Stories of Life Discovered at a Concentration Camp
- Emily
- Mar 23, 2024
- 3 min read
It's been some time since I last posted on my blog channel, but I came across an article tonight that brought tears to my eyes. I knew, with a discovery like this made recently, I had to write on it. I couldn't pass down this opportunity to inform others of history being made.
Many news hubs have posted about this, but I decided to choose the Jerusalem Post to use as my source. Considering it's a crucial news hub to the Jewish community and news like this, I thought this choice was best. To me, as a history student an ally to the Jewish community now and forever, this discovery is so huge to me. To imagine the wave of shock and sadness that must have overwhelmed by the people who found these pieces. These artifacts play as a crucial point to understanding not only the Holocaust, but prisoner life too.
These pieces were found at Auschwitz I, Block 8 at the former camp in Poland. Auschwitz Concentration Camp, the biggest of it's kind was both a concentration, forced-labour, and extermination camp created by the Nazi's in World War Two. Auschwitz consisted of three large camps in the complex: Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II (Birkenau), and Auschwitz III (Monowitz). It's important to understand that more than one million people lost their lives at Auschwitz, nine out of ten of them Jewish. In fact, the four largest gas chambers could each hold 2,000 people at one time.
Life at Auschwitz was not made to be liveable, prisoners were fed poorly, given terrible clothing that was certainly not suitable for winter conditons, given poor living conditions and tested on as if they were rats. These are just a few examples of how hard life was made to be at Auschwitz, there's much more to mention of course. The fact is, the Nazi's wanted to kill their so-called enemies and would do absolutely anything they could to get the satisfaction of watching the enemy suffer and die at the feet of the prey. Babies, to the elderly were brutally murdered here. Nothing at all was humane about this.
"This collection, consisting of 35 cardboard squares with hand-drawn figures of rooks, pawns, bishops, and knights, shines a light on the prisoners' efforts to maintain a semblance of normalcy under horrific conditions," says the Jeruselum Post
It's reported that many, but sadly not all of this collection was preserved fairly well. This uncovers the wonder if there is more in not only Auschwitz but the 44,000 other concentration camps and incarceration sites during the Holocaust that lay across Europe.
As I imagined, and confirmed by Magdalena Urbaniak, a team member of the New Main Exhibition Team, I believed these chess pieces were used as a mean of mental escape from the horrendous and frightful conditions these prisoners were put through 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. These pieces would have been hidden under the boards, as they were found, away from the sight of the commandment officers and other people who would have exposed the prisoners who played with these pieces. If they were caught, I could only image how they would have been beaten, torchered and slaughtered by camp officals.
"Cards with images of chess pieces fit into the display case, which we have titled 'evening time.' Our topic will revolve around the short, theoretically free time for prisoners between the evening roll call and the declaration of curfew," says the Jersuleum Post.
"Adding a personal perspective, Holocaust survivor Jan Dziopek recounted his experiences crafting chess pieces and boxes in the camp. "I had a lot of orders, even from SS men. However, I was reluctant to fulfill them. Nonetheless, I had to fulfill their orders because, under the guise of working for them, I could fulfill the requests of my colleagues," he recalled," says the Jeruselum Post.
That concludes this blog post.
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