Major Crimes and True Crime

Consider a warehouse filled to capacity with suitcases where the walls are out of view. It was here at Auschwitz that the term “Canada” was coined. Not that Canada was a good place; it had too many stolen items from the victims brought there. These were not random items but systematically collected. After prisoners were taken off the trains very few returned to pick up their belongings. The belongings became a kind of inventory of a larger system just as men women and children were used as numbers within it. Prisoners including young children and teenagers were required to separate these belongings. They had no choice. They opened the bags and found things that reminded them of former lives like books with names in them stuffed animals eyeglasses and food prepared for a trip that ended in tragedy. The belongings that remained were sorted and reused. Clothing items were cleaned and sent to soldiers in the war effort. Any jewelry in the bags was taken and reused...

Éva Heyman died on October 17, 1944 at Auschwitz. She was born February 13, 1931 and died at age 13. Her family was Jewish. Her parents were Bela and Ágnes. After they separated, her mother married Béla Zsolt. In 1944, Éva started her diary in which she recorded her life, her fear, and her hopes. Nagyvárad was conquered by the Nazi Germans on 19 March 1944. A few days later Éva's family was sent to a ghetto. Life there was very difficult. She was compelled to share a small room with numerous people and couldn't leave the house. Three days before she was sent to Auschwitz, she wrote in her diary that she didn't want to die. If she had to hide till the war was over, she wanted to live, she said. She pleaded for the opportunity to live. She arrived with her grandparents to Auschwitz where she was forced to join forced labor. She lived for some time due to the fact that the guards did not know her true age. Later, she became sick and developed an infec...

The most scary thing that happened during the holocaust was that Nazis didn't just use gas. They used the human lives as cruel science experiments. Records exist of them attempting to kill people in very nasty ways with electricity before choosing gas as it was easier. In the camp of Belzec, in Poland, there have been stories of a room with a metal floor. Nazis would flood the floor with water and force people in. Then they switched on a severe electric current that went through the water and the metal. They stopped because of a current blowing the local power grid. For the Nazis, it was not a moral issue, but a technical one that they could cover up. Electricity also killed people on the camps of the fences such as Auschwitz. Those barbed wire fences carried 6000 volts or so. Guards used them to put prisoners to death by pushing them into the wires or by drawing them near while they were shooting. Prisoners talked of these deaths being going to the wire. ...