Exploitation
Web. 14 May 2012. .
Upon arrival to the concentration camp, Auschwitz, prisoners were asked to remove clothing and all personal items and turn them over to the SS soldiers at the entrance. Not only did the prisoners have to strip down to bare skin, but everyone’s heads were shaved. Lilly Malnik was sent to Auschwitz where she experienced this grueling process. Malnik discloses the emotion she felt, “the delusion, the disappointment, the discouragement that I felt, I felt like I was not a human person anymore. They had shaved our heads, and I felt so ashamed. And also when they told us to undress and to shower, they made us feel like, like we were animals. The men were walking around and laughing and looking at us, and you take a young girl at that age who has never been exposed to a, a person, to a man, and you stay there naked. I wanted the ground should open and I should go in it” (Malnik). The Nazi perfected the art of sexual exploitation during the selection process. They humiliated the women and girls that entered the camps as they intimidated them to remove all their clothes. The officers, usually male, would laugh and tease these girls, making them feel ashamed of their presence. They had no where else to go because if they failed to follow orders, they would be shot immediately. Many young girls were molested and raped, and once the act was complete, they would be sent to the gas chambers. Accounts from women prisoners reveal how “girls and women who, on their arrival at a camp, were not chosen for immediate death, underwent a gamut of humiliations, including exposure, crude body searches for hidden jewelry, painful body shaves and sexual ridicule. Even at the moments before death, SS men tried to demoralize Jewish women." Since the prisoners have no name, no identity, the officers have no emotion and no regret as they treated them like their personal puppets.