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During the nineteen thirties a terrible time arose taking a permanent place in history as

one of the most horrible tragedies the world has ever witnessed. Showing a time of hatred and

power for the Germans, but for the Jews a time of survival and uniting. The Holocaust held

responsibility for the deaths of just under six million people. Germans believed themselves to be

the superior race and Jews the inferior race that posed a threat to the German racial community.

In addition, this led to the persecution of so many people in the hands of the Nazi Regime. There

are many steps the Nazis took in depleting the world of the Jews, all of them being more cruel

and horrible than anyone could imagine, unless we were to live through it.

The Nazi party came into power in Germany in 1993. At that time the Jewish population

consisted of about nine million people. The beginning of World War two happened September of

1939 and the anti- Jew policy heightened to imprisonment and murder of the Jews. The Nazis

created ghettos to separate the Jews from the rest of the community. Ghettos are enclosed city

districts where the Nazis kept the Jewish people in horrible living conditions. We can only

imagine a small part of these ghettos through the description of Paula Garfinkel, a survivor of the

holocaust who said,

“In early 1940 our family was forcibly relocated to the Lodz ghetto, where we
were assigned one room for all six of us. Food was the main problem. At the women's
clothing factory where I worked, I at least got some soup for lunch. But we desperately
needed to find more food for my younger brother, who was very sick and bleeding
internally. From the window at my factory I looked out at a potato field. Knowing that if I
was caught, I'd be shot, I crept out one night to the field, dug up as many potatoes as I
could, and ran home.” (Par 3)

About one thousand ghettos existed in annexed Poland and the Soviet Union. Ghettos

usually existed for only a few days, and on some occasions, a few months or even years. In 1941,

the Germans started to implement the final solution idea, causing the destruction of the ghettos.
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The Germans shot many of the ghetto residents into mass graves and deported others to killing

centers.

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the German collaborators

killed approximately two out of every three Jews in 1945 as a part of the Nazi policy to eliminate

the Jews of Europe, and is known as the “Final Solution”. The German SS along with the police

murdered 2,700,000 Jews in the killing centers. The Final Solution was intended for the murder

of all European Jews by means of gassing, shooting, or any other necessary action. The Jewish

people were only one group of people targeted by the Nazi’s racism. Others targeted included

Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gypsies, homosexuals, and mentally or physically disabled people.

200,000 gypsies and disabled people were murdered in the Euthanasia Program; The Euthanasia

Program involved the killing of institutionalized people without the knowledge or consent of

their family or themselves. Once people started catching on to the suspicious deaths of so many

institutionalized people, Hitler called off the Euthanasia Program. Through this tragic period of

time it is important to remember that adults weren’t the only ones affected, children had to deal

with scary situations and horrible cruelty. Furthermore, children were especially vulnerable

during the Holocaust. The Nazis advocated killing children of “unwanted” or “dangerous”

groups in accordance with their ideological views, either as part of the “racial struggle” or as a

measure of preventative security. The Germans and their collaborators killed children both for

these ideological reasons and in retaliation for real or alleged partisan attacks.

Many children managed to survive despite their extreme vulnerability. They smuggled in

food and medicine and smuggled out personal possessions to trade for these items. Children in

youth movements had been included in underground resistance activities. There was also the

Kindertransport that rescued many children from Nazi Germany and brought them to Great
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Britain. Another thing threatening the children of the Holocaust were medical experiments.

However, these medical experiments were not only performed on children, but on all

concentration camp prisoners, without their consent. Another personal story about medical

experiments at Auschwitz comes from Claude J. Letulle who states,

“I was captured by the German army six weeks after they invaded France. Like
other POWs, I was put to forced work for the Reich. As punishment for threatening to kill
a guard, I was made to work in a hospital where Nazi doctors performed "medical
experiments." I was present when they castrated men, and when they crushed prisoners'
fingers in a press to "study" broken bones. Many died during the procedures. One
woman's eyelids were sewn open to force her to watch in a mirror as both her breasts
were removed.” (Par 3)

These medical experiments divide into three categories. The first category consists of

experiments to help facilitate the survival of Axis military personnel. Physicians from the

German air force conducted high-altitude experiments using a low pressure chamber; this

determined the maximum altitude crews could parachute to safety from a damaged aircraft.

Freezing experiments used prisoners to find a treatment for hypothermia. The second category

tested pharmaceuticals and treatment methods for injuries and illnesses such as yellow fever and

tuberculosis. Bone grafting experiments were also conducted along with the efficiency of newly

developed sulfa drugs. Prisoners also had been subjected to mustard gas and phosgene to test

antidotes. Finally, the third category sought to advance the racial Nazi worldview. These are the

experiments of Joseph Mengele. Mengele performed experiments on twins and serological

experiments on gypsies. He did this to determine whether or not different races could withstand

illnesses differently. Many more gruesome experiments had been performed to try and discover

new medical insight, at least that’s how they tried to justify their disgusting actions.

All the medical experiments took place in the main camp at Auschwitz. Auschwitz is the

largest camp and consists of three main camps. This had been the only concentration camp that
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the prisoners received tattoos. The SS tattooed the prisoners to identify the bodies of registered

prisoners after they had died. Many different ways could be used to give the prisoners serial

numbers, this had been by piercing a needle into their skin and then rubbing ink into the bleeding

wound. This method proved to be impractical and a single needle was introduced. The prisoners

sent to the gas chambers did not receive a tattoo because they did not get issued a number and

had been sent straight to death. Many prisoners arrived at Auschwitz and rapidly died there, so to

keep track of the identification the tattoos came into play. In order to avoid reaching overly high

numbers from the general series, a new sequence of numbers were introduced.

There had also been triangles sewn onto the uniforms to identify what race the person

was or why they resided there. Different colors stood for a different category such as pink for

homosexuals and purple for Jehovah’s Witnesses. Even as the time went by and the torture

continued, it could not go on forever. In 1945, Anglo-American and Soviet troops entered the

concentration camps to discover the gruesome scene of piles of corpses, human bones, and ashes.

Though there had been so much death, there are also many survivors.

The survivors had been found in terrifying conditions, suffering from starvation

and diseases. Afraid to return home for fear of their lives, Jewish survivors did not know where

to go. Rioters killed and beat the Jews because there had still been hatred towards them. Survivor

of the Holocaust, Thomas Buergenthal, describes the difficulties involved in postwar migrations,

“It wasn't all that, all that easy to leave Poland. You know, I had no papers, or
anything else, and my mother was in Germany at the time, in the, in the British zone. So
the, uh, American, uh, Joint Distribution Committee [the Joint] basically smuggled me
out in December of 1946, from Poland to Czechoslovakia, Czechoslovakia to the
American zone, and then the American zone to the British zone in Germany, until I was
reunited with my mother. And there was, the Joint operated with the Brihah ["flight"],
which had bribed a lot of people on the border. And, uh, that's how I got to Germany in
'46. That was really three years after I'd been separated from my mother.” (Par 1)
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With very few possibilities for emigration, tens and thousands of homeless

survivors had been housed in displaced persons camps (DP). The United Nations Relief and

Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) provided over six million displaced persons camps. The

army had no time to prepare for the millions of DP’s who refused to return to the land where

their families were tortured and massacred. Survivors began searching for their families. The

UNRRA created the Central Tracing Bureau to help survivors find their family who had

survived. Newspapers and public radio had lists of survivors and their locations. While so much

energy went into reuniting families, there were also new ones being created. Many weddings and

births took place in the DP camps. Schools had been established and teachers came from the

United States and Israel to teach at these new DP camp schools. Religious schools were also

established in these camps along with religious holidays which became major occasions.

In conclusion, the Holocaust survivors began to get their lives back on track

knowing that things would never be the same following this horrible tragedy. Over 80,000 DP’s

came to the United States, 163,000 went to Israel, and about 200,000 more went to other nations

such as Canada and South Africa. By 1952 all of the DP camps were put to a close. Although

survivors will forever be scarred by this terrible tragedy, so will the world. Others in the future

can learn from this sad time in the past and prevent it from happening again in the future.
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Works Cited

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Holocaust. 2008. 9 Sep. 2008

<http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/article.php?lang=en&ModuleId=10005143>.

The Holocaust Crimes, Heroes and Villains. 2008. 9 Sep. 2008

<http://www.auschwitz.dk/>.

Remember. A Cybrary of the Holocaust. 2008. 7 Sep. 2008 <http://remember.org/>.

Jewish Virtual Library. Adolf Hitler. n.d. 9 Sep. 2008.

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