Monday, February 14, 2011

Chapter 4 (pages 47-65): A-7713

What did the "A" stand for? Why was it important for the Nazis to refer to the prisoners as numbers?

3 comments:

  1. The “A” stands for Auschwitz. For the Nazis to refer to the prisoners as numbers was another way to call them “animals”. People don’t mark other people, people just mark cattle. The Nazis took away everything from the prisoners, their families, homes, things, freedom and even their names. Giving the prisoners names made the Nazis jobs easier because that way they didn’t have to memorize all their names.

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  2. As Ana said the “A” stands for Auschwitz. Auschwitz was the only place where the Nazis tattooed the Jews. The numbers allowed the Germans to keep track of every Jew that was in Auschwitz. It helped the Nazis count how many were alive. The Nazis also did it in order to make the Jews less “human”. They didn’t even bother to give them a name or anything, they just wrote the Jews as numbers. You can care about a name. A number is just a number. In the Nazi world, Jews weren’t human and numbers were used to identify each one of them. Tattooing is forbidden by Judaism so this tattoo meant that the Jews were suffering in their physical bodies as well as Judaism. The numbers were also used to keep track of people and where their cell was. I think that the tattoo was only given to working Jews in Auschwitz.

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  3. Yeggi,
    EVERY camp tatooed its prisoners -- not just Auschwitz!

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