Death Marches Blog #5

     When looking through the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, I thought about what I had read in my book, that I wanted to know more about. In Annexed, by Sharon Dogar, Peter van Pels is forced on a death march from Auschwitz in 1944. Dogar only spent very little time talking about the death marches, but I'm realizing that they were actually a big part of the Holocaust. In 1944 and 1945 Nazi soldiers were instructed to evacuate camps and bring them to other sub-camps for three different reasons. One was because the enemy was coming, and they didn't want survivors to be able to tell their stories. The second was because they believed that it was necessary for them to have prisoners in order to maintain production of weapons. The third was because some leaders believed that they could use prisoners as hostages to bargain for peace in the West that would allow the Nazi regime to survive. Thousands and thousands of people died during the death marches, some lasted a day on the march, some lasted a week, while others lasted two whole months.
     Barbara Marton Farkas was in her mid-twenties when she was forced on a death march from Gross-Rosen camp in Germany. She describes the experience similar to Peter, describing how the camp was evacuated, how the men and women were shot if they didn't keep up, and the scarce resources that were provided. In an interview conducted by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Barbara recounts the conditions like this, ". . .getting out from the train on the camp and eating green leaves, and no water. And then we start to have a lot, a lot of lice because we didn't have water to drink, not to wash ourself." Although Peter's story didn't go into such detail, the death marches were all fairly similar. Peter was forced to walk from Auschwitz to Mauthausen. Dogar writes, "We sleep where we fall. In the morning we leave the dead where they are. Frozen and curled in their blanket of frost." (315) Peter, Barbara, and thousands of other prisoners, were forced on these marches of no mercy. We read stories about the Holocaust, and realize that people actually went through the horrors. However, when we read personal encounters of those horrors, which are still so vivid after 50 or some years, we realize how scarring and awful the Holocaust truly was.