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means roll call; they were a daily feature of camp life. Prisoners had to stand at roll calls morning and night.
The roll calls were punitive as the prisoners were pointlessly made to stand for hours outside in inclement weather. Even dead prisoners had to be turned out and counted. Selections occurred at roll calls where the weaker prisoners would be culled for extermination.
Source: Various survivor memoirs (see Bibliography).
eastern and central European Jews, one of the two main branches of DiasporaDiaspora: the dispersion of the Jews among the lands outside of Israel, in Hebrew “Galut,” (literally, “exile”). Source: Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish. Jewry.
The Ashkenazim created a distinctive civilization and a Yiddish language based culture. During the Holocaust most of the population and the communities of the Ashkenazim in Eastern Europe were destroyed. The Ashkenazim originally moved from northern France to Germanic cities along the Rhine, and then settled in central and eastern Europe.
From 1880 to 1910 about one-third of the Jews in Eastern Europe migrated, mainly to the United States. Most of the Jews living in the United States are descended from the Ashkenazim. The other main branch of Disapora Jewry is called Sephardim. They lived in Portugal, Spain and southern France, speaking a language called Ladino, and also in the Middle East, where they spoke Persian or Arabic.
Source: Rosten, the Joys of Yiddish.
a concentration, forced labor and extermination camp, it was the largest camp established by the Germans. It has been called the largest graveyard in human history and has become a symbol for the Holocaust itself.
The Auschwitz complex consisted of Auschwitz I, Auschwitz II (also known as Auschwitz-Birkenau or Birkenau), Auschwitz III (Monowitz) and forty-five sub-camps.
Auschwitz I began as penal camp. The “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Leads to Freedom) sign was above the entrance to Auschwitz I. It was the site of the infamous Block 11, the punishment block, and the site where the depraved “Medical experiments” were carried out.
Auschwitz II or Auschwitz-Birkenau was a forced labor and extermination camp. Of vast dimensions, it played a central role in the plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe, the so-called “Final Solution.”
Trains arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau daily with Jews from almost every German occupied country in Europe. The new arrivals underwent a process of selection. The majority, including all of the old people, the young and mothers with children, were sent directly to the gas chambers. Those who were chosen for forced labor were tattooed with their camp numbers on their left arms.
In April 1944, two young Jews, Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, escaped from the camp and wrote a detailed report which was smuggled to the free world. It exhorted the Allies to bomb the camp. Although industrial areas near the camp were bombed, the gas chambers and the deportation railways never were.
In October 1944, Crematorium IV was destroyed in an uprising by the inmates who tended the extermination installations (Sonderkommando). Auschwitz III or Monowitz was primarily a labor camp built to produce Buna or synthetic rubber. For most of its existence Auschwitz was commanded by Rudolf Hoss. After his trial in 1947, he wrote his memoirs while awaiting execution.
The SS began evacuating Auschwitz on January 18, 1945 as the Soviet army began approaching. Almost 60,000 prisoners were forced on death marches to their eventual evacuation to Germany. The Soviet army reached the camp on January 27, 1945, freeing 7,650 prisoners who had not been evacuated. In the warehouses the Soviets found 7.7 tons (7,000 kg) of human hair, which had been packed for shipping.
It is estimated that 1,600,000 people were murdered at Birkenau, over 90 percent of them Jews. The Jews and Roma (Gypsies) were the only people targeted for extinction, although large numbers of Poles and Soviet prisoners-of-war and people of other various nationalities died there as well.
When the Germans abandoned Auschwitz to the Soviet Army in January 1945, they destroyed what seemed to them to be the most damning evidence of their crimes-the crematoria were blown up along with most of the records of the camp. What they failed to destroy when they burned the records of the camp Kommandantur were the documents of the construction office located 300 yards away.
The archives of the Zentralbauleitung der Waffen SS und Polizei, Auschwitz O/S (Central Building Authority of the Waffen SS and the Police, Auschwitz in Upper Silesia) contained hundreds of site plans, maps, building and guard tower designs and revisions to the plans. These tell the story of Auschwitz through the intentions of the planners.
The story they tell, like most stories in history, looks haphazard when viewed from a contemporary perspective time. Auschwitz was not planned as an death camp from its earliest beginnings, but evolved into one as Nazi policy toward the Jews changed and became less concerned with exploitation and more and more concerned with immediate extermination. Over the period of Nazi domination from 1939 to 1945, the prime function of Auschwitz shifted from penal colony, to agricultural station, to industrial site and finally to extermination center.
The plans for the crematoria show this unsteady evolution. Crematorium I in Auschwitz I was located in a converted ammunition bunker. Originally it was intended to dispose of the bodies of the prisoners who had died at the camp. Later it assumed a second function as an execution site for the Gestapo. Prisoners who had been tried in courts elsewhere were brought to crematorium I to be executed. They were shot in a room which had been designated as a morgue and which adjoined the room containing the ovens. In the morgue a drain in the floor collected the blood. Because the odor became foul and unbearable to the SS, a powerful ventilation system was installed.
Went the Nazi masters saw the need for efficient mass extermination, crematorium I with its powerful ventilation system was at hand. The fans would extract the poison gas. The lethal agent, Zyklon B, was being used elsewhere in the camp to exterminate lice; its properties were well known. All that remained to convert crematorium I into a gas chamber was to hermetically seal the doors and to cut several rectangular holes in the flat roof to drop the gas in.
The plans for crematorium II, designated for Auschwitz I, but later changed to the larger site of Auschwitz-Birkenau, originally included a chute to slide the bodies down into the cellar where there were 2 morgues. When the goal of camp became the mass extermination of deportees, the slide was removed leaving a wider stairway. Live victims would walk, not slide, down to the morgues, which now became a gas chamber and an undressing room.
The archives of the Building Authority implicate German civilians in the mass murders. While the Nazi doctors, the SS guards and the Capos exemplified depravity and physical cruelty astounding in its departure from civilized norms, the behavior of civilian businessman, architects and engineers exhibited a parallel descent into barbarity. For the plans clearly indicate that there was a knowing participation in mass murder and in the exploitation of a slave labor so arduous as to destroy its victims within days or, at most, weeks.
A few examples follow of how civilian firms were implicated in the crime: The Topf and Sons firm designed the ovens for crematorium II; they had the enormous capacity of 1440 bodies per day. The imprimatur of Topf can be seen today in raised letters on the machinery of the ovens.
The firm AEG, contractor for the electrical system in crematorium II, warned that the capacity of the system would not allow for simultaneous “special treatment” and “incineration.” (Sure enough, in March 1943 the electrical system of crematorium II caught fire and both the ventilation system that extracted the Zyklon B gas from the gas chamber and the forced-draft system that fanned the incinerator flames were damaged.)
The chemical giant IG Farben was the largest corporation in Europe, and after General Motors, US Steel and Standard Oil of NJ, the fourth largest corporation in the world. It chose a site near Auschwitz camp to establish a monumental project that would produce Buna or synthetic rubber. There was coal and lime there, abundant water, access to rail and cheap labor. The SS would supply unlimited manual labor to IG Farben for 3 marks per person per day. The Auschwitz survivor Rudolf Vrba describes how IG Farben engineers stood with yellow folding rules in their hands while ruthless guards beat prisoners to death literally under their faces.
The enormity of the crime at the Auschwitz camps justifies its role as one of the foremost symbols of the Holocaust. In the post-war years the symbol of Auschwitz became the focus of various political, religious, nationalistic, Holocaust denial and other groups. The Communists had a use for Auschwitz in their hagiography of anti-Nazi resistance, as did the Polish nationalists, for many of their heroes perished there.
For a time the Jewish presence was erased from the story of the camp as told by the signs erected there and in the booklets about the camp published in Poland. Catholics appropriated the symbol of Auschwitz for their martyrs, and crosses erected on the site offended Jewish memory. The human hair collected there became the focus of those who wanted to honor the victims by burying it and those who felt that the hair was a telling historical artifact and should be displayed. Holocaust deniers visited the site and came away with pseudo-scientific reasons to disbelieve that the Holocaust actually happened.
In 1959 a jury chaired by the distinguished sculptor Henry Moore met to chose a chief monument to erect on the site. The design that was chosen was a collaboration that was ultimately deemed not suitable, and simple memorial tablets and a monolith were chosen instead. Auschwitz is today a Polish State Museum and Historical Archive and a popular tourist destination for hundreds of thousands of tourists each year.
Sources: Pelt & Dwork, Auschwitz 1270 to the Present; Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; Young, The Texture of Memory; Historical Atlas of the Holocaust
declared itself neutral and secured German guarantees of its neutral status in 1937. On May 10, 1040, German forces invaded and on May 28, on the orders of King Leopold III, the Belgian army surrendered.
The king remained in Belgium and cooperated to some extent with the Germans, even meeting with Hitler at one point. As Belgium was put under German military administration, a government-in-exile for a free Belgium was established at the same time in London.
There was an indigenous Belgian fascist party, the Rexists, which collaborated openly with the Germans. However, the majority of the population had no Nazi sympathies and displayed solidarity with the Jews. In September 1944, Brussels and Antwerp were liberated by the Allies. In December 1944, the Germans counterattacked and penetrated into Belgium. After a series of counterattacks (the Battle of the Bulge) the Allies routed the Germans on January 16, 1945.
When the wearing of the yellow star was introduced in May 1942, there were protests among the Belgian people, and the city council of Brussels refused to distribute the badges. Additionally, a number of people showed sympathy for the Jews and expressed their solidarity by wearing similar badges. It is estimated that 70,000 people belonged to the resistance out of a population of 8,000,000. The Belgian resistance movement aided many Jews to go into hiding. At the time of the German invasion the Jewish population of Belgium was 65,696. Of these some 44 percent perished, most deported to Auschwitz. With help, some 25,000 Belgian Jews hid from the Germans.
Sources: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny; Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews 1933-1945.
an extermination campExtermination Camps: (Vernichtungslager), Nazi camps in Poland in which millions of Jews were murdered as part of the “Final Solution”, as well as hundreds of thousands of Roma (Gypsies), non-Jewish Poles and Soviet prisoners of war.
The 6 extermination camps were Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka. The purpose of these six camps was the systematic murder of human beings and the disposal of their bodies. Killing was done in a factory-like manner by poison gas in gas chambers or gas vans. The bodies were buried in mass graves or burned. The overwhelming majority of victims in these 6 camps were Jews. Sources: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; USHMM, Historical Atlas of the Holocaust. located outside of the small town of the same name in southeastern Poland. Approximately 600,000 Jews and a few hundred Roma (Gypsies) were murdered there.
On November 1, 1941, as part of Aktion Reinhard, the Germans began construction of the death camp. The Belzec site had good rail connections and was located in the center of the large Jewish populations of Lvov, Cracow and Lublin. The commandant of Belzec was Christian Wirth. His former experience was in the Euthanasia Program, which was code named T-4 by the Nazis. He commanded 30 SS guards and 120 Ukrainian volunteers who had been Soviet prisoners-of-war.
The physical dimensions of the camp were small; it was 886 feet square. The victims arrived by trains, each consisting of 40 to 60 boxcars packed with 100 to 130 Jews per car. The conditions in the boxcars were horrible with no water or toilet facilities. Twenty of the freight cars at a time were shunted into the camp. The Jews were told that they were at a transit camp and that they would be sent for distribution to labor camps after they had been disinfected and washed. The men were separated from the women and small children and both groups forced to strip. The women were shorn of their hair, which was to made into felt footwear.
The victims were driven by blows into the “showers,” the gas chambers. Carbon monoxide gas produced by a diesel engine outside caused death in 20 to 30 minutes. The corpses were lying in all directions, and the gas gave their lips a bluish tint. A group of Jewish prisoners took out the bodies, a “dentist” removed gold teeth, and the bodies were thrown into ditches and buried. After the camp had been shut down, the bodies were dug up and cremated. Then the ashes were buried in the same ditches. After the camp was dismantled, farmers in the area swarmed over the site looking for money and gold that the Jews were rumored to have hidden in the ground. To stop this the Germans had the area plowed over and sown, and trees were planted.
Belzec was liberated by the Soviet army and is now a national shrine. Christian Wirth was killed by partisans during the war. Only a few individuals succeeded in escaping from Belzec. One, Rudolf Reder escaped in November 1942 and wrote a booklet about his experiences. Another, Chaim Hirschmann, was killed in Lublin after the war on March 19, 1946.
Sources: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; USHMM, Historical Atlas of the Holocaust; Gilbert, Atlas of the Holocaust.
(1886-1973), the first prime minister of Israel. As head of the Jewish Agency in October and November 1945, Ben-Gurion made a tour of the DP camps in Europe. He encouraged the survivors to join in establishing a Jewish homeland in Israel and calling world attention to their plight.
Ben-Gurion’s attitude toward European Jewry during the Holocaust has been the subject of controversy. As one of the leaders of the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Palestine) Ben-Gurion’s actions appear to have been based on the conviction that the Yishuv would not be able to rescue many Jews from the Nazis. In conflict with many members of his own political party, he opposed broad-based rescue programs and public demonstrations. He supported small scale and what he regarded as more realistic rescue plans.
In May 1939, Jewish immigration to then British Palestine had been severely restricted by a White Paper issued by the British Government. The White Paper prohibited refugees from Hitler from seeking refuge in Palestine during the war. When Ben-Gurion spoke to the DP camps in 1945 the White Paper still prohibited the survivors from starting new lives in Palestine. The state of Israel was proclaimed on May 14, 1948.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
(Or “Bricha”--Hebrew “flight”), the movement after WWII which organized groups of Holocaust survivors to escape from eastern Europe to the West and from there to reach Palestine.
Abba Kovner, partisan fighter and poet, was one of the early organizers. Jews fled from eastern Europe through Czechoslovakia and Romania to Italy, Austria and Germany. In the wake of the pogrom in Kielce, Poland on July 4, 1946, when 42 Holocaust survivors were murdered, a large number of Jews, around 95,000, fled Poland. This flood overwhelmed the Bericha organization. The approximately 250,000 Jews who used the Bericha routes made it the largest organized illegal mass movement in modern times.
Source: Encyclopedia of Holocaust.
the popular shrine of great national and religious significance to Poland. It is located in the city of Czestochowa in the monastery of Jasna Gora (Bright Mountain). The Black Madonna is a painting on wood that depicts the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus. Its origins are ancient and obscure.
The monastery was founded on the mountain in 1382, and the painting came there soon afterwards. The icon was damaged in 1430 by Hussites who slashed the face of the portrait. The painting is credited with the miracle of having protected the monastery from the invading Swedish army in 1655-56. The shrine continues to be the focus of pilgrimages and a site for confirmations and marriages.
Source: Dydynski, Poland, Lonely Planet Travel Survival Guide.
the accusation that Jews kill gentiles to obtain their blood to use in Jewish rituals. Commonly it was asserted that the blood of children was used to make matzah for the Passover seder.
Source: Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews.
a infamous pogromPogrom: (Yiddish from Russian “devastation” or “destruction” from the roots po “like” and from gram “thunder”), the killing and looting of innocent people usually with official sanction, most often applied to Jews. Source: Webster’s Third International Dictionary Unabridged.. The German army entered Czestochowa, Poland on September 3, 1939. The next day, later called “Bloody Monday,” a pogrom was organized in which a few hundred Jews were murdered. On December 25, 1939 a second pogrom took place and the Great Synagogue was set on fire.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
one of the largest concentration camps on German soil. It was constructed in 1937 in Weimar, Germany. Originally a camp for political prisoners, 10,000 Jews were imprisoned there after Kristallnacht.
At that time the Jews were subjected to extraordinarily hard treatment then released to their families. The object was to get them to emigrate from Germany. With the outbreak of WWII thousands of Poles were housed there in a tent camp. Armament factories were established nearby and the camp’s population grew.
In January 1945, as Soviet forces swept through Poland, thousands of concentration camp prisoners were marched in death marches to Buchenwald. On April 11, 1945, the camp was liberated by American forces. Some 21,000 prisoners were liberated including 4,000 Jews, and including 1,000 children. In 1947, 31 members of the camp staff were tried by an American court. Two were sentenced to death and four to life imprisonment.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
section of Auschwitz-Birkenau where the belongings of those deported to the camp were sorted and stored in preparation for being shipped to Germany.
Rudolf Vrba who worked in Canada described mountains of trunks, of blankets, of pots and pans, of clothing and hundreds of prams. He reflects that these stolen items were destined to be sent to a blockaded Germany to boost the morale of civilians.
Prisoners who were assigned to Canada could forage food from the booty and were allowed to wear regular civilian clothes.
Sources: Gilbert, The Holocaust; Vrba, Escape from Auschwitz at 158-59, 165-66.
(Kapo), trustee, an SSSS: (Schutzstaffel, Protection Squad), originally Adolf Hitler’s bodyguard, it became the elite guard of the Nazi state and its main tool of terror. The SS maintained control over the concentration camp system and was instrumental in the mass shootings conducted by the Einsatzgruppen.
Led by Heinrich Himmler, its members had to submit with complete obedience to the authority of the supreme master, Hitler and himself. SS officers had to prove their own and their wives’ racial purity back to the year 1700, and membership was conditional on Aryan appearance.
In the charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (commonly known as the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials) the SS was held to be a criminal organization. Its members were considered war criminals involved in brutalities and killings in the concentration camps, mass shootings in the occupied countries, involvement in the slave labor program and the murder of prisoners-of-war. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. appointed prisoner who was the head of a labor squad. He or she retained this privileged position by terrorizing subordinate prisoners.
The Capos were an instrument of the camp regime of humiliation and cruelty, and their role was to break the spirits of the prisoners.
The Capos had warm clothing, enough to eat and lived in a reserved section to the prison barracks. In many instances Capos who mistreated prisoners were put on trial after the war.
Source: Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle; Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; various survivor memoirs (see Bibliography).
a Jewish elementary school where Jewish children were instructed in Hebrew, the language of prayer, and chumashthe Five Books of Moses.
Source: Binyomin Kaplan.
in August 1940 about 1,000 young men from Czestochowa between the ages of 18 and 25 were sent to the forced labor camp in Cieszanow (Lublin Province); almost none survived.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
(Konzentrationslager; KL), places of detention where people were imprisoned often under barbaric conditions. They were a repressive feature of the Nazi regime from 1933 to 1945. The camps were under the jurisdiction of the SSSS: (Schutzstaffel, Protection Squad), originally Adolf Hitler’s bodyguard, it became the elite guard of the Nazi state and its main tool of terror. The SS maintained control over the concentration camp system and was instrumental in the mass shootings conducted by the Einsatzgruppen.
Led by Heinrich Himmler, its members had to submit with complete obedience to the authority of the supreme master, Hitler and himself. SS officers had to prove their own and their wives’ racial purity back to the year 1700, and membership was conditional on Aryan appearance.
In the charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (commonly known as the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials) the SS was held to be a criminal organization. Its members were considered war criminals involved in brutalities and killings in the concentration camps, mass shootings in the occupied countries, involvement in the slave labor program and the murder of prisoners-of-war. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. and Heinrich HimmlerHimmler, Heinrich: (1900-1945), leader of the SS, head of the Gestapo, minister of the interior and, next to Adolf Hitler, the most powerful man in Nazi Germany. Himmler was a fanatic racist whose theories originated with Adolf Hitler, but who used his superior administrative abilities to put into practice the “Final Solution,” which was the attempted elimination of the Jewish people. The killing of Jews was for Himmler and other Nazi ideologues the means to achieve the supremacy of the Ayran race and to purify the world of “sub-humans”.
Himmler took part in the Nazi putsch of 1923. He joined the SS in 1925 and became its head in 1929. In 1933, he became head of the Gestapo. In 1936 he won control of the entire police force throughout Germany, his title being Reichsfuhrer-SS und Chef der Duetschen Polizei (Reich Leader of the SS and Chief of the German Police). His concern for racial purity was exemplified by the men selected for the SS. They were chosen for their Nordic qualities which were thought to be the characteristics of a “master race.”
Initially, 4 Einsatzgruppen were delegated to begin a campaign of mass murder as they followed the German Army in its invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. But mass shootings had practical problems. This led to the creation of extermination camps in Poland and the use of poison gas. Through the SS Himmler dominated the concentration camps and extermination camps in Poland.
Near the end of the war Himmler, realizing the inevitability of a German defeat, made a number of humanitarian gestures hoping to ingratiate himself with the Allies. Through Count Folke Bernadotte, head of the Swedish Red Cross, he allowed the release to Sweden of 10,000 women from the Ravensbruck concentration camp, 2,000 of whom were Jewish. Himmler committed suicide before he could be brought to trial as a war criminal. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. .
Initially established to house political prisoners, they evolved into an elaborate camp system. Although the term is sometimes used generically to designate all Nazi camps, there were distinctions between them. The extensive camp system included forced labor camps (Arbeitslager), prisoner-of-war camps (Kriegsgefangenlager) and extermination campsExtermination Camps: (Vernichtungslager), Nazi camps in Poland in which millions of Jews were murdered as part of the “Final Solution”, as well as hundreds of thousands of Roma (Gypsies), non-Jewish Poles and Soviet prisoners of war.
The 6 extermination camps were Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka. The purpose of these six camps was the systematic murder of human beings and the disposal of their bodies. Killing was done in a factory-like manner by poison gas in gas chambers or gas vans. The bodies were buried in mass graves or burned. The overwhelming majority of victims in these 6 camps were Jews. Sources: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; USHMM, Historical Atlas of the Holocaust. (Vernichtungslager). There were almost three thousand camps in the vast camp system established across Europe.
Concentration camps contained political opponents, Communists, Jews, Roma (Gypsies), Jehovah’s Witnesses, male homosexuals, and common criminals. The Jews and the Roma, having been selected for eventual extermination, received the worst treatment. Also selected for extermination were certain groups of Soviet prisoners-of-war.
Each category of prisoner had different conditions of imprisonment which affected their chances for survival. In the camp hierarchy the common criminals and the political prisoners got the best treatment. The different categories were identified by color badges worn on the prisoners’ clothes. Yellow trianglesTriangle: a color badge worn on the clothes of a concentration camp inmate that disclosed the reason for his incarceration.
Green triangles were for criminals; yellow triangles were for Jews; red triangles for political prisoners; purple triangles for Jehovah’s Witnesses; pink triangles for homosexuals; black triangles for Roma (Gypsies) and “asocials”; and blue triangles for emigrants. Sources: Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle; USHMM, Stars, Triangles and Markings educational poster. were for Jews.
Certain features were common to all camps: Violations of orders were punished severely by beatings or torture. Prisoners were also liable to be beaten for no reason at all. Kapos, chosen from the ranks of common criminals or political prisoners, were assigned to supervise their fellow inmates. They were often as brutal as the guards. Guards and Kapos might bribed with cigarettes, food or gold, if prisoners could get these contraband items through their camp jobs or connections. Roll calls which could last many hours were a daily feature of camp life and were held outdoors in all kinds of weather. Roll calls were especially feared by the Jewish prisoners because they would sometimes be accompanied by selections where the weaker prisoners would be culled for extermination.
Food was inadequate and many prisoners were in advanced states of starvation. The morning meal was a kind of ersatz coffee and a small ration of bread. A watery turnip or cabbage soup would be the midday meal. The evening meal might be a repetition of the morning. Survival might depend on augmenting the standard food rations by bribery or by “connections” or by holding a special job in the camp kitchen, in the camp hospital, or in camp administration. Many camps did not provide adequate fresh water and the water was polluted.
The prisoners slept on hard boards in tiered bunks in poorly ventilated barracks. Overcrowding added to the misery. If the prisoners were assigned to work, it was often to dangerous and exhausting labor. The accusation of sabotage was punishable by death. In penal sections the work might consist of meaningless tasks, such as moving rocks from one place to another.
Illness was rampant, particularly dysentery, typhus, scabies and tuberculosis. If the camp had a hospital, it was dangerous to go there because there were frequent selections. Lice were impossible to keep under control as there was no soap and little water to wash with. In those camps where uniforms were assigned, they were the characteristic blue and grey striped jacket and trousers or striped dress. No underwear was issued. Many prisoners succumbed to the ill treatment and lack of food. If they died at work, their bodies had to be carried back for the evening roll call. Many would be found dead in the morning having died during the night. Some prisoners committed suicide, the most common method being to touch the electrified barbed wires that surrounded many camps.
The prisoners who survived the camp experience in addition to plain luck usually had some sustaining reason to keep them going. Often that reason would be another prisoner who was a comrade or a relative who could be depended upon and with whom one shared food and information. Or the reason might be to rejoin loved ones after the war. After liberation many survivors suffered from what today has become known as post-traumatic shock syndrome. Psychiatric problems, nervousness and recurrent nightmares were frequent symptoms.
Sources: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; USHMM, Stars, Triangles and Markings educational poster; various survivor memoirs (see Bibliography).
(Krakow), one of the oldest and largest cities in Poland, and the location of one of the most important Jewish communities in Europe.
On March 20, 1941 the ghettoGhetto: an enclosed district where Jews were forced to live separate from the rest of society.
The concentration of Jews in ghettos was a policy implemented by Germany in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The establishment of ghettos was often the first stage in a process which was followed by deportation to concentration camps and selection for extermination or for forced labor. Forcing Jews into ghettos required their ingathering from surrounding areas and their segregation from local populations. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. was sealed off. It was confined to a small area and heavily overcrowded. By the end of October 1942 after the second deportation (Aktion)the ghetto was split into two parts. On March 13, 1943 the residents of part “A” were sent to the Plaszow labor camp and on March 14 the residents of part “B” were transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau and gassed there.
There was a resistance movement in the ghetto. Their most famous operation was an attack on the Cygeneria café in which 11 Germans were killed and 13 wounded. Attempts were made to join in partisan activities in the surrounding area but the resistance encountered problems because of their isolation and because of the hostile attitude of units of the AK (Armia Krajowa Polish Home Army) which did not take kindly to Jewish partisanPartisans: guerrilla forces operating in enemy occupied territory. In World War II there were partisan groups of various political, national and religious complexions operating mainly in eastern Europe and the Balkans. The major areas of activity in eastern Europe were in Belorussia, in Lithuania and in the Ukraine. There were also Jewish underground movements that functioned within the ghettos and camps of Poland. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. operations.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
established on April 9, 1941, it was sealed off on August 23, 1941. The ghetto population suffered from overcrowding, hunger and epidemics. On September 23, 1942 a large scale deportation (Aktion) began. By October 5, 1942, about 39,000 people had been deported to Treblinka extermination camp, while 2,000 had been executed on the spot.
The now diminished ghetto within new borders was called the “small ghetto.” A Jewish Fighting Organization was set up in December 1942. On January 4, 1943 it rose in armed resistance to the Nazis. The next day the Nazis shot 250 children and old people.
On June 26, 1943, the Germans began liquidating the “small ghetto.” The remaining 4,000 Jews were transferred to two slave labor camps organized at the city’s HASAGHASAG:(Hugo Schneider Aktiengesellschaft-Metalwarenfabrik, Leipzig), one of the privately owned German industrial companies that used concentration camp prisoners to manufacture armaments. HASAG was the third largest after I.G. Farben and the Hermann Goring Werke.
HASAG operated four camps in Czestochowa, Poland. The largest, HASAG-Apparatexbau held seven thousand Jewish prisoners. In general, the policy of Vernichtung durch Arbeit (“extermination through work”) was applied. Selections were held when those no longer fit for work were killed. From July 1944 to early 1945, HASAG transferred most of its equipment and Jewish workers to Germany. HASAG personnel were put on trial by the Allies in the later Nuremberg proceedings.Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. factories. Before leaving the city on January 17, 1945, the Germans managed to deport almost 6,000 inmates from the HASAG factories to concentration camps inside Germany. The 5,200 inmates who succeeded in hiding were liberated by the Soviet army.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
one of the first Nazi concentration camps opened March 22, 1933, and located 10 miles from Munich. Dachau was a model institution for subsequent camps and a training ground for the SS.
Originally intended for political prisoners, Communists and Socialists, later Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses who resisted the draft and homosexuals were sent there. During the last months of the war Dachau became a dumping ground for inmates from other camps and conditions deteriorated further. Up to 1,600 prisoners were crowded into barracks intended for 200.
Dachau was liberated on April 29, 1945 by the US Seventh Army. A trial was held by an American court and 36 members of the SS staff were sentenced to death.
In Dachau, as well as at other Nazi camps, medical “experiments” were carried out where prisoners were used as human guinea pigs. At Dachau there were high-altitude and freezing experiments and a malaria and tuberculosis station. There were tests to see if seawater could be made drinkable. Many inmates who were forced to participate died horrible deaths. The Nuremberg Military Tribunals found that the medical experiments served the ideological objectives of the Nazi regime and that none of them were of any scientific value.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
(Polish Gdansk), a city on the Baltic Sea, held alternatively by Germany and Poland.
After WWI Danzig was made a “free city” under the auspices of the League of Nations. This gave Poland access to the sea and cut off East Prussia from the rest of Germany. Over ninety percent of the population was German and wanted to be re-united with Germany.
In the elections of 1933 the fascist National Socialists became the leading political power. Anti-Semitic policies were enforced. Danzig was reunited with Germany on September 1, 1939 with the outbreak of WWII.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
the dispersion of the Jews among the lands outside of Israel, in Hebrew “Galut,” (literally, “exile”).
Source: Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish.
(DP), one of approximately 1,500,000 to 2,000,000 persons who had been uprooted by the war and who by the end of 1945 had refused to or could not return to their prewar homes.
When the war ended, most Jewish DP’s were housed in camps behind barbed wire in poor conditions. Until the State of Israel was established in 1948, legal immigration to Palestine was blocked by official British policy. Immigration to the United States in meaningful numbers was also severely restricted until the passage of the Displaced Persons’ Act in 1948. Between 1945 and 1952 approximately 400,000 DP’s immigrated to the United States, of whom approximately 20 percent, or 80,000, were Jewish. Between 1948 and 1951, almost 700,000 Jews emigrated to Israel, including more than 2/3 of the Jewish displaced persons in Europe.
Displaced Persons camps were set up at the end of WWII to house the millions of uprooted persons who were unwilling or unable to return to their homes. By the end of 1946, the number of Jewish DP’s was 250,000, of whom 185,000 were in Germany, 45,000 in Austria and 20,000 in Italy.
The Jewish survivors languished in camps primarily in the Allied zones of occupation in Germany. At first the DPs lived behind barbed wire fences under guard in camps that included former concentration camps. For example, in the British zone the survivors were held at the former Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Some DP’s were housed in better conditions in residential facilities. Eventually, the Jews gained recognition as a special group with their own needs and put into separate facilities.
Sources: USHMM, Historical Atlas of the Holocaust; Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
the district capital of the Ukraine in the former Soviet Socialist Republic. On the eve of World War II it had a Jewish population of some 80,000 out of a total population of 500,000.
During WWII the northern Ukraine with its wide expanses of forests and swamps became an area of extensive Soviet partisan activity. The forest areas provided refuge to Jews who fled extermination and to escaped Jewish prisoners-of-war. Jewish partisanPartisans: guerrilla forces operating in enemy occupied territory. In World War II there were partisan groups of various political, national and religious complexions operating mainly in eastern Europe and the Balkans. The major areas of activity in eastern Europe were in Belorussia, in Lithuania and in the Ukraine. There were also Jewish underground movements that functioned within the ghettos and camps of Poland. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. groups in the Ukraine were not able to maintain a separate Jewish identity but were required to be incorporated within the Soviet units.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
(1892-1982), labor leader and president of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) in New York from 1932 to 1966.
He started as a fabric cutter. Under his leadership the ILGWU became one of the most successful unions in America. In 1934, the ILGWU joined with other organizations in forming the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC), which was involved in anti-Nazi work in Europe and in post-war relief for child survivors.
Sources: www.biography.com; Lebowitz, “Jewish Labor Committee,” www.remember.org/educate/labor.html.
(Operational Squad), mobile killing squads composed of SSSS: (Schutzstaffel, Protection Squad), originally Adolf Hitler’s bodyguard, it became the elite guard of the Nazi state and its main tool of terror. The SS maintained control over the concentration camp system and was instrumental in the mass shootings conducted by the Einsatzgruppen.
Led by Heinrich Himmler, its members had to submit with complete obedience to the authority of the supreme master, Hitler and himself. SS officers had to prove their own and their wives’ racial purity back to the year 1700, and membership was conditional on Aryan appearance.
In the charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (commonly known as the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials) the SS was held to be a criminal organization. Its members were considered war criminals involved in brutalities and killings in the concentration camps, mass shootings in the occupied countries, involvement in the slave labor program and the murder of prisoners-of-war. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. and police personnel which followed the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Operating in the rear of the front lines and with the assistance of the German Army, Einsatzkommandos were deployed to organize the mass shootings of Jews, Roma (Gypsies), Communist leaders and prisoners-of-war.
The method employed was to shoot the victims in ravines, abandoned quarries or huge trenches. These murders were performed without regard for age or gender. By the spring of 1943, when the Germans began their retreat from Soviet territory, the Einsatzgruppen had murdered 1,250,000 Jews and hundreds of thousands of other Soviet nationals. The Einsatzgruppen sent back to Berlin detailed reports of their activities, which were later introduced as evidence at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials. Some of the most notorious locations of Eisatzgruppen massacres were at Babi Yar (Kiev), Ponary (Vilna), Rumbula (Riga) and Fort IX (Kovno).
Source: The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
"My God, My God," reminiscent of Psalms 22:1, "My God, My God, Why have You forsaken me?"
Source: Psalms
one of a number of Jewish private schools in Vilna. This high school was distinguished by the fact that it was progressive, secular and that Polish was the language of instruction.
Long after the war the records of the school were found by a former student, Yulian Rafes, who collected many of them into a book. It gives a glimpse into the lives of a privileged class of Vilna students before the war.
Source: Rafes, The Way We Were Before Our Destruction.
(Vernichtungslager), Nazi camps in Poland in which millions of Jews were murdered as part of the “Final Solution”, as well as hundreds of thousands of Roma (Gypsies), non-Jewish Poles and Soviet prisoners of war.
The 6 extermination camps were Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka. The purpose of these six camps was the systematic murder of human beings and the disposal of their bodies. Killing was done in a factory-like manner by poison gas in gas chambers or gas vans. The bodies were buried in mass graves or burned. The overwhelming majority of victims in these 6 camps were Jews.
Sources: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; USHMM, Historical Atlas of the Holocaust.
(Endlosung), the Nazis’ program to murder every Jew in Europe. Initiated by Adolf Hitler in the summer of 1941 in the wake of his advances into the Soviet Union, the Final Solution was the culmination of years of Nazi Jewish policy.
The phrase, “Final Solution,” was just one of the euphemisms used by the Nazis to signify their program of murder. The Final Solution was a secret that had to be disguised in seemingly innocent sounding formulations. Other euphemisms for the mass murder were: “Liquidated” “Finished Off” “Special Treatment” “Cleansing” “Elimination” “Resettlement” “Treated Appropriately” and “Made Free of Jews.
As early as 1919 Hitler wrote that he advocated an “anti-Semitism of reason.” His goal was the removal of Jews altogether from German society. The “Jewish Question” remained central to Nazi philosophy throughout the 20’s and 30’s. Hitler compared the Jew to a tuberculosis bacillus that had to be destroyed or they would destroy society. Hitler was obsessed with the Jews, who in his view were the prime destructive influence on the political, cultural and economic fortunes of Germany. In the view of the Nazi ideologues the removal of the Jews would allow Germany to realize her full potential and destiny.
At first Nazi policy was to coerce Jewish emigration. In the 1930’s a series of discriminatory laws against Jews were adopted. On November 9 and 10, 1938, KristallnachtKristallnacht: the Night of Broken Glass, was a pogrom organized by the Nazis which took place in Germany and Austria in 1938. Hundreds of synagogues were burned and thousands of Jewish shop windows were broken. “Kristallnacht” refers to the broken glass from the shop windows.
On October 29, 1938 the German police began driving 20,000 Polish citizens into the no-man’s land between Poland and Germany near the Polish town of Zbaszyn. On November 7, 1938, in Paris Herschel Grynszpan, a Jewish youth whose parents were among the expelled, shot Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomat.
The Nazis used this as a pretext for a pogrom against the Jews. On November 9 and 10, in all parts of Germany and in parts of Austria, Nazi storm troopers set fire to hundreds of synagogues and destroyed thousands of Jewish businesses. Around 100 Jews were murdered and 30,000 Jewish men were put into concentration camps. The Jews were fined 1,000,000,0000 marks to pay for the damage that was done to them, not by them. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. , a pogromPogrom: (Yiddish from Russian “devastation” or “destruction” from the roots po “like” and from gram “thunder”), the killing and looting of innocent people usually with official sanction, most often applied to Jews. Source: Webster’s Third International Dictionary Unabridged. against Jewish lives and property, occurred within Germany and Austria. At the outbreak of WWII schemes for mass expulsion were still being discussed. On January 30, 1939, Hitler spoke before the Reichstag threatening that if war broke out it would mean “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” With the conquest of Poland millions more Jews were brought under Nazi control.
Hitler’s decision to invade the Soviet Union was fateful in advancing the Nazi program from expulsion to mass murder. With each conquest of territory the Nazis controlled millions more Jews. Hitler made it clear to his generals that the invasion of the Soviet Union was a special kind of war, an ideological war against Bolshevism (which in his view was an offshoot of Judaism). With the invasion of the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, Hitler stood at the pinnacle of his power.
On July 31, 1941, Reinhard Heydrich met with Hermann Goring, then still official head of Nazi Jewish policy, to get his signature on a document authorizing a “total solution” to the Jewish question in Europe. The program of mass murder of men, women and children was begun in July and August of 1941. The EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen:(Operational Squad), mobile killing squads composed of SS and police personnel which followed the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Operating in the rear of the front lines and with the assistance of the German Army, Einsatzkommandos were deployed to organize the mass shootings of Jews, Roma (Gypsies), Communist leaders and prisoners-of-war.
The method employed was to shoot the victims in ravines, abandoned quarries or huge trenches. These murders were performed without regard for age or gender. By the spring of 1943, when the Germans began their retreat from Soviet territory, the Einsatzgruppen had murdered 1,250,000 Jews and hundreds of thousands of other Soviet nationals. The Einsatzgruppen sent back to Berlin detailed reports of their activities, which were later introduced as evidence at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials. Some of the most notorious locations of Eisatzgruppen massacres were at Babi Yar (Kiev), Ponary (Vilna), Rumbula (Riga) and Fort IX (Kovno).Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. , killing squads roving behind the front lines, began the mass shootings of Jews in the captured territories.
There were numerous problems with the firing squad method. Bringing the killers and the victims eye to eye created psychological problems for the executioners. Secrecy was also a problem as the events attracted onlookers. Mass graves were evidence of the mass crimes and they were deposited in numerous locations. In the fall of 1941, some Nazis in Heinrich Himmler’sHimmler, Heinrich: (1900-1945), leader of the SS, head of the Gestapo, minister of the interior and, next to Adolf Hitler, the most powerful man in Nazi Germany. Himmler was a fanatic racist whose theories originated with Adolf Hitler, but who used his superior administrative abilities to put into practice the “Final Solution,” which was the attempted elimination of the Jewish people. The killing of Jews was for Himmler and other Nazi ideologues the means to achieve the supremacy of the Ayran race and to purify the world of “sub-humans”.
Himmler took part in the Nazi putsch of 1923. He joined the SS in 1925 and became its head in 1929. In 1933, he became head of the Gestapo. In 1936 he won control of the entire police force throughout Germany, his title being Reichsfuhrer-SS und Chef der Duetschen Polizei (Reich Leader of the SS and Chief of the German Police). His concern for racial purity was exemplified by the men selected for the SS. They were chosen for their Nordic qualities which were thought to be the characteristics of a “master race.”
Initially, 4 Einsatzgruppen were delegated to begin a campaign of mass murder as they followed the German Army in its invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. But mass shootings had practical problems. This led to the creation of extermination camps in Poland and the use of poison gas. Through the SS Himmler dominated the concentration camps and extermination camps in Poland.
Near the end of the war Himmler, realizing the inevitability of a German defeat, made a number of humanitarian gestures hoping to ingratiate himself with the Allies. Through Count Folke Bernadotte, head of the Swedish Red Cross, he allowed the release to Sweden of 10,000 women from the Ravensbruck concentration camp, 2,000 of whom were Jewish. Himmler committed suicide before he could be brought to trial as a war criminal. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. organization began to develop a more efficient alternative.
The physical setting of the concentration camps could be combined with the techniques learned in the euthanasia program. The euthanasia program known as T-4 was developed in Germany to kill the mentally and physically defective. Add to this the deportation of victims using a modern transportation system and the Nazis developed an assembly line technique for killing thousands of victims, day after day. The first gassing experiments were conducted in Auschwitz in September 1941. In October and November, the construction of two extermination camps was begun at Belzec and Chelmno. Altogether, 6 extermination campsExtermination Camps: (Vernichtungslager), Nazi camps in Poland in which millions of Jews were murdered as part of the “Final Solution”, as well as hundreds of thousands of Roma (Gypsies), non-Jewish Poles and Soviet prisoners of war.
The 6 extermination camps were Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka. The purpose of these six camps was the systematic murder of human beings and the disposal of their bodies. Killing was done in a factory-like manner by poison gas in gas chambers or gas vans. The bodies were buried in mass graves or burned. The overwhelming majority of victims in these 6 camps were Jews. Sources: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; USHMM, Historical Atlas of the Holocaust. were constructed including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, MajdanekMajdanek: one of the 6 extermination camps, it was the only death camp located near a major city in a suburb of Lublin.
The camp covered 667 acres, had a double barbed wire electrified fence and 19 watchtowers. There were 7 gas chambers, a crematorium and 2 gallows. Nearly 500,000 people passed through the camp; of those, 360,000 perished, most from the harsh conditions at the camp, a minority were gassed.
In July 1944 the camp was abandoned; the staff destroyed documents and set fire to the buildings but they failed to destroy the gas chambers and most prisoner’s barracks.
Immediately after the camp’s liberation by the Soviet Army townspeople from Lublin gathered several tons of human ash into a great pile near the crematorium. The camp was designated a national museum. Wiktor Tolkin designed a mausoleum which stands next to the gas chamber-crematorium complex. Inside of a huge marble bowl open to the elements, protected by a dome top supported by 3 pillars, visitors gaze on a black mound of bone-flecked ash. Majdanek is one of the best preserved camps and its exhibits are a chilling reminder of its lethal history.Sources: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; Young, The Texture of Memory. , Sobibor and Treblinka.
The Wannsee Conference was conducted in a villa in Berlin on January 20, 1942. Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s most effective agent, and Adolf Eichmann, the Gestapo’s expert on Jewish affairs, met with the members of the most important civilian government ministries to secure their participation in the mass murder program. Various SSSS: (Schutzstaffel, Protection Squad), originally Adolf Hitler’s bodyguard, it became the elite guard of the Nazi state and its main tool of terror. The SS maintained control over the concentration camp system and was instrumental in the mass shootings conducted by the Einsatzgruppen.
Led by Heinrich Himmler, its members had to submit with complete obedience to the authority of the supreme master, Hitler and himself. SS officers had to prove their own and their wives’ racial purity back to the year 1700, and membership was conditional on Aryan appearance.
In the charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (commonly known as the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials) the SS was held to be a criminal organization. Its members were considered war criminals involved in brutalities and killings in the concentration camps, mass shootings in the occupied countries, involvement in the slave labor program and the murder of prisoners-of-war. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. , including Heinrich Muller of the Gestapo, were in attendance. Most of those attending already knew that Jews were being killed but they did not know the scope of the program.
In his opening speech Heydrich reiterated his authority from Goring to effect a “Final Solution” to the Jewish question. He stated that instead of emigration the official policy would be deportation to the east for labor. These evacuations to the east would only be a temporary solution. There would be a natural diminution of population. He said a remnant who survived would have to be treated accordingly because it represented the “germ cell of a new Jewish reconstruction if released.” There is no doubt that the audience understood that Heydrich meant death by ill treatment and killing by the use of euphemisms like “natural diminution” and “appropriate treatment”.
Sources: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews.
a term derived from the Greek word genos, “race” and the Latin work caedes, “killing.” The term as generally applied means the killing of persons belonging to a specific racial, ethnic, or religious group with the intent to destroy the group.
The term was invented by Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish jurist. Lemkin pointed out that the crime of genocide need not mean the immediate and total destruction of the group. It may also consist of a planned actions designed to destroy the basic components of a group’s distinctive existence such as its language, culture and national consciousness.
The term has taken on a specific legal meaning as defined by the United Nations Genocide Convention. It defined genocide as the following actions carried out against a national, ethnic, racial or religious group in order to destroy that group in full or in part: 1. Killing persons belonging to the group; 2. Causing grievous bodily or spiritual harm to members of the group; 3. Deliberately enforcing upon the group living conditions which could lead to its complete or partial extermination; 4. Enforcing measures designed to prevent births among the group; 5. Forcibly removing children from the group and transferring them to another group.
The term genocide is similar to the Crimes Against Humanity charge which was part of the indictment at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials (officially the International Military Tribunal or IMT) against the Nazi war criminals. It has been said that genocide is a component of the Holocaust but the Nazi crime against the Jewish people has features that surpass genocide. These features include: the use of mass production methods for the killing of human beings, the use of transportation systems to concentrate people from diverse geographical areas and the adoption of the legal and administrative capacity of the modern state to identify and separate the victims.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
an agreement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union on the eve of WWII. The pact was a temporary alliance of adversaries which secured Hitler’s eastern front and bought time for Soviet military preparedness. The agreement was breached by Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union less than 2 years later.
The Pact was signed one week before Germany attacked PolandPoland’s Defeat: On September 1, 1939, German troops invaded Poland. Polish defenses crumbled before the German onslaught of tanks, motorized vehicles and attacks by dive-bombers on the civilian population. The German theory of Blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) involved massive concentrated attack.
After two weeks Germany controlled western Poland except for Warsaw, which held out for two more weeks. Meanwhile, on September 17, 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east according to the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact signed in August 1939, which divided Poland into spheres of interest for each country. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. on September 1, 1939. It divided Poland into two spheres of influence with the eastern parts being of interest to the Soviet Union and the western parts being in the sphere of influence of Nazi Germany. The dividing line was along the Narew, Vistula and San rivers.
By a special protocol the Baltic states were recognized as part of the Soviet sphere, with Lithuania’s claim to Vilna acknowledged by the Germans. The pact which was supposed to last 10 years was terminated by the invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany on June 22, 1941.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
(Geheime Staatspolizei; Secret State Police), a police force, often members of the SSSS: (Schutzstaffel, Protection Squad), originally Adolf Hitler’s bodyguard, it became the elite guard of the Nazi state and its main tool of terror. The SS maintained control over the concentration camp system and was instrumental in the mass shootings conducted by the Einsatzgruppen.
Led by Heinrich Himmler, its members had to submit with complete obedience to the authority of the supreme master, Hitler and himself. SS officers had to prove their own and their wives’ racial purity back to the year 1700, and membership was conditional on Aryan appearance.
In the charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (commonly known as the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials) the SS was held to be a criminal organization. Its members were considered war criminals involved in brutalities and killings in the concentration camps, mass shootings in the occupied countries, involvement in the slave labor program and the murder of prisoners-of-war. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. , who were responsible for state security and the consignment of people to concentration camps.
The Gestapo’s main tool was the protective custody procedure which allowed it to take actions against “enemies of the Reich.” With Jews and Gypsies the Gestapo simply rounded them up; it was not necessary to give even the appearance of legality to their actions.
By 1934, Heinrich HimmlerHimmler, Heinrich: (1900-1945), leader of the SS, head of the Gestapo, minister of the interior and, next to Adolf Hitler, the most powerful man in Nazi Germany. Himmler was a fanatic racist whose theories originated with Adolf Hitler, but who used his superior administrative abilities to put into practice the “Final Solution,” which was the attempted elimination of the Jewish people. The killing of Jews was for Himmler and other Nazi ideologues the means to achieve the supremacy of the Ayran race and to purify the world of “sub-humans”.
Himmler took part in the Nazi putsch of 1923. He joined the SS in 1925 and became its head in 1929. In 1933, he became head of the Gestapo. In 1936 he won control of the entire police force throughout Germany, his title being Reichsfuhrer-SS und Chef der Duetschen Polizei (Reich Leader of the SS and Chief of the German Police). His concern for racial purity was exemplified by the men selected for the SS. They were chosen for their Nordic qualities which were thought to be the characteristics of a “master race.”
Initially, 4 Einsatzgruppen were delegated to begin a campaign of mass murder as they followed the German Army in its invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. But mass shootings had practical problems. This led to the creation of extermination camps in Poland and the use of poison gas. Through the SS Himmler dominated the concentration camps and extermination camps in Poland.
Near the end of the war Himmler, realizing the inevitability of a German defeat, made a number of humanitarian gestures hoping to ingratiate himself with the Allies. Through Count Folke Bernadotte, head of the Swedish Red Cross, he allowed the release to Sweden of 10,000 women from the Ravensbruck concentration camp, 2,000 of whom were Jewish. Himmler committed suicide before he could be brought to trial as a war criminal. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. became head of the Gestapo throughout Germany. Under Himmler’s leadership the Gestapo grew enormously. The Gestapo was a bureaucratic organization with many sections and branches. In 1939 the Gestapo was consolidated with other police forces to form the RSHA (Reich Security Main Office). The RSHA, including the Gestapo and the SS, assumed the task of enslaving the “inferior races” and carried out a major role in the “Final Solution”.
Besides Himmler, other notables in the organization were Reinhard Heydrich the architect of the Final Solution until his assassination by Czech and British agents, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who was tried and hung at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, Adolf Eichmann, who was in charge of Jewish deportations to the death camps and later tried in Israel, and Heinrich Muller.
Source: USHMM, Historical Atlas of the Holocaust.
an enclosed district where Jews were forced to live separate from the rest of society.
The concentration of Jews in ghettos was a policy implemented by Germany in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The establishment of ghettos was often the first stage in a process which was followed by deportation to concentration camps and selection for extermination or for forced labor. Forcing Jews into ghettos required their ingathering from surrounding areas and their segregation from local populations.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
(1922-1944) Lithuanian poet and partisan and author of “Zog Nit Keyn MolZog Nit Keyn Mol:Zog nit keyn mol, az du geyst dem letsten veg (“Never say that you are on the final road”), the so-called Partisan Song, written by Hirsh Glick. In April 1943 when news of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising reached the Vilna ghetto, Hirsh Glick wrote this defiant anthem. It has become the universal Hymn of the Holocaust Survivors. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. ,” the anthem of the partisansPartisans: guerrilla forces operating in enemy occupied territory. In World War II there were partisan groups of various political, national and religious complexions operating mainly in eastern Europe and the Balkans. The major areas of activity in eastern Europe were in Belorussia, in Lithuania and in the Ukraine. There were also Jewish underground movements that functioned within the ghettos and camps of Poland. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. .
He was born in a working class family in Vilna. He began to write poetry at age 13 and at 16 was co-founder of a group of poets who called themselves Yungvald (Young Forest). He was active in the artistic activities which were being carried out in the ghetto and participated in the underground movement which was preparing for a revolt.
He was later deported to concentration camps in Estonia where he continued to compose songs and poems. In July 1944, with the Russians approaching, he escaped into the forest to try to join up with the partisan fighters. He was never heard from again, and it is presumed he was caught by the Germans and executed. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
one of about 60 sub-camps of the Gross-RosenGross-Rosen:a concentraton camp located near a granite quarry of the same name in Lower Silesia. The working conditions involved backbreaking labor in the quarry and special work assignments during what were supposed to be hours of rest.
The camp was expanded into a network of 60 sub-camps involved in armaments production. The main camp held 10,000 and the sub-camps 80,000 prisoners.
The Jewish population of the camp varied. From March 1944 until January 1945 the camp received an uninterrupted flow of Jewish prisoners, including prisoners from the partially evacuated Auschwitz camps.
Gross-Rosen was evacuated in early February 1945 by rail and on death marches. Records show that 489 prisoners were sent to Dachau, 3,500 to Bergen-Belsen, 5,565 to Buchenwald, 4,930 to Flossenburg, 2,249 to Mauthausen and 1,103 to Mittelbau, however, the records are incomplete.Sources: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; Historical Atlas of the Holocaust. concentration camp located in Lower Silesia.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
greenhorns, inexperienced people, particularly new immigrants, used affectionately among the Holocaust survivors.
The term comes from the Yiddish word "grin" which means the color green.
Source: Shep Zitler.
a concentraton camp located near a granite quarry of the same name in Lower Silesia. The working conditions involved backbreaking labor in the quarry and special work assignments during what were supposed to be hours of rest.
The camp was expanded into a network of 60 sub-camps involved in armaments production. The main camp held 10,000 and the sub-camps 80,000 prisoners.
The Jewish population of the camp varied. From March 1944 until January 1945 the camp received an uninterrupted flow of Jewish prisoners, including prisoners from the partially evacuated Auschwitz camps.
Gross-Rosen was evacuated in early February 1945 by rail and on death marches. Records show that 489 prisoners were sent to DachauDachau:one of the first Nazi concentration camps opened March 22, 1933, and located 10 miles from Munich. Dachau was a model institution for subsequent camps and a training ground for the SS.
Originally intended for political prisonersCommunists and Socialists, later Jews, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses who resisted the draft and homosexuals were sent there. During the last months of the war Dachau became a dumping ground for inmates from other camps and conditions deteriorated further. Up to 1,600 prisoners were crowded into barracks intended for 200.
Dachau was liberated on April 29, 1945 by the US Seventh Army. A trial was held by an American court and 36 members of the SS staff were sentenced to death.
In Dachau, as well as at other Nazi camps, medical “experiments” were carried out where prisoners were used as human guinea pigs. At Dachau there were high-altitude and freezing experiments and a malaria and tuberculosis station. There were tests to see if seawater could be made drinkable. Many inmates who were forced to participate died horrible deaths. The Nuremberg Military Tribunals found that the medical experiments served the ideological objectives of the Nazi regime and that none of them were of any scientific value.Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. , 3,500 to Bergen-Belsen, 5,565 to Buchenwald, 4,930 to Flossenburg, 2,249 to MauthausenMauthausen: the main concentration camp for Austria located near an abandoned stone quarry.
It was created shortly after the Anschluss of Austria in March 1938 to handle criminal and “asocial elements.” It later became a penal camp and was known for its harsh treatment of prisoners. Inmates were forced as punishment to carry heavy stone blocks up 186 steps from the camp quarry. This stairway became known as the “Stairway of Death.” Mauthausen had over 60 sub-camps. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. and 1,103 to Mittelbau, however, the records are incomplete.
Sources: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; Historical Atlas of the Holocaust.
(Hugo Schneider Aktiengesellschaft-Metalwarenfabrik, Leipzig), one of the privately owned German industrial companies that used concentration camp prisoners to manufacture armaments. HASAG was the third largest after I.G. Farben and the Hermann Goring Werke.
HASAG operated four camps in Czestochowa, Poland. The largest, HASAG-Apparatexbau held seven thousand Jewish prisoners. In general, the policy of Vernichtung durch Arbeit (“extermination through work”) was applied. Selections were held when those no longer fit for work were killed. From July 1944 to early 1945, HASAG transferred most of its equipment and Jewish workers to Germany. HASAG personnel were put on trial by the Allies in the later Nuremberg proceedings.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
in the Jewish tradition it is a sign of piety to keep the head covered. The most familiar form of head covering is the yarmalke, a skullcap. The word “yarmalke” comes from the Aramaic phrase meaning “fear of the king.” One is supposed to constantly be mindful of God’s presence.
Source: Binyomin Kaplan
for Jews to hide in Christian society was a daunting task. Some of the challenges have been discussed by Nechama Tec with regard to Poland, and are applicable with modifications to other countries:
Source: Tec, When Light Pierced the Darkness, pgs. 27-51.
(1900-1945), leader of the SSSS: (Schutzstaffel, Protection Squad), originally Adolf Hitler’s bodyguard, it became the elite guard of the Nazi state and its main tool of terror. The SS maintained control over the concentration camp system and was instrumental in the mass shootings conducted by the Einsatzgruppen.
Led by Heinrich Himmler, its members had to submit with complete obedience to the authority of the supreme master, Hitler and himself. SS officers had to prove their own and their wives’ racial purity back to the year 1700, and membership was conditional on Aryan appearance.
In the charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (commonly known as the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials) the SS was held to be a criminal organization. Its members were considered war criminals involved in brutalities and killings in the concentration camps, mass shootings in the occupied countries, involvement in the slave labor program and the murder of prisoners-of-war. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. , head of the GestapoGestapo: (Geheime Staatspolizei; Secret State Police), a police force, often members of the SS, who were responsible for state security and the consignment of people to concentration camps.
The Gestapo’s main tool was the protective custody procedure which allowed it to take actions against “enemies of the Reich.” With Jews and Gypsies the Gestapo simply rounded them up; it was not necessary to give even the appearance of legality to their actions.
By 1934, Heinrich Himmler became head of the Gestapo throughout Germany. Under Himmler’s leadership the Gestapo grew enormously. The Gestapo was a bureaucratic organization with many sections and branches. In 1939 the Gestapo was consolidated with other police forces to form the RSHA (Reich Security Main Office). The RSHA, including the Gestapo and the SS, assumed the task of enslaving the “inferior races” and carried out a major role in the “Final Solution”.
Besides Himmler, other notables in the organization were Reinhard Heydrich the architect of the Final Solution until his assassination by Czech and British agents, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who was tried and hung at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, Adolf Eichmann, who was in charge of Jewish deportations to the death camps and later tried in Israel, and Heinrich Muller.Source: USHMM, Historical Atlas of the Holocaust. , minister of the interior and, next to Adolf Hitler, the most powerful man in Nazi Germany. Himmler was a fanatic racist whose theories originated with Adolf Hitler, but who used his superior administrative abilities to put into practice the “Final Solution,” which was the attempted elimination of the Jewish people. The killing of Jews was for Himmler and other Nazi ideologues the means to achieve the supremacy of the Ayran race and to purify the world of “sub-humans”.
Himmler took part in the Nazi putsch of 1923. He joined the SS in 1925 and became its head in 1929. In 1933, he became head of the Gestapo. In 1936 he won control of the entire police force throughout Germany, his title being Reichsfuhrer-SS und Chef der Duetschen Polizei (Reich Leader of the SS and Chief of the German Police). His concern for racial purity was exemplified by the men selected for the SS. They were chosen for their Nordic qualities which were thought to be the characteristics of a “master race.”
Initially, 4 EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen:(Operational Squad), mobile killing squads composed of SS and police personnel which followed the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Operating in the rear of the front lines and with the assistance of the German Army, Einsatzkommandos were deployed to organize the mass shootings of Jews, Roma (Gypsies), Communist leaders and prisoners-of-war.
The method employed was to shoot the victims in ravines, abandoned quarries or huge trenches. These murders were performed without regard for age or gender. By the spring of 1943, when the Germans began their retreat from Soviet territory, the Einsatzgruppen had murdered 1,250,000 Jews and hundreds of thousands of other Soviet nationals. The Einsatzgruppen sent back to Berlin detailed reports of their activities, which were later introduced as evidence at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials. Some of the most notorious locations of Eisatzgruppen massacres were at Babi Yar (Kiev), Ponary (Vilna), Rumbula (Riga) and Fort IX (Kovno).Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. were delegated to begin a campaign of mass murder as they followed the German Army in its invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. But mass shootings had practical problems. This led to the creation of extermination camps in Poland and the use of poison gas. Through the SS Himmler dominated the concentration camps and extermination campsExtermination Camps: (Vernichtungslager), Nazi camps in Poland in which millions of Jews were murdered as part of the “Final Solution”, as well as hundreds of thousands of Roma (Gypsies), non-Jewish Poles and Soviet prisoners of war.
The 6 extermination camps were Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka. The purpose of these six camps was the systematic murder of human beings and the disposal of their bodies. Killing was done in a factory-like manner by poison gas in gas chambers or gas vans. The bodies were buried in mass graves or burned. The overwhelming majority of victims in these 6 camps were Jews. Sources: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; USHMM, Historical Atlas of the Holocaust. in Poland.
Near the end of the war Himmler, realizing the inevitability of a German defeat, made a number of humanitarian gestures hoping to ingratiate himself with the Allies. Through Count Folke Bernadotte, head of the Swedish Red Cross, he allowed the release to Sweden of 10,000 women from the Ravensbruck concentration camp, 2,000 of whom were Jewish. Himmler committed suicide before he could be brought to trial as a war criminal.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
(1889-1945), dictator of Germany, launched the most destructive war in history. WWII involved the deaths of perhaps 50,000,000 men, women and children, including the 6,000,000 killed in the Holocaust.
Hitler’s political ideas are highly discredited today. He believed that the individual should submit to the authoritarian power of the state, that the inequality of the races was a law of nature, and that the superior races should rule over the inferior ones. He had a contempt for democracy, a fierce hatred of Jews and a belief in the heroic virtues of war.
HITLER’S RISE TO POWER
Hitler’s career was marked by a spectacular rise to power. Hitler went from being a marginal member of society, an impoverished artist living in a men’s hostel in Vienna, to being the dictator of one of the world’s strongest nations. His fall from power was equally spectacular. It involved the deaths of perhaps 50,000,000 men, women and children, including the 6,000,000 killed in the Holocaust. It left his nation, Germany, in ruins. It ended in a bunker under the streets of Berlin with a self-inflicted pistol shot.
Hitler’s rise to power was a function of his personal political talents and the tumultuous historical period in Germany following its defeat in the WWI. Hitler was a demagogue who had a hypnotic effect on others. He expounded his radical ideas in a shrill and screaming voice at mass rallies and by using the then new technology of radio broadcasts. Hitler would harangue and threaten his opponents. These were not empty threats. Hitler had a private army, the SA (Sturm Abteilungen = Storm Troopers), which would take to the streets to attack, intimidate and sometimes murder political opponents.
Germany in the 1920’s and 1930’s was a nation in turmoil. Forced to pay unpopular reparations as a consequence of the peace treaty with which WWI concluded (The Treaty of Versailles), Germany went through a period of hyperinflation when the German mark became almost worthless and a wheelbarrow of currency was required to buy basic necessities. In November 1923, one dollar was worth 130 billion German marks. Germany recovered from this crisis of hyperinflation only to be hit several years later by a worldwide depression which had begun in the United States. The depression hit Germany hard in 1931 and continued throughout 1932 and 1933. These were the years of Hitler’s rise to prominence on the national scene and his ascension to the post of Chancellor of Germany.
The social consequences of this depression were enormous. Germans saw the social fabric of their society crumbling. In such uncertain times radical solutions like Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei = Nazi Party) and the Communist party became attractive alternatives to centrist democratic government. The Weimar Republic, the democratic government which had been established after WWI, was fractionalized by competing political parties and impotent to face the growing crisis.
Hitler came to power by a combination of legal means and backroom politics. It culminated in his being made Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. Once in power he engineered the adoption of emergency powers in the form of the the so-called Enabling Law (Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich = Law for Removing the Distress of People and Reich) that allowed him to govern by decree, to suspend individual liberties and to abrogate the Constitution. Hitler’s dictatorship rested on the constitutional foundation of this single law. Six months later Hitler conducted a bloody purge within his own party and executed the leaders of the SA and carried out various political vendettas. On August 2, 1934, Hitler assumed the office of President as well as Chancellor and became Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Reich. With the army swearing personal allegiance to the man Adolf Hitler, his dictatorship of Germany became complete.
Source: Bullock, Hitler A Study in Tyranny.
is derived from the Greek word "holokauston" which originally meant a sacrifice totally burned by fire. In the 1950's the term came to be applied to the destruction of the Jews of Europe by the Nazi German state.
"Holocaust" is also used to describe the annihilation of other groups during World War II.
The Hebrew word "Shoah" meaning catastrophe or destruction also denotes the attempt to destroy European Jewry during WWII. "Shoah" first appeared in this context in a booklet concerned with aid for the Jews of Poland published in Jerusalem in 1940.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
the attempt to “disprove” that the Holocaust actually happened by means of spurious evidence and historical analysis, often by neo-fascists posing as academics or experts.
A notable group is The Institute for Historical Review and notable figures include Arthur Butz, Ernst Zundel and Fred Leuchter.
Source: Binyomin Kaplan
the tragedy of the destruction of Hungarian Jewy is that it came late in the war. The deaths of approximately 550,000 Hungarian Jews occurred between May and July 1944; most of them were gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Germany occupied Hungary on March 19, 1944 in response to the threat of the approaching Soviet Army. Prior to that time the authoritarian government of Hungary, although allied with Nazi Germany, resisted German demands to implement the Final Solution program.
The occupation forces included a Sonderkommando unit headed by Adolf Eichmann. Between May and July 1944 Eichmann succeeded in deporting 440,000 Jews. However, the Hungarian government stopped the deportations in July. In October 1944 when the fascist Arrow Cross Party overthrew the Horthy government in a coup d’etat Eichmann was able to resume his murderous activities.
Eichmann was opposed by efforts to rescue Hungarian Jews, most notably by the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg. Wallenberg saved the lives of tens of thousands of Jews in Budapest by creating safe houses and distributing protective passports, the so-called Swedish Schutz-Passes.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union.
The Union was formed in 1909 in response to a strike in New York when 20,000 women shirtwaist makers protested sweatshop conditions. In 1911, a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory killed 146 workers, many of them young girls. An inquiry revealed that the fire exits had been locked to prevent the girls from taking long work breaks. The tragedy gave an impetus to the movement for laws to protect workers.
In 1931, because of the Great Depression Union membership fell. David DubinskyDubinsky, David:(1892-1982), labor leader and president of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) in New York from 1932 to 1966.
He started as a fabric cutter. Under his leadership the ILGWU became one of the most successful unions in America. In 1934, the ILGWU joined with other organizations in forming the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC), which was involved in anti-Nazi work in Europe and in post-war relief for child survivors. Sources: www.biography.com; Lebowitz, “Jewish Labor Committee,” www.remember.org/educate/labor.html. , who was elected president in 1932, boosted Union membership from a low of 24,000 to 217,000 in just three years.
Just before America’s entry into World War II the ILGWU and its president, David Dubinsky,was instrumental in creating the Jewish Labor Committee(JLC). The JLC publicized the plight of European Jewry, raised emergency funds for partisan forces and ghetto fighters, rescued over a thousand political and cultural leaders.
After the war, the Jewish Labor Committee was actively involved in relief and rehabilitation work for the survivors. A special program entailed so-called adoptions, wherein American groups such as the ILGWU, other unions, and branches of the Workmen’s Circle, a social democratic Jewish fraternal organization, sponsored the cost of sustaining child survivors in the aftermath of the war.
Sources: ILGWU web site, JLC web site.
a leadership organization within the Jewish community in Palestine (Yishuv).
During the war it was concerned with the rescue of Jews in Europe; however, because of lack of resources, the indifference of the Allied powers and because of internal political divisions it was largely ineffective.
Some of its plans involved cash payments to Nazi controlled countries in return for the permission of Jews to emigrate. Negotiations took place; however, the Germans has no intention of allowing this to happen.
Of note were two proposals: In the summer of 1944 the Jewish Agency made repeated appeals to the Allies to bomb the extermination facilities at Auschwitz; the appeals were rejected on technical grounds. The Jewish Agency proposed to the British that Jewish parachutists be dropped behind enemy lines to promote partisan activities. Thirty-five men and two women including the heroic Hannah Szenes, were infiltrated into Europe.
In 1945, the it changed its objective to aiding war refugees.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
a brigade composed of Jewish volunteers from Palestine who enlisted in the British Army. They fought in Italy and were the only regular Jewish formation to fight in WWII under the Jewish flag, recognized as representing the Jewish people.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
(Judischer Ordnungsdienst), the Jewish police units organized in the ghettos by the JudenratJudenrat: a Jewish council created under German orders which was responsible for internal matters in a ghetto.
It was required to provide Jews for forced labor and to collect valuables to pay collective fines imposed by the Germans. The members of the Judenrat believed that by complying with German demands that could ameliorate the harsh realities of German administration. Frequently, they were able to set up hospitals and soup kitchens and to try to meet basic sanitary needs in the ghetto.
In the beginning the members tried to resist German pressure. However, as time went on, the Judenrat was forced to deliver Jews to the deportation trains that were bringing them to their deaths. Under pressure many members of the Judenrat cooperated with the Germans. However, there were many cases of resistance, of resignation, of support for the partisans, and of committing suicide rather than bending to German pressure. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. . The Jewish police collected people for forced labor, guarded the ghetto fences and gates and eventually seized people for deportations.
There was often misconduct and corruption among the police, and they were regarded with apprehension by the ghetto community. They and their families were, at first, exempt from deportation, but this exemption was rescinded when their usefulness to the Germans ceased.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
a Jewish council created under German orders which was responsible for internal matters in a ghettoGhetto: an enclosed district where Jews were forced to live separate from the rest of society.
The concentration of Jews in ghettos was a policy implemented by Germany in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The establishment of ghettos was often the first stage in a process which was followed by deportation to concentration camps and selection for extermination or for forced labor. Forcing Jews into ghettos required their ingathering from surrounding areas and their segregation from local populations. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. .
It was required to provide Jews for forced labor and to collect valuables to pay collective fines imposed by the Germans. The members of the Judenrat believed that by complying with German demands that could ameliorate the harsh realities of German administration. Frequently, they were able to set up hospitals and soup kitchens and to try to meet basic sanitary needs in the ghetto.
In the beginning the members tried to resist German pressure. However, as time went on, the Judenrat was forced to deliver Jews to the deportation trains that were bringing them to their deaths. Under pressure many members of the Judenrat cooperated with the Germans. However, there were many cases of resistance, of resignation, of support for the partisans, and of committing suicide rather than bending to German pressure.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
from an Aramaic word meaning “holy”, one of the most solemn and ancient of all Jewish prayers. The Kaddish is recited at a grave and on the anniversary of the death of a close relative.
Although the prayer itself contains no reference to death its use in this regard perhaps arose from the belief that saying the praises of God would help the souls of the dead find everlasting peace.
Besides the Mourner’s Kaddish, regular Kaddish is recited at every public prayer service.
Source: Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish.
a small labor camp located outside of the Vilna ghetto. It housed about 1250 workers and their families.
The camp resembled a ghetto more than a concentration camp in that families were not separated and the clothing was ordinary. The workers were engaged in making fur garments for the German army. This involved re-manufacturing confiscated civilian fur coats into winter uniforms.
On March 27, 1944, a deportation (Aktion; action) involving the children took place. It was said that the children were to be taken to a clinic near the camp to receive anti-typhoid shots. Some of the mothers went with their children to the “vaccinations.” Martin WeissWeiss, Martin:(1903-?), SS-Hauptscharfuhrer assigned to the Vilna ghetto, the so-called “Boss of Ponary.” For a time he was the SS liaison in charge of a Lithuanian executioner unit. This unit, consisting of 45 to 150 volunteers, was responsible for killing at least 48,000 Jews at Ponary.
There are numerous stories of Martin Weiss’ sadism and sarcastic sense of humor. Abraham Sutzkever testifed at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial in February 1946, of his killing Gitele Tarlo, an eleven year old girl. Sutzkever also wrote of Weiss’s torture killing of young Tzerna Morgenstern in “Geto Vilna,” and a similar story is told in Martin Gilbert’s “The Holocaust.” Another account, the story of Weiss’ assisting his girlfriend in the killing of singer Liuba Levitska, is told in “Yes, We Sang!” In February 1950, Martin Weiss was tried before a court in Wurzburg, Germany and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Sources: Arad, Ghetto in Flames; Ran, Jerusalem of Lithuania; Sutzkever, Getto Vilna; Kalisch, Yes, We Sang!; Gilbert, The Holocaust; Letter 10/31/97 from Satu Haase-Webb, Researcher, Office of the Historian at USHMM. arrived at the clinic, grabbed the children and loaded them onto trucks. The mothers resisted and several of them were put on the trucks also. One woman who shouted “Murderer” to Weiss was shot on the spot. The children were sent to death camps. With the Soviet army near and the German front collapsing, the inmates of Kalis were taken to PonaryPonary: a forest preserve located six miles from Vilna. Before the war it was used for outings and picnics, but it became a killing field for most of Vilna‘s Jews. The victims were shot to death by SS men and German police assisted by Lithuanian collaborators. Perhaps, 70,000 to 100,000 victims, the majority of them Jews, were murdered there. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. and murdered or sent to other camps further west.
Sources: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; Arad, Ghetto in Flames.
a Jewish community residing in a particular place. Designated leaders were responsible for the welfare of the community including education, burial and charity.
Source: Binyomin Kaplan.
a Hebrew term meaning “sanctifying the Name [of God]”, denotes exemplary conduct in connection with religious martyrdom.
Historically, the choice of accepting martyrdom was an option, and conversion or expulsion were alternatives. The Holocaust eliminated the element of choice.
Where rescue was impossible and resistance would be futile there are numerous accounts of Jews going to their deaths with dignity.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
site of a pogromPogrom: (Yiddish from Russian “devastation” or “destruction” from the roots po “like” and from gram “thunder”), the killing and looting of innocent people usually with official sanction, most often applied to Jews. Source: Webster’s Third International Dictionary Unabridged. in 1946 where 42 Holocaust survivors were killed by a mob. The massacre at Kielce convinced most survivors that they had no future in Poland.
a medium-sized city in southeast Poland. 22,000 Jews lived there before WWII. When the city was liberated by the Soviet army, only 2 Jews remained. Gradually, about a 150 former residents came back, and they lived in the Jewish community building.
At the beginning of July 1946 anti-Semitic rumors spread through the town. It was said that a missing Polish boy had been killed by the Jews to use his blood to make matzot. His body was said to be in the basement of the Jewish community building. On July 4 a mob gathered outside the building. The mob attacked and killed 42 Jews and wounded 50 more. Order was restored by the central government in Warsaw. Seven of the main instigators and killers were tried and executed, and the missing Polish boy was later found in a nearby village.
The pogrom was a turning point in the attempt to rebuild a Jewish community Poland. Kielce convinced most survivors that Poland had no future for them. Of the 244,000 Jews who had returned to Poland after the war, only 80,000 remained by 1951.
Sources: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead.
a system of rules and laws (the laws of kashrut) which for Jews govern the preparation and consumption of food.
Eating and drinking are for Jews religious acts where man takes from the bounty of God. Certain items are forbidden as food including blood, pork and fish without scales (e.g. shellfish). Other foods can be eaten separately but not together at the same meal. For example, milk cannot be eaten with meat, but each is a permissible food to be eaten separately within its own family of foods. The rules of kashrut are complex and in cases of doubt a Rabbi is consulted to make a decision according to the law.
Source: Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish.
(Lith. Kaunas) a city in central Lithuania which was the capital of independent Lithuania between 1920 and 1940. In 1940, all of Lithuania was incorporated into the Soviet Union.
On June 24, 1941, the third day of the invasion of the Soviet Union Kovno was occupied by the Germans. Even before the Germans began entering the city, Lithuanian gangs went on a rampage of murder. Thousands of Jews were moved to the Seventh Fort and other locations where they were mistreated then murdered by Lithuanian guards. A total of 10,000 Jews were murdered in June and July of 1941.
The Kovno ghetto was sealed off in August 1941. The killings continued. On October 28, 1941, the date of the "big Aktion" 9,000 Jews, half of them children, were taken to the Ninth Fort and murdered.
A period of relative calm ensued. Most of the 17,412 Jews left in the ghetto were put to forced labor. Like in most other large ghettos life was administered by a community organization headed by an elderly Jew. Welfare and educational organizations sprang up.
In June 1943, it was decided to impose a concentration camp regime on the ghetto. Young Jews organized resistance groups. At the end of 1943, 170 members of a resistance organization made off for partisanPartisans: guerrilla forces operating in enemy occupied territory. In World War II there were partisan groups of various political, national and religious complexions operating mainly in eastern Europe and the Balkans. The major areas of activity in eastern Europe were in Belorussia, in Lithuania and in the Ukraine. There were also Jewish underground movements that functioned within the ghettos and camps of Poland. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. bases in the Rudninkai forest, south of Vilna.
On July 8, 1944 as the Red Army approached Kovno the remaining Jews were transferred to concentration camps inside Germany, to Kaufering or Stutthof concentration camps. Ninety Jews were able to hold out in bunkers and lived to see the Red Army enter the city.
Source: Gutman, The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
a city in the Ukraine located near the Black Sea. By the time of its occupation on August 9, 1942, thousands of refugees had fled to Krasnodar to escape the advancing German army. During its occupation SonderkommandoSonderkommando: (Special Commando), 1. a prisoner slave labor group assigned to work in the killing area of an extermination camp. Few Sonderkommando survived as they were usually killed and replaced at periodic intervals. There were several Sonderkommando revolts. The group at Auschwitz-Birkenau staged an uprising in 1944 and set off an explosion that destroyed Crematorium IV.
2. A German unit that worked along with the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet territories. Their task was to obliterate the traces of mass slaughter by burning bodies. Sources: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; Historical Atlas of the Holocaust. 10a of Einsatzgruppe DEinsatzgruppen:(Operational Squad), mobile killing squads composed of SS and police personnel which followed the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Operating in the rear of the front lines and with the assistance of the German Army, Einsatzkommandos were deployed to organize the mass shootings of Jews, Roma (Gypsies), Communist leaders and prisoners-of-war.
The method employed was to shoot the victims in ravines, abandoned quarries or huge trenches. These murders were performed without regard for age or gender. By the spring of 1943, when the Germans began their retreat from Soviet territory, the Einsatzgruppen had murdered 1,250,000 Jews and hundreds of thousands of other Soviet nationals. The Einsatzgruppen sent back to Berlin detailed reports of their activities, which were later introduced as evidence at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials. Some of the most notorious locations of Eisatzgruppen massacres were at Babi Yar (Kiev), Ponary (Vilna), Rumbula (Riga) and Fort IX (Kovno).Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. operated in the city murdering thousands of Jews.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
a city in the Ukraine. It was occupied by the German army on September 9, 1941, and liberated by the Soviet army on November 29, 1942.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
the Night of Broken Glass, was a pogromPogrom: (Yiddish from Russian “devastation” or “destruction” from the roots po “like” and from gram “thunder”), the killing and looting of innocent people usually with official sanction, most often applied to Jews. Source: Webster’s Third International Dictionary Unabridged. organized by the Nazis which took place in Germany and Austria in 1938. Hundreds of synagogues were burned and thousands of Jewish shop windows were broken. “Kristallnacht” refers to the broken glass from the shop windows.
On October 29, 1938 the German police began driving 20,000 Polish citizens into the no-man’s land between Poland and Germany near the Polish town of Zbaszyn. On November 7, 1938, in Paris Herschel Grynszpan, a Jewish youth whose parents were among the expelled, shot Ernst vom Rath, a German diplomat.
The Nazis used this as a pretext for a pogrom against the Jews. On November 9 and 10, in all parts of Germany and in parts of Austria, Nazi storm troopers set fire to hundreds of synagogues and destroyed thousands of Jewish businesses. Around 100 Jews were murdered and 30,000 Jewish men were put into concentration camps. The Jews were fined 1,000,000,0000 marks to pay for the damage that was done to them, not by them.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
kommandant (commander) of a concentration camp.
Source: Dictionary of the Holocaust.
(Lidris) a town 60 miles south of Vilna. Between the World Wars it was part of Poland. In September 1939 it was annexed to the Soviet Union.
On June 30, 1941, it was occupied by the Germans. A ghetto was created there. Refugees from Vilna and other towns were settled there. In the period July through November 1941, when mass murder was taking place in Vilna, Lida was relatively calm and many Jews tried to flee there.
In May 1942, an “Aktion” was carried out in Lida and 5,670 Jews were killed. A partisanPartisans: guerrilla forces operating in enemy occupied territory. In World War II there were partisan groups of various political, national and religious complexions operating mainly in eastern Europe and the Balkans. The major areas of activity in eastern Europe were in Belorussia, in Lithuania and in the Ukraine. There were also Jewish underground movements that functioned within the ghettos and camps of Poland. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. organization was formed. Young Jews began to escape to the forests.
On the evening of September 17, 1943, a group of partisans came into the ghetto to lead Jews into the forest. However, the next day the ghetto was liquidated and the inhabitants were sent to the Majdanek extermination campExtermination Camps: (Vernichtungslager), Nazi camps in Poland in which millions of Jews were murdered as part of the “Final Solution”, as well as hundreds of thousands of Roma (Gypsies), non-Jewish Poles and Soviet prisoners of war.
The 6 extermination camps were Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka. The purpose of these six camps was the systematic murder of human beings and the disposal of their bodies. Killing was done in a factory-like manner by poison gas in gas chambers or gas vans. The bodies were buried in mass graves or burned. The overwhelming majority of victims in these 6 camps were Jews. Sources: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; USHMM, Historical Atlas of the Holocaust. . The partisans were caught in this liquidation. Only a few managed to escape at the last minute.
Altogether, 500 Jews fled from Lida into the forest. Some 300 reached partisan units. Some 100 were still alive when Lida was liquidated in July 1944.
Sources: Gutman, The Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; Arad, Ghetto In Flames.
a sub-camp of MauthausenMauthausen: the main concentration camp for Austria located near an abandoned stone quarry.
It was created shortly after the Anschluss of Austria in March 1938 to handle criminal and “asocial elements.” It later became a penal camp and was known for its harsh treatment of prisoners. Inmates were forced as punishment to carry heavy stone blocks up 186 steps from the camp quarry. This stairway became known as the “Stairway of Death.” Mauthausen had over 60 sub-camps. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. created in May 1944. It held a maximum of 5,615 prisoners.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
due to the tangled history of the Vilna region the Polish Jews who came from Lithuania were accorded better treatment than the other Jewish prisoners-of-war held by the Germans.
The city of Vilna had been taken by Poland in 1920 from independent Lithuania during the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-20. The August 1939 German-Soviet Non-Aggression PactGerman-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact: an agreement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union on the eve of WWII. The pact was a temporary alliance of adversaries which secured Hitler’s eastern front and bought time for Soviet military preparedness. The agreement was breached by Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union less than 2 years later.
The Pact was signed one week before Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939. It divided Poland into two spheres of influence with the eastern parts being of interest to the Soviet Union and the western parts being in the sphere of influence of Nazi Germany. The dividing line was along the Narew, Vistula and San rivers.
By a special protocol the Baltic states were recognized as part of the Soviet sphere, with Lithuania’s claim to Vilna acknowledged by the Germans. The pact which was supposed to last 10 years was terminated by the invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany on June 22, 1941.Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. recognized Vilna as being an area of Poland that was under the Soviet sphere of influence.
In the period leading up to WWII, since from 1920 Vilna had incorporated into Poland, Vilna Jews served in the Polish army. PolandPoland’s Defeat: On September 1, 1939, German troops invaded Poland. Polish defenses crumbled before the German onslaught of tanks, motorized vehicles and attacks by dive-bombers on the civilian population. The German theory of Blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) involved massive concentrated attack.
After two weeks Germany controlled western Poland except for Warsaw, which held out for two more weeks. Meanwhile, on September 17, 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east according to the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact signed in August 1939, which divided Poland into spheres of interest for each country. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. was invaded by Germany on September 1, 1939, and was quickly defeated. On September 17, 1939 the Soviet Union pursuant to the German-Soviet Pact occupied parts of Poland within its sphere of influence, which included Vilna.
In a treaty with the neutral government of Lithuania the Soviets got the privilege of stationing Russian troops on Lithuanian soil. In October 1939, in return for this privilege the Soviet Union returned Vilna to then independent Lithuania. On August 3, 1940 after an artificially created incident the Soviet Union annexed Lithuania.
When Germany defeated the Polish army it captured altogether 60,000 to 65,000 Jewish soldiers. The Jews were immediately separated from the prisoner-of-war population for harsh treatment and many died, some 25,000, by the spring of 1940.
In late 1939 the Germans began releasing Jewish prisoners. These demobilized prisoners were sent to Polish ghettosGhetto: an enclosed district where Jews were forced to live separate from the rest of society.
The concentration of Jews in ghettos was a policy implemented by Germany in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The establishment of ghettos was often the first stage in a process which was followed by deportation to concentration camps and selection for extermination or for forced labor. Forcing Jews into ghettos required their ingathering from surrounding areas and their segregation from local populations. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. and most perished, suffering the fate of the ghetto population.
However, the Lithuanian Jews were treated as ordinary prisoners-of-war and not singled out as Jews for harsh treatment or demobilization. Of the Polish soldiers who were from Lithuania 72 survived to liberation.
Sources: Tec, Defiance; Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; Ran, Jerusalem of Lithuania.
located in the town of Lubaczow near Przemysl, Poland. The ghettoGhetto: an enclosed district where Jews were forced to live separate from the rest of society.
The concentration of Jews in ghettos was a policy implemented by Germany in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The establishment of ghettos was often the first stage in a process which was followed by deportation to concentration camps and selection for extermination or for forced labor. Forcing Jews into ghettos required their ingathering from surrounding areas and their segregation from local populations. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. was established in October 1942 and liquidated in January 1943. Seven thousand Jews were kept in apartments located in the center of town. Five to six families lived in each apartment. Twenty-five hundred were shipped to the extermination camp at Belzec. The rest were shot and buried in Lubaczow.
Source: Mogilanski, The Ghetto Anthology.
the Majdanek death camp was located adjacent to and within sight of the city of Lublin. The headquarters of the SSSS: (Schutzstaffel, Protection Squad), originally Adolf Hitler’s bodyguard, it became the elite guard of the Nazi state and its main tool of terror. The SS maintained control over the concentration camp system and was instrumental in the mass shootings conducted by the Einsatzgruppen.
Led by Heinrich Himmler, its members had to submit with complete obedience to the authority of the supreme master, Hitler and himself. SS officers had to prove their own and their wives’ racial purity back to the year 1700, and membership was conditional on Aryan appearance.
In the charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (commonly known as the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials) the SS was held to be a criminal organization. Its members were considered war criminals involved in brutalities and killings in the concentration camps, mass shootings in the occupied countries, involvement in the slave labor program and the murder of prisoners-of-war. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. , and Sipo and the SDSD: (Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsfuehrers-SS), SS security and intelligence service. The SD played an important role in carrying out the Final Solution.
SD officers served in Einsatzgruppen, police and other security units. It was established in 1932 under Reinhard Heydrich and in 1938 incorporated into the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office, RSHA). Sources: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; Historical Atlas of the Holocaust. were located in Lublin approximately 3 miles NE of the Majdanek camp.
Source: Historical Atlas of the Holocaust.
one of about 60 sub-camps of the Gross-RosenGross-Rosen:a concentraton camp located near a granite quarry of the same name in Lower Silesia. The working conditions involved backbreaking labor in the quarry and special work assignments during what were supposed to be hours of rest.
The camp was expanded into a network of 60 sub-camps involved in armaments production. The main camp held 10,000 and the sub-camps 80,000 prisoners.
The Jewish population of the camp varied. From March 1944 until January 1945 the camp received an uninterrupted flow of Jewish prisoners, including prisoners from the partially evacuated Auschwitz camps.
Gross-Rosen was evacuated in early February 1945 by rail and on death marches. Records show that 489 prisoners were sent to Dachau, 3,500 to Bergen-Belsen, 5,565 to Buchenwald, 4,930 to Flossenburg, 2,249 to Mauthausen and 1,103 to Mittelbau, however, the records are incomplete.Sources: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; Historical Atlas of the Holocaust. concentration camp located in Lower Silesia.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
one of the 6 extermination campsExtermination Camps: (Vernichtungslager), Nazi camps in Poland in which millions of Jews were murdered as part of the “Final Solution”, as well as hundreds of thousands of Roma (Gypsies), non-Jewish Poles and Soviet prisoners of war.
The 6 extermination camps were Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka. The purpose of these six camps was the systematic murder of human beings and the disposal of their bodies. Killing was done in a factory-like manner by poison gas in gas chambers or gas vans. The bodies were buried in mass graves or burned. The overwhelming majority of victims in these 6 camps were Jews. Sources: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; USHMM, Historical Atlas of the Holocaust. , it was the only death camp located near a major city in a suburb of Lublin.
The camp covered 667 acres, had a double barbed wire electrified fence and 19 watchtowers. There were 7 gas chambers, a crematorium and 2 gallows. Nearly 500,000 people passed through the camp; of those, 360,000 perished, most from the harsh conditions at the camp, a minority were gassed.
In July 1944 the camp was abandoned; the staff destroyed documents and set fire to the buildings but they failed to destroy the gas chambers and most prisoner’s barracks.
Immediately after the camp’s liberation by the Soviet Army townspeople from Lublin gathered several tons of human ash into a great pile near the crematorium. The camp was designated a national museum. Wiktor Tolkin designed a mausoleum which stands next to the gas chamber-crematorium complex. Inside of a huge marble bowl open to the elements, protected by a dome top supported by 3 pillars, visitors gaze on a black mound of bone-flecked ash. Majdanek is one of the best preserved camps and its exhibits are a chilling reminder of its lethal history.
Sources: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; Young, The Texture of Memory.
the main concentration camp for Austria located near an abandoned stone quarry.
It was created shortly after the Anschluss of Austria in March 1938 to handle criminal and “asocial elements.” It later became a penal camp and was known for its harsh treatment of prisoners. Inmates were forced as punishment to carry heavy stone blocks up 186 steps from the camp quarry. This stairway became known as the “Stairway of Death.” Mauthausen had over 60 sub-camps.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
(1911-1978?), doctor and SS officer, in May 1943 he volunteered to go to Auschwitz and remained there until its evacuation on January 18, 1945. He was noted for his sadism.
Mengele played a prominent role in the selections where deportees were either sent to be registered in the camp or sent to immediate extermination. Mengele’s imperious presence at these selections is noted in numerous survivor memoirs.
Mengele also conducted pseudoscientific experiments at Auschwitz using twins and dwarfs as human guinea pigs. One series of experiments involved dripping chemicals into his victims’ eyes in order to attempt to change their color. He killed his victims himself with injections into their hearts and carried out postmortem examinations on their bodies.
Mengele’s doctoral disertation was titled “The Racial Morphological Investigation of the Front Submaxilla Section in Four Racial Groups.” His research in this regard has been called a precursor to his later work in Auschwitz.
In 1949 Mengele turned up in Argentina where he was given asylum. In 1960 West Germany asked for his extradition, but Mengele escaped to Brazil and from there to Paraguay. He reputedly drowned in a swimming accident in Brazil in 1978.
Sources: Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle; Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
(Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; NSDAP) National Socialist German Workers’ Party, the party led by Adolf Hitler and the only legal party in Germany from 1934 to 1945. The party was based on the so called leadership principle (Fuhrerprinzip). At its head stood the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler. The party’s structure was authoritarian and centralist.
Its political power grew steadily during the 1930’s when the catastrophe of hyper-inflation wrecked the German economy. However, it never achieved an absolute majority in a free election, achieving 43.9 percent of the vote in the elections of March 5, 1933. The Nazi party was extinguished for all practical purposes with the suicide of Adolf Hitler on April 30, 1945.
Two basic elements of its ideology were antisemitism and pan-German nationalism. Only a person of German blood could be a citizen of the state. This excluded Jews and foreigners. The Germans were considered to be a master race entitled by right to conquer areas in the east. The humiliating defeat of Germany in World War I was blamed on Jewish leftists through invoking the stab-in-the-back myth. For Adolf Hitler, the war he unleashed with the invasion of Poland in September 1939 was a means of realizing the Nazi dream of a German master race’s empire in eastern Europe.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
a small town to the east of Vilna which was incorporated into the city of Vilna (Vilnius) in 1947. It was the site of a small labor camp, the last camp in the Vilna district to be liquidated in July 1943 because of suspected partisanPartisans: guerrilla forces operating in enemy occupied territory. In World War II there were partisan groups of various political, national and religious complexions operating mainly in eastern Europe and the Balkans. The major areas of activity in eastern Europe were in Belorussia, in Lithuania and in the Ukraine. There were also Jewish underground movements that functioned within the ghettos and camps of Poland. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. activity. The workers were taken to PonaryPonary: a forest preserve located six miles from Vilna. Before the war it was used for outings and picnics, but it became a killing field for most of Vilna‘s Jews. The victims were shot to death by SS men and German police assisted by Lithuanian collaborators. Perhaps, 70,000 to 100,000 victims, the majority of them Jews, were murdered there. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. and killed.
Several days before the liquidation The "Leon Group" of FPO partisans escaped from the Vilna Ghetto by deserting a wood cutting work detail. The members of the "Leon Group" passed through the labor camp at Nowa Wilejka on their way to join other partisans in the Narocz forests. Fourteen members of the Nowa Wilejka labor camp insisted on joining the partisan group.
Near the bridge over the river Vileyka 20 miles north of Vilna the group of 35 fell into an ambush. Nine were killed and the rest scattered into the forest. Thirteen of the group gathered together and made it to the Narocz forests, a distance of 90 miles from Vilna, 4 days later.
Source: Arad, Ghetto In Flames.
There were 6 orchestras at Auschwitz including a women’s orchestra at Birkenau and a male orchestra at Auschwitz I which consisted of 100 musicians.
Their activities included playing music for the prisoners who were marching to work and for the arrival of important guests at the camp. In addition, they played at parties for the SS and gave formal concerts for the camp staff.
Various survivor memoirs mention the orchestra’s playing for the arrival of deportees to give them a false sense of comfort. There were orchestras at most of the major concentration and extermination camps.
Sources: informal conversation with Bret Werb, Music Archivist at the USHMM; Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
(Organization for Rehabilitation through Training), an international organization for developing skilled trades and agriculture among Jews. ORT established a vocational training network for Jewish Displaced PersonsDisplaced Person:(DP), one of approximately 1,500,000 to 2,000,000 persons who had been uprooted by the war and who by the end of 1945 had refused to or could not return to their prewar homes.
When the war ended, most Jewish DP’s were housed in camps behind barbed wire in poor conditions. Until the State of Israel was established in 1948, legal immigration to Palestine was blocked by official British policy. Immigration to the United States in meaningful numbers was also severely restricted until the passage of the Displaced Persons’ Act in 1948. Between 1945 and 1952 approximately 400,000 DP’s immigrated to the United States, of whom approximately 20 percent, or 80,000, were Jewish. Between 1948 and 1951, almost 700,000 Jews emigrated to Israel, including more than 2/3 of the Jewish displaced persons in Europe.
Displaced Persons camps were set up at the end of WWII to house the millions of uprooted persons who were unwilling or unable to return to their homes. By the end of 1946, the number of Jewish DP’s was 250,000, of whom 185,000 were in Germany, 45,000 in Austria and 20,000 in Italy.
The Jewish survivors languished in camps primarily in the Allied zones of occupation in Germany. At first the DPs lived behind barbed wire fences under guard in camps that included former concentration camps. For example, in the British zone the survivors were held at the former Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Some DP’s were housed in better conditions in residential facilities. Eventually, the Jews gained recognition as a special group with their own needs and put into separate facilities. Sources: USHMM, Historical Atlas of the Holocaust; Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. .
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
guerrilla forces operating in enemy occupied territory. In World War II there were partisan groups of various political, national and religious complexions operating mainly in eastern Europe and the Balkans. The major areas of activity in eastern Europe were in Belorussia, in Lithuania and in the Ukraine. There were also Jewish underground movements that functioned within the ghettosGhetto: an enclosed district where Jews were forced to live separate from the rest of society.
The concentration of Jews in ghettos was a policy implemented by Germany in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The establishment of ghettos was often the first stage in a process which was followed by deportation to concentration camps and selection for extermination or for forced labor. Forcing Jews into ghettos required their ingathering from surrounding areas and their segregation from local populations. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. and camps of Poland.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
(1867- 1935), Poland’s prominent leader between WWI and WWII. At the end of WWI Poland was granted renewed independence after 130 years of partition and political subjugation. Pilsudski, a popular military figure and political moderate, came to power in a coup in 1926 and continued to lead the country until his death in 1935.
He favored a policy (known as “sanacja”) that would unite all the ethnic groups in Poland, the Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Germans, Lithuanians and the Jews with the ethnic Poles. At the opposite end of the political spectrum was Roman Dmowski whose Endeks party espoused a policy of Polish domination and “Poland for the Poles.”
Marshal Pilsudski was a pragmatic and charismatic leader whose political heirs were unable to maintain the coalition on which his power was based. After his death a national boycott of Jewish businesses was organized and an campaign was started that would prohibit the kosherKosher: a system of rules and laws (the laws of kashrut) which for Jews govern the preparation and consumption of food.
Eating and drinking are for Jews religious acts where man takes from the bounty of God. Certain items are forbidden as food including blood, pork and fish without scales (e.g. shellfish). Other foods can be eaten separately but not together at the same meal. For example, milk cannot be eaten with meat, but each is a permissible food to be eaten separately within its own family of foods. The rules of kashrut are complex and in cases of doubt a Rabbi is consulted to make a decision according to the law.Source: Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish. slaughtering of animals.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
(Yiddish from Russian “devastation” or “destruction” from the roots po “like” and from gram “thunder”), the killing and looting of innocent people usually with official sanction, most often applied to Jews.
Source: Webster’s Third International Dictionary Unabridged.
On September 1, 1939, German troops invaded Poland. Polish defenses crumbled before the German onslaught of tanks, motorized vehicles and attacks by dive-bombers on the civilian population. The German theory of Blitzkrieg (“lightning war”) involved massive concentrated attack.
After two weeks Germany controlled western Poland except for Warsaw, which held out for two more weeks. Meanwhile, on September 17, 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east according to the German-Soviet Non-Aggression PactGerman-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact: an agreement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union on the eve of WWII. The pact was a temporary alliance of adversaries which secured Hitler’s eastern front and bought time for Soviet military preparedness. The agreement was breached by Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union less than 2 years later.
The Pact was signed one week before Germany attacked Poland on September 1, 1939. It divided Poland into two spheres of influence with the eastern parts being of interest to the Soviet Union and the western parts being in the sphere of influence of Nazi Germany. The dividing line was along the Narew, Vistula and San rivers.
By a special protocol the Baltic states were recognized as part of the Soviet sphere, with Lithuania’s claim to Vilna acknowledged by the Germans. The pact which was supposed to last 10 years was terminated by the invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany on June 22, 1941.Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. signed in August 1939, which divided Poland into spheres of interest for each country.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
Jewish attitudes regarding Poles and Poles regarding Jews have been shaped by a complex and long history. Many Holocaust survivors have negative attitudes toward the Poles based on their experiences in the 1930’s and 1940’s.
While for a thousand years Poles and Jews lived in close physical proximity and became economically inter-dependent they remained highly separate groups: separated by culture, by religion and by national identity.
The Holocaust made matters even more complicated. Polish Jews accounted for over half of all the victims of the Holocaust and the death camps were established on Polish soil. Yet Poles were themselves victims of German barbarity; after the Jews and the Roma (Gypsies) the Poles were the most tormented national group. Millions of Poles were murdered by the Nazis during WWII.
The Poles were also witnesses to the destruction of the Jews. Most were passive witness who did nothing to aid their neighbors nor did they assist the Germans in destroying them. But by remaining passive (it is arguable) they took on a kind of bystander guilt and complicity.
A minority of Poles co-operated with the Germans by turning in Jews who were in hiding to get rewards of money or goods. A different minority became the so-called Righteous Gentiles who risked their own lives to save Jews. A majority of the Righteous Gentiles honored at Yad Vashem are Poles.
Jewish Holocaust survivors grew up in Poland in the 1920’s and 1930’s and survived in Poland of the 1940’s. Their memories in the present are based on what were current events back then. Their experience of Poland ended when they left the country; and most either never returned after WWII or left after the massacre of 42 Jews in KielceKielce: site of a pogrom in 1946 where 42 Holocaust survivors were killed by a mob. The massacre at Kielce convinced most survivors that they had no future in Poland.
a medium-sized city in southeast Poland. 22,000 Jews lived there before WWII. When the city was liberated by the Soviet army, only 2 Jews remained. Gradually, about a 150 former residents came back, and they lived in the Jewish community building.
At the beginning of July 1946 anti-Semitic rumors spread through the town. It was said that a missing Polish boy had been killed by the Jews to use his blood to make matzot. His body was said to be in the basement of the Jewish community building. On July 4 a mob gathered outside the building. The mob attacked and killed 42 Jews and wounded 50 more. Order was restored by the central government in Warsaw. Seven of the main instigators and killers were tried and executed, and the missing Polish boy was later found in a nearby village.
The pogrom was a turning point in the attempt to rebuild a Jewish community Poland. Kielce convinced most survivors that Poland had no future for them. Of the 244,000 Jews who had returned to Poland after the war, only 80,000 remained by 1951. Sources: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead. by a Polish mob in 1946. Poland was a very anti-Semitic society in the years just before and after WWII.
During the War Jews were appalled by the lack of aid they received from their neighbors and what they took to be avariciousness as some Poles usurped Jewish property now suddenly become available. The small number of Poles who preyed on Jews by turning them in for rewards made every Pole a risk to Jewish confidence. Jewish partisans were attacked and killed by Polish right wing nationalist groups who instead of making common cause against the Germans regarded the Jews as their enemies also.
It is hard to know how many Poles had sympathy for their Jewish neighbors but were paralyzed into inaction by fear. Yet incidents described above were frequent enough that it was a common Jewish perception of Polish attitudes that they were either indifferent to Jewish suffering or positively glad that the Jews were being removed.
Historically, Jewish identity in the DiasporaDiaspora: the dispersion of the Jews among the lands outside of Israel, in Hebrew “Galut,” (literally, “exile”). Source: Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish. was based on insularity. Insularity from the majority of the population ensured Jewish perpetuity and continuity. Religious strictures meant that Jews could not eat the same foods that other people ate and many Jews did not dress the way that Poles dressed.
The Poles for their part were passionately devoted to the Catholic religion which taught them that the Jews were responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. Many Jews feared having stones flung at them or worse at Easter.
Differences and insularity led to mutual suspicion and stereotyping. Typically, the Jews were regarded as sharp dealing in business and comical in their affectations. The Poles were regarded as ignorant and overly fond of vodka.
Poland has been enormously important to the Jews. Large numbers of Jews had settled in Poland because they found relative freedom from anti-Semitism and economic restrictions. Before WWII Poland was the center of the European Jewish world. Yet, by the 20th century for complex reasons of nationalism and economic competition Polish anti-Semitism had become harsh and pervasive in public life.
Two political parties represented divergent alternatives. The Polish Socialist Party of Jozef PilsudskiPilsudski, Jozef:(1867- 1935), Poland’s prominent leader between WWI and WWII. At the end of WWI Poland was granted renewed independence after 130 years of partition and political subjugation. Pilsudski, a popular military figure and political moderate, came to power in a coup in 1926 and continued to lead the country until his death in 1935.
He favored a policy (known as “sanacja”) that would unite all the ethnic groups in Poland, the Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Germans, Lithuanians and the Jews with the ethnic Poles. At the opposite end of the political spectrum was Roman Dmowski whose Endeks party espoused a policy of Polish domination and “Poland for the Poles.”
Marshal Pilsudski was a pragmatic and charismatic leader whose political heirs were unable to maintain the coalition on which his power was based. After his death a national boycott of Jewish businesses was organized and an campaign was started that would prohibit the kosher slaughtering of animals. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. adopted a policy of pluralistic and inclusive nationalism. The National Democratic Party of Roman Dmowski (known as Endecja) advocated a policy of “integral nationalism;” this meant it favored a monolithic state populated by those of ethnic Polish descent and of the Roman Catholic religion.
Following WWI when the newly constituted Polish state emerged from the Versailles peace conference there began a period of civil conflict. The resulting bloodshed led to pogroms against Jews. Prior to this time anti-Jewish violence had been rare in Poland. Jews were identified with the Communists.
During Pilsudski’s rule anti-Semitism moderated somewhat. However, in the 4 years between his death in 1935 and the beginning of WWII there was an increasing tide of anti-Semitism in national life.
During the 1930’s when Poland was hit by massive unemployment as a result of the worldwide depression anti-Semitism became rampant. National policy was such that jobless Jews were excluded from welfare benefits. The Endecja party promoted a national boycott of Jewish merchants that so radical as to advocate the confiscation of Jewish businesses.
At the universities Jewish enrollment was restricted and Jews had to sit in a segregated area of the classroom. The restrictions were so inclusive that while in 1921 Jews made up 24.6% of the student population by 1938 their share was down to only 8%. There was physical violence as well. Right-wing students assaulted their Jewish associates with canes and razors.
In the late 1930’s the Polish government became increasingly concerned with the “Jewish Question.” The favored solution was mass Jewish emigration. Under the guise of animal rights there was a national movement to forbid the Jewish ritual slaughter or kosheringKosher: a system of rules and laws (the laws of kashrut) which for Jews govern the preparation and consumption of food.
Eating and drinking are for Jews religious acts where man takes from the bounty of God. Certain items are forbidden as food including blood, pork and fish without scales (e.g. shellfish). Other foods can be eaten separately but not together at the same meal. For example, milk cannot be eaten with meat, but each is a permissible food to be eaten separately within its own family of foods. The rules of kashrut are complex and in cases of doubt a Rabbi is consulted to make a decision according to the law.Source: Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish. of animals. It has been pointed out that anti-Semitism is not the same thing as mass murder. Polish anti-Semitism never envisioned wholesale murder.
In the post-War period Communism made the Polish-Jewish attitudes and even more murky. Communism in Poland needed to use the past to show that the present regime was the progressive outcome of historical necessity. Nazi barbarity was opposed to Socialist humanitarianism. The Communist used the Jewish victims of the Holocaust by erasing their Jewish identity. Auschwitz was portrayed as a monument to internationalism.
Polish nationalists opposed to the 4 decades of Communist rule identified their oppressors as being of Jewish origin. Some Communist leaders had been of Jewish background but the stereotype belied statistics. And the Communist leaders of Jewish heritage had rejected their Jewish identity. Then in 1968 the Communist government expelled the majority of the Jews who had remained in Poland, some 20,000 people.
Today there are signs in Poland of a interest in learning about and preserving the artifacts of Jewish culture. There is a Jewish festival in Cracow. One can tour Jewish museums and sites. Poles have preserved and catalogued the graves in Jewish cemeteries. Yet there are also Poles who fight to put up crosses at Auschwitz and express anti-Semitic untruths.
Gilbert, The Holocaust; Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead.
a forest preserve located six miles from Vilna. Before the war it was used for outings and picnics, but it became a killing field for most of Vilna‘s Jews. The victims were shot to death by SS men and German police assisted by Lithuanian collaborators. Perhaps, 70,000 to 100,000 victims, the majority of them Jews, were murdered there.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
a city in central Poland of about 100,000 population before World War II, approximately one-third Jewish.
After Radom was seized by the German army on September 8, 1939 it was incorporated within the Generalgouvernement. The Generalgouvernement was a German administrative unit which was organized in occupied central and southern Poland but not directly incorporated into the German Reich.
Anti-Jewish persecutions and abductions to forced labor preceded the establishment in March, 1941 of the Radom ghetto. Allotted rations in the ghetto were 100 grams (3.5 oz) of bread daily per person. Hundreds were shot attempting to smuggle food in from the outside. Eventually, most of the ghetto residents were deported to Treblinka extermination camp. A few hundred Jewish survivors returned after the war to settle in Radom, but soon left the city.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
the chief rabbi of a Chassidic group. He is treated with veneration and often consulted in a wide variety of matters, including business, marriage, and religious concerns. The position is often inherited, and many dynasties were named for the cities in Poland and Russia in which Chassidim resided.
Source: Binyomin Kaplan.
(1918-1967) an American neo-Nazi who achieved notoriety out of proportion to the minuscule number of his followers due to his flair for publicity. He founded the American Nazi Party in 1958 and was assassinated by one of his former followers.
He and his “storm troopers” would appear in full Nazi regalia after informing the media in advance. In May 1961, he sent word to the New Orleans Police Department that he intended to picket the premier of the movie “Exodus.” In 1967, he was assassinated by one of his discontented followers.
Sources: Powell, When Hate Came to Town, www.biography.com.
(1908-1974), Sudeten businessman and protector of Jews during the HolocaustHolocaust: is derived from the Greek word "holokauston" which originally meant a sacrifice totally burned by fire. In the 1950's the term came to be applied to the destruction of the Jews of Europe by the Nazi German state.
"Holocaust" is also used to describe the annihilation of other groups during World War II.
The Hebrew word "Shoah" meaning catastrophe or destruction also denotes the attempt to destroy European Jewry during WWII. "Shoah" first appeared in this context in a booklet concerned with aid for the Jews of Poland published in Jerusalem in 1940.Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. . Oskar Shindler was the subject of an acclaimed film by Steven Spielberg and book by Thomas Kneally.
In 1939, Oskar Schindler in the wake of the German invasion went to Poland looking for business opportunities. In Cracow he took over a Jewish firm which manufactured enamel kitchenware products. Schindler employed mainly Jewish workers at his factory protecting them from deportations.
When the CracowCracow: (Krakow), one of the oldest and largest cities in Poland, and the location of one of the most important Jewish communities in Europe.
On March 20, 1941 the ghetto was sealed off. It was confined to a small area and heavily overcrowded. By the end of October 1942 after the second deportation (Aktion)the ghetto was split into two parts. On March 13, 1943 the residents of part “A” were sent to the Plaszow labor camp and on March 14 the residents of part “B” were transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau and gassed there.
There was a resistance movement in the ghetto. Their most famous operation was an attack on the Cygeneria cafe in which 11 Germans were killed and 13 wounded. Attempts were made to join in partisan activities in the surrounding area but the resistance encountered problems because of their isolation and because of the hostile attitude of units of the AK (Armia Krajowa Polish Home Army) which did not take kindly to Jewish partisan operations. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. ghettoGhetto: an enclosed district where Jews were forced to live separate from the rest of society.
The concentration of Jews in ghettos was a policy implemented by Germany in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The establishment of ghettos was often the first stage in a process which was followed by deportation to concentration camps and selection for extermination or for forced labor. Forcing Jews into ghettos required their ingathering from surrounding areas and their segregation from local populations. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. was brutally liquidated and its inhabitants sent to the infamous Plaszow concentration camp, Schindler used his influence with German officials to set up a branch of the camp in his factory. He shielded some 900 Jewish workers from the horrors of the Plaszow camp. Plaszow was commanded by the infamous Amon Goeth (1908-1946) whose excesses included shooting at passing prisoners from his balcony. After the war Amon Goeth was tried and executed for his crimes.
In October 1944, with the approach of the Russian army, Schindler moved his factory from Cracow to Brunnlitz and took his Jewish workers with him, including 300 Jewish women who had been sent to Auschwitz. Schindler’s list refers to the list of workers who were transferred to Brunnlitz.
Schindler used his connections and his jovial personality to ingratiate himself and win favors from SSSS: (Schutzstaffel, Protection Squad), originally Adolf Hitler’s bodyguard, it became the elite guard of the Nazi state and its main tool of terror. The SS maintained control over the concentration camp system and was instrumental in the mass shootings conducted by the Einsatzgruppen.
Led by Heinrich Himmler, its members had to submit with complete obedience to the authority of the supreme master, Hitler and himself. SS officers had to prove their own and their wives’ racial purity back to the year 1700, and membership was conditional on Aryan appearance.
In the charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (commonly known as the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials) the SS was held to be a criminal organization. Its members were considered war criminals involved in brutalities and killings in the concentration camps, mass shootings in the occupied countries, involvement in the slave labor program and the murder of prisoners-of-war. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. commanders in Poland. After the war he was honored as a “Righteous Among the Nations.” This was an award created by the Israeli Government for those who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
a sub-camp of MauthausenMauthausen: the main concentration camp for Austria located near an abandoned stone quarry.
It was created shortly after the Anschluss of Austria in March 1938 to handle criminal and “asocial elements.” It later became a penal camp and was known for its harsh treatment of prisoners. Inmates were forced as punishment to carry heavy stone blocks up 186 steps from the camp quarry. This stairway became known as the “Stairway of Death.” Mauthausen had over 60 sub-camps. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. created in October 1943. It held a maximum of 1,488 prisoners.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
(Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsfuehrers-SS), SSSS: (Schutzstaffel, Protection Squad), originally Adolf Hitler’s bodyguard, it became the elite guard of the Nazi state and its main tool of terror. The SS maintained control over the concentration camp system and was instrumental in the mass shootings conducted by the Einsatzgruppen.
Led by Heinrich Himmler, its members had to submit with complete obedience to the authority of the supreme master, Hitler and himself. SS officers had to prove their own and their wives’ racial purity back to the year 1700, and membership was conditional on Aryan appearance.
In the charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (commonly known as the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials) the SS was held to be a criminal organization. Its members were considered war criminals involved in brutalities and killings in the concentration camps, mass shootings in the occupied countries, involvement in the slave labor program and the murder of prisoners-of-war. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. security and intelligence service. The SD played an important role in carrying out the Final Solution.
SD officers served in EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen:(Operational Squad), mobile killing squads composed of SS and police personnel which followed the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Operating in the rear of the front lines and with the assistance of the German Army, Einsatzkommandos were deployed to organize the mass shootings of Jews, Roma (Gypsies), Communist leaders and prisoners-of-war.
The method employed was to shoot the victims in ravines, abandoned quarries or huge trenches. These murders were performed without regard for age or gender. By the spring of 1943, when the Germans began their retreat from Soviet territory, the Einsatzgruppen had murdered 1,250,000 Jews and hundreds of thousands of other Soviet nationals. The Einsatzgruppen sent back to Berlin detailed reports of their activities, which were later introduced as evidence at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials. Some of the most notorious locations of Eisatzgruppen massacres were at Babi Yar (Kiev), Ponary (Vilna), Rumbula (Riga) and Fort IX (Kovno).Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. , police and other security units. It was established in 1932 under Reinhard Heydrich and in 1938 incorporated into the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Reich Security Main Office, RSHA).
Sources: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; Historical Atlas of the Holocaust.
the Sabbath, the weekly holiday that commemorates the day of rest that God took after creating the world in six days. Shabbos begins at sundown on Friday night with the lighting of candles, the blessing of wine and the saying of prayers. Afterwards a festive meal is eaten. Shabbos ends with nightfall on Saturday. No work can be performed, and the day is to be spent in rest and prayer.
Source: Binyomin Kaplan.
the caretaker of the synagogue. In the shtetl he would go around waking up the congregation and calling them to prayer, announcing sunset and Shabbos times, and rounding up a minyan.
Source: Rosten: The Joys of Yiddish.
(Deuteronomy 6: 5-9, 11:13-21, Numbers 15:37-41)the primary credo-statement and affirmation of monotheism in Judaism.
Its opening verse reads, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.” Since the Shema itself mentions the obligation to recite it “when you lie down and when you get up,” i.e., in the morning and evening, it is included in the morning and evening prayers and recited upon awakening and retiring. It is a Jewish custom to recite it in times of danger and also to endeavor to make it one’s final utterance before death.
Source: Binyomin Kaplan.
the Jewish holiday commemorating the gift of the Torah. During the 49 days between Passover and Shevouth at each evening prayer service the Sifra is proclaimed which is the number of the day.
the Hebrew word used to denote the destruction of the Jews in Europe during WWII corresponding to the English word HolocaustHolocaust: is derived from the Greek word "holokauston" which originally meant a sacrifice totally burned by fire. In the 1950's the term came to be applied to the destruction of the Jews of Europe by the Nazi German state.
"Holocaust" is also used to describe the annihilation of other groups during World War II.
The Hebrew word "Shoah" meaning catastrophe or destruction also denotes the attempt to destroy European Jewry during WWII. "Shoah" first appeared in this context in a booklet concerned with aid for the Jews of Poland published in Jerusalem in 1940.Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. . It first appeared in a booklet in 1940 concerned with aid for the Jews of Poland.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
the authorized slaughterer of animals according to the laws of kashrut (kosherKosher: a system of rules and laws (the laws of kashrut) which for Jews govern the preparation and consumption of food.
Eating and drinking are for Jews religious acts where man takes from the bounty of God. Certain items are forbidden as food including blood, pork and fish without scales (e.g. shellfish). Other foods can be eaten separately but not together at the same meal. For example, milk cannot be eaten with meat, but each is a permissible food to be eaten separately within its own family of foods. The rules of kashrut are complex and in cases of doubt a Rabbi is consulted to make a decision according to the law.Source: Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish. -ness).
The shochet is not a butcher. His job is to kill the animal and examine the carcass, not to render it into food. Jewish law generally discourages cruelty to animals, and the kosher method of slaughter is extremely quick and humane when its guidelines are followed strictly. The carcass must be free of disease and major blemishes. The work of the shochet is authorized and supervised by rabbis.
Source: Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish.
small town or village in Eastern Europe where the culture of the AshkenazimAshkenazim: eastern and central European Jews, one of the two main branches of Diaspora Jewry.
The Ashkenazim created a distinctive civilization and a Yiddish language based culture. During the Holocaust most of the population and the communities of the Ashkenazim in Eastern Europe were destroyed. The Ashkenazim originally moved from northern France to Germanic cities along the Rhine, and then settled in central and eastern Europe.
From 1880 to 1910 about one-third of the Jews in Eastern Europe migrated, mainly to the United States. Most of the Jews living in the United States are descended from the Ashkenazim. The other main branch of Disapora Jewry is called Sephardim. They lived in Portugal, Spain and southern France, speaking a language called Ladino, and also in the Middle East, where they spoke Persian or Arabic. Source: Rosten, the Joys of Yiddish. flourished.
Source: Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish.
(Special Commando), 1. a prisoner slave labor group assigned to work in the killing area of an extermination campExtermination Camps: (Vernichtungslager), Nazi camps in Poland in which millions of Jews were murdered as part of the “Final Solution”, as well as hundreds of thousands of Roma (Gypsies), non-Jewish Poles and Soviet prisoners of war.
The 6 extermination camps were Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka. The purpose of these six camps was the systematic murder of human beings and the disposal of their bodies. Killing was done in a factory-like manner by poison gas in gas chambers or gas vans. The bodies were buried in mass graves or burned. The overwhelming majority of victims in these 6 camps were Jews. Sources: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; USHMM, Historical Atlas of the Holocaust. . Few Sonderkommando survived as they were usually killed and replaced at periodic intervals. There were several Sonderkommando revolts. The group at Auschwitz-Birkenau staged an uprising in 1944 and set off an explosion that destroyed Crematorium IV.
2. A German unit that worked along with the EinsatzgruppenEinsatzgruppen:(Operational Squad), mobile killing squads composed of SS and police personnel which followed the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Operating in the rear of the front lines and with the assistance of the German Army, Einsatzkommandos were deployed to organize the mass shootings of Jews, Roma (Gypsies), Communist leaders and prisoners-of-war.
The method employed was to shoot the victims in ravines, abandoned quarries or huge trenches. These murders were performed without regard for age or gender. By the spring of 1943, when the Germans began their retreat from Soviet territory, the Einsatzgruppen had murdered 1,250,000 Jews and hundreds of thousands of other Soviet nationals. The Einsatzgruppen sent back to Berlin detailed reports of their activities, which were later introduced as evidence at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials. Some of the most notorious locations of Eisatzgruppen massacres were at Babi Yar (Kiev), Ponary (Vilna), Rumbula (Riga) and Fort IX (Kovno).Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. in the Soviet territories. Their task was to obliterate the traces of mass slaughter by burning bodies. Sources: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; Historical Atlas of the Holocaust.
Sources: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; Historical Atlas of the Holocaust.
RebbesRebbe: the chief rabbi of a Chassidic group. He is treated with veneration and often consulted in a wide variety of matters, including business, marriage, and religious concerns. The position is often inherited, and many dynasties were named for the cities in Poland and Russia in which Chassidim resided. Source: Binyomin Kaplan. are often asked to give blessings, and the wording of this blessing may have been unusually lengthy or different in some other way from the usual or familiar wording.
Source: Binyomin Kaplan.
(Schutzstaffel, Protection Squad), originally Adolf Hitler’s bodyguard, it became the elite guard of the Nazi state and its main tool of terror. The SS maintained control over the concentration camp system and was instrumental in the mass shootings conducted by the Einsatzgruppen.
Led by Heinrich Himmler, its members had to submit with complete obedience to the authority of the supreme master, Hitler and himself. SS officers had to prove their own and their wives’ racial purity back to the year 1700, and membership was conditional on Aryan appearance.
In the charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (commonly known as the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials) the SS was held to be a criminal organization. Its members were considered war criminals involved in brutalities and killings in the concentration camps, mass shootings in the occupied countries, involvement in the slave labor program and the murder of prisoners-of-war.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
a round fur hat worn by Chassidic Jews.
Source: Binyomin Kaplan.
auxiliary forced labor camp linked administratively to one of the major concentration camps. There were thousands of sub-camps in the concentration camp system, which numbered nearly 3,000 camps.
Source: Historical Atlas of the Holocaust.
a section of Bohemia and Moravia in which the German population of Czechoslovakia ( Volksdeutsche) was concentrated. In 1938 it was transferred to Germany as a result of agreements reached at the Munich Conference. “Munich” became a symbol of “Appeasement” which meant in this context the pursuit of a short-range policy of conciliation to an aggressive tyrant.
In 1938 Hitler was acquiring territory at little cost to Germany. Nazi foreign policy aimed at expanding the borders of Germany, expanding German “Lebensraum” (living space).
In March he had annexed Austria in the Anschluss. In April Hitler encouraged the German minority in the Sudetenland to raise radical demands based on trumped up grievances. Hitler threatened to crush Czechoslovakia by force.
An international crisis ensued. On September 15 the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain met with Adolf Hitler at Hitler’s mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden. The annexation of the Sudetenland was agreed to in principle but certain contingencies remained to be worked out.
On September 22 Chamberlain again went to Germany to meet Hitler at Bad Godesberg. Hitler added to his earlier demands a demand for immediate occupation. The British, the French and the Czechs hardened their attitude.
On September 28 Chamberlain returned to Germany for a third time. Meeting Hitler in a hotel in Munich he essentially agreed to the terms that had been offered and rejected earlier at Bad Godesberg. The Czechs were not invited to participate in these negotiations.
On his return from Munich Chamberlain brandished the declaration he had signed with Hitler claiming he had achieved “peace in our time.” However, this was a vain proclamation. The new balance of power aided Hitler to keep up his aggression and increased the likelihood of war.
On March 16, 1939 Hitler sent in the German Army to complete his occupation of the Second Czechoslovak Republic (The First Czechoslovak Republic was created after World War I; the Second Czechoslovak Republic was declared in the wake of the Munich Conference and the transfer of the Sudetenland). By this time the British public were disillusioned. World War II broke out when Hitler invaded Poland over trumped up grievances on September 1, 1939.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
(1913- ), a Yiddish poet, born in a small town near Vilna in 1913. He became a leader in the “Yung Vilne” literary movement before WWII. When the Nazis established the Vilna ghetto he joined the “Paper Brigade,” a group who were hiding documents from the archives of YIVO, the Yiddish Scientific Institute.
Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg had created the Institute Zur Erforschung der Judenfrage (Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question), whose purpose was to study the vanished Jewish race. YIVO’s Judaica collection was being ransacked to provide exhibits for a museum of Jewry in Frankfurt.
In 1943 Sutzkever escaped from the Vilna ghetto into the forest where he became a partisan. In July 1944 he returned to Vilna after its liberation by the Soviet army. He began to dig up the Jewish treasures which had been hidden. A Museum of Jewish Art and Culture was established, the first Jewish institution in Vilna after the war.
Mr. Sutzkever testified at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. In 1947 he emigrated to Israel where he founded the premier Yiddish literary journal, “Di Goldene Keyt” (The Golden Chain).
Sources: Fishman, “Those Daring Escapades of Vilna’s “Papir Brigade”; Goodman,”Translating the Poetry of Abraham Sutzkever”; Proceedings of the International Military Tribunal, February 27, 1946, Vol. 8 [pp. 302-308];Dawidowicz, From that Place and Time.
(Svencionys) is a small town in eastern Lithuania north-east of Vilna. A small ghettoGhetto: an enclosed district where Jews were forced to live separate from the rest of society.
The concentration of Jews in ghettos was a policy implemented by Germany in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The establishment of ghettos was often the first stage in a process which was followed by deportation to concentration camps and selection for extermination or for forced labor. Forcing Jews into ghettos required their ingathering from surrounding areas and their segregation from local populations. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. was located there. The ghetto was liquidated April 4, 1943. The people were told that they were being resettled in either the Vilna or the Kovno ghettos.
The train with the Jews of Swieciany was detained at the Vilna depot while murder operations proceeded with the Jews of Sol. Then the train went to PonaryPonary: a forest preserve located six miles from Vilna. Before the war it was used for outings and picnics, but it became a killing field for most of Vilna‘s Jews. The victims were shot to death by SS men and German police assisted by Lithuanian collaborators. Perhaps, 70,000 to 100,000 victims, the majority of them Jews, were murdered there. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. . When Swieciany Jews found themselves at Ponary they realized that they had been tricked. They burst out of the cattle cars and began to run away. Others violently resisted the German and Lithuanian guards with bare hands, with knives and with a few pistols. The guards fired into the crowd. They ordered the train to move and many were crushed beneath the wheels.
Some 600 people were killed at the railroad depot at Ponary. There were casualties among the German and Lithuanian guards. That day altogether 4,000 people were killed at Ponary. A few escaped back into the Vilna ghetto.
In April 1943, a report to the Reich Security Headquarters in Berlin stated that Swieciany was in an area, 35 by 65 miles, which was completely purged of Jews. “About 4,000 received special treatment at Ponary on April 5, 1943...”
There had been a partisanPartisans: guerrilla forces operating in enemy occupied territory. In World War II there were partisan groups of various political, national and religious complexions operating mainly in eastern Europe and the Balkans. The major areas of activity in eastern Europe were in Belorussia, in Lithuania and in the Ukraine. There were also Jewish underground movements that functioned within the ghettos and camps of Poland. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. group in Swieciany whose members were mostly young men. It has been stated that the incident involving the revolt of the Swieciany Jews would not have taken place if it were not for the partisans. Source: Arad, Ghetto In Flames.
Source: Arad, Ghetto In Flames.
a prayer shawl worn during religious services.
Source: Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish.
(phylacteries), small leather boxes which are bound to the arm and the head with leather straps during prayer. They contain parchments on which are hand lettered four passages from the Torah. The passages recite the commandments to place a sign on the hand, upon the heart and between the eyes.
Source: Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish.
was found as a result of a astounding coincidence. Discovered by Auschwitz survivor Lili Jacob Meier the Album showed the arrival and the selection of her family and friends. This Album is the only photographic documentation of the extermination process at Auschwitz-Birkenau except for 3 photographs secretly taken by the SonderkommandoSonderkommando: (Special Commando), 1. a prisoner slave labor group assigned to work in the killing area of an extermination camp. Few Sonderkommando survived as they were usually killed and replaced at periodic intervals. There were several Sonderkommando revolts. The group at Auschwitz-Birkenau staged an uprising in 1944 and set off an explosion that destroyed Crematorium IV.
2. A German unit that worked along with the Einsatzgruppen in the Soviet territories. Their task was to obliterate the traces of mass slaughter by burning bodies. Sources: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; Historical Atlas of the Holocaust. .
On May 24, 1944 Lili was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau with her family and friends from the little town of Bilke located near the Carpathian mountains. On May 26 her train rolled onto the spur track that led under the main watchtower of Birkenau. Lili and the other dazed people were ordered to get out of the boxcars. There was a selection and most were sent to be gassed.
There was something unprecedented happening. The Nazis took great pains to keep the Final Solution a secret. Yet, for the only time that we know of a photographer was present documenting the entire extermination process.
He photographed the boxcars before the doors were opened with the strutting SS with their canes. He showed the Jews exiting the boxcars with their yellow stars and their pitiful bundles and the attendant camp inmates with their bizarre striped uniforms hurrying them along.
The photographer then climbed the train to show the selection process. He photographed those sent through the gate into the camp proper and those sent down the Lagerstrasse, the main camp street, which led to the crematoria. From his vantage point the chimneys of Crematoria II and III can be seen in the distance.
He followed the people to where they waited in the small grove of birch trees just outside the crematoria that gave the Birkenau camp its name-the old men together, the women and children together. The calm faces of most belie their knowledge of impending death. Yet, one old woman looks distraught; she is being restrained by 3 men.
He followed the belongings of the doomed to CanadaCanada: section of Auschwitz-Birkenau where the belongings of those deported to the camp were sorted and stored in preparation for being shipped to Germany.
Rudolf Vrba who worked in Canada described mountains of trunks, of blankets, of pots and pans, of clothing and hundreds of prams. He reflects that these stolen items were destined to be sent to a blockaded Germany to boost the morale of civilians.
Prisoners who were assigned to Canada could forage food from the booty and were allowed to wear regular civilian clothes. Sources: Gilbert, The Holocaust; Vrba, Escape from Auschwitz at 158-59, 165-66. where they being sorted by inmates for shipment to Germany. The women in “civilian” clothes, white blouses and dark pants, look well nourished-Canada was a coveted assignment with ample opportunity to smuggle food. He followed those chosen to live (for the present) into the main camp. He showed them being herded with their camp uniforms and their shaved heads.
Lili was young; she could work and survive the harsh regime; she was sent to the right. Torn away from her mother and the rest of her family Lili tried to re-join them. An SS stabbed her on the arm (leaving a permanent scar) and sent her back to join the people on the right. She was processed into the main camp and sent to compound B IIc, known as the Hungarian women’s camp. She was tattooed with number A-10862.
When the Russian Army approached and Auschwitz was evacuated she was sent to the west through various camps finally being liberated at Dora, a sub-camp of Nordhausen; Dora was over 400 miles from Auschwitz. Lili was ill and weighed only 80 pounds.
Fellow prisoners carried her into newly vacated SS barracks and put her on a bed. She awoke and out of curiosity looked into a cupboard beside the bed. Inside was a frayed photographic album. It is estimated 1,600,000 people were killed at Auschwitz. Thousands of transport trains arrived there. Yet when Lili opened the album she saw a photograph of Naftali Svi Weiss, her own rabbi from Bilke. As she turned the pages she saw the faces of other members of her community and her own family.
The Auschwitz Album was eventually donated by Lili to the Holocaust Museum in Israel, Yad Vashem. No other copy of the photographs was ever discovered. The photographer remains unknown. The purpose or the use to which the photographs were to be put remains a mystery.
Source: Meier, The Auschwitz Album.
a textile factory, operated by Walter Tobbens the largest employer in the Warsaw ghetto.
German manufacturers appeared in the Warsaw ghetto in the summer of 1941. At first they placed orders with Jewish workshops, but they established their own factories.
In 1943, Tobbens was appointed as ghetto commissar to transfer workers from the Warsaw ghetto to labor camps in the Lublin area. However, by this time the workers were obeying the instructions of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB).
In May 1943, after the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 10,000 workers were transferred to a factory Tobbens established in the Poniatowa labor camp near Lublin. However, in November 1943 as part of the operation known by code name of “Erntefest” (Harvest Festival) the camp was liquidated and the prisoners were shot.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
the scroll containing the first five books of the Jewish Bible or Five Books of Moses. The Torah contains the essence of the Jewish religion, including the 613 commandments or mitzvot. The highest ideal for every Jew is the study of Torah.
The verses must be written in hand by a qualified sofer, or scribe. The scribe must take a ritual bath before beginning to inscribe a Torah and rules dictate which mistakes can be corrected and which mistakes require starting over. The Torah scrolls are stored on the East wall of the synagogue facing Jerusalem in the Ark or Aron Kodesh. Above the Ark hangs the ner tamid or eternal light.
Another major usage of the word “Torah” refers to classical Jewish religious texts in general and to the total corpus which they form. Hence, someone studying Talmud, Tanach, Midrash or Codes is also “learning Torah.”
ource: Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish.
one of the Nazi extermination camps, with the second highest mortality after Auschwitz. Between 700,000 and 870,000 people were killed there, including most of the Jews from Warsaw.
The camp was closed after a revolt by the prisoners during which most of the camp was burned. Treblinka was purely a death camp, the small number of prisoners there functioned only to run the camp, unlike Auschwitz which maintained a large prisoner population as slave laborers.
Treblinka was located in a heavily wooded area in a sparsely populated part of Poland near the diminutive Malkinia railway station. The camp was completed in July 1942.
A spur railway ran from the nearby station into the camp. From the reception area a narrow path had been fenced in and camouflaged with tree branches; this led into the extermination area. The narrow path was known as the “tube” or the “pipe”.
The extermination area was 656 by 820 feet. A brick building contained 3 gas chambers fed by a diesel engine that produced lethal carbon monoxide gas. Later 10 more gas chambers were added.
Huge pits were dug to be used as mass graves. In March 1943 Heinrich HimmlerHimmler, Heinrich: (1900-1945), leader of the SS, head of the Gestapo, minister of the interior and, next to Adolf Hitler, the most powerful man in Nazi Germany. Himmler was a fanatic racist whose theories originated with Adolf Hitler, but who used his superior administrative abilities to put into practice the “Final Solution,” which was the attempted elimination of the Jewish people. The killing of Jews was for Himmler and other Nazi ideologues the means to achieve the supremacy of the Ayran race and to purify the world of “sub-humans”.
Himmler took part in the Nazi putsch of 1923. He joined the SS in 1925 and became its head in 1929. In 1933, he became head of the Gestapo. In 1936 he won control of the entire police force throughout Germany, his title being Reichsfuhrer-SS und Chef der Duetschen Polizei (Reich Leader of the SS and Chief of the German Police). His concern for racial purity was exemplified by the men selected for the SS. They were chosen for their Nordic qualities which were thought to be the characteristics of a “master race.”
Initially, 4 Einsatzgruppen were delegated to begin a campaign of mass murder as they followed the German Army in its invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. But mass shootings had practical problems. This led to the creation of extermination camps in Poland and the use of poison gas. Through the SS Himmler dominated the concentration camps and extermination camps in Poland.
Near the end of the war Himmler, realizing the inevitability of a German defeat, made a number of humanitarian gestures hoping to ingratiate himself with the Allies. Through Count Folke Bernadotte, head of the Swedish Red Cross, he allowed the release to Sweden of 10,000 women from the Ravensbruck concentration camp, 2,000 of whom were Jewish. Himmler committed suicide before he could be brought to trial as a war criminal. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. ordered the mass graves opened and the corpses burned on huge pyres called “roasts”. The bones were crushed and together with the ashes were re-buried in the mass graves. This was to obliterate the evidence of the killing.
There was an underground resistance organization formed by 50 to 70 prisoners in the beginning of 1943. The plan was to take weapons from the SS armory, seize control of the camp and destroy it and flee into the forests to join the partisans.
The date of the uprising was fixed for the afternoon of August 2, 1943. With a copied key the armory was opened and weapons distributed. At this point the prisoners became suspicious of SS officer Kurt Kuttner, and he was shot.
The shot alarmed the guards and the plan to seize control of the camp was aborted. Those who had arms fired on the SS and the camp buildings were set ablaze. Most of the camp structures except for the gas chambers were destroyed. Masses of prisoners tried to storm the fence. Many of those who succeeded in breaching the walls were rounded up by security forces who had been alerted outside of the camp.
Of the approximately 750 prisoners who tried to escape only 70 survived the war. The prisoners who did not take part in the rebellion were forced to dismantle the camp and then they were shot.
The grounds were plowed under and trees were planted. The camp was turned into a farm and a Ukrainian peasant family was settled there.
There were 2 trials of camp personnel held in Germany. In the first the deputy camp commandant, Kurt Franz, was sentenced to life imprisonment. Franz was a sadist whose handsome appearance earned him the nickname “Lalka” (“doll” in Polish); he compiled a photographic album of the camp which he titled “Schone Zeiten” (Happy Days). The second trial resulted in the camp commandant, Franz Stangl, also being sentenced to life imprisonment.
In 1964 a memorial was created consisting of 17,000 granite shards set around a 26 foot obelisk. It was designed by architect Adam Haupt and sculptor Franciszek Duszenko. The shards are engraved the names of the cities and countries from which the victims came.
Sources: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; Historical Atlas of the Holocaust.
a color badge worn on the clothes of a concentration camp inmate that disclosed the reason for his incarceration.
Green triangles were for criminals; yellow triangles were for Jews; red triangles for political prisoners; purple triangles for Jehovah’s Witnesses; pink triangles for homosexuals; black triangles for Roma (Gypsies) and “asocials”; and blue triangles for emigrants. Sources: Czech, Auschwitz Chronicle; USHMM, Stars, Triangles and Markings educational poster.
means transfer point, the place in the Warsaw ghetto where the Jews were assembled for deportation.
The Umslagplatz, located at the corner of Zamenhof and Niska streets, was the area dividing the Warsaw ghetto from the Polish part of the city. From this location hundreds of thousands of Jews were deported to extermination camps and concentration camps--mostly to Treblinka between July and September 1942 and January and May 1943.
In 1988 a monument was erected on the site where some 300,000 Warsaw Jews were sent to their deaths.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
After the surrender of Germany, Great Britain, the United States, France and the Soviet Union divided Germany and Austria into 4 zones of occupation.
The cities of Berlin and Vienna were similarly divided. The Western zones became the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the Soviet zone became the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). In 1990 West and East Germany were reunited.
Source: Historical Atlas of the Holocaust.
On June 24, 1941, the Germans occupied Vilna which had been a Soviet Republic just prior to the invasion. A series of anti-Jewish decrees followed. Jews were ordered to wear the yellow star front and back. Certain streets were out-of -bounds, shopping was restricted and a curfew imposed. A JudenratJudenrat: a Jewish council created under German orders which was responsible for internal matters in a ghetto.
It was required to provide Jews for forced labor and to collect valuables to pay collective fines imposed by the Germans. The members of the Judenrat believed that by complying with German demands that could ameliorate the harsh realities of German administration. Frequently, they were able to set up hospitals and soup kitchens and to try to meet basic sanitary needs in the ghetto.
In the beginning the members tried to resist German pressure. However, as time went on, the Judenrat was forced to deliver Jews to the deportation trains that were bringing them to their deaths. Under pressure many members of the Judenrat cooperated with the Germans. However, there were many cases of resistance, of resignation, of support for the partisans, and of committing suicide rather than bending to German pressure. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. was established.
In July 5,000 Jews were rounded up and taken away. No rumors of their fate reached Vilna; it was thought they were sent to work in the east. In fact they were taken to a popular forest preserve 7.5 miles outside of Vilna and shot. In August and September 8,000 more Jews were taken to PonaryPonary: a forest preserve located six miles from Vilna. Before the war it was used for outings and picnics, but it became a killing field for most of Vilna‘s Jews. The victims were shot to death by SS men and German police assisted by Lithuanian collaborators. Perhaps, 70,000 to 100,000 victims, the majority of them Jews, were murdered there. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. .
Two ghettos were set up in the areas where the deportations took place. The remaining Jews were forced into the ghettos. More “Aktions” (deportations) to Ponary, occurred. The Germans distributed work permits which made the fortunate holders of such permits exempt from deportation.
By the end of 1941 the Germans had killed 33,500 of the 57,000 Jews who been in Vilna. Remaining in the 2 ghettos were 12,000 “legal” Jews who had work permits and 8,000 “illegal” Jews who were in hiding. There was relative quiet for about a year.
The dominant figure in the Ghetto leadership was Jacob Gens, the Jewish police commander. Gens’ position was controversial since he participated in the deportations. Yet he saw himself as a utilitarian preserving the greatest number for the longest period of time. In the beginning of 1942 an underground fighting organization was formed, the FPO. The FPO was an alliance of all the political factions. A Communist, Yitzhak Wittenberg, was chosen commander partially in the hope that the Soviet Union would give material support to the organization.
A fiasco for the FPO occurred in July 1943. Wittenberg’s name became known to the Nazis who demanded his arrest, threatening the liquidation of the entire ghetto. Wittenberg was arrested by the Lithuanian police only to be freed by armed FPO members. He went into hiding in the ghetto, and the consensus of the ghetto’s population was that 20,000 people should not be jeopardized for the sake of one man.
Wittenberg hid in an attic and at one point dressed in woman’s clothes. When the FPO leaders presented Wittenberg with the facts and proposed that he surrender himself, he argued that the ghetto faced liquidation anyway and that armed resistance should begin immediately. Wittenberg convened with the Communist members of the FPO, and they influenced him to agree to give himself up. The ghetto population, the FPO command and his party comrades were all in favor of his surrender. Wittenberg surrendered himself, and the next morning he was found dead in his cell from cyanide poisoning.
In August and September 1943 deportations to work camps in Estonia began. During the September Aktions the FPO called on the ghetto population to rebel. Abba Kovner had been chosen commander after Wittenberg. The call to rebellion was unheeded and Gens provided the Germans with the quota they demanded. On September 14 Gens was shot by the Gestapo. The final liquidation of the ghetto occurred on September 23 and 24, 1943, although a few hundred members of the FPO escaped and formed partisanPartisans: guerrilla forces operating in enemy occupied territory. In World War II there were partisan groups of various political, national and religious complexions operating mainly in eastern Europe and the Balkans. The major areas of activity in eastern Europe were in Belorussia, in Lithuania and in the Ukraine. There were also Jewish underground movements that functioned within the ghettos and camps of Poland. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. groups in the Rudninkai and Naroch forests. At that point about 2500 Jews were left in Vilna in the Kailis and HKP labor camps, four thousand old men woman and children were sent to extermination campsExtermination Camps: (Vernichtungslager), Nazi camps in Poland in which millions of Jews were murdered as part of the “Final Solution”, as well as hundreds of thousands of Roma (Gypsies), non-Jewish Poles and Soviet prisoners of war.
The 6 extermination camps were Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka. The purpose of these six camps was the systematic murder of human beings and the disposal of their bodies. Killing was done in a factory-like manner by poison gas in gas chambers or gas vans. The bodies were buried in mass graves or burned. The overwhelming majority of victims in these 6 camps were Jews. Sources: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; USHMM, Historical Atlas of the Holocaust. , and 3700 men and women were sent to labor camps in Estonia and Latvia. Also, eighty Jews were taken to Ponary to open up the mass graves and burn the bodies. On July 13, 1944 Vilna was liberated by the Soviet army, but ten days earlier the Jews in the local labor camps had been taken to Ponary to be killed.
Sources: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. Arad, “Ghetto in Flames.” Menszer, Interview with Zenia Malecki, May 1998; Oral History Web Site Inteview with Zenia Malecki, www.interlog.com/~mighty/zenia.htm.
a Nazi term for a person of German ancestry living outside of Germany.
They did not have German or Austrian citizenship as defined by the Nazi term Reichsdeutscher. Nazi Germany made great efforts to enlist the support of the Volksdeutshe, who constituted minorites in several countries.
Nazi Germany received support from the Volksdeutsche; hundreds of thousands joined the German armed forces,including the SSSS: (Schutzstaffel, Protection Squad), originally Adolf Hitler’s bodyguard, it became the elite guard of the Nazi state and its main tool of terror. The SS maintained control over the concentration camp system and was instrumental in the mass shootings conducted by the Einsatzgruppen.
Led by Heinrich Himmler, its members had to submit with complete obedience to the authority of the supreme master, Hitler and himself. SS officers had to prove their own and their wives’ racial purity back to the year 1700, and membership was conditional on Aryan appearance.
In the charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (commonly known as the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials) the SS was held to be a criminal organization. Its members were considered war criminals involved in brutalities and killings in the concentration camps, mass shootings in the occupied countries, involvement in the slave labor program and the murder of prisoners-of-war. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. .
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
was the largest ghetto containing at its height more than 400,000 people. It was the site of the first urban uprising in occupied Europe.
The Warsaw shared many characteristics with other ghettos: Conditions worsened over time as did accompanying mortality from starvation and disease; social welfare organizations ministered to the needy; there was a rich cultural life; the ghetto was administered internally by a JudenratJudenrat: a Jewish council created under German orders which was responsible for internal matters in a ghetto.
It was required to provide Jews for forced labor and to collect valuables to pay collective fines imposed by the Germans. The members of the Judenrat believed that by complying with German demands that could ameliorate the harsh realities of German administration. Frequently, they were able to set up hospitals and soup kitchens and to try to meet basic sanitary needs in the ghetto.
In the beginning the members tried to resist German pressure. However, as time went on, the Judenrat was forced to deliver Jews to the deportation trains that were bringing them to their deaths. Under pressure many members of the Judenrat cooperated with the Germans. However, there were many cases of resistance, of resignation, of support for the partisans, and of committing suicide rather than bending to German pressure. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. and policed by the Jewish PoliceJewish Police: (Judischer Ordnungsdienst), the Jewish police units organized in the ghettos by the Judenrat. The Jewish police collected people for forced labor, guarded the ghetto fences and gates and eventually seized people for deportations.
There was often misconduct and corruption among the police, and they were regarded with apprehension by the ghetto community. They and their families were, at first, exempt from deportation, but this exemption was rescinded when their usefulness to the Germans ceased. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. ; many residents were employed in workshops virtually as slave laborers; there was an underground resistance organization; deportations ultimately decimated the population; the ghetto was merely a way station in the Nazi plan to destroy the Jewish people.
Because of its size the ghetto evolved slowly, only being sealed on November 16, 1940. The construction of the wall took many months. It was 11.5 feet high; the Judenrat was forced to pay the costs of its construction.
Initially, some 30% of Warsaw’s population was being crammed into 2.4% of the city’s area. This resulted in 6 to 7 people per room. The population increased as Jews from outlying areas were relocated there.
The daily food ration was 181 calories. Some could supplement this by purchasing food from smugglers. The workers in the factories received a meal at work. One of the diarists of the ghetto, Stefan Ernst, wrote that 20,000 to 30,000 people, the social elite, have enough to eat, 250,000 people who are all beggars, completely bereft of everything, wage a daily struggle to postpone death by starvation, and in between are about 200,000 people who somehow manage.
Smuggling goods across the wall was a risky occupation; everyday people were caught and lost their lives. Children aged 7 or 8 gathered near the ghetto gates to look for a smuggling opportunity. Smuggling took place through buildings that were connected with buildings on the Polish side, across the wall, through openings in the wall and through the sewers.
The head of the Judenrat was Adam Czerniakow. Czerniakow tried to manage the affairs of the ghetto without the direct involvement of the German authorities. He was in daily contact with German civil and police administration and attempted to ameliorate the conditions in the ghetto.
He was deceived by ghetto commissar, Heinz Auerswald, regarding the mass deportations. He refused to help roundup Jews and committed suicide on July 23, 1942. According to one version he left a note to his wife that said, “They are demanding that I kill the children of my people with my own hands. There is nothing for me to do but to die.” He was buried in the Warsaw Jewish cemetery which survived the war intact. Czerniakow’s diary was found and published.
The mass deportations began on July 22, 1942 and continued until September 12. The goal was to deliver 7,000 Jews a day to the UmslagplatzUmslagplatz: means transfer point, the place in the Warsaw ghetto where the Jews were assembled for deportation.
The Umslagplatz, located at the corner of Zamenhof and Niska streets, was the area dividing the Warsaw ghetto from the Polish part of the city. From this location hundreds of thousands of Jews were deported to extermination camps and concentration camps--mostly to Treblinka between July and September 1942 and January and May 1943.
In 1988 a monument was erected on the site where some 300,000 Warsaw Jews were sent to their deaths. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. , and from there to trains heading to Treblinka. Jews tried to buy their way into the ghetto workshops where they felt they would be exempt from deportation.
At first the Jewish police, numbering some 2,000 men, took charge of rounding up the deportees. Later, after their had been days when the quota was not met SS, German police and their Ukrainian and Latvian helpers took charge grabbing people despite any permits they might have.
In August in an march observed by many 200 orphans were sent from Dr. Janusz Korczak’s orphanage to the Umschlagplatz. Refusing efforts to save him the elderly educator and his team of assistants went with the children. Before the first wave of mass deportations ended they took on the character of a manhunt. Anyone who could be caught was seized. The Jewish policemen were compelled to bring in 5 Jews a day or their families would be taken.
In response to the deportations an underground resistance movement flourished. The major group was the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (ZOB,Jewish Fighting Organization). Mordecai Anielewicz was to be the commander. One of its first missions was to distribute leaflets describing the fate awaiting the deportees at Treblinka. The ZOB passed a death sentence on the Jewish police commander, but he was only wounded. The ZOB began the difficult task of acquiring arms. The Armia Krajowa (AK, Home Army), the Polish military underground organization, was contacted but they gave little help.
The second wave of deportations began on January 18, 1943. The Jews were ordered to assemble in the courtyards of their apartment houses; many went into hiding. The group of 1000 that the Germans rounded up were marched in the direction of the Umschlagplatz. A group of fighters belonging to the resistance including Mordecai Anielewicz infiltrated the column. At a signal the fighters engaged the German guards in hand-to-hand fighting. The group of 1000 disbursed.
The deportation continued for a few more days during which 6,000 were deported; then it was abandoned. The fact that it was halted in response to Jewish resistance had a tremendous impact on the ghetto and was instrumental in unifying support for the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising which took place in April. It was not known that the goal of the January deportations was the limited to removing 8,000 Jews from the ghetto.
The final liquidation of the ghetto began on the eve of Passover, April 19, 1943. The Germans were expecting resistance. When the German forces entered the ghetto they were met with Molotov cocktails, hand grenades and bullets. This was the beginning of the heroic Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising resulted in the physical destruction of the ghetto and the deportation or escape of the survivors. It is estimated some 20,000 Jews left the ghetto to seek refuge on the Polish side.
Our knowledge of the Warsaw ghetto is immeasurably enhanced by the chronicles of historian Emanuel Ringelblum and his group of clandestine archivists. Their documents, known as the Oneg Shabat Archive, were buried in milk cans and found after the war under the ruins of the ghetto.
When the war ended some 20,000 to 30,000 Jews settled in Warsaw, but the overwhelming majority of these left during one of the 3 waves of emigration prior to 1968.
There was a second uprising in Warsaw, the Warsaw Polish Uprising. The general population revolted against the Germans in anticipation of the Soviet entry into the city. The Soviet Army delayed coming into Warsaw, and in a brutal campaign the Germans killed 150,000 civilians, including some Jews who were hiding in the general population. As an act of revenge the Germans razed 85% of the city.
Only a few sites of Jewish interest remain, they include the Nozik synagogue and the historic Jewish cemetery on Okopowa Street. The Zydowski Instytut Historyczny (Jewish Historical Institute) is located in the former library of the Great Synagogue. In 1948 an heroic monument designed by sculptor Nathan Rapaport was dedicated on the site of the former ghetto.
Sources: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; Historical Atlas of the Holocasut; various survivor memoirs.
the first civilian, urban uprising in German-occupied Europe, the heroic revolt begun by the Jewish Fighting Organization was joined by the remaining ghetto population. It was the longest lasting Jewish uprising lasting from April 19 through May 16, 1943. Of negligible military value, the revolt became a symbol of the indomitableness of the human spirit.
In response to the July 1942 deportations from the Warsaw ghetto and to reports of mass murder in Lithuania the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa (Jewish Fighting Organization, henceforth ZOB) was founded. When the first wave of deportations ended in September 300,000 Jews had been removed leaving a ghetto population of around 60,000, most of them young people. The survivors blamed themselves for not having offered armed resistance.
The leader of the ZOB was Modecai Anielewicz. Historian of the Warsaw ghetto Emmanuel Ringelblum wrote that Anielewicz was driven by the need to make the Germans pay dearly for Jewish blood. It was not a question of saving Jewish lives; this was hopeless. It was a question of what kind of death the Polish Jews would select for themselves.
When the deportations resumed in January 1943 Modecai Anielewicz led an attack on a group of Jews who were being marched to the UmslagplatzUmslagplatz: means transfer point, the place in the Warsaw ghetto where the Jews were assembled for deportation.
The Umslagplatz, located at the corner of Zamenhof and Niska streets, was the area dividing the Warsaw ghetto from the Polish part of the city. From this location hundreds of thousands of Jews were deported to extermination camps and concentration camps--mostly to Treblinka between July and September 1942 and January and May 1943.
In 1988 a monument was erected on the site where some 300,000 Warsaw Jews were sent to their deaths. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. . This was the first attack on Germans in the ghetto and when the deportations ceased 4 days later it was attributed to Jewish resistance. This led to a decisive change in the attitude of ghetto population: from submission and compliance to resistance--both passive (noncompliance) and active (fighting).
The German security forces knew that they faced an active Jewish underground. Heinrich HimmlerHimmler, Heinrich: (1900-1945), leader of the SS, head of the Gestapo, minister of the interior and, next to Adolf Hitler, the most powerful man in Nazi Germany. Himmler was a fanatic racist whose theories originated with Adolf Hitler, but who used his superior administrative abilities to put into practice the “Final Solution,” which was the attempted elimination of the Jewish people. The killing of Jews was for Himmler and other Nazi ideologues the means to achieve the supremacy of the Ayran race and to purify the world of “sub-humans”.
Himmler took part in the Nazi putsch of 1923. He joined the SS in 1925 and became its head in 1929. In 1933, he became head of the Gestapo. In 1936 he won control of the entire police force throughout Germany, his title being Reichsfuhrer-SS und Chef der Duetschen Polizei (Reich Leader of the SS and Chief of the German Police). His concern for racial purity was exemplified by the men selected for the SS. They were chosen for their Nordic qualities which were thought to be the characteristics of a “master race.”
Initially, 4 Einsatzgruppen were delegated to begin a campaign of mass murder as they followed the German Army in its invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. But mass shootings had practical problems. This led to the creation of extermination camps in Poland and the use of poison gas. Through the SS Himmler dominated the concentration camps and extermination camps in Poland.
Near the end of the war Himmler, realizing the inevitability of a German defeat, made a number of humanitarian gestures hoping to ingratiate himself with the Allies. Through Count Folke Bernadotte, head of the Swedish Red Cross, he allowed the release to Sweden of 10,000 women from the Ravensbruck concentration camp, 2,000 of whom were Jewish. Himmler committed suicide before he could be brought to trial as a war criminal. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. therefore decided to liquidate the ghetto as soon as possible. April 19, 1943 was chosen; the plan was to liquidate the ghetto in 3 days and give Hitler a birthday present (his birthday was April 20).
The Germans assembled a force of 2,842 men to enter the ghetto and brought 7,000 security forces into Warsaw. Their greatest fear was that the rebellion would spread to the Polish side of the city.
At the outbreak the ZOB consisted of about 600 members. However, thousands of Jews spontaneously joined the uprising once it had started. The Germans had the most modern military weapons, including tanks. The ghetto fighters had a few guns, mainly pistols which turned out to be useless, some hand grenades and most effectively Molotov cocktails (glass bottles filed with gasoline).The fighters had been severely hampered by lack of arms. They had tried with very limited success to obtain weapons from the Polish underground, the Armia Krajowa (AK, Home Army).
The leadership of the uprising realized that to attack the Germans directly would be suicide; therefore it was decided to attack at the crossings of ghetto streets from the rooftops and attics of surrounding houses. Underground bunkers were prepared and stocked with provisions.
The ghetto was surrounded with a guard armed with a machine gun placed every 25 feet. The main German forces entered the ghetto. At two places they were attacked by the Jewish fighters and retreated. Tanks were brought in but these were hit with Molotov cocktails and set on fire. The fact that the enemy retreated at the first encounter evoked jubilation among the Jews.
With this ignominious defeat the head of the operation was replaced by General Jurgen Stroop, who was experience in partisan warfare. General Stroop restored order in the ranks. He changed the tactics from an outright assault on the ghetto to concentrated attacks on one point at a time in order to drive the Jews into a narrow area. He used artillery fire as he would on a regular battlefield and had his men move under cover like snipers.
The minimal weapons of the Jews were no match for artillery and their supply of ammunition was giving out. The fighting advanced house by house, street by street. The Jews started burning the warehouses of the ghetto factories that held German valuables. The Germans entered the ghetto hospital and slaughtered those they found there.
The second day of uprising, April 20, was like the first-heavy German attacks and stubborn Jewish resistance. A mine had been set in the area of the brush factory at the gate of Wolowa Street Number 6. When the SS reached the gate it was detonated; the ZOB reported that 22 Germans were killed.
On the third day of the uprising Stroop decided to avoid direct contact with the Jewish fighters as much as possible; he decided to set the ghetto on fire. Thousands were burned alive or suffocated in the underground bunkers. People leapt from burning buildings.
The bunker war-the burning of the bunkers was the German’s most difficult task. The leaders of the ZOB were hidden in a bunker at Mila Street Number 18. It is not known how the Germans discovered its location. There were 5 exits; the Germans blew up all five and sent gas into the bunker. The fighters who were still alive decided to commit suicide, including Mordecai Anielewicz. A group of fighters escaped from the ghetto through the sewers and reached the Lomianki forest.
Mordecai Anielewicz had written to his comrade Yitzhak Zuckerman who was hiding outside the ghetto: I feel that great things are happening, that what we have undertaken is of tremendous significance...Peace be with you, my dear friend. Perhaps we will see each other again. The main thing is that my life’s dream has been realized. The Jewish self defense in the Warsaw ghetto has become a reality. The armed Jewish struggle and the revenge became a reality. I am a witness to this grand, heroic battle of the Jewish fighters.
The battle raged for 27 days. When it was over General Stroop claimed to have destroyed 6,065 Jews. As a “celebration” Himmler ordered the Great Synagogue on Tlomacka Street (which was outside the ghetto) blown up as a symbol of the fact that “the Jewish quarter of Warsaw no longer exists.”
After May 16 there were still hundreds of Jews living in the ruins of the ghetto. Many succeeded in making contact with Poles in other parts of the city. As late as the second Warsaw uprising, when the Poles rose up against the Germans in anticipation of the entry of the Soviet Army, there were still a few Jews eking out an existence in the ruins of the former ghetto.
General Stroop compiled an illustrated report (The Stroop Report) which described the uprising and the efforts to suppress it. He was tried and executed in Warsaw in 1951.
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising became one of the most celebrated events of the Holocaust. It gave encouragement to Jews elsewhere as news of the brave stand taken by the Warsaw fighters spread. In Vilna Hirsh Glick wrote the song, Zog nit keyn mol, which became the partisanPartisans: guerrilla forces operating in enemy occupied territory. In World War II there were partisan groups of various political, national and religious complexions operating mainly in eastern Europe and the Balkans. The major areas of activity in eastern Europe were in Belorussia, in Lithuania and in the Ukraine. There were also Jewish underground movements that functioned within the ghettos and camps of Poland. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. fighters anthem. The worldwide day of remembrance of the Holocaust, Yom Hashoah, was chosen to be as close as religious custom allowed to actual date of the beginning of the uprising. The uprising took place on April 19, 1943 which corresponds to the 15 th day of the month Nissan in the Hebrew calendar, which is the first day of Passover; Yom Hashoah occurs every year on the 27 th day of Nissan.
Encyclopedia of the Holocaust; Young, The Texture of Memory; Suhl, They Fought Back pgs. 85-127 (a memoir by Emmanuel Ringelblum on Mordecai Anielewicz and an article by historian Ber Mark on the Warsaw Uprising).
the armed forces of Germany during the period from 1935 to 1945; the former name of the armed forces had been Reichswehr.
The victories of 1939 against Poland and 1940 against France were spectacular successes. In June 1941 Hitler opened up a 2 front war by invading the Soviet Union. Nazi atrocities in the wake of this invasion were largely tolerated without protest by the Wehrmacht officers.
Within the Wehrmacht opposition to what was seen as Hitler’s destructive leadership culminated in the abortive July 20, 1944 attempt on Hitler’s life. The participants in this plot were executed or forced to commit suicide, most notably Erwin Rommel.
In the beginning of World War II the Wehrmacht numbered 2,700,000 men by 1943 it totaled 13,555,000 men.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
(1903-?), SS-Hauptscharfuhrer assigned to the Vilna Ghetto, the so-called “Boss of Ponary.” For a time he was the SS liaison in charge of a Lithuanian executioner unit. This unit, consisting of 45 to 150 volunteers, was responsible for killing at least 48,000 Jews at PonaryPonary: a forest preserve located six miles from Vilna. Before the war it was used for outings and picnics, but it became a killing field for most of Vilna‘s Jews. The victims were shot to death by SS men and German police assisted by Lithuanian collaborators. Perhaps, 70,000 to 100,000 victims, the majority of them Jews, were murdered there. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. .
There are numerous stories of Martin Weiss’ sadism and sarcastic sense of humor. Abraham SutzkeverSutzkever, Abraham: (1913- ), a Yiddish poet, born in a small town near Vilna in 1913. He became a leader in the “Yung Vilne” literary movement before WWII. When the Nazis established the Vilna ghetto he joined the “Paper Brigade,” a group who were hiding documents from the archives of YIVO, the Yiddish Scientific Institute.
Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg had created the Institute Zur Erforschung der Judenfrage (Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question), whose purpose was to study the vanished Jewish race. YIVO’s Judaica collection was being ransacked to provide exhibits for a museum of Jewry in Frankfurt.
In 1943 Sutzkever escaped from the Vilna ghetto into the forest where he became a partisan. In July 1944 he returned to Vilna after its liberation by the Soviet army. He began to dig up the Jewish treasures which had been hidden. A Museum of Jewish Art and Culture was established, the first Jewish institution in Vilna after the war.
Mr. Sutzkever testified at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. In 1947 he emigrated to Israel where he founded the premier Yiddish literary journal, “Di Goldene Keyt” (The Golden Chain). Sources: Fishman, “Those Daring Escapades of Vilna’s “Papir Brigade”; Goodman,”Translating the Poetry of Abraham Sutzkever”; Proceedings of the International Military Tribunal, February 27, 1946, Vol. 8 [pp. 302-308];Dawidowicz, From that Place and Time. testifed at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial in February 1946, of his killing Gitele Tarlo, an eleven year old girl. Sutzkever also wrote of Weiss’s torture killing of young Tzerna Morgenstern in “Geto Vilna,” and a similar story is told in Martin Gilbert’s “The Holocaust.” Another account, the story of Weiss’ assisting his girlfriend in the killing of singer Liuba Levitska, is told in “Yes, We Sang!” In February 1950, Martin Weiss was tried before a court in Wurzburg, Germany and was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Sources: Arad, Ghetto in Flames; Ran, Jerusalem of Lithuania; Sutzkever, Getto Vilna; Kalisch, Yes, We Sang!; Gilbert, The Holocaust; Letter 10/31/97 from Satu Haase-Webb, Researcher, Office of the Historian at USHMM.
the language of East European or AshkenazicAshkenazim: eastern and central European Jews, one of the two main branches of Diaspora Jewry.
The Ashkenazim created a distinctive civilization and a Yiddish language based culture. During the Holocaust most of the population and the communities of the Ashkenazim in Eastern Europe were destroyed. The Ashkenazim originally moved from northern France to Germanic cities along the Rhine, and then settled in central and eastern Europe.
From 1880 to 1910 about one-third of the Jews in Eastern Europe migrated, mainly to the United States. Most of the Jews living in the United States are descended from the Ashkenazim. The other main branch of Disapora Jewry is called Sephardim. They lived in Portugal, Spain and southern France, speaking a language called Ladino, and also in the Middle East, where they spoke Persian or Arabic. Source: Rosten, the Joys of Yiddish. Jews. Yiddish is to be distinguished from Hebrew, which is the language of Jewish prayer and the official language of Israel.
Yiddish is descended from the form of German heard by Jewish settlers who came from northern France to Germany a thousand years ago. Almost all East European Jews before WWII understood Yiddish and many would have spoken it at home. Some East European Jews attended schools taught in Yiddish. It was estimated that in the 1920’s about two-thirds of the Jews in the world could understand Yiddish. Although Yiddish used to be a lingua franca or common language for Jews, this is not true today.
Yiddish possesses an incomparable vocabulary to express shades of feeling and a rich storehouse of characterization names, praises, expletives and curses. A Yiddish literature developed that matured into a diverse and sophisticated body of work. Perhaps its most famous exponent was Sholem Aleichem (the pen name of Sholom Rabinowitz 1859-1916). The musical “Fiddler on the Roof” is based on his stories. YIVO, the Yiddish Scientific Institute, was created in Vilna and continues in New York City to further Yiddish research and culture.
The Holocaust had a devastating effect on the Yiddish language because it destroyed most of its speakers. Isaac Bashevis Singer(1904-1991) won the 1978 Nobel Prize for literature for his Yiddish novels and short stories. In 1980, the National Yiddish Book Center opened in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Source: Rosten, The Joys of Yiddish.
the Day of Atonement, the holiest day of the year. The prohibition against work is similar to that of ShabbosShabbos: the Sabbath, the weekly holiday that commemorates the day of rest that God took after creating the world in six days. Shabbos begins at sundown on Friday night with the lighting of candles, the blessing of wine and the saying of prayers. Afterwards a festive meal is eaten. Shabbos ends with nightfall on Saturday. No work can be performed, and the day is to be spent in rest and prayer. Source: Binyomin Kaplan. , and additionally the day is spent fasting, even when Yom Kippur falls on Shabbos. It is the only day of the year in which there are five prayer services, and the day is particularly asociated with the forgiveness of sin. In Temple times it was distinguished by the unique service of the High Priest in the Holy of Holies.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
Zog nit keyn mol, az du geyst dem letsten veg (“Never say that you are on the final road”), the so-called PartisanPartisans: guerrilla forces operating in enemy occupied territory. In World War II there were partisan groups of various political, national and religious complexions operating mainly in eastern Europe and the Balkans. The major areas of activity in eastern Europe were in Belorussia, in Lithuania and in the Ukraine. There were also Jewish underground movements that functioned within the ghettos and camps of Poland. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. Song, written by Hirsch GlickGlick, Hirsch:(1922-1944) Lithuanian poet and partisan and author of "Zog Nit Keyn Mol," the anthem of the partisans.
He was born in a working class family in Vilna. He began to write poetry at age 13 and at 16 was co-founder of a group of poets who called themselves Yungvald (Young Forest). He was active in the artistic activities which were being carried out in the ghetto and participated in the underground movement which was preparing for a revolt.
He was later deported to concentration camps in Estonia where he continued to compose songs and poems. In July 1944, with the Russians approaching, he escaped into the forest to try to join up with the partisan fighters. He was never heard from again, and it is presumed he was caught by the Germans and executed. Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. . In April 1943 when news of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising reached the Vilna ghetto, Hirsh Glick wrote this defiant anthem. It has become the universal Hymn of the Holocaust Survivors.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.
