6.1 What was lost?

6.1 What was lost?

During the Holocaust, six million Jews were murdered, including one and a half million children – 90 per cent of all Jewish children living in Europe. The loss was devastating. Entire families, entire communities, entire towns and villages all across Europe no longer existed. Hopes and dreams were shattered, ways of life were destroyed, and the diversity of Jewish life and culture that existed before the war was gone forever. Before the Second World War, cities like Warsaw, Budapest and Vienna were bustling with Jewish life. Today, you can walk the streets of these cities and not meet a single Jewish person. Think of the huge void that was left by the loss of six million people, the families they never had, and the contributions to art, culture and science they were never able to make.

Figure 6.1 Children of the Jewish school in the shtetl Trochenbrod (in Ukraine) in 1934/35. In 1930, approximately 5,000 Jews lived in this town, which had seven synagogues and a rich farming culture.

Figure 6.2 The location of the Jewish shtetl Trochenbrod as it is today. During the Holocaust, the town’s people, buildings and streets were completely destroyed.

Activities

1 Look back at the map on pages 8–9. Which countries had the greatest Jewish losses? Which country did the largest number of Jewish people killed come from? 2 Look at Figures 6.1 and 6.2. What is the difference between these images? What do they tell us about the Holocaust? 3 Look at Figure 6.3. How did the architect of the Jewish

Museum in Berlin try to show the void that was created by the Holocaust? Undertake some research on other ways people have tried to express this huge loss.

Figure 6.3 The Jewish Museum, Berlin. The architect of this building (Daniel Libeskind) created these empty spaces, called ‘voids’. They are meant to show the emptiness that resulted from the destruction of Jewish life in the Holocaust. He wanted to make this loss visible through architecture.

UNIT 6

Aftermath and legacy

Other victims of the Nazis

The Nazis persecuted other groups, as well as Jews. Estimates of how many were killed are based on census reports, Nazi documents and post-war investigations.

Activity

Read the information on this page. Undertake further research into the suffering of one of these groups at the hands of the Nazis.

Soviet civilians and prisoners of war (POWs)

Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) were killed by the Nazis on a mass scale. Out of approximately 5.7 million Soviet prisoners, 3.3 million were murdered. In addition, millions of Soviet civilians were starved or worked to death. The Nazis also brutally murdered vast numbers of Soviet civilians at any sign of opposition or resistance.

Political opponents

In 1933, the Nazis established concentration camps to imprison German political opponents (see page 27). They were treated brutally but most were released. During the war, as the German soldiers advanced to the east, they were given orders to shoot and kill all Communist Party officials they could find. The killing included anyone who was perceived as a threat, such as intellectuals, priests and partisans.

Polish civilians

During the German invasion of Poland, many Polish civilians were shot, and many more were sent to concentration camps. Hundreds of thousands were forced to leave the west of Poland to make room for Germans. About 1.5 million Poles were used as slave labour. It is estimated that 1.8 million non-Jewish Polish civilians were killed during the Second World War.

Disabled people

During the war, the children’s ‘euthanasia’ programme murdered around 5,000 disabled children. The adult ‘euthanasia’ programme (see page 32) began killing by gas in the winter of 1939 and was officially halted in 1941, when more than 70,000 adults in Greater Germany and German-occupied Poland had been murdered. The programme secretly continued and approximately 250,000 disabled people were killed by the end of the war.

Roma and Sinti (‘Gypsies’)

When the Nazis came to power, they persecuted the Roma and Sinti within Greater Germany. Their racist laws were applied to the ‘Gypsies’. Many were arrested without cause and many were forcibly sterilised. After the outbreak of war, Roma and Sinti were murdered in death camps and died of hunger and disease in forced labour and concentration camps. An estimated 500,000 people died. The genocide is sometimes referred to as Pharrajimos – the Great Devouring.