BELLA JAKUBOWICZ TOVEY
The Second World War was a watershed event for world’s history. It has been the bloodiest and deadliest war of all times. The exact number of deaths during the war is unknown but it was approximately 50 million (or more). The war took place after a time of instability as a consequence of the worldwide Great Depression which took place during the 1930s. Additionally, during the epoch, countries like Japan, Italy and Germany had developed profound nationalistic feelings which incremented the desire of expansion of their territories. Besides, Germany had the desire and motivation to avenge the WWI. The arrival and rise of the Nazi Party, a political power, became a major cause of the fatal conflict. The basic ideology of the Nazi Party and its leader, Adolf Hitler, consisted on the establishment of a totalitarian State where the government would control each and every human activity (both private and public). This Party’s ideologies were based in the intoleration of democracies, workers’ rights and communism. Nazis were supremacists. Hitler wanted to create a society where inhabitants were all young, physically fit and totally obedient Aryans. This race, according to the Nazis, was the only one who should exist. Hitler had an specific hate towards the Jewish; however he also desired to liquidate anyone who was not part of the “master race”. Hitler wanted to expand the territory for this “supreme” and “perfect” race and he wanted revenge from the Jewish because he blamed them for the loss of WWI. Therefore, he and all of his army started a plan in order to expand his territory and liquidate Jews (antisemitism).
In order to perform this task of ending with Jews (and other groups that were considered “racially inferior” or a “threat” to the German racial community), Nazis created killing centers to exterminate them. These were called the concentration camps. According to the webpage of Holocaust, a concentration camp “refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy.” In these centers, people were killed not only with lethal gasses but also with extreme forced labour, under unsanitary conditions, exposure to diseases, starvation and torture. It really was a dreadful genocide.
Concentration camps were placed all over Europe. Some examples of them are: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Ebensee, Sobibor and Bergen-Bersel. The Bergen-Bersel camp was a killing center created in 1940 in Northern Germany. It was created specially to assassinate the Jewish. In 1945, the Bergen-Belsen camp held approximately 22,000 people. It was really short in supplies. Therefore, prisoners would lack of food for days. The sanitary conditions were terrible: there were just a few faucets and latrines for ten thousands of people. Due to these conditions, many diseases such as typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever and dysentery emerged. As thousands of people died, thousands of corpses lay unburied over the camp grounds.
Bella Jakubowicz Tovey is a survivor of the Second World War. She was born in 1926 in a sosnowiec Jewish family. He father owned a knitting factory. However, in 1939, Germans invaded Poland and took over the factory. A german woman took all of her family’s properties. Bella was forced to work in another factory in the Sosnowiec ghetto in 1941. She was deported to the Greaben subcamp of Gross-Rosen in 1943, and to Bergen-Belsen in 1944. She was liberated in April 1945.
Bella Jakubowicz Tovey gave testimony of her experience in the concentration camp of Bergen-Bersel and described its conditions. She said that Bergen-Belsen had not been like Auschwitz due to the fact that in Bergen-Bersel there were no gas chambers because they weren’t required, it was certainly by itself a killing center.
Bella said that there was only straw on the floor of a big and empty barrack where prisoners had been brought to. She stated that prisoners had been pushed into this barrack and that, at the beginning, she couldn’t stretch her legs and all prisoners had been sitting with their knees next to their chins (due to the lack of space). However, she mentioned that,as people had been dying massively around her, it hadn’t taken much time for the remaining survivors to be able to stretch their legs. Bella pointed out that there had always been big piles of dead bodies all around her and that she she had to carry a lot of corpses out of the barrack. She said she did not know how she could keep on going living that lifestyle everyday for such a long time. Bella indicated, at the end of her testimony, that people had some way of protecting themselves and that she protected herself by never looking at the faces of the dead people.
To me, Bella Jakubowicz Tovey is an idol and a role model. She, with her experience, learned and taught us about the importance of bravery. In her testimony she said “I don’t know how I kept on going”. This means that even though she had been living under terrible circumstances, she still protected herself by avoiding seeing the faces of corpses. This topic, about concentration camps, is very complicated and barbarous and in this case we can see it by the conditions in which she was living and by the fact that she had to carry an enormous number of dead people in order to survive. However, I can notice Bella was a very valiant woman because she could overcome all her difficulties. Additionally, the fact that she was only 15 years old when she was taken to these camps makes her even more courageous and smart. Bella taught us, the readers, that even though the circumstances are extremely tough, self-esteem and courage must always be present.
The Second World War was a very complex issue with a lot of problematics and incoherent aspects. A lot of inhumane acts were executed during the war and lots of lives were destroyed or ruined during this war only for racist motives. Despite this, nowadays when we talk about this event, we talk mostly about numbers, names of important people and places of the war or we talk about dates. In the present time, we are not talking much about human suffering or the implications of the war in human lives. This is why testimonies (like Bella Jakubowicz Tovey’s) are very important for a more complete understanding of the war. Bella is just one witness of the WWII that has something to show and to teach to society. Testimonies will allow us and the future generations to see the war with more compassion, empathy, tenderness; they allow us to see the war from a more humane perspective.
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