The Holocaust

capturaţi au murit de foame sau de boală în lagărele germane cu prizonieri de război. Aceşti oameni au fost ucişi intenţionat: în timpul asediului Leningradului, au existat planul şiintenţia înfometării oamenilor pînă la moarte. Dacă Holocaustul nu ar fi avut loc, acestea ar fi numite cele mai oribile crime de război din istoria modernă. Germanii au ucis ceva mai mult de zece milioane de civili, în cele mai mari acţiuni de ucidere în masă, aproape jumătate dintre ei evrei, iar jumătate non-evrei. Şi evreii, şi non-evreii proveneau în majoritate din aceeaşi parte a Europei. Proiectul de a ucide toţi evreii a fost, în substanţă, realizat; proiectul de a distruge populaţiile slave a fost doar în mică parte aplicat. Auschwitz este doar o introducere la Holocaust, iar Holocaustul e doar o sugestie a planurilor finale ale lui Hitler. Studierea Holocaustului reprezintă o mare provocare deoarece acest subiect poate provoca suferințe sufletești, ca urmare a naturii sale traumatice, a proporțiilor sale și a modului sensibil în care interacționează cu probleme precum rasismul și antisemitismul, aflate într-o continuă dinamică.

Bibliografie: Wiesel, Elie, Friling, Tuvia, Ioanid, Radu, Benjamin, Lya & Ionescu, Mihail E. (edit.):International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania Final report (electronic resource, Comisia internațională pentru studierea Holocaustului în România), Polirom, 2004 Rozett, Robert &Spector, Shmuel (ed.): Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, edit. YadVashem in association with the Jerusalem Publishing House, 2000

Teacher Mușat Daniela- Ionela "Constantin Noica" Theoretical High School, Alexandria

There are certain events in modern history that have marked the entire course of humanity, moments of crisis, such as the two world conflagrations. During these sad events, the extremist doctrines degenerated and manifested, with which we are all familiar, so we can talk about antiSemitism and implicitly the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a decisive event in the history of the world, which transcended geographical boundaries and affected all segments of society that it reached. Decades later, societies continue to face the memory of the Holocaust, in ways that intersect with our contemporary realities. The Holocaust represented the systematic persecution and killing of Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler, a genocide spread across an entire continent that

destroyed not only individuals and families, but also communities and cultures that developed over the centuries. According to the specialists present at the event, in the years 1937-1944, in addition to the Jewish families, many gypsy or Sinti families from different countries were exterminated. For many years in a row, the German authorities did not talk about the crimes during the Second World War. The main reasons we know something about Auschwitz distort our understanding of the Holocaust: we know about Auschwitz because there were survivors there, and there were survivors because Auschwitz was a concentration camp and a death factory at the same time. These were mostly Western European Jews, because they were usually sent to Auschwitz. After World War II, Jewish survivors in Western Europe were free to write and publish as they wished, while Eastern European Jews, prisoners behind the Iron Curtain, could not. In the West, memories of the Holocaust could (though very slowly) enter historical writing and the public consciousness. This form of survivor history inadequately captures the reality of mass murder. In 1943 and 1944, when most of the crimes took place among Western European Jews, the Holocaust was largely complete. Two-thirds of the Jews who will be killed during the war were already dead by the end of 1942. The main victims, Polish Jews and Soviet Jews, were killed by bullets fired from death nests or by carbon monoxide from internal combustion engines, pumped in the gas chambers of Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor in occupied Poland. Auschwitz, as a symbol of the Holocaust, excludes those who were at the center of the historical event. The largest group of Holocaust victims - Orthodox Jews and Yiddish speakers in Poland - was culturally alienated by Western Europeans, including Jews from Western Europe. To some degree, they continue to be marginalized in the memory of the Holocaust. The AuschwitzBirkenau death factory was built on the territories now belonging to Poland, although at that time they were part of the German Reich. Auschwitz is thus associated with modern-day Poland by anyone who visits it, although relatively few Polish Jews and almost no Soviet Jews died there. The two large groups of victims are almost missing from the memorial symbol. An appropriate view of the Holocaust should place Operation Reinhardt - the killing of Polish Jews in 1942 - at the heart of its history. Polish Jews were the largest Jewish community in the world, and Warsaw - the most important Jewish city. This community was exterminated at Treblinka, Belzec and Sobibor. About 1.5 million Jews were killed in these three places, 780,863 in Treblinka alone. Only a few dozen people survived these death factories. Belzec, although in third place in Holocaust crimes, after Auschwitz and Treblinka, is little known. 434,508 Jews perished in that death factory and only two or three survived. Another million Polish Jews were killed in other ways, some in Chelmno, Majdanek or Auschwitz, many others shot in the actions in the eastern half of the country. All in all, even though the number of Jews killed by bullets was not as large as those killed by gassing, they died of bullets in places forgotten in a hazy memory. The second very important part of the Holocaust is mass murder by shooting in Eastern Poland and the Soviet Union. It began with the shooting of Jewish men by the SS Einsatzgruppen in June 1941, followed by the killing of Jewish women and children in July and the extermination of the entire Jewish community in August and September. At the end of 1941, the Germans, together with the local auxiliary troops and the

Romanian troops, killed one million Jews from the Soviet Union and the Baltic States. It is the equivalent of the total number of Jews killed at Auschwitz during the entire war. By the end of 1942, the Germans had shot 700,000 Jews, and the populations of Soviet Jews under their control had ceased to exist. Of the approximately 5.7 million Jews killed, three million were pre-war Polish citizens and another million were Soviet citizens: taken together, 70% of the total. After the Soviet and Polish Jews, the next largest group of Jews killed were from Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. If we take them into account, the Eastern European character of the Holocaust becomes even clearer. Even this corrected picture of the Holocaust leads to an incomplete sense of the extent of German mass murder policies in Europe. The "final solution," as the Nazis called it, was at first only one of the extermination projects to be implemented after a victorious war against the Soviet Union. The Germans have succeeded in pursuing certain policies that bear some resemblance to these plans. They expelled half a million non-Jewish Poles from the territories annexed to the Reich. An impatient Himmler ordered the implementation of a first stage of the "General Plan Ost" in eastern Poland: ten thousand children were killed and one hundred thousand adults - expelled. The Wehrmacht intentionally starved nearly a million people during the siege of Leningrad and another hundred thousand in Ukrainian cities. Nearly three million captured Soviet soldiers died of starvation or disease in German prisoner-of-war camps. These people were intentionally killed: during the siege of Leningrad, there was a plan and intent to starve people to death. If the Holocaust had not taken place, they would have been called the most horrific war crimes in modern history. The Germans killed just over ten million civilians in the largest mass killings, nearly half of them Jews and half non-Jews. Both Jews and non-Jews came mostly from the same part of Europe. The plan to kill all the Jews was, in essence, realized; the project to destroy the Slavic populations was only partially implemented. Auschwitz is just an introduction to the Holocaust, and the Holocaust is just a suggestion of Hitler's final plans. Studying the Holocaust is a great challenge because this subject can cause emotional suffering, due to its traumatic nature, its proportions and the sensitive way in which it interacts with issues such as racism and anti-Semitism, which are in a continuous dynamic.

Bibliography: Wiesel, Elie, Friling, Tuvia, Ioanid, Radu, Benjamin, Lya & Ionescu, Mihail E.: International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania Final report, Polirom, 2004 Rozett, Robert & Spector, Shmuel: Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, edit. YadVashem in association with the Jerusalem Publishing House, 2000