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Persecution of Jews in the Second World War
Anti - semitism during the Holocaust
Anti - semitism during the Holocaust
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Dear diary, I have been deported, we traveled through Hungary and Poland. We were taken through the forest to an area where we were required to dig huge trenches. When we were finished with the job, the Gestapo had to do theirs. Without even hesitating or resisting, the Gestapo had each of us stand in front of the trenches and killed each of us. I managed to escape by being mistaken for being dead but I was just wounded. What broke my heart was that infants were being thrown in the air (young children) and were used for the machine gun target. Young children had to suffer, all Jews had to suffer. Why would any human wanna do this to us? We all are humans too and we shouldn’t be used as targets or killed because of our religion.Once I had made
Many groups had great power and influence around the world during the Holocaust. How this influence was used or not used helped shape experiences, often horrific, for many European Jews. In Hungary, toward the end of the Holocaust not only did the international institutions become silent bystanders, but their very own neighbors turned their back on their fellow citizens knowing what atrocities awaited their arrival at Auschwitz. The brutality started close to home when fellow Hungarians, in a combined effort with the city government, railroad officials, and law-enforcement agencies coordinated a swift transport of 400,000 Jews to their almost certain death. “In March 1944, the Germans occupied Hungary and in April, they forced the Jews into ghettos.
Imagine people who don’t trust you, like you, or care about you, asking you and your family to leave home for the safety of others. You don’t know when or if you are getting back. That seems pretty unfair and rude, right? Well, that is exactly what happened to Japanese Americans during WWII, except they weren’t imagining it. With forces of the Axis on the rise in the 1940’s, America was struggling to keep everyone safe. National security was at stake, so the United States acted poorly to reverse problems. During WWII, the Japanese Americans were interned for reasons of national security because the war made the U.S. act foolishly, the U.S. government didn’t trust them, and the U.S. also didn’t care about them.
6,000,000 Jews were murdered in concentration camps and mistreated by the Nazis. As common knowledge, people normally recognize the term “concentration camp” and immediately refer to the prison camps the Jews were sent to during the Holocaust. In Corrie Tenboom’s famous collective story of her imprisonment, The Hiding Place, she writes in visual description of exactly how the Jews were treated in these camps. Women were forced to stand naked in front of Nazi guards for not much reason at all and made them feel less than human and animalistic.
Have you ever read the play “The Diary of Anne Frank?” She wrote in a book during the Holocaust. She hid in a place called the “Secret Annex” Mr. Kraler was the man who let the Franks and Van Daans stay in his attic. The theme was “Which characters contribute to them theme people are good at heart.” In the play “ The diary of Anne Frank”, the theme people are good at heart is developed through the characters Miep Gies, Mr.Kraler, and Anne Frank.
Regine Donner, a famous Holocaust survivor, once said, “I had to keep my Jewishness hidden, secret, and never to be revealed on the penalty of death. I missed out on my childhood and the best of my adolescent years. I was robbed of my name, my religion, and my Zionist idealism” (“Hidden Children”). Jewish children went through a lot throughout the Holocaust- physically, mentally, and emotionally. Life was frightening and difficult for children who were in hiding during the rule of Adolf Hitler.
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl narrates the journey of adolescent Anne Frank during World War II. The diary allows insight into the changes Anne went through during the war after going into hiding to avoid persecution. Over the course of her time in hiding she matured, and used her diary to voice her innermost thoughts and desires. Anne’s diary shows how she came to terms with change as a result of her circumstances, and how she herself changed as a result.
As early as age thirteen, we start learning about the Holocaust in classrooms and in textbooks. We learn that in the 1940s, the German Nazi party (led by Adolph Hitler) intentionally performed a mass genocide in order to try to breed a perfect population of human beings. Jews were the first peoples to be put into ghettos and eventually sent by train to concentration camps like Auschwitz and Buchenwald. At these places, each person was separated from their families and given a number. In essence, these people were no longer people at all; they were machines. An estimation of six million deaths resulting from the Holocaust has been recorded and is mourned by descendants of these people every day. There are, however, some individuals who claim that this horrific event never took place.
My name is Makino Toshio and I am a second generation Japanese-American. My father moved to Hawaii before coming to the mainland, like most Japanese-Americans. Before World War II, I worked on a Japanese truck farm. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, tension was bad for any Japanese-American in the United States. Many people in the United States did not trust people with Japanese ancestry. A store that I usually shop at had a sign in the window saying, “We don’t want any Japs back here-EVER! Within hours after the bombing of Pearl Harbor at Hawaii, FBI agents went house to house and rounded up 1,212 Japanese in the U.S. mainland and Hawaii islands. Most of the arrests were prominent leaders in Japanese communities. All of them were taken to unknown destinations and treated as Prisoners of War.
No one understands such a dreadful experience as the Holocaust without shifting in the way you were before. In Night, a memoir by Elie Wiesel, the author defines his suffering at the hands of Nazis. Taken with his family in 1944, they were directed to Auschwitz to come before the dishonorable selection. There, Elie parted from his mom and sister leaving him with his father who was too busy to spend any time with his son before the camp. Being under the Nazis' control, Elie and his father moved to several camps. The Nazi command “deprived Elie...of the desire to live..., which murdered his God and soul and turned my dreams to dust” (32).
During the tragic times of the German Holocaust, many innocent people were brutally murdered. Jews were not the only victims during this dark time. Roma (gypsies), Poles and other Slavs, the mentally and/or physically disabled, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, African-German children, priests and pastors, and many other miscellaneous groups all fell victim of persecution and murder by the Nazis for various reasons.
“One of the most extraordinary aspects of Nazi genocide was the cold deliberate intention to kill children in numbers so great that there is no historical precedent for it.” (Lukas, 13 Kindle) About 1.5 million children were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust—one million being killed because they were Jews (ushmm.org) The Germans had a clearly defined goal of killing the Jewish children so that there would be no remnants of their race to reproduce, resulting in extinction. Not only were the children that were victimized in the Holocaust persecuted and murdered, but they were all stripped of their childhood. Children were not allowed to be children—they had to, for their own survival, be adults. The oppression of children because of race was a direct result of Hitler’s cruel policies and beliefs. In order to stifle the Jewish race from growing, the children were the first to be slaughtered at extermination camps (ushmm.org).
Picture this for a moment, a cattle drive to the slaughter house, thousands of cattle being pushed, crammed, and hit into cattle cars for a one way trip, but now, picture the even sadder reality, that this occurred to our own race, the human race, to millions with even harsher treatment than death itself… The Holocaust. During World War II, Adolf Hitler, the German leader, used his power and the Nazi party to convince and force his attempt at a genocide of the Jews in Europe, by using work and death camps. While every aspect of the Holocaust was equally sinful, when it comes to the worst of the worst of the concentration camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau probably was the most brutal.
Vladka Patel Meed was an 18 year old girl when she and her family has to face the atrocities of the holocaust. born in 19211 in Warsaw, Poland, Meed was born in the center of Polish Nazi operations during the Holocaust. As Jews, she and her family were sent to live in the Warsaw Ghetto where there was ‘starvation and typhoid and hunger and [constant] terror’ conditions in the Warsaw Ghetto were terrible and inhumane although to make things less depressing, Meed ‘belonged at the time ... to the Jewish Cultural group’. While in the ghetto, Meed and other young people ‘has lectures and ... cultural events.’ After spending some time in the Warsaw Ghetto, the Nazis in charge of the ghetto decided it was time to begin deportations, which both meed’s mother and brother were included in, although she was not. Her mother and brother were to be sent to Umschlagplatz, a place that was well known as being a poor place to be sent to, often resulting in death. In vain, meed tried to bribe an officer to keep her mother and brother, the only family she had left, from leaving. They left and her brother later sent her a note telling her that he was hung...
With the beginning of the holocaust my family had many struggles. We had our lives ripped away from us. The building I worked at had a hidden annex where my family, four others, and I lived in for more than two years. When we were in the annex my daughter Anne wrote a diary. She wrote about her experiences of being closed off from the world among other things. On the date of August fourth 1944 we were discovered in the annex and arrested. After being arrested we were taken to Westerbork transit concentration camp, and shortly after I was sent to Auschwitz. I stayed there until it was liberated in 1945. While I was in the concentration camp a woman named Miep who helped my family hide in the annex found my dear daughter’s diary. When I got back Miep handed me the journal thinking that it should be given to someone that is very close to Anne.
I. Introduction The autobiography book, “The Diary of a Young Girl”, is a collection of Dutch diary entries authored by Anne Frank, a 13-year-old Jewish girl who lived through the atrocities of the Anti-Semitist German Nazi Regime. Beginning on June 14, 1942, the diary, which Anne named “Kitty”, vividly depicts fear-filled stories of the Franks and other Jews in evading racial annihilation. Besides the stories of war, the world-renowned personal account narrates a teenage girl’s blossoming and her search for identity, love, and acceptance. The entries end abruptly on August 1, 1944, signifying the Gestapo’s capture of the Frank family and all the other residents of the Secret Annexe, but despite the impermanence of Anne’s life, her legacy endures in her 70-year-old memoir which immortalizes the horrors of the humanity-crushing war and violence in the minds of mankind and how it was perceived through the eyes of the juveniles.