Heartbreaking footage of Auschwitz, 70 years after World War II

World War II has gone down in history as the most brutal, unforgiving, and horrible event that has ever happened. From the very start of it on September 1st, 1939, Germans devised a plan to capture as many Jews as they can.

Because they had to put all those people somewhere, they started building concentration camps. In those concentration camps, Jews, Poles, Romani, anyone who was a homosexual or born with some disability, was tortured and, in the end, killed.

The concentration camp began working in 1933 and was also used to lock down political prisoners. As the years went by, the concentration camps started popping up more and more, and they were getting bigger. By the end of the war in 1945, there was a total of 730 concentration camps.

People who were prisoners were used by the Germans to do their industrial work. The Germans had an agenda to kill and wipe out every Jew in Europe.

The most known concentration camp was Auschwitz, where during World War II, almost 1.3 million people sent there, and 1.1 million of them were killed. The camp had three parts, and the one that was meant for killing all of those people was Auschwitz II-Birkenbau. When people realized they were going to be sent there, they knew they weren’t going to make it out alive. A million of those, 1.3 million that were sent to Auschwitz were Jews.

At the end of the war, a Swedish man by the name of Folke Bernadotte was sending busses to concentration camps to save and bring back to Sweden as many people he could.

He painted the busses white and with red crosses on them, so on his way back, they wouldn’t get attacked. Thanks to Folke and the white busses, almost 30 000 people were saved and brought back home. The majority of the people who got on the busses were from Scandinavia. Still, at the very end of the war, the administration in the camps was falling apart, and others managed to escape as well. It has been said that around 4000 Jews managed to avoid concentration camps using those white busses.

One granddaughter had spoken how her grandmother when she got back from the concentration camp, was only 30 kilograms or 66 pounds. She goes on telling the story of her uncle, born in 1932, and from the age of five, he was required to work in a factory. Germans used young children in factories regularly, and her uncle was working in a glass factory for three years. He worked because young children’s hands are small, and they could reach places where an adult would struggle to reach.

For three years, her uncle worked every day in that factory, up until he and his mother were taken from their home in Piotrków and brought to Ravensbrük concentration camp. Her family was scattered in different concentration camps. When her grandmother and uncle came to Ravensbrük, her grandmother was killed, and they sent her uncle to a different camp.

Bergen-Belsen was the name of the concentration camp where lots of orphans and children were sent. There a woman took care of the children. When the war ended, her uncle was taken back to Sweden.

Her grandfather, who managed to escape Buschenwald concentration camp at the end of the war, searched for a year for his son. When he found out that a lot of orphans were taken to Sweden, he went there and found his son.

Very few people today are still alive and telling stories about the Holocaust. We mustn’t forget what happened to the ones that made it out and the ones who didn’t have the fortune to escape the concentration camps. It is horrible what happened to those people, and no one should go through that ever in life.