Death Marches Essay, Research Paper
Perhaps some of the most vivid images of the Holocaust are the
death marches, when tens of thousands of Jews at one time were paraded
to the extermination camps in Germany, Poland and Austria. Some of the
more notable death marches included the mass march from the Warsaw
Ghetto to the extermination camp at Auschwitz and the numerous marches
that occurred following ghettoization related in Elie Wiesel’s Night.
Though much of the modern world may find it difficult, if not
impossible, to accept that notion that humankind can act with such
disdain for human life, the objectification of the Jews as a component
of the Nazi regime defined the acceptability of the death marches and
the systematic extermination of innumerable populations of Jews.
One of the keys to the relative successes of Hitler’s
extermination plans was that few people escaped the horrors at the end
of the death march, and so there were only a handful of people who were
able to actually substantiate claims of mass extermination that took
place at camps like Auschwitz, and even fewer who could fan the flames
of resistance by retelling the horrific stories of what occurred to
those who followed. Some theorists argue that if the Jews had not been
exposed to the kind of Nazi propaganda that was utilized as a control
measure through out the early part of World War II that the mass
exterminations would have been far less effective. At the same time,
Nazi occupation of much of Europe during this period maintained an
atmosphere capable of quelling resistance, even to the horrific death
camp marches that occurred following increasing ghettoization of the
Jewish population and subsequent implementation of the death march to
exterminate large segments of the Jewish population.
Warsaw
Perhaps one of the most interesting examples of the kinds of
atrocities that occurred and the implementation of the death march can
be assessed in the events that followed the ghettoization of the Jewish
community in Warsaw. After the occupation of Poland, the Nazi regime
determined the necessity centralizing the Jewish community, only to
force many into the killing facilities at Auschwitz-Birkenau between
1942 and 1944. The views of some of the survivors of Auschwitz help to
underscore the history of the ghettoization process and the quelling of
opposition to Nazi control.
The process of ghettoization has been related in the stories of
many of the survivors of the death marches, many of whom lived through
ghettoization in Hungary and Poland under the directives of Adolph
Eichmann (Smith 22). Under the plan for the Judenfrei-Europe
(Jew-free), the directive was set for the use of the death marches to
transport Jews from regions of Europe like Hungary to the more
centralized extermination camps in Poland (Smith 22). Over 500,000
Hungarian Jews, for example, were exterminated in the midst of Hitler’s
plan, many of whom were transported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death
camps for extermination (Smith 22).
The German occupation of much of Europe caused considerable
changes for the Jewish communities, especially in countries like Poland,
Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Prior to the German military action, the
Anglo-Polish mutual assistance agreement had assured that Poland would
remain independent, but held no military value in the face of German
occupation forces (Richardson uprising.htm). In August of 1939, the
signing of the Mololov-Ribbentrop Pact determined the fate of Poland and
it took just eight days for the Germans to advance on Warsaw (Richardson
uprising.htm). Though the Polish Army worked in resistance to German
occupation, the German “Blitzkrieg” or “lightening war” was unstoppable,
and by late September, Warsaw fell with over 50,000 casualties in the
city alone and some 25 percent of the buildings in ruins (Richardson
uprising.htm). The demoralized and demolished Poland was conquered
(Richardson uprising.htm).
The conditions of the surrender of Warsaw included a statement
about the Jewish population, and a promise was made by the German
Wehrmacht, General von Blaskowitz, that no harm would come to the Polish
Jews (Richardson uprising.htm). But following the surrender, the German
occupation marked a period of rumored activities, including the burning
alive of rabbis and the mass slaughter of all the male inhabitants of
the village of Pilica (Richardson uprising.htm). The general perception
that spread within the Jewish community was that any agreement about the
safety of the Jewish populations were grossly exaggerated and a sense of
“shcrecklichkeit” or fearfulness quickly spread (Richardson
uprising.htm).
In November of 1939, Hitler called for the abolishing of the
existing military government in Poland and the creation of two
differentiated political administrations, divided by regions (Richardson
uprising.htm). The regions to the west and north were3 annexed by the
German Reich and the regions of central Poland were defined as the
“Generalgovernment,” including four districts: Cracow, Radom, Warsaw
and Lablin (Richardson uprising.htm). The Generalgovernment consisted
of more than 36 thousand square miles and included a population of over
11 million, 1.4 million of whom were Jews (Richardson uprising.htm).
Reinhard Heydrick was the central figure in charge of the task of
ethnic cleansing of the population and there were clearly three
different populations being addressed by Heydrick: the political
leadership, who were sent to concentration camps; the intelligentsia,
who were imprisoned; and the Jews, who were placed in the ghettos, for
what was called “re-education” (Richardson uprising.htm).
Unfortunately, some of the other distinct methods for controlling the
Jewish population were hidden by other agendas, including the
establishment of the Judenrat, or “Jewish councils” that were created in
some ways to make acceptable the many necessary steps towards
exterminating the Jews all together (Richardson uprising.htm). For
example, one of the first orders of the Nazis to the Judenrat in Warsaw
was the organization of a census, which was conducted in October of
1939.
The census gave the Nazis the information they needed to put into
place a plan for the extermination of the Jews. The census found that
there were at least 359,827 Jews in Warsaw and that many of them were
land and business owners who still maintained a capacity for personal
livelihood (Richardson uprising.htm). As a result, the Nazis determined
the necessity for removing any immediate source of income and livelihood
for all of the Jews in Warsaw as a part of the process of “cleansing”
and determined a plan to exclude the Jews from the Polish economy
(Richardson uprising.htm). In August of 1940, the Nazis announced that
the city of Warsaw would be divided into three separate districts by
ethnicity: German, Polish and Jewish (Richardson uprising.htm). The
relocation of the Jews into the Warsaw ghetto occurred almost
immediately, and between October and November of 1940, the mass
resettlement of the Jewish community occurred in a systematic manner
(Richardson uprising.htm).
By June of 1941, the Nazis had constructed a prison in the Jewish
Ghetto for Jewish “criminals” and by May of 1942, the prison had some
1,300 detainees (500 of whom were children)(Richardson uprising.htm).
But the Jewish prison was just one of the many institutions introduced
to further oppress the Jews. The lack of food and food distribution in
the ghetto resulted in the systematic starvation of the ghetto
population, and it was recognized that the German’s were selective in
any aid they provided, clearly avoiding any support to the Jewish
community. Between September of 1939 and June of 1942, statistics
suggest that as many as 100,000 deaths occurred as a result of
starvation (Richardson uprising.htm). Life in the ghetto was perceived
by many to be a death sentence. “Death from starvation is a gradual
process in which only 50 percent of the population is affected.
Extermination
Between 1940 and 1943, the German’s systematically participated in
the mass deportation of many of the Polish Jews, and the population of
the Warsaw Ghetto decreased considerably. At the same time, the
German’s also cut rations and the availability of food and medical
supplies to the region, creating what some have described as a process
of “indirect extermination” that resulted in the death of tens of
thousands of Jews over a period of less than two years (Richardson
uprising.htm). In 1941 alone, 43,000 Jews died in the Warsaw Ghetto
(Richardson uprising.htm). By 1942, the population of the Warsaw Ghetto
was down from some 550,000 following the German occupation to just
70,000, many of whom were demoralized and hiding (Howe 29).
The mass deportation of the Jews occurred as a systematic process
through out much of occupied Europe, and was integrated into a view of
the transformation of many communities under ghettoization. As a
result, the overall opposition was reduced and there was a general
perception of the acceptance of the death marches as a component of the
relocation process. Many people did not know that they faced
extermination, but instead perceived the death marches as a relocation
process that went hand in hand with the increasing development of the
Jewish ghettos.
Some social theorists have argued that the narratives of the death
marches, including the reflections outlined in Elie Wiesel’s Night,
often relate an initial sense of fear relative to the dissolution of the
Jewish community, but not a fear that the end results of these marches
would be the mass extermination of the population (Schwarz 221). It was
not until individuals like Wiesel experienced the death marches and
understood the kind of systematic violence that would be commonplace
that fear actually nullified any sense of existing faith or hope. Of
the initial transport process, Weisel wrote:
The days were like nights, and the nights left the dregs of
their darkness in our souls. The train was traveling slowly,
often stopping for several hours and then setting off again.
It never ceased snowing. All through these days and nights
we stayed crouching, one on top of the other, never speaking
a word. We were no more than frozen bodies. Our eyes closed,
we waited merely for the next stop, so that we could unload
our dead (Weisel 94-95).
The marches themselves, which sometimes took place under the dark of
night and over the course of days, were horrific experiences were acts
of violence, torture and murder were committed with great regularity and
without any kind of humanization or any sense of remorse.
Memorialization of the events that surrounded the death marches
often embraced a sense of fragmentation, based on the fact that many of
the people who were forced into these mass transport operations were
never able to walk away. Benjamin Wilkomirski, in his work Fragments,
attempts to direct a view of this kind of segmentation in the history of
the European Jews, and struggles to find a greater correlation between
personal history and the larger perspective. For Wilkomirski and others
whom have created their narratives of the death marches, the process of
developing a view of what occurred that is not negated by a sometimes
anti-Semitic historiography of the era is at the heart of issues around
expression of these events (Yudkin 485).
It has readily been recognized that the narratives of the
Holocaust, including the narratives of the death marches and even the
few stories that actually recount experiences in camps like Auschwitz
and Dachau, are defined by a correlation between fictional elements and
biographical information (Yudkin 485). Some theorists have asserted
that this perspective is defined by the prevalence of varied accounts
and the way in which the human mind attempts to dismiss the truly
horrific in exchange for what can be accepted or at least socialized.
The link between the past and present, then, in regards to the death
marches and the mass extermination of the Jews often underplays the
level of horror that was most likely a common component of the Jewish
experience during this era.
Conclusions
In recent years, a number of different authors have developed
their own perspectives and stories that relate the tales of their older
generations and provide a second hand account of the events that
occurred. In Ozick’s The Shawl, for example, the author presents the
story of a young woman, Rosa, and her experiences during the Holocaust,
a story that relates to the history of the author, the families
retelling of Holocaust experiences and the sense of greater concern for
the overall view of the events that occurred rather than just a
narrative of what can be perceived after years of separation from the
terror (Lehmann 29). The simplicity of the story, which integrates past
and present components, demonstrates the way in which the Holocaust
experience dictated changes in many of the survivors’ lives.
Unfortunately, the ability of the survivors of these events to create
viable depictions of their experience has been relatively limited, and
it is more common for family members to have defined an approach to
recreating the events of the Holocaust and presenting sometimes typified
perspectives on what occurred.
There is no way to deny the level of destruction caused by the
Holocaust or reduce the impacts on the lives of survivors to simple
sentence about the atrocities that occurred. But the violence and the
degradation that was inherent in the ghettoization of the Jewish
communities through out occupied Europe and the increasing sense that
Jews were perceived as “vermin” rather than as a part of humankind is at
the center of most narratives of the Holocaust created by survivors.
While it may be possible to ignore the kind of physical violence that
occurred based on the need for emotional separation, there is no way to
deny the historical content of the events surrounding the ushering of
hundreds of thousands of Jews into the death camps and the mass
extermination of most. The few survivors, though careful in their
perspective, often demonstrate the complexities related to a retelling
of the Holocaust story.