- Coming of age in the Holocaust. , her mother and all of the prisoners they meet all have to undergo numerous physical and psychological hardships when they are forced into the concentration camps. They are treated like cattle on their way to the slaughterhouse when they are taken from their houses to the ghetto, then to the synagogue, and eventually to Auschwitz, the death camp. The majority of suffering that was inflicted on and her associates was physically inflicted, this was in the various forms of: beatings, rapes, murders, hard labor, ....