We take life for granted. I think we take a lot of the freedoms and the resources available to us in our blessed lives for granted. After reading the tragic line of events happening through out the horrifying era of the holocaust, I think its safe to conclude that we are the lucky ones. Just the basic necessities of food, water and shelter were more of a luxury then anything else for the victims of Hitler’s mindless torture. Even more so, the simple act of giving someone the dignity of being a human being was difficult for the Nazis to perform. Imagine living in that era, witnessing the deaths and separations of family and loved ones. Not being able to eat for days, not knowing that if you sleep tonight you will wake up alive tomorrow. Not knowing where your brother, sister, mother or dad might be. Not knowing what sick and evil plan the SS soldiers have in stored for you the next day. Not knowing if you will be shipped out to another concentration camp, or will you be put through the death chambers. How can you live like that? How do you find the courage to go on and not give up on life in general? But yet, these people did; and not because they were Jewish but because they had a strong will to survive and had the courage to face the barbaric acts of the Nazi army headfirst. And yet you would have to wonder why it happened, whatever happened to these people. Did they hurt anybody? Did they have a dislike towards the German people or Nazi army? Why did this happen to them, What’s the reason? For me there is only one explanation “Hatred”. Hatred towards the Jewish people for no particular reason other then the fact that they followed the jewish religion and were not good enough for Hitler and his vision of a mad world. Only a psychopath could think of something of this nature. What saddens me is that innocent people got caught in the cross fire between wars in between different countries of globe. Innocent women and children, who had no affiliation to no government whatsoever in general got caught in the middle and were tortured, put into concentration camps and brutally murdered.
George Levy Mueller was such a person that was caught in this mayhem of madness created by Nazi soldiers under Hitler’s command. In his book “Lucie’s Hope”, he talks about the hardships and struggles of life he had to face at an early age. The story in his books follows an all too similar path which I read in previous holocaust books also. He grew up in a happy, rich family. His parents sent him to a catholic school , even though he was jewish because it was the best school in town. And then everything changed in the blink of an eye; The Nazi soldiers came, stripped his family of everything they had and everything they had worked for. George watched his father die after he was tortured by SS soldiers. His mother shipped him off along with his sister because she thought it was better for them this way. He was only 8 years old then. That is the last time he ever saw her. At a mere tender age of 14, when a lot of things are confusing to a growing teenager in the first place, he was forced to witness death and inhumane behavior by the Nazis on the Jewish people. When you are 14 and you are walking around a camp with a spoon in your hand in hopes of finding something to eat, then that gives you a pretty good idea of how bad things are in your life. There were times when he had to eat rations of food that had urine dumped on it. There were times when he had to witness a brother fight with his own brother just to munch on a few pieces of bread. The Nazis had reduced the prisoners at the camp to mere animals, and they were treating them like one too. They were ordered by the Nazis to wear the yellow Star of David, which would symbolize them as being jewish. George remembers being picked on and being made fun of because he was jewish, He was blamed for the killing of jesus even though he had nothing to do with that ordeal. He remembers having diarrhea constantly for 2 years. He remembers not being able to run like any normal kid, because his legs were so weak they would give way under him and he would fall. He remembers he would check the clothing of all the dead people around him and if they were better then the ones he had on already he would change them. His body was covered with lice all the time during his stay at the camps, He contracted typhus and thought that he was going to die. And yet, through all of this turmoil he did his best to take care of his sister Ursula, because that was a responsibility that his mother bestowed upon him before they got separated, and George intended to keep that promise no matter what. Amazing how you can find courage and resiliency in times of such hopelessness and pain. He remembers him and his sister were always moving from one camp to the other. The Nazis soldiers never told the prisoners where they were being moved off to and why. All the people could do was speculate and hope and pray for the best. Along the way, many people died because of extremely unhealthy environmental conditions. Some were sent to their death by shipping them to gas chambers or having them shot. They were usually people who had gotten too old or to sick to work and labor anymore for the Nazis. I have to wonder if all this killing and beating of people made George normal anymore, whether it still bothered him to watch people being gased or beaten to a bloody plump by the SS soldiers. I wonder if his heart became so numb from watching these acts of violence over and over again everyday, that it became normal for him and didn’t really bother him anymore. The Nazis took away his innocence; they took it away at a very young age as did they took away the innocence of thousand other children along with him in the concentration camps.
