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FOR YOUNG PEOPLE AGED YEARS OLD

THE FINAL SOLUTION

HOME LEARNING ACTIVITY PACK

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What do you think the picture above shows?

Activity

HOME LEARNING ACTIVITY PACK 5

THE FINAL SOLUTION

The picture shows wedding rings that were taken off prisoners arriving at Auschwitz concentration camp. Every single ring symbolises a human brutally murdered by the Nazis and a family destroyed.

What was meant by the ‘Final Solution’?

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THE FINAL SOLUTION

AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU Auschwitz-Birkenau was one of the most famous death camps. Thousands of innocent people lost their lives in the gas chambers within, including homosexuals, ‘gypsies’, communists and of course Jews. Auschwitz did also have other parts to it—a concentration camp and slave labour factory.

Trains would arrive each day carrying thousands of victims. Prisoners had been packed into cattle wagons with no room to sit, no food, a bucket for water and another as a toilet. The journey could last days on end. Many victims died during the journey as a result of suffocation, illness or hunger.

On arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau the trains would pull up on the unloading ramp in front of the awaiting SS officers and guards, kapos and the Sonderkommando.

The Jews were thrown out of the railway wagons and made to leave their belongings behind them. They were then ordered to form lines ready for the selection process. Men were in one line, and women in another. For Anne Frank this was the last time she will have ever seen her father.

As the Jews were stood in these lines camp officials and doctors would

decide who was going to be sent straight to the gas chambers – those

usually sent included pregnant women, children under 15, the elderly,

the disabled and the poorly.

The majority of those who survived the initial selection died as a result of

overwork, ill-treatment, disease or lack of food.

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SURVIVOR TESTIMONIES

Before we got to the wagons they gave us bread. In the middle of the wagon there

was a barrel with water. We were like sardines. The stench in that train! I cannot tell

you. It’s impossible to visualise. We were like animals. I don’t know how long we were

travelling, from Lodz to Auschwitz is not very far, but I suppose we were going about

a day and a night because when we got to Auschwitz it was still dark. They told us to

get off the train and leave our luggage, that would come

afterwards. They were separating men and women. The screams! Can you imagine

when a husband is separated from a wife or a son separated from a mother? It was

just terrible. I was feeling sick and had had diarrhoea. I was in a terrible state. They

were counting and counting us. And when it got a little bit lighter, I realised there

were wooden barracks with electric wires around them. Then from one of the

barracks a girl came out; she had a very short hair dress, no hair, no shoes. I thought

that I was a mental institution. I didn’t realise that in about two hours I would look

exactly the same.


THE FINAL SOLUTION

We were bullied out of the train and stood about waiting. It must have been about

half past two in the morning. It was dark; a blue light was shinning on the platform.

We saw a few SS men walking up and down. They separated the men from the

women. So I stood right in front of the men and I could see my wife there with the

child in her arms. She threw me a kiss and she showed the baby. All of a sudden one

of the women ran away from where she was towards her husband, hysterically.

Maybe she sensed something. Halfway she was met by an SS officer and he let a

club down on her head. She dropped to the ground and he kicked her in the belly.

Then one of the prisoners in a striped uniform commanded us to follow him. Well, we

turned to the left and walked a little way for two or three minutes. A truck arrived,

stopped near us and on the truck were all the women, children, babies and in the

centre my wife and child standing up. They stood up to the light as if it was meant to

be like that so that I could recognise them. A picture I’ll never forget. All these were

supposed to have gone to the bathroom to have a bath, to eat and to live. Instead

they had to undress and go into the gas chambers, and two hours later those people

were ashes, including my wife and child.

Young Polish woman, Auschwitz-Birkenau

British Jewish inmate, Auschwitz-Birkenau

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The next part was getting my number tattooed. Two young slaves – I would describe

them that way – came along; one of them had a book, nothing in it but numbers.

And the other one took a pen and bottle of ink and with this, very quickly they tat-

tooed us. In Auschwitz you was a number. What struck me about the camp was the

smell. By then we knew it was an extermination camp: we saw chimneys and the fire

was very high. ‘You go through the chimney’ – that was the standard saying. I never

heard about the gas chambers, so I didn’t know how people were killed. But we saw

the chimneys and we associated the flames with the transports coming in ... there

was the smell of human flesh being burnt, a certain smell, it was the air. Also, the air

was not clean: you were breathing the dead. Another thing was the water pools;

some days it had been raining and you would see how the water was coated with a

mart film of ashes, greenish grey. By that time I knew what it was.


Young Czech Youth, Auschwitz-Birkenau

The most tragic contact we had with people in the camp was with the

sonderkommando (special selected Jewish workers forced to remove bodies from

the gas chambers and then burn the bodies in the crematoria.) What they described,

what they had to do, was so horrible. One man said that in the group he had to burn

were the bodies of his wife and children. He was crying all night and you couldn’t

help him or do anything. The sonderkommando lived under sentence of death

because after three, four months, the Germans suspected they were going insane

and killed them.

Polish inmate, Auschwitz-Birkenau

Now dreadful things were happening in Auschwitz-Birkenau during 1944. They were

gassing and burning thousands of people who couldn’t work anymore because of

their failing strength; I knew particularly everything that was going on there. I knew

that from all over the Continent people would be brought to Auschwitz-Birkenau: men,

women, children, old people; and then they were sorted out and some were gassed

right away. There were heaps and heaps of clothing, glasses, footwear – huge ware-

houses full of possessions taken from these people. They just put them into the gas

chambers using the Zyklon B gas and then they were burned. And this happened day

in and day out.

British Prisoner of War, Buna-Monowitz, Auschwitz-Birkenau

THE FINAL SOLUTION

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Young Hungarian Jewish woman, Auschwitz-Birkenau

The deportation of the Hungarians started in the summer of 1944. The normal load

for the trucks was 60-90 people, we were 120. We had two buckets for our human

needs men, women, and children had to use them.

Anyway, with every jolt of the train the muck ran out so we were sitting in it and

we couldn’t do a thing about it. This was June 1944, a very hot summer and there

was very little air in the truck. The two openings had barbed wire over them and the

air became really unbreakable. We were thirsty; we had a bottle of water to drink,

most probably we drink it the first day, thinking that we could refill our bottles, but

this didn’t happen and we were getting thirstier and thirstier.

In our normal life we talk we talk about being thirsty, but thirsty there meant one’s

lips were parched, broken, hurting; you were hungry, you had a piece of bread in your

hand and couldn’t eat it because you couldn’t swallow anymore. People went mad,

people had heart attacks and people died.

What I observed was that the women and children had been separated from the

men and were sitting in a small wood across from our barrack. The children would

pick flowers, the women would sit and picnic and give children the food and drink

they still had. Then a group would be lead into the low building which was crematori-

um 4. Then I could see a person walking up a ladder wearing a gas mask and he

would empty a tin into an opening, a sort of skylight, at the top.

You couldn’t hear a lot, other than the muffled sound; sometimes you could

actually hear screams. After a pause you could see smoke coming out the chimney

of crematorium 4. Now what I couldn’t understand was that the people sitting in the

wood were totally calm, they had no idea that the people who had gone in front of

them were already dead. They simply had no idea.

Young Polish woman, Auschwitz-Birkenau

THE FINAL SOLUTION

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One day this SS, who was not a doctor, but wore a white coat like a doctor, called me, gave

me some cards and said, ‘bring these prisoners in a group at a time.’ I had no idea what

was happening, but brought the first one in and told him to lie down. The SS told me, ‘What

you are about to see, you are never going to talk about; if you do you are a dead man.’

Then he opened a cabinet, took out an injection tube, opened a bottle of gasoline and filled

it. The SS pushed the needle between the prisoner’s ribs and pumped the gasoline into the

heart. Then the SS waited tried his pulse and the prisoner was dead. Then he asked me to

bring the next one. On that day he killed about three dozen (36) people. It was horrible how

a man could kill in cold blood. The SS man couldn’t care less, he even joked about it. The

prisoners who came in had no idea what would happen, they thought that they were going

to be examined by a doctor.


I installed showerheads in the gas chambers. The nozzles were not connected to any

water pipes; they were serving as camouflage for the gas chamber. For the Jews who

were gassed it would seem as if they were being taken to baths and for disinfection.

In front of the building there were pots of geraniums (plants) and above there was a

Star of David. The building was brightly and pleasantly painted so as not to suggest

that people were killed here. From what I saw I do not believe that the people who

had just arrived had any idea of what would happen to them.

Czech inmate, Auschwitz

Helped build the gas chambers at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka

My dearest little wife, 23rd September 1942

The dice have been thrown. I am heading towards deportation and it is while the train is moving

that I am throwing this last letter to an employee of the railways in the hope that he will post it

without a stamp ... I leave in good health and if we are able to resist the regime that is waiting for

us, I will come back. I ask you to do as I am doing and to take courage and to hope. Don’t re-

nounce anything for yourself. Don’t worry about your future, while you are waiting for my return. If I

get out, I hope that we will live happily ... Have confidence and don’t fall into despair.

All my thoughts and all my love are in this last letter together with my gentle, tender, kisses.

Your husband

Adrien

A letter from

OTHER

TESTIMONY

THE FINAL SOLUTION

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2. Watch Eva’s Story



Whilst reading the survivor testimony you will have experienced a range of emotions and feelings. You may even have some questions. Imagine you had an opportunity to speak to one of the survivors. What questions would you ask them? Write them in the box below:

1. Come up with a list of questions you would ask one of the survivors.

Create a poem, reflection, or write a letter about concentration camps and how the Nazis treated people they saw as ‘other’.

URL: vimeo.com/386931047

RESPOND

ACTIVITY

THE FINAL SOLUTION

https://vimeo.com/386931047

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