Holocaust Showers

Last moments before the gas chambers.

Holocaust showers. Assignment to slave labor. Those who had been selected to die were led to gas chambers. A group of tourists are cooling off during a massive heatwave at makeshift showers that spray a cool mist of air.

As prisoners arrived young children the elderly and infirm were separated and immediately sent to take showers which pumped deadly zyklon b poison gas into the chambers. Prisoners sent to the left were urged quietly forward into shower rooms where they were stripped of their clothes and told that they were about to be bathed and given fresh clothes. Then they were driven naked into the showers a guard closed and locked the steel door.

They make a difference. The nazi and ukrainian guards sometimes shouted at and beat the victims who were ordered to enter the showers with raised arms to allow as many people as possible to fit into the gas chambers. The tighter the gas chambers were packed the faster the victims suffocated.

Similar contraptions can be found across israel s tourists sites during the heat of the summer. As a jew who has lost so many relatives in the holocaust they looked like the showers that the jews were forced to take before entering the gas chambers visitor meir bulka 48 told the. The guards instructed them to turn over all their valuables and to undress.

Gas chambers have been used for capital punishment in the united states to execute death row inmates the first person to be executed in the united states by lethal gas was gee jon on february 8 1924 an unsuccessful attempt to pump poison gas directly into his cell at nevada state prison led to the development of the first makeshift gas chamber to carry out gee s death sentence. Offended jewish visitors over the weekend likened the misting stations to the showers used to exterminate members of their faith at the camp during world war ii israeli media reported.