Why Would You Do This?! Wednesday, January 06, 2010 By Meghan Mulcahy - Advertising I am not the only one getting things stolen here lately. The Holocaust sign bearing the Nazi slogan "Arbeit Macht Frie" ("Work Will Set You Free") was stolen from former Auschwitz death camp. That sign represents all the pain and suffering the Jews went through during WWII. Now someone was mean enough to take it. Is there a reason for this? Why?   I don't think these thieves really know what the Jews went through. This year I had the chance to go to Washington D.C. and visit the Holocaust Museum; I experienced just a piece of what they went through.  Imagine living in a world where German soldiers would come to your house, tear it apart, then take you and your family. The men would go to one place and the women would go to another. You would never see them again. The ones you love the most were gone. Then you would go to concentration camps.  Soldiers would brutally beat you. You would be placed in gas chambers where you would be left to die with ten dozen other people. If you were lucky, instead you would be starved, and without any energy you would be forced to work. You would have to watch others die. You would be spit upon. Some prisoners would become medical experiments. The Nazis wanted to see the suffering of a people who they [the Germans] thought to be disgusting defilers of their nation.  Most Jews did not even make it out of the concentration camps. Some never even made TO the concentration camps. Edward Adler, a survivor, said he watched a man die as the German soldier stepped on his throat until he died on the walk to the camp. Edward and the others had to pick the man up and throw him up into the river. They then continued to walk into the concentration camp. There was never any remorse for what the soldiers did.   If you were female, your odds were even worse. Jewish girls would be raped and then killed by the German soldiers.  These are experiences these Jewish people have to live with. They will never get them out of their minds. It is a nightmare that keeps repeating over and over again. They remember everything. From the time the soldiers came to their house, to the time the entered the concentration camp, to the day they were finally saved. Over six million people died before the end of WWII. These concentration camps are a symbol to remind us every day what the men and women of the Jewish faith went through. Now some people want to make us forget. Chances are they stole for money. Experts say there actually is a black market for items like the 'Auschiwitz sign,' as sick as that sounds. Maybe they did it for political reasons. Who knows why they stole it, or even why it was found cut up into three pieces in Northern Poland a few days later.   Whatever the case, we can't forget because the victims of WWII will never get the chance to forget.

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