Children of the Holocaust
Advanced Composition/ ENGL 135
June 20, 2011

Alena Synjova once stated, “ I’d like to go away alone where there are other, nicer people, somewhere into the far unknown, there, where no one kills another. Maybe more of us, a thousand strong, will reach this goal before too long” (Volavková, 1994, p. 50). During the Holocaust, people craved opportunity to escape to a place where there were polite people and no one killed each other. The Holocaust affected everyone, ranging from the elderly to the young children, who were faced with horrific situations. They witnessed the death of the people around them and were forced to live under unmentionable conditions. The holocaust altered non-Jewish and Jewish
When we had nothing left to exchange, they spitefully spilled the water on the ground” (Adler, 1989, p. 68). Upon arrival at the camps the passengers were split up into two groups: death or work. “It was usually the young and strong who were selected to work. The old, the weak, and the very young were immediately killed” (Adler, 1989, p. 74). “The camp authorities sent majority of children directly to the gas chambers. SS and police forces in German-occupied Poland and the occupied Soviet Union shot thousands of children at the edge of mass graves” (United Stated Holocaust Memorial Museum).
After being chosen to work, the adults and children were tattooed with numbers. “Everyone imprisoned in Auschwitz had his or her arm tattooed with an identification number. This served two purposes. First, it allowed camp officials to keep track of the thousands of prisoners in the camp. Second, making the inmates into nameless units served to dehumanize them, both crushing the spirit of the prisoners and making it easier for their guards to avoid facing the humanity of their changes” (Roth, 2001, p.585 ). The children had to continue working or suffer the chance of being killed on the spot with a gunshot to the head. Since the males and females were split up, the only way they were able to see each other was through barbed wire. Werner Galnik, a Holocaust survivor who was eight during the Holocaust, wrote in his diary, “When I got a piece of bread for a