If Only the Eternal Trees Could Speak: Identity: Concentration Camps Beyond the Mass; Looking Deeper at the Individual Victims

Here you see a mound of hair, all from the heads of the victims which were so hatefully shaved when they entered Auschwitz. All of the people's individual identities no longer seemed to matter to the Nazis when they came to the camp. Women lost their hair that they once proudly brushed and cared for, and each day it became harder and harder to identify one person from another; victims became more and more malnourished and so thin that their bodies were down to the bone.

This hair represents the unique existence everyone seeks to obtain, defeated by a larger force. The hair seems carelessly mixed together, as if an individual's identity was unimportant (because to the Nazis a Jew was a Jew). The hair is much like how the victims were thrown together into different barracks without a name but a number insignificant to an individual. Without an individualized experience the victims to the Nazis were their animals which had to be tamed through inhuman demands. How do you think these poor victims were able to find their place in the world when they were treated like "good" or "bad" cattle depending on how Nazis felt at different times? People could literally be tortured for doing nothing wrong; sometimes when the kapo asked for roll call in a specifically ordered line and somebody did something wrong, the SS officers would punish the people standing besides the "somebody." Clearly this is not right and is a corrupt order. What do you think of this unfairness and brutality to be uniform when everyone was in fact their own individual?