Fredrick Douglas

Concentration Camp

In Fredrick Douglass’ story “Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglas,” he chronicles the horrid conditions of slavery and how it dehumanizes the slaves and corrupts the slaveholders. The struggle of slavery described by Douglas resembles some of the same struggles that Jews faced in concentration camps during World War, dehumanization and severe work and punishment being the most comparable connections. Also, the effects of both slavery and the concentration camps had a dire effect on the slaveholders and guards that drove them to inhumane acts of violence.

The first effect of slavery that Douglas explains is the way in which slavery dehumanizes people, much like that of concentration camps. In concentration camps they strip of you of your name, your identity and replace it with a number and separate you form your family, loosing your ties to people you love and care about. In slavery, the omission of the characteristics that define you, your family, your age, your birthday are attempts to take away the humane feelings of love and leave them in “mental darkness”(95). To destroy the tie of family, kids were often taken from there family or the family was separated into different farms. As Douglas said,” it was a common custom…to part children from their mothers at a very early age.”(42) The slaveholders attempt to remove any sense of compassion, to turn the slaves, like Douglas, into mindless tools beaten into submission. The same thing happened at camps like Auschwitz. They separate family, killed people in front of groups to rob people of their sense of feeling, to make them mindless workers. After months of hard labor Douglas described the effect of slavery to horrifying effect: “My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute.” Slavery, much like the internment, was a means by which people were made to feel sub-human, and rob them of hope.

The second main effect of slavery that Douglas describes is the harsh working conditions and cruel punishment that was handed out by the slaveholders. Like the Jews at concentration camps, slaves were forced to work sunrise to sunset in the fields come rain or shine, hot or cold. During this time they were often ill equipped and generally had little to know clothes, especially the children who were often naked summer to winter. On top of the harsh working conditions are the cruel and often whippings and beatings. This is where a definite connection to the concentration camps is made. In concentration camps, beating and torturing became so common soldiers used to wear a glove with a long blade attached so it would be easier to hit, stab, or even behead somebody. In slave punishment, there was almost the same amount of cruelty, minus the death because for the most part slaves