An older woman and three children head to the gas chamber
For the most part with a sudden death. Unlike other inmates, 9/10 of the Jews were immediately killed on arrival. In the early days, they were trasferred to the extermination camps (like Sobibor or Chelmno). These were very small camps with just a few hundred regular inmates (also Jews) who manned most aspects of the extermination except for the actual gassing. Those who survived the train travel (not all did) were divided between men on one side, women and small children on the other, then were forced to strip and rapidly led to gas chambers where they were killed. In most cases they were dead within a few hours of arrival. The Jewish inmates then cleared the gas chambers and brought the bodies to the crematoriums, while others sorted the belongings of the dead and stored it for future use.
Later, the lack of manpower made the Nazis rethink this setup and convinced them to join the Jews to the extermination by labour process. This was already used with other inmates: political prisoners, Soviet POWs, homosexuals, etc. The Jews were still for the most part gassed on arrival, but this time before proceeding with the gassing the young and able bodied were picked to be added to the camp population.
A bowl of unsweetened ersatz coffee, a bowl of watery potato broth, and a slice of black bread with a dollop of margarine was all the food an inmate was given
Camp inmates lived a short and precarious life. They slept in three or four tiered bunk beds, two to four inmates on each level of the bunk bed. The beds were often just crude wooden structures with no mattress or with a rotting straw mattress. Each inmate had a single threadbare blanket that he or she had to share with the neighbors. Several people sleeping in the same cot at least meant that they could keep each other warmer, but accelerated the spread of diseases. At around 5 am they were woken up to be counted. They had to stand in the cold, with insufficient clothes, to be counted, and the counting usually took more than it had to. Sometimes the guards took a long time to show up, sometimes a single absence sparked a recount that lasted half an hour.
The staircase of death in Mauthausen, on the left the photo taken by inmate Francisc Boix: inmates had to load up a stone and trudge up the stair, when one faltered he brought down a whole column of men; anyone who fell or could not keep up was shot; if the number of inmates was too high, the prisoners were lined up by two near the ravine: the prisoner in the front had to choose whether to push down the man behind him or be shot, sometimes also the second in line was shot anyhow; Mauthausen was mainly used for political prisoners, but by the end of the war it also held Jewish inmates
Once the count was over, they were given a meager breakfast of a bowl of ersatz coffee (the workers also received a thin slice of black bread bulked with sawdust or with animal fodder), then the workers headed to their jobs, which were most commonly backbreaking. Non workers remaine din the camp, where they had to keep busy with various tasks. For instance, in Ravensbruck (the female-only lager), teams of women were tasked to use a heavy stone roller to flatten the ground: the roller was so heavy that when trying to stop it, it often rolled on killing the women. Workers worked from 6 am to noon, then they stopped for lunch when they received a meager lunch of “soup” (boiled potatoes or cabbages or other root vegetables in the water they were boiled in, served usually with no salt, except in Ravensbruck where there was no drinking water available, so the soup was often served heavily salted). Workers also got another thin slice of the same bread.
The Ravensbruck roller is as tall as a person
The afternoon was more or less like the morning. After a brief lunch break, workers resumed working and worked another 6 hours shift, then they were taken back to the camp, There they were subject to another count as long as the morning one before being served a meager dinner of bread with a small amount of margarine, reconstituted cheese, sausage. Theoretically after that they had an hour of rest, during which they were not allowed to go to bed. At bed time the inmates had to strip of their jackets, and on order to not get their limited properties stolen (shoes, bowl, spoon, jacket), they made a bundle with them so that they could rest their head on those. The sleep was often interrupted for impromptu countings, reducing their sleeping time.
Work went on 7 days a week, sometimes in two shifts (a day one and a night one, each 12 hours long). On Sundays the inmates had a day off during which they had to shower, fix their clothing, and clean up the barrack. The lack of a button on the jacket, the lack of the bowl or spoon, a piece of paper layered under the jacket to keep warm, not being fast enough to execute an order given in German, anything could be the cause of being beaten to death by the Kapo (the inmates used as guard helpers) or shot by a guard. Any disease would being the inmate to the Revier, the camp hospital, which was void of any useful medicine (the doctor inmates often only had toilet paper for bandages and no disinfectants or suture material). There the worst off prisoners were left to die.
It is worth noticing that this treatment was not exclusive for Jews: it was the same applied to all inmates (political prisoners, common criminals, homosexuals, emigrants, Soviet POWs, etc.), while gipsies of any ethnicity were most commonly just left to die of starvation, disease, and exposure in a separate area of the lager (they were given no extra rations for working, and were not allowed to wash to accelerate the spread of the diseases). The rules, though, were not evenly applied: guards were often more harsh on Jews, and Jews tended to receive smaller rations.
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