Category: Holocaust

by Anita Dittman
May 4, 2016

I was twelve years old and entering early teen years living in Nazi Germany. Often as the lights went out at night, I lapsed into self-pity and cried myself to sleep. I knew it would be a long winter with minimum food rations, crowded, substandard living quarters, and that never-ending dread of the Gestapo knock on the door.

by The Jewish Foundation For the Righteous

During the Holocaust there were thousands of non-Jews who refused to be passive in the face of the evil thet witnessed, rescuing Jews, often at risk to their own lives and the lives of their families.

by Institute of the World Jewish Congress
1996

Switzerland’s reputation as a neutral safe-haven during World War 11 has been badly tarnished by recent revelations about its wartime transactions with Germany. What began as an examination of the dormant bank accounts of Holocaust victims has gained momentum to include the whole gamut of Swiss financial dealings with the Nazis. In recent months a vast amount of incriminating documentation has been unearthed that reveals the sinister side of Swiss “neutrality”.

by United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

When World War II began in September 1939, there were approximately 1.6 million Jewish children living in the territories that the German armies or their allies would occupy. When the war in Europe ended in May 1945, more than 1 million and perhaps as many as 1.5 million Jewish children were dead, targeted victims in the Nazis’ calculated program of genocide. Even in the most barbaric times, a human spark glowed in the rudest heart, and children were spared. But the Hitlerian beast is quite different. It would devour the dearest of us, those who arouse the greatest compassion—our innocent children.

by United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Parents, children, and rescuers faced daunting challenges once the decision was made to go into hiding. Some children could pass as non-Jews and live openly. Those who could not had to live clandestinely, often in attics or cellars. Children posing as Christians had to carefully conceal their Jewish identity from inquisitive neighbors, classmates, informers, blackmailers, and the police. Even a momentary lapse in language or behavior could expose the child, and the rescuer, to danger.

by Rebecca Macatee
July 1, 2015

Sir Nicholas Winton, a British man who helped save hundreds of Jewish children from the Holocaust during World War II, has passed away at the age of 106. Winton, nicknamed the “British Schindler,” remained quiet for nearly half a century about his acts of heroism, including his role in organizing trains to rescue 669 children bound for Nazi concentration camps.

by Holocaust Encyclopedia

We must remember, we must remember the times of cruelty and suffering when in the darkest of all places, in man’s world, day after day, hour after hour, the killers killed, the victims perished. We must remember the old men and women whispering ancient prayers, and the children, we must always remember the children, frightened and forlorn, all part of a nocturnal procession walking towards the flames, rising to the highest heavens. Among those children there were future scientists, physicians, scholars, statesmen, writers, poets, philanthropists. One of them might have invented a cure for AIDS, or composed a text of such humanity that all the racists would be silenced to shame. In murdering them, the killers deprived the human family of its future. One and a half million Jewish children.

by Yad Vashem

The Holocaust was the murder by Nazi Germany of six million Jews. While the Nazi persecution of the Jews began in 1933, the mass murder was committed during World War II. It took the Germans and their accomplices four and a half years to murder six million Jews. They were at their most efficient from April to November 1942 – 250 days in which they murdered some two and a half million Jews. They never showed any restraint, they slowed down only when they began to run out of Jews to kill, and they only stopped when the Allies defeated them.

by Geri Ungurean
January 27, 2015

When I was a child, I remember my dad saying to us “The Holocaust could happen again.” Those words haunted my soul. How could the world allow this again? They captured the horrors of the camps in photos and news reels. Surely the world would NOT allow such an atrocity to happen again!

by U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

Concentration Camps Map: Nazi Camps in Occupied Europe  (1943 – 1944)