Using Holocaust Images

1. Using Holocaust Images A Picture is Worth a Thousand Questions

8. The Buses to Nowhere… The Aktion T4 Program (originated at the address #4 Tiergartenstrasse) was responsible for the murder of over 70,000 German citizens with physical and mental disabilities. Developed in 1938 and carried on throughout Germany and Austria from 1939 to 1941, the T4 Program provided the Nazis with a systematic way of eliminating individuals considered to be “unworthy of life”. This euthanasia program represents the first step in the evolution towards the Holocaust.

9. The ChairsKrakow, Poland Chairs normally symbolize comfort, rest, and relaxation. Chairs were also a dehumanizing tool used at Nazi forced labour camps. Something a simple as a chair became a symbol – a test – of who would live and who would die at the labour camps. How was it used?

10. The IcicleTaken from the experiences of Primo Levi “It was becoming tiring to think. It was better not to think. As his mind drifted back to reality, he once again became aware of his hunger, how could he forget being hungry? It was a chronic hunger, the kind of hunger unknown to free men, that makes one dream at night and settles in all the limbs of one’s body. Auschwitz is hunger, he himself was hunger, living hunger… Driven by his hunger and constant thirst, he eyed a fine looking icicle outside the window of his barrack, within hand’s reach. He opened the window and broke it off, but at once, a large heavy guard prowling outside brutally snatched it away from him. “Warum?” (why?) he asked the guard in his poor excuse for the German language. The massive guard replied “Heir ist kein warum!” (there is no why here at Auschwitz!), pushing him back inside with a shove. The explanation for this is simple: in that place, everything was forbidden, not for hidden reasons, but because Auschwitz was simply created for that exact purpose.”

11. The Shoes… It is estimated that there were about 230,000 children and young people under 18 among the approximately 1,300,000 people whom the German Nazis deported to Auschwitz Concentration Camp from 1940-1945. Aside from the shoes, the camp liberators found 3,800 suitcases, 12,000 pots and pans, and 40 cubic meters of metal objects from the “Kanada” warehouses in Auschwitz II - Birkenau, as well as about 2,000 artistic objects made by prisoners in the concentration camps.

12. The Showerheads To the Jews at the concentration camps, the showers were not a place of warmth or an opportunity to clean oneself after a hard days work. Survivor Testimony – Arrival at Auschwitz “They marched us to a huge building which had shower caps, and we were told to undress, and I was always, I was young and vain, and I dressed in my best clothes, my nice coat, my, my best dress, so I put it nicely together when I, when I undressed, and there comes over this Kapo, and she flings it to the side, and I say, "This is my clothes." She said, "Yes, but you won't need it anymore," and, and I was terribly scared because I didn't know what that meant. Then when we were undressed, we were ordered, everybody was ordered to stand up on a stool, and they shaved us, they shaved our hair, and the private parts, and we looked, we couldn't even recognize each other once we were stripped, not only of our clothes, but of our hair. Then we were shoved into those, um, showers, and they first opened the hot water, so we were scalded and as we ran out from under the hot water, we were beaten back by the SS and by the Kapos to go under the showers again, so they opened the ice cold water, which had the same effect, and finally we were out of this shower. Each of us was given one garment, which, of course, didn't fit.” Cecilie Klein-Pollack, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - Collections

13. Physical Evidence of the Jews at Auschwitz Part of the seven tons of hair found by the Soviet army after it liberated Auschwitz. Much of the hair is in locks, some of it still in beautiful braids. All of it would crumble to dust if handled. Tests after the war showed that some of the hair contained traces of Zyklon B. The Nazis used the hair to make haircloth for tailor's lining and to make fabrics and textile products including blankets.

14. Dehumanization • The Nazis targeted the Jews in particular ways in order to make them so vulnerable that non-Jews would lose any sympathy for them and only worry about how to avoid being treat that badly themselves. • This process involved the use of everyday items in barbaric ways - designed to break down the Jews to the point that they would accept their plight, lose the will to mount a resistance, and ultimately, even live.

15. THE DEHUMANIZATION EFFECT • “In this place it is practically pointless to wash everyday in the turbid water of the filthy washbasins for purposes of cleanliness and health; but it is most important as a symptom of remaining vitality, and necessary as an instrument of moral survival. I must confess however, after only one week, the instinct for cleanliness disappeared in me. I wandered aimlessly around in the washroom until one day, I suddenly saw my friend Steinlauf aged almost fifty, scrubbing his neck and shoulders with little success (he has no soap) but great energy. He asked me severely why I do not wash. Why should I wash? Would I be better off that I am? Would I please someone more? Would I live a day, an hour longer? I would probably live a shorter time, because to wash is an effort, a waste of energy and warmth. The more I think about it, the more washing one’s face in our condition seems a stupid feat, even frivolous: a mechanical habit, or worse, a dismal repetition of an extinct rite. We will all die; we are all about to die: if they give me ten minutes between reveille and work, I would rather look at the sky and think that I am looking at it perhaps for the last time. But Steinlauf, now finished washing, interrupts my thoughts and administers me a complete lesson. He reminded me that precisely because the camp was a great machine designed to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last – the power to refuse our consent. So we must certainly wash our faces with dirty water and dry ourselves on our jackets. We must not polish our shoes because the regulation states it, but for dignity. We must walk erect, without dragging our feet, not in homage to discipline but to remain alive, not to begin to die…” • PRIMO LEVI – IF THIS IS A MAN