Name________________________________
Holocaust – Notebook #3
1. Read thru the articles included in this packet -As you read use some of the reading strategies that we have talked about in class. Highlighting, writing in the margins, circling words you don't understand. You can use whatever strategy you are most comfortable with but I need to see evidence that you read each article.
2. Answer the learning targets on a separate sheet of paper.-Read through all of the questions before you begin the articles so that you know what you are looking for. The answers will appear in more than one article. 3. We will watch a documentary that corresponds to the last page in the packet.
4. There will be a writing assignment at the end of this unit that will count as your assessment grade.
Holocaust Learning Targets:
1. I can define genocide.
2. I can describe what the holocaust was. (Who, When, Why, Where, How)
3. I can define Anti-Semitic.
4. I can describe what life was like in the camp for the prisoners. (What happened to them, what did they have
control over, what was taken away from them?)
5. I can explain why some people in the world deny the holocaust happened.
6. I can explain / describe the type of experiments that were performed on people in the concentration
camps.
7. I can use the information from this packet and my prior knowledge to describe what was important to
those who survived the holocaust.
8. I can describe the United States reaction to the Holocaust.
A. Did we do enough?
B. What problems did American’s face when liberating the camps?
WHY STUDY THE HOLOCAUST?
The Holocaust is our legacy - all of us. It is essential that all of us understand what took place during the Holocaust. We live after and thus participate in post Holocaust life. The tragic events presented in this unit of study represent one of the darkest periods in the history of the world. The Holocaust is over but the nature of the society that carried it out exists here and now.
The Holocaust refers to the murder of some six million European Jews from 1933 to 1945 (There were another 5 million people killed during the holocaust, Polish, Slavic, Romanians, Handicap and mentally ill.) It was not the first state-ordained mass murder or attempted genocide (the annihilation of a people, nation or race). The first such attempt in the 20th century was the Armenian Genocide in which 1.5 million Armenians were murdered by the government of Turkey from 1915 to 1922.
Since 1945 several nations have attempted genocides. 1975-1979 Pol Pot Regime in Cambodia. 1967-1969 Nigeria. Uganda 1972-1979. Rwanda and Bosnia 1990’s, Darfur (South Sudan) 2000’s. Countless people were murdered.
The Holocaust differs from other genocides in several ways:
It was totally involving. Every part of industrial society became involved in the murders.
The Holocaust was not a barbaric undertaking. The killers used the most advanced technical, scientific means available. Places for the killing of millions were called death factories. Assembly-line techniques were adopted. Not only science but even medical science-doctors, surgeons, researchers, whole medical faculties actively participated.
Each step leading toward annihilation was approved by legitimate state authorities and was legally carried out by public officials.
Most civilians became indifferent to the destruction of their neighbors.
Perhaps, as a result of studying the Holocaust, you will be better able to identify the political, social and intellectual conditions that led to it. And, equally important, you may better understand how the Holocaust directly affected the lives of specific individuals. This unit may help you to see how the lives of people, some your own age, were and can be disrupted because of indifference and apathy.
By examining the behavior of “civilized” people, this study takes a painful look at how fragile morality, democracy and the sanctity of human life itself can be. The unit is designed to make us all more aware of our
responsibilities to ourselves and others, so that, as one Holocaust survivor noted, "no such event will happen again, and the future will be safe for our children ~ for all children."
ARRIVAL IN AUSCHWITZ ―
“You have 15 minutes. Pack one suitcase and report in front of your house.”
‖ You and your family join a procession marching to the railroad station. You are guarded by SS men and local police. The train arrives—cattle cars. You hold your father’s hand as you are forced into a car with 80 to 100 other people. The door slams and you hear the lock. About one-half hour later, the train begins to move.
The smell of sweat, excrement and urine permeates the car. People grow panicky, irritable, frantic. After eight hours, about 25 of the people have passed out or died. After 20 more hours, the train stops again. People cry out for water as they hear voices outside. A machine gun sprays the car and four people fall with blood flowing from their bodies. Your sister is one of them. Silence.
The doors open – air rushes in. ―Raus! Raus! Out! Out!‖ There are dogs, men with guns, prisoners in striped uniforms take suitcases, old people and the dead out of the car. You watch as they throw your sister’s body onto a wagon. You move almost in a daze and get off the car onto the platform with crowds of others. Thousands of people have stumbled, fallen from the long line of cattle cars. The noises are deafening, frightening.
Line up by fives! No talking!‖ Shots are heard. The air is filled with foul smelling smoke. A chimney is visible; flames and smoke billow from it. You are made to move in an endless line – shouts in German or other languages route people in different directions. Your father is again next to you. Someone whispers that you should lie about your age, ―Tell them you’re 16.‖ A handsome SS man with a whip in hand and his coat draped over his shoulders asks your age. ―Sixteen,‖ you lie. He points his whip to the left and you and your father follow his direction. You see your mother and old people and children going to the right. Unknown to you, you will never see them again. All those under 16 and over 40 are sent to die. Your mother, younger brothers and grandparents have disappeared.
There are lines, yelling, crying, dogs, orders, shots. Men and women have been separated from one another. You are made to strip and stand naked. Next, a bathhouse. You are sprayed with delousing solution—it burns. Still naked, you are marched to a long room where all body hair is shaved; your arm is tattooed with a number, and you are 2 given an ill-fitting uniform and shoes. Finally, you are herded into a barracks with about 200 others.
What has happened? Where are we, you wonder. What has happened to you mother and brothers? Your father is silent; he seems to be hypnotized, stiff, not responding to anything around him. Where did they take your poor sister’s body? You ask someone with a striped uniform, another prisoner, when you will see your mother and brothers again. Where are they? He roughly drags you to a window and points: ―Do you see that chimney? Do you see the smoke? There are you mother and brothers. This is not a summer camp—this is Auschwitz.‖
A “NORMAL” DAY IN AUSCHWITZ
As a 15-year-old girl, you have survived the selection on the platform. You are alone— packed into a barracks with hundreds of others but with no one from your family. You share your “bunk” with three bunkmates. The word “bunkmates” is not exactly correct—there are three other frightened, emaciated victims who share the wooden board on which you sleep.
4 a.m.: Appel or roll call. Fall out, with only a prisoner’s striped uniform and a pair of wooden shoes, into the biting zero-degree cold. Stand. One hour passes and a Kapo, a prisoner in charge of the barracks, calls numbers. Your number is called. All must wait because one person is not present. Fifteen minutes later, the body is dragged to its place. Even the dead must report. The Kapo yells his count to the SS guard: “All present or accounted for! One hundred ninetyfour are standing, five are in the sick barrack, one is dead.”
with holes in them. A prisoner is given a whip with which she beats women who take too long. An older woman confides to you that prisoners are found dead each morning—suicides or drowned in excrement by someone else. The smell is overpowering, and you feel the urge to vomit. Yet, such smells are no longer new to you: the stench in the cattle car, the sickening odor of the smoke from the chimneys, the body smells of the prisoners crammed into the barracks and now this latrine smell. The older woman tells you that almost all women have ceased menstruating—either from fear, malnutrition or disease.
Again the Appelplatz (roll call place), where you see women being beaten for “slacking.” You are chosen for a work detail at the Brezhinka, the mountain of clothing collected from victims, most of whom were gassed upon their arrival. Your job is to sort clothing. You are lucky—one can “organize,” that is, steal extra clothes from here. Should you be caught, you will probably be beaten, or worse. As you work, you watch trains arrive, the chimneys of the crematoria belching flames, the lines of people at the gas chamber, the dogs barking, women crying, children screaming and SS men shouting commands.
At noon, you are given “coffee” and another slice of bread with margarine. Ten minutes to eat. Back to work. In the distance, you see men carrying cement blocks from one place to another. Later, they are made to carry them back. Every so often you hear gunshots. Everyone around you has the stench of death, disease and excrement. All are crawling with lice. The sky is gray, trees glisten with snow, icicles form on the barracks and on the barbed wire fences.
While you work at the Brezhinka, you suddenly find a familiar sweater, your mother’s, and a pair of shoes—your sister’s. They are dead, you know that now. You cannot stop to mourn or 2 think of them. Guards are watching. You tear the sweater to pieces. It is a small act of defiance, of sabotage.
All prisoners move as in a fog. Some are beaten, some are hung, shot or tortured—they seem to show no emotion because of their starved, semi-hypnotized condition. By 6 p.m., your head swims—malnutrition, grief, fear, pain, thirst—all take their toll.
Another Appel. Nineteen people have died from your group—a small number for this day— in the bitter cold.
After the final “meal,” which consists of one slice of bread and a small piece of hard salami, you return to the barracks. People stare blankly. The Kapo grabs a young girl and beats her until blood pours from her head—the girl has not performed some simple task to the Kapo’s satisfaction. She moans on the wooden floor. No one moves. The Kapo swears at the prisoners and storms into her room at the end of the barracks.
You lay on your board with two other girls (the third has not returned) thinking of your mother and sister in your kitchen at home and fall asleep.
Common Questions About the Holocaust- United States Holocaust Museum
WAS HITLER SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR THE HOLOCAUST?
WHY DIDN’T JEWS LEAVE WHEN THE NAZIS CAME TO POWER?
Similar to their fellow citizens, German Jews were patriotic citizens. More than 10,000 died fighting for Germany in World War I, and countless others were wounded and received medals for their valor and service. The families of many Jews who held German citizenship, regardless of class or profession, had lived in Germany for centuries and were well assimilated by the early 20th century. From 1933–39, the German government passed and enforced discriminatory laws targeting Jews at a relatively gradual pace. Up until the nationwide anti-Jewish violence of 1938, known as Kristallnacht, many Jews in Germany expected to be able to hold out against Nazi-sponsored persecution, as they hoped for positive change in German politics. Before World War II, few could imagine or predict killing squads and killing centers.
Those who made the difficult decision to leave Germany still had to find a country willing to admit them and their family. The search for safe haven was very difficult. The Evian Conference of 1938 showed this when almost every nation in attendance declined to change its immigration policies. Even when a new country could be found, a great deal of time, paperwork, support, and sometimes money was needed to get there. In many cases, these obstacles could not be overcome.
WHY WASN’T THERE MORE RESISTANCE FROM JEWS?
The statement that Jews did not fight back against the Germans and their allies is false. Jews carried out acts of resistance in every German-occupied country and in the territory of Germany’s Axis partners. Against impossible odds, they resisted in ghettos, concentration camps, and killing centers. There were many factors that made resistance difficult, however, including a lack of weapons and resources, deception, fear, and the overwhelming power of the Germans and their collaborators.
HOW DID THE PERPETRATORS KNOW WHO WAS JEWISH?
German officials identified Jews residing in Germany through census records, tax returns, synagogue membership lists, parish records (for converted Jews), routine but mandatory police registration forms, the questioning of relatives, and from information provided by neighbors and officials. In territory occupied by Nazi Germany or its Axis partners, Jews were identified largely through Jewish community membership lists, individual identity papers, captured census documents and police records, and local intelligence networks.
WHAT HAPPENED IF YOU DISOBEYED AN ORDER TO PARTICIPATE IN AN ATROCITY?
Germans who refused to participate in atrocities were generally not punished, but risked peer, social, and sometimes professional exclusion or disadvantage. They could request other duties, such as guard duty or crowd control. There is no reliable evidence that German soldiers or police officials were killed for refusing to kill civilians. Non-Germans serving as auxiliaries and refusing to carry out direct orders to kill could be subject to discipline, dismissal, imprisonment, or even death.
WASN’T ONE OF HITLER’S RELATIVES JEWISH?
Rumors about Hitler’s ancestry were circulated by political opponents as a way of discrediting Hitler’s leadership of an antisemitic party. The rumors are derived largely —then and now—from the fact that the identity of Hitler’s paternal grandfather remains unknown. There is no reliable evidence, however, to suggest that the unknown grandfather was Jewish.
WHY WERE THE JEWS SINGLED OUT FOR EXTERMINATION?
dominance of the so-called “German-Aryan” race. According to the Nazis, the Jews, as an “inferior” race, would use their supposed control of world finances and of world mass media to support Communist uprisings and to encourage other “inferior” races to overwhelm and triumph against Nordic-Germanic races.
Nazi antisemitism linked traditional negative and false images of Jews and their behavior with modern pseudo-scientific beliefs. Among these stereotypes were those derived from centuries-old Christian anti-Jewish thinking, which incorrectly presented Jews as murderers of Christ, agents of the devil, and practitioners of witchcraft. The Nazis linked these negative stereotypes to a “Jewish way of thinking” that they believed was based in genetics and, therefore, not subject to change. The Nazis used this belief to justify the discrimination, persecution, and, eventually, physical murder of Jewish people.
WHAT DID THE UNITED STATES KNOW ABOUT THE HOLOCAUST AND HOW DID IT RESPOND?
Despite a history of providing sanctuary to persecuted peoples, the United States grappled with many issues during the 1930s that made living up to this legacy difficult. These issues included widespread antisemitism, xenophobia,
isolationism, and a sustained economic depression. Unfortunately for those fleeing Nazi persecution, such issues greatly impacted US refugee policy, reinforcing an official and popular unwillingness to expand immigration quotas to admit greater numbers of people endangered by Nazi persecution and aggression at a time when doing so might have saved lives.
Over the years, scholarly investigation into US responses in the era of the Holocaust has raised a number of questions, such as: What did the United States know? What did government officials and civilians do with this knowledge? Could more have been done? Scholars have examined US immigration policy, the reactions of the US government to reported atrocities, and sluggish efforts to organize operations aimed at rescuing European Jews.
Anti- Semitism- Holocaust Denial
Prejudice against or hatred of Jews--known as antisemitism--has plagued the world for more than 2,000 years. The Holocaust, the state-sponsored persecution and murder of European Jews between 1933 and 1945 by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, is history’s most extreme example of antisemitism. Yet even in the aftermath of the Holocaust, antisemitism remains a continuing threat. Manifestations of this hatred appear in literature, art, film, speeches, legislation, and on the Internet, as well as in acts of violence.
Holocaust denial is an attempt to negate the established facts of the Nazi genocide of European Jewry. Holocaust denial and distortion are forms of antisemitism. They are generally motivated by hatred of Jews and build on the claim that the Holocaust was invented or exaggerated by Jews as part of a plot to advance Jewish interests.
These views perpetuate long-standing antisemitic stereotypes, hateful charges that were instrumental in laying the groundwork for the Holocaust. Holocaust denial, distortion, and misuse all undermine the understanding of history.
WHY IT'S IMPORTANT TO CONFRONT DENIAL
The Nazi persecution of the Jews began with hateful words, escalated to discrimination and dehumanization, and culminated in genocide. The consequences for Jews were horrific, but suffering and death was not limited to them. Millions of others were victimized, displaced, forced into slave labor, and murdered. The Holocaust shows that when one group is targeted, all people are vulnerable.
Today, in a world witnessing rising antisemitism, awareness of this fact is critical. A society that tolerates antisemitism is susceptible to other forms of racism, hatred, and oppression.
WHY DO PEOPLE DENY THE HOLOCAUST?
Holocaust denial, distortion, and misuse are strategies to reduce perceived public sympathy to Jews, to undermine the legitimacy of the State of Israel—which some believe was created as compensation for Jewish suffering during the Holocaust—to plant seeds of doubt about Jews and the Holocaust, and to draw attention to particular issues or
viewpoints. The Internet, because of its ease of access and dissemination, seeming anonymity, and perceived authority, is now the chief conduit of Holocaust denial.
Key denial assertions are that the murder of approximately six million Jews during World War II never occurred, that the Nazis had no official policy or intention to exterminate the Jews, and that the poison gas chambers in
Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp never existed. Common distortions include, for example, assertions that the figure of six million Jewish deaths is an exaggeration and that the diary of Anne Frank is a forgery.
The World Is Full of Holocaust Deniers
-EMMA GREEN MAY 14, 2014 The Atlantic
Only 54 percent of the world's population has heard of the Holocaust. 54 percent!
This is the most staggering statistic in a new survey by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of more than 53,000 people in over 100 countries, conducted by First International Resources. But that figure speaks to only those who have heard of it: Only a third of the world's population believe the genocide has been accurately described in historical accounts. Some said they thought the number of people who died has been exaggerated; others said they believe it's a myth. Thirty percent of respondents said it's probably true that "Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust." Seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz, two-thirds of the world's population doesn’t know the Holocaust happened—or they deny it.
When the data is sliced by religious groups, the results are even more surprising: Hindus were most likely to believe that the number of Holocaust deaths has been exaggerated. Muslims followed closely, and those two groups were distantly trailed by Christians, Buddhists, and those with no religion. In no
coincidence, Hindus and Muslims were also
significantly less likely to have heard of the Holocaust.
In almost every religious group, people younger than 65 were much more likely to say they believe that facts about the Holocaust have been distorted, and they were less likely to know what the Holocaust is.
Percent of Who Believe Facts About the Holocaust Have Been Distorted, by Age and Religious Group
The report by the ADL, a Jewish NGO that campaigns against anti-Semitism and discrimination, also covers the prevalence of other anti-Semitic attitudes, including beliefs about Jews' allegiance to Israel, influence in media and business, and likeability. Although the prevalence of Holocaust ignorance and denial was just one small aspect of the survey, it illuminates a powerful fact: As the memory of the genocide grows fainter, attitudes toward Jews—and Israel—are changing. The fate of the Jewish people in the twentieth century was largely centered around the Holocaust: the anti-Semitism that facilitated it, the loss it wrought, and the reflection it prompted. As that history becomes more distant, it's unclear what will animate the Jewish community—and attitudes toward it—moving forward.
Depressingly, the study does hint at the way most people get their information about Jews and the Holocaust today:
Auschwitz Survivors Fight to Be Remembered
STEVEN GUTKIN Associated Press WriterA Museum painting of a barefoot girl holding up a pair of shoes led Bracha Ghilai to break a half century of silence about what happened to her in the concentration camp barrack.
She saw herself in that girl, taking her dead sister Shari's shoes for protection against the cold.
"Forgive me, my dear sister, forgive me Shari, but I wanted so much to live, and the shoes symbolized life for me," Ghilai later wrote in a short story titled "The Shoes."
On Thursday, as the world marks the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, there will still be survivors of that camp and others who wake up screaming in the middle of the night and are unable to speak about their trauma.
Some, however, are determined to keep telling their stories -- concerned that memories will fade with time, aware that the number of living survivors is dwindling and fearful that history might repeat itself.
Ghilai couldn't bring herself to talk about her experiences in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps until several years ago, when she visited Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust museum. There she was moved by the picture of the shoeless girl standing beside a naked woman. "And then I started to speak. This is what opened me."
And this is what happened to Ruth Brand: Arriving in Auschwitz from Hungary on May 18, 1944, she was immediately separated from her family, and the German guards promised the 16-year-old girl she would soon be reunited with them.
Her fellow inmates laughed at her.
"Don't you see the chimneys? Don't you see that's where they're burning your people now?" she remembers them telling her. Her parents, brother, sister and grandmother were gassed that same night. She recalls a Jewish doctor named Gisela Pearl who performed abortions to save pregnant women from extermination or experimentation, including one in which mothers were tied to beds so that they couldn't care for their newborns. The experiments were "to see how long it takes for the woman to go crazy ... and to see how long it takes for the infant to die without food," Brand said.
Brand returned to Auschwitz 60 years to the day of her first arrival there, accompanied by 200 Israeli Air Force officers and a rabbi carrying the Torah.
"Here it is 60 years that I'm walking back into Auschwitz but I'm not alone," she says. "The Torah that they wanted to destroy, our Torah, is with us. I'm saying a blessing that in this place a miracle happened to me. I remained alive."
In Auschwitz death was always close and survival could depend on fluke.
Ghilai said she survived one "selection" -- when the Nazis weeded out the weak and sick for extermination -- by pleading with a fellow inmate to open a barracks window when she was running a temperature. She crawled through the window to safety.
Martha Weiss was 10 when she arrived at Auschwitz in 1944, and like all children too young to work, she was selected for death. But the Soviet army was approaching and the SS diverted her group from the gas chamber after Soviet planes flew over. She said she and her older sister Eva spent their last month in camp doctor Josef Mengele's notorious experimental ward.
"He would tell little children to sit on his lap and tell them to call him 'uncle,' 'uncle Mengele' and sometimes give them a sweet and in the same tone of voice that he said 'I'm uncle Mengele' he would tell the officials to give them a lethal injection," Weiss said. "So when he approached my sister, I threw myself on him. I had enough sense to know that it was dangerous but he happened to be in a good mood and it didn't matter to him if he killed Eva Weiss or whether he killed the next person, so she survived."
Martha and Eva Weiss were among an estimated 5,000 mostly sick inmates still in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death complex when it was liberated.
The Nazis began evacuating Auschwitz 10 days before the Soviets arrived, forcing some 60,000 prisoners into the Polish forests on "death marches" during which many thousands were murdered or died of cold, hunger and exhaustion.
"They cannot walk anymore ... So you can hear the shooting," Handeli recalls of the marchers. "They are all shot and in this beautiful white snow you see the red blood of those poor people ...
"I walked like some kind of robot that does not think anything," Handeli said.
Living with the memories and the nightmares is a daily struggle for the estimated 1 million Holocaust survivors still alive today. Ghilai said that for 60 years she's had the same dream about another of her sisters who died in the gas chamber, coming to her and insisting she's still alive.
"And I'm so happy. So happy to meet her. And then when I wake up I see that it was just a dream." Alongside the nightmares, however, lives have been rebuilt.
Bracha Ghilai went on to serve in the Israeli army. Jack Handeli has a son who's a scientist. Martha Weiss raised a family in Australia and seven years ago moved to Israel, where a suicide bombing injured her granddaughter.
The Last Days - Film Notes
As you watch please make special note of the following to help you complete your assignment. You can make your notes on this paper or on a separate sheet of notebook paper.
Life before the war
Why didn't you run away?
Leaving their home
Conditions on the train
Arrival at the camp
Day to Day conditions of the camp
How was water acquired?
"Going on the fence"
How were prisoners executed?
Did some people attempt to help the Jews? Why? Who?
Life after Liberation
