concentration camp

noun

: a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard

—used especially in reference to camps created by the Nazis in World War II for the internment and persecution of Jews and other prisoners

The Nazi soldiers hauled [Mordechai] Strigler off to a concentration camp, and carved swastikas into his cheeks and forehead with a razor blade. Over the next five years, he was sent from one concentration camp or slave-labor camp to another.

—David Remnick

She ended up dying in a concentration camp, just a few months before she would have been liberated.

—Marilyn Reynolds

The V2 killed thousands of British civilians while 20,000 concentration camp inmates died as slave labourers during its manufacture in the closing stages of the second world war.

—Anna Tomforde et al.

see also death camp

Examples of concentration camp in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

It was described in the script as representing the barracks of the concentration camps where Tóth and his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) were imprisoned. —Bill Desowitz, IndieWire, 8 Jan. 2025

The ambiguities that result are fascinating and provocative, though Corbet never quite thinks them through: If László is creating, in effect, architectural poetry after Auschwitz, does this poetry redeem the cruelty and brutality of the concentration camps or reproduce it? —Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 3 Jan. 2025

Obituary: Michel del Castillo, a Franco-Spanish writer whose wrenching chronicle of a childhood spent in World War II concentration camps brought him renown on both sides of the Atlantic, died at 91. —Lyna Bentahar, New York Times, 29 Dec. 2024

Though fictional, the film follows a heartbreakingly familiar story for many immigrant modernist architects: Having survived the Nazi concentration camps, celebrated Jewish architect László Toth (Adrien Brody) escapes persecution in postwar Europe to begin his life and career again in Philadelphia. —Elizabeth Fazzare, Architectural Digest, 20 Dec. 2024

Word History

First Known Use

1901, in the meaning defined above

Kids Definition

concentration camp

noun

: a camp where persons (as prisoners of war, political prisoners, or refugees) are detained