Children…

Annihilation through work
The Germans also killed prisoners with
a method they called “annihilation
through work”. Under extremely hard
conditions, prisoners were forced to
carry out more or less meaningless
physical labour. This, combined with
a severe food shortage, extremely poor
hygienic conditions, the guards’ bru­
tality and the arbitrary punishments
imposed for any alleged “offence”,
however small, led to a very high
death rate among the camp inmates in
thousands of work and concentration
camps. Many tens of thousands lost
their lives this way.
Joseph Schupack, a prisoner at
the Majdanek labour and death camp,
describes the humiliating “labour”:
“Then we went to ’work’. In our
wooden shoes we were chased into
a corner of the field and had to fill
sometimes our caps, at other times our
jackets, with stones, wet sand or mud,
and, holding them with both hands
and running under a hail of blows,
bring them to the opposite corner of
the field, empty the stuff, refill it and
bring it back to the opposite corner,
and so on. A gauntlet of screaming
SS men and privileged prisoners
(Häftlingsprominenz), armed with rods
and whips, let loose on us a hail of
blows. It was hell.”
85