Hello.
My name is Dr. Na'ama Shik from Yad Vashem.
And I welcome you to our discussion
on daily life in the camps.
In this section, we will talk about the experiences
of the lives of men, women, and children
in German concentration camps.
As you have seen throughout this course,
concentration and extermination camps
were an essential part of the German state apparatus
and of the final solution--
concentration, extermination through labour and murder.
It must be said that not the only Jews were
imprisoned in the camps.
But starting from mid-1942, Jews were
the majority of the prisoners.
We don't have the time here to try and describe the full scope
of experiences in the camps.
And the limitations of our understanding
as people who haven't gone through those experiences
mean we can't really go into the differences between the camps
or the differences between the various experiences of men,
women, and children.
But I will try to describe a few basic features of daily life
in the camps.
Zalman Gradowski, a Jewish member of the Sonderkommando,
kept a diary in Auschwitz.
In his opening lines, he wrote, "Come to me, you,
the contented citizen of the world.
You who live in a country where only happiness, joy,
and pleasure may dwell, and I will tell you
how the modern and despised criminals have turned
the joy of a nation to a disaster,
its happiness to everlasting agony,
and the pleasantness of its life to eternity of its destruction.
Bid farewell to your friends and acquaintances,
for after you have seen the dreadful and sadistic deeds
off the supposedly cultured legions of devils,
you will certainly want to erase your name
from the Family of Man."
Zalman Gradowski was murdered or killed
during the only armed uprising in the Auschwitz Birkenau
camp, which took place on October 7, 1944.
Yet, can we really accept Gradowski's call
and invitation?
Robert Antelme, a French political prisoner who was
deported to Buchenwald, then to a labour camp,
and then to Dachau, described the terrible experiences
in the camps in his book The Human Race.
He wrote about the basic fact of his and other camp survivors
inability to really share their experiences with other people,
to describe and to actually be understood,
to try and explain the unimaginable.
"Two years ago, during the first days after our return,
I think we were all prey to a genuine delirium.
We wanted at last to speak, to be heard.
And we felt a frantic desire to describe it such
as it had been.
As of those first days, however, we
saw that it was impossible to bridge the gap we discovered
opening up between the words at our disposal
and that experience which, in the case of most of us,
was still going forward within our bodies.
No sooner would we begin to tell our story than we
would be choking over it.
And then, even to us, what we had to tell
would start to seem unimaginable."
What was it that is so beyond our comprehension?
What are the camp survivors talking
about when they speak about the loss of humanity?
What human experiences can't be taught because they
can't be understood?
What had human beings done to other human beings?
Those arriving at the camp immediately
encountered a complex, scary, incoherent world
that was impossible to compare to anything
they had known before.
They had no tools from the previous life
that would help them in coping with this new reality they
were thrown into.
Let me try and present a little of what we can try
and learn about the cruel world of the camps.
Life in the camp consisted a difficult process
of dehumanisation and the shattering
of the self-- loss, fear, terror, terrible hunger,
cold, insanitary conditions, powerlessness,
loss of faith in mankind, a sense of their total ruin.
Isabella Leitner, called the extreme manifestation
of this experience, that of becoming a Muselmann, not quite
alive yet not quite yet dead.
But we also find brief flickers of friendship,
of extraordinary inner strength, and attempts
to maintain some kind of humanity.
Two essential components of the camps
were dehumanisation and humiliation.
Even before the actual murder, we
see in this total world of death physical and spiritual death
combined, the attempt to destroy the prisoners' spirit,
destruction of the self.
This terrible process began with the journey to the camp
and continued with the arrival there.
Most family members of the Jews sent to the camp
had been murdered.
The prisoners had no property, their names
had been taken away from them, and instead
they became a number.
Their hair and bodies were shaved.
They wore prisoners' uniforms or rags and wooden clogs
or worn out shoes.
Their living conditions were horrid.
They were constantly exposed to the threat of immediate death,
to extreme hunger and cold.
And they had to perform harsh physical labour.
They lived in buildings designed for cattle
and slept, or tried to sleep, between three and 15 people
in one bunk bed.
In many cases, they had no undergarments.
They were denied basic hygienic facilities,
like showers or bathrooms.
Their bodily needs were controlled by the Germans.
Their daily schedule involved a series
of tortures and punishments, a violent wake-up call,
standing in morning and evening role
calls that often lasted many hours, minimal food
rations, and the constant threat of punishment.
And they were submitted to a constant threat of death
in their work, from starvation, epidemics,
and during the regular selections in which many
were chosen for death.
Miriam Steinem was born in Hungary in 1929.
In June 1944, when she was 15, she
was deported along with her family to Auschwitz.
After they arrived, her father and brother
were sent to the men's camp and Steinem and her mother
were sent to Birkenau.
She speaks about the shock of going
through the sauna, the humiliation and terrible sense
of dehumanisation.