The Holocaust By: Ananya Almeida

 The Holocaust

By: Ananya Almeida

hol·o·caust

/ˈhäləˌkôst,ˈhōləˌkôst/

destruction or slaughter on a mass scale, especially caused by fire or nuclear war.

The mass murder of Jewish people under the German Nazi regime during the period 1941–5. More than 6 million European Jews, as well as members of other persecuted groups such as Romani and gay people, were murdered at concentration camps such as Auschwitz.

The Holocaust was the mass murder of Jewish people (and other groups of people) from 1941-1945 by Nazi soldiers. The Holocaust was a result of World War One. After Germany’s catastrophic loss in the first world war, Jewish people were blamed for it. It was called the “stab in the back theory”. The theory revolves around the belief that Germany didn’t truly lose the war. They were actually betrayed by Jewish people on the homefront and in the war. This, completely untrue, fueled the second world war. When Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party came to power in 1933, the Holocaust began. Jewish people were cut off and blacklisted from society. People boycotted their stores, fired them, and harassed them. The Night of Broken Glass, also known as Kristallnacht, was when German Nazi’s attacked the property of Jewish people. It was November 9th, 1938 where it had all started. 

Concentration Camps

Concentration Camps such as Auschwitz and Dachau were created to detain Jewish people. Men, women, children, families were ripped from their homes to be forcibly held in these facilities. The conditions were terrible. Families were torn apart. An example of this is Anne Frank and her family. Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, were sent to a concentration camp called Bergen-Belsen. Her parents were forced to stay behind in Auschwitz. In these concentration camps, people were forced to work, abused by Nazi soldiers, and tortured. Babies that were at Auschwitz passed away due to the horrible conditions. An Auschwitz midwife recalls that of “the 3,000 babies delivered by Leszczyńska, medical historians Susan Benedict and Linda Sheilds write that half of them were drowned, another 1,000 died quickly of starvation or cold, 500 were sent to other families and 30 survived the camp” (Blakemore). Jewish people were killed in gas chambers. They were told that they were going into the bathroom for a shower. Little did they know, they were not to leave alive. They were killed with Zyklon B gas. “After they were killed, Sonderkommando prisoners dragged the corpses out of the gas chambers. They cut off the women’s hair and removed all metal dental work and jewelry. Then they burned the corpses in pits, on pyres, or in the crematorium furnaces. (Until September 1942, some of the corpses were buried in mass graves; these corpses were burned from September to November 1942.) Bones that did not burn completely were ground to powder with pestles and then dumped, along with the ashes, in the rivers Soła and Vistula and in nearby ponds, or strewn in the fields as fertilizer, or used as landfill on uneven ground and in marshes” (Extermination). 

Post- Holocaust

6 million Jewish people were killed during the Holocaust. We are taught in school about this event but, sometimes the gravity of the situation is overlooked. We remember the Holocaust today through survivors, museums, and stories and we should continue to remember the Holocaust.