Wednesday April, 30 2003 I attended Mendel Rosenburg’s speech on his own life experiences during and after the Holocaust. It is hard to believe that a person can go through many years of their life being tormented and live to talk about it. Mendel said that he would not talk about his experiences with the Holocaust for over twenty-five years. It was way too hard for him to talk or even think about his father being taken from his family and being shot right in front of him and also all the hardships he went through. This speech was very interesting to me and I now have an extreme interest in the Holocaust and would like to learn more about.
Mendel Rosenburg was born in Lithuania and raised in what he called the “Lithuanian ghetto”. In 1930 Lithuania was controlled by Germany, and was under the communist rule. Mendel was taken to a concentration camp at the age of 13. June 1941 the war between Germany and Russia was going on and Russia was getting to close to Germany so the Germans started arresting all the adult male Jews. They were taking them into the desert, making them dig large holes in the dirt the shooting them and burring the in the holes that they dug themselves. On
s father was one of the men killed in the desert. The Germans wanted to get all the Jews out of Lithuania so they moved over 240,000 to a place Mendel called another ghetto. They placed his whole family in a small room with another mother and her children. Mendel and his older brother made bunks for everyone to sleep on.
They made all the men left in the ghetto work all day long in agricultural fields. Food was rationed between each family so the more people in your family the less food everyone was allowed to eat. It was not long before the Germans came in to the ‘ghetto’ and demanded that all the children come with them and they would take them to a children’s concentration camp. When all the parents refused to let their children go with them the guard took 20 adults out to the main gates and shot them right in the head. Luckily Mendel was not considered a child still because later he found out that they were pilling all the children into large vans and putting the exhaust pipes fumes in through the window and killing all the children. The Germans felt that the children were worthless. Next Mendel had to work in a sugar factory then a railroad station, and ended up working in a furniture factory. In 1943 the Germans decided to close the ‘ghetto’ so over 6,000 Jews were sent to Stutthof a concentration camp in Germany. Four days after that the Russians took over the ‘ghetto’ where Mendel had just been. When they got to Stutthof everyone was ordered to remove all clothes and leave all belongings behind. They shaved off all the hair on their bodies and gave them stripped jump-suits to wear, and wooden shoes. That was t
Example Essays Home
