What Was the Holocaust?

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The camps were liberated from July 1944, and footage of the scenes that Allied soldiers encountered were witnessed across the world. The conditions are so badthat many prisoners continued to die after liberation due to malnutrition and disease. For those prisoners that did survive, liberation was not the end of their suffering. LW: "So what we have here is the wedding dress worn by Gena Goldfinger on her wedding day to Norman Turgel in October 1945, and what's so special about this dress, about this story, is that Gena and Norman met when Norman entered Belsen concentration camp upon its liberation, and thetwo met and were engaged within a week, and they got married a few months later, and this is thedress that Gena was wearing. It's made of British parachute silk and made into a dress by a localtailor. So Bergen-Belsen was liberated on 15 April 1945 and the conditions at that time werecatastrophic, it was in a state of absolute chaos. The British soldiers upon arrival found almost 60,000 prisoners so it's severely overcrowded, and typhus was running rampant throughout the camp.This wedding dress tells the story of Gena who survived the Holocaust. She was forced toface a future and rebuild her life, but it was a future that she had to face without her family, the majority of whom didn't survive, without a home to go to and without any possessions." Rudi Bamber: "What had been an undercurrent before then became very much public. The streets were full of marching storm troopers who were triumphant because of the electoral victory and a boycott was started against the Jewish shops. Stormtroopers stood outside the shops and wrote slogans on the windows of the shops with Star of David. So it was a very difficult and unpleasant atmosphere and the reaction of my family and Jews in general was to withdraw and to keep out of the streets and the town as much as possible."

Lauren Wilmott: "So this is a tile or part of a tile from one of the gas chambers at the Treblinka death camp. It's most likely a wall tile and we know this from the limited survivor testimony that's in existence that describes the colour of the wall and the floor tiles in the gas chambers, and the reason that I say limited testimony is that there were very few survivors from the Treblinka death camp. It was a camp designed specifically for mass murder. Between July 1942 and September 1943 approximately nine hundred thousand Jews and two thousand Roma were murdered at the Treblinka death camp. To hide all traces of what had happened at Treblinka, the Nazis demolished the camp and turned it into a farm. Because of this it had been assumed that there was nothing left to find at Treblinka but in 2014 there was a large excavation. This tile was one of the artifacts found during this excavation so it's some of the only physical evidence in existence that was once witness to what happened in the gas chambers at Treblinka."

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The author, Gail Herman, did a good job of explaining and listing all the problems the Jews went through. He also made it clear on the important points. For example, when Hitler got into power, life got even worse for the Jews. "And they blamed Jews for all the country's problems"(18). However, Hitler only disliked the Jews that much because he thought "the Jews of Germany were not real Jews"(18). It started with dislike and then turned into hatred because he started believing that they were the only reasons for his failures. This is when the real story began. JB: "The First World War left Germany in complete chaos. There was a lot of displaced anger because Germany didn't expect to lose theFirst World War, the people of Germany being encouraged to believe that this was a war that they were set to win, and when they didn't it left people feeling angry and frustrated and needing someone to blame, and a lot of these young men who'd been part of the military found that they had all this displaced anger and nowhere to direct it so politics became very volatile and very incendiary, and this was a landscape in which extreme politics and extremist politicians found some real ground to manoeuver."

My daughter and I love to read together at bedtime still, and now that she is older the books she is interested in have more complex topics. This book was a natural next option after she read the Who Was Anne Frank book. This book about the Holocaust presents the facts of what happened to the Jewish people and others not in Nazi favor in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s. While there was plenty left out in what many victims endured and suffered at the hands of the Nazi's, the cruel facts of the genocide are not sugar coated while being presented in a very age appropriate way. Photos that are included do not show the worst of the worst, but definitely depict the suffering and cruelty. The invasion of the Soviet Union was a turning point in the course of the war and the Holocaust. As the Nazis occupied Soviet countries in the East, they slaughtered hundreds of thousands of non-combatants that they considered ‘enemies’ within these territories. When Hitler Got out of jail, he made many many more rules for the Jews to follow. He wanted then to wear tags on their chests like an ID that said "Jude." He did this so that the others would know that this particular person is Jewish and not to respect them because of that.From the beginning of 1942 these massacres were consolidated into a programme of co-ordinated annihilation. Millions of Jews were deported from ghettos or holding camps to be killed. Most were sent to a small number of purpose-built killing centres called death camps, but as the war developed, thousands more were sent to concentration camps to be worked to death in service of Germany’s deteriorating war effort. This Nazis were central to this process, but they did not act alone and relied on the support and complicity of hundreds of thousands of people across Europe. The so-called Reinhard camps, Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka II, were the final destination of approximately 1.75 million men, women and children. Located within occupied Poland,they were designed to be discreet and efficient. People were told that they are being processed for work ’in the east’, but will need to be showered before this procedure. The showerswere actually gas chambers that pumped carbon monoxide into the sealed rooms.The process was brutal, barbaric, and routinely inefficient. I particularly liked the full-scale map of Auschwitz Birkenau, and I feel it was important to include the illustration of the gas chambers. For whatever reason, this is the part conspiracy theorists like to target, and I have no tolerance for this nonsense whatsoever and was encouraged by seeing the author/illustrator speak plainly and show these atrocities. I understand it may be hard to think of these things actually happening, but I think the author says just enough and puts it plainly so this is still appropriate for young children/middle schoolers. I would argue it is not just appropriate- it is essential! (Yes, I am passionate about this point!) I thought this might have been a coincidence, but seeing as this book was published in 2017, the "Could Germany be great again? Yes!" line was a bit... on the nose. Don't get me wrong, I hate Trump as much as the next socialist, but this might keep some parents from letting their children from reading this book, and I feel that every child should, and then allow themselves to find their own parallels between the Hitler's Nazi Party and any other current political party and its leader.