The guards told the prisoners that they would be taken to the “showers” which is really where the gas chambers and crematoriums were. The Nazis used poisonous gas and fire to kill millions of Jews. This was one of the many horrifying examples of the lies and delusions the Nazis used throughout the Holocaust to assert power of the Jews

Around the mid-1940s the soviet troops started to liberate camps. Most of the time, when they arrived at the different camps, the buildings would be deserted and fully evacuated. However when they did finally find some Jewish prisoners they were shocked by their physical appearance and the stories they told. The outside world did not know anything about what was happening in the concentration camps so when people started to spread the information most of the listeners didn’t even believe what they were hearing.

The horrors and atrocities that occurred in the concentration camps can never be forgotten. It would be an unforgivable crime to let these stories and happenings never to be learned and to let the holocaust be shrugged off. Some might say that “It happened a long time ago”. A tragedy of this scale and step by step execution of a plan to eradicate the world of a people must never be forgotten.

Artifact Statement

The Unforgotten Tragedies

Our holocaust artifact is called, “the unforgotten tragedies”, a memorial to the millions of Jewish people that tragically lost their lives within these death camps. The map that sits next to our other artifact marks the different locations of major death camps and concentration camps with red lights. We chose red lights to represent the death and horrors that happened at these camps. To make the map we began by finding a map and printing it on a piece of wood in our laser printer. Our map seemed to lack detail so we decided to add lights to emphasize the locations. We were going to add white lights to our map but we thought adding white lights would make it seem too happy and positive.

The second part of our artifact is the gas chamber. Gas chambers were one of the main ways that the Nazis murdered Jewish people in these death camps. We built the gas chamber out of wood pieces and spray-painted them gray. We wanted to make the gas chamber dirty because as seen in photos the walls of the chambers are dirty and mangled.

We added scratches to our walls and scratched some of the spray paint off to add to that effect. We used blue paint and cotton balls to represent the poisonous smoke used to kill Jews. The main gas used was Zyklon B, also known as hydrogen-cyanide. Zyklon B is blue in its solid form and has stained the walls of these chambers to this day with blotches of blue littered around the walls.

We almost used the color red to represent the deaths in the chambers but we thought the blue paint would be a better choice because of the symbolism of the actual gas. To memorialize the deaths that occurred in these chambers, we chose to create a smoke stack that depicts photos of faces all over the smoke stack to represent the deaths that happened in these camps.

We chose a smoke stack to memorialize deaths because, in these camps, bodies were taken to crematoriums and were burned which would produce smoke exiting out of a chimney connected to the crematorium.

Bibliography & Resources

Primary sources

IWitness | IWitness – Education Through Genocide Testimony. iwitness.usc.edu/testimony/55630?search=Herman%20Roth&category=I witness &from=%2Fsearch.

Iwitness.usc.edu/testimony/44439?search=Concentration%20Camps&category=testimonies&from=%2Fsearch.

Secondary sources

Daily Life in the Camps. www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/about/camps/daily-life.html#narrative_info.
Nazi Camps. encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/nazi-camps
The death camps. (n.d.). https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/about/final-solution/death-camps.html
The National Archives. “Gas Chambers and Crematoria at Birkenau – the National Archives.” The National Archives, 2 Oct. 2017, www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/holocaust/gas-chambers-crematoria-birkenau.
The Weimar Republic. encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-weimar-republic#:~:text=%22Weimar%20Republic%22%20is%20the%20name,characterized%20the%20complex%20Weimar%20period.
Daily Life in the Ghettos – the Holocaust Explained: Designed for Schools. 24 Feb. 1920, www.theholocaustexplained.org/the-camps/ghettos-an-overview/daily-life-in-the-ghettos

German Railways and the Holocaust. encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/german-railways-and-the-holocaust.

Personal Reflections

The Horrors of Death Camps

Rex Hudson, The Fenn School, Class of 2025

That’s the difficulty in these times: ideals, dreams, and cherished hopes rise within us, only to meet the horrible truth and be shattered. It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet, I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.
– Anne Frank

Hello, my name is Rex Hudson, and I was a part of a group of three within the Preserving Memories Holocaust Project. My group and I decided that since we only have three people, we would have a documentary person, an artifact person, and a swing person. I was chosen as the swing person, which meant that I would work on both parts of the project. My general experience during this project was somber on one hand but also fascinating on the other. I viewed the project as somber because of the different facts and information I learned during my research on the project. After the somber part of the research was finished, I started my work on the artifact, which was an indulging process.

This project, which we worked on for many weeks, was a very rewarding process. Viewing our first week’s research slowly transform into our final artifact and documentary was a fantastic feeling and made our group proud of ourselves. Jack and I wanted to start out our artifact by depicting the different locations of these death camps by creating a map using our laser printer. We scavenged for a perfect piece of wood and found it, so we placed it into the laser printer and allowed the printer to work its magic. The map was an essential part of our artifact in that it demonstrated to the viewers of our artifact where these death camps we were talking about were.

The main part of our artifact was the gas chamber and the smoke stack erecting from the gas chamber. Jack and I came to the agreement that I would be assigned to the gas chamber and he would be assigned to the smoke stack. This process worked great for us, and we managed to complete our tasks with great efficiency using this tactic.

The gas chamber consisted of a small rectangular wood box that I spray painted silver, along with a small box connected to it containing the gas that was used in these chambers. In the chamber, I used symbolism by adding blue paint scattered around the chamber, which resembled the gas because the gas, Zyklon B, is made of blue pellets in their solid form. Therefore, the blue paint symbolized the powerful gas used in the chambers.

As I didn’t know much about the Holocaust, this project left me with much more essential knowledge about the Holocaust that I will need later in life. One of the hardest things about this project was agreeing on different things about the artifact with my partners.

This project helped me grow as a researcher, writer, and creator. It taught me to be descriptive in my research, informative in my writing, and a creative creator.

Remembering the Horrors

Jack Beresford, The Fenn School, Class of 2025

“To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time,”
-Albert Camus

Hello, my name is Jack Beresford and I was in charge of the creation of the artifact my group made for the Preserving Memory Holocaust Museum. I was in a group of three and we were assigned the topic of Death Camps. As the main builder for the artifact, Ihad to make some critical decisions for the betterment of our artifact. I also had to make some last minute decisions in order to better the way our artifact looks and to make sure we have enough time to complete certain elements. There was one major theme of my experience, remembering. This theme appears many times during the working process, whether I was researching, building, or helping others. I always felt the importance of remembering what happened and those who died.

Before the project, I knew very little about the Holocaust and I did not understand the seriousness of the topic. After researching and creating an artifact about death camps and the Holocaust I have gained a deeper understanding. I now know the importance of remembering the tragic events that occurred and why it should never happen again. This experience helped me understand what is a reliable source and what sources are not, I also learned how to understand the content of the sources better. I did not do much writing but I learned how to take notes efficiently. I got a good understanding of how to use color in the building process to create a mood. I discovered that interactive elements help people understand more, and that through the use of symbolism you can convey emotions and feelings to others through pictures, objects, and scenes.

I had a great time working on the project with my group and gained a deeper understanding of the seriousness of the Holocaust.

Death Camp Horrors