holocaust explanatory essay

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The Holocaust

By: History.com Editors

Updated: April 11, 2023 | Original: October 14, 2009

The Holocaust was the state-sponsored persecution and mass murder of millions of European Jews, Romani people, the intellectually disabled, political dissidents and homosexuals by the German Nazi regime between 1933 and 1945. The word “holocaust,” from the Greek words “holos” (whole) and “kaustos” (burned), was historically used to describe a sacrificial offering burned on an altar.

After years of Nazi rule in Germany, dictator Adolf Hitler’s “Final Solution”—now known as the Holocaust—came to fruition during World War II, with mass killing centers in concentration camps. About six million Jews and some five million others, targeted for racial, political, ideological and behavioral reasons, died in the Holocaust—more than one million of those who perished were children.

Historical Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism in Europe did not begin with Adolf Hitler . Though use of the term itself dates only to the 1870s, there is evidence of hostility toward Jews long before the Holocaust—even as far back as the ancient world, when Roman authorities destroyed the Jewish temple in Jerusalem and forced Jews to leave Palestine .

The Enlightenment , during the 17th and 18th centuries, emphasized religious tolerance, and in the 19th century Napoleon Bonaparte and other European rulers enacted legislation that ended long-standing restrictions on Jews. Anti-Semitic feeling endured, however, in many cases taking on a racial character rather than a religious one.

Did you know? Even in the early 21st century, the legacy of the Holocaust endures. Swiss government and banking institutions have in recent years acknowledged their complicity with the Nazis and established funds to aid Holocaust survivors and other victims of human rights abuses, genocide or other catastrophes.

Hitler's Rise to Power

The roots of Adolf Hitler’s particularly virulent brand of anti-Semitism are unclear. Born in Austria in 1889, he served in the German army during World War I . Like many anti-Semites in Germany, he blamed the Jews for the country’s defeat in 1918.

Soon after World War I ended, Hitler joined the National German Workers’ Party, which became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), known to English speakers as the Nazis. While imprisoned for treason for his role in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, Hitler wrote the memoir and propaganda tract “ Mein Kampf ” (or “my struggle”), in which he predicted a general European war that would result in “the extermination of the Jewish race in Germany.”

Hitler was obsessed with the idea of the superiority of the “pure” German race, which he called “Aryan,” and with the need for “Lebensraum,” or living space, for that race to expand. In the decade after he was released from prison, Hitler took advantage of the weakness of his rivals to enhance his party’s status and rise from obscurity to power.

On January 30, 1933, he was named chancellor of Germany. After the death of President Paul von Hindenburg in 1934, Hitler anointed himself Fuhrer , becoming Germany’s supreme ruler.

Concentration Camps

The twin goals of racial purity and territorial expansion were the core of Hitler’s worldview, and from 1933 onward they would combine to form the driving force behind his foreign and domestic policy.

At first, the Nazis reserved their harshest persecution for political opponents such as Communists or Social Democrats. The first official concentration camp opened at Dachau (near Munich) in March 1933, and many of the first prisoners sent there were Communists.

Like the network of concentration camps that followed, becoming the killing grounds of the Holocaust, Dachau was under the control of Heinrich Himmler , head of the elite Nazi guard, the Schutzstaffel (SS) and later chief of the German police.

By July 1933, German concentration camps ( Konzentrationslager in German, or KZ) held some 27,000 people in “protective custody.” Huge Nazi rallies and symbolic acts such as the public burning of books by Jews, Communists, liberals and foreigners helped drive home the desired message of party strength and unity.

In 1933, Jews in Germany numbered around 525,000—just one percent of the total German population. During the next six years, Nazis undertook an “Aryanization” of Germany, dismissing non-Aryans from civil service, liquidating Jewish-owned businesses and stripping Jewish lawyers and doctors of their clients. 

Nuremberg Laws

Under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was considered a Jew, while those with two Jewish grandparents were designated Mischlinge (half-breeds).

Under the Nuremberg Laws, Jews became routine targets for stigmatization and persecution. This culminated in Kristallnacht , or the “Night of Broken Glass” in November 1938, when German synagogues were burned and windows in Jewish home and shops were smashed; some 100 Jews were killed and thousands more arrested.

From 1933 to 1939, hundreds of thousands of Jews who were able to leave Germany did, while those who remained lived in a constant state of uncertainty and fear.

HISTORY Vault: Third Reich: The Rise

Rare and never-before-seen amateur films offer a unique perspective on the rise of Nazi Germany from Germans who experienced it. How were millions of people so vulnerable to fascism?

Euthanasia Program

In September 1939, Germany invaded the western half of Poland , starting World War II . German police soon forced tens of thousands of Polish Jews from their homes and into ghettoes, giving their confiscated properties to ethnic Germans (non-Jews outside Germany who identified as German), Germans from the Reich or Polish gentiles.

Surrounded by high walls and barbed wire, the Jewish ghettoes in Poland functioned like captive city-states, governed by Jewish Councils. In addition to widespread unemployment, poverty and hunger, overpopulation and poor sanitation made the ghettoes breeding grounds for disease such as typhus.

Meanwhile, beginning in the fall of 1939, Nazi officials selected around 70,000 Germans institutionalized for mental illness or physical disabilities to be gassed to death in the so-called Euthanasia Program.

After prominent German religious leaders protested, Hitler put an end to the program in August 1941, though killings of the disabled continued in secrecy, and by 1945 some 275,000 people deemed handicapped from all over Europe had been killed. In hindsight, it seems clear that the Euthanasia Program functioned as a pilot for the Holocaust.

'Final Solution'

Throughout the spring and summer of 1940, the German army expanded Hitler’s empire in Europe, conquering Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. Beginning in 1941, Jews from all over the continent, as well as hundreds of thousands of European Romani people, were transported to Polish ghettoes.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 marked a new level of brutality in warfare. Mobile killing units of Himmler’s SS called Einsatzgruppen would murder more than 500,000 Soviet Jews and others (usually by shooting) over the course of the German occupation.

A memorandum dated July 31, 1941, from Hitler’s top commander Hermann Goering to Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (the security service of the SS), referred to the need for an Endlösung ( Final Solution ) to “the Jewish question.”

Yellow Stars

Beginning in September 1941, every person designated as a Jew in German-held territory was marked with a yellow, six-pointed star, making them open targets. Tens of thousands were soon being deported to the Polish ghettoes and German-occupied cities in the USSR.

Since June 1941, experiments with mass killing methods had been ongoing at the concentration camp of Auschwitz , near Krakow, Poland. That August, 500 officials gassed 500 Soviet POWs to death with the pesticide Zyklon-B. The SS soon placed a huge order for the gas with a German pest-control firm, an ominous indicator of the coming Holocaust.

Holocaust Death Camps

Beginning in late 1941, the Germans began mass transports from the ghettoes in Poland to the concentration camps, starting with those people viewed as the least useful: the sick, old and weak and the very young.

The first mass gassings began at the camp of Belzec, near Lublin, on March 17, 1942. Five more mass killing centers were built at camps in occupied Poland, including Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek and the largest of all, Auschwitz.

From 1942 to 1945, Jews were deported to the camps from all over Europe, including German-controlled territory as well as those countries allied with Germany. The heaviest deportations took place during the summer and fall of 1942, when more than 300,000 people were deported from the Warsaw ghetto alone.

Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Amid the deportations, disease and constant hunger, incarcerated people in the Warsaw Ghetto rose up in armed revolt.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising from April 19-May 16, 1943, ended in the death of 7,000 Jews, with 50,000 survivors sent to extermination camps. But the resistance fighters had held off the Nazis for almost a month, and their revolt inspired revolts at camps and ghettos across German-occupied Europe.

Though the Nazis tried to keep operation of the camps secret, the scale of the killing made this virtually impossible. Eyewitnesses brought reports of Nazi atrocities in Poland to the Allied governments, who were harshly criticized after the war for their failure to respond, or to publicize news of the mass slaughter.

This lack of action was likely mostly due to the Allied focus on winning the war at hand, but was also partly a result of the general incomprehension with which news of the Holocaust was met and the denial and disbelief that such atrocities could be occurring on such a scale.

'Angel of Death'

At Auschwitz alone, more than 2 million people were murdered in a process resembling a large-scale industrial operation. A large population of Jewish and non-Jewish inmates worked in the labor camp there; though only Jews were gassed, thousands of others died of starvation or disease.

In 1943, eugenics advocate Josef Mengele arrived in Auschwitz to begin his infamous experiments on Jewish prisoners. His special area of focus was conducting medical experiments on twins , injecting them with everything from petrol to chloroform under the guise of giving them medical treatment. His actions earned him the nickname “the Angel of Death.”

Nazi Rule Ends

By the spring of 1945, German leadership was dissolving amid internal dissent, with Goering and Himmler both seeking to distance themselves from Hitler and take power.

In his last will and political testament, dictated in a German bunker that April 29, Hitler blamed the war on “International Jewry and its helpers” and urged the German leaders and people to follow “the strict observance of the racial laws and with merciless resistance against the universal poisoners of all peoples”—the Jews.

The following day, Hitler died by suicide . Germany’s formal surrender in World War II came barely a week later, on May 8, 1945.

German forces had begun evacuating many of the death camps in the fall of 1944, sending inmates under guard to march further from the advancing enemy’s front line. These so-called “death marches” continued all the way up to the German surrender, resulting in the deaths of some 250,000 to 375,000 people.

In his classic book Survival in Auschwitz , the Italian-Jewish author Primo Levi described his own state of mind, as well as that of his fellow inmates in Auschwitz on the day before Soviet troops liberated the camp in January 1945: “We lay in a world of death and phantoms. The last trace of civilization had vanished around and inside us. The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to conclusion by the Germans in defeat.”

Legacy of the Holocaust

The wounds of the Holocaust—known in Hebrew as “Shoah,” or catastrophe—were slow to heal. Survivors of the camps found it nearly impossible to return home, as in many cases they had lost their entire family and been denounced by their non-Jewish neighbors. As a result, the late 1940s saw an unprecedented number of refugees, POWs and other displaced populations moving across Europe.

In an effort to punish the villains of the Holocaust, the Allies held the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46, which brought Nazi atrocities to horrifying light. Increasing pressure on the Allied powers to create a homeland for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust would lead to a mandate for the creation of Israel in 1948.

Over the decades that followed, ordinary Germans struggled with the Holocaust’s bitter legacy, as survivors and the families of victims sought restitution of wealth and property confiscated during the Nazi years.

Beginning in 1953, the German government made payments to individual Jews and to the Jewish people as a way of acknowledging the German people’s responsibility for the crimes committed in their name.

The Holocaust. The National WWII Museum . What Was The Holocaust? Imperial War Museums . Introduction to the Holocaust. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum . Holocaust Remembrance. Council of Europe . Outreach Programme on the Holocaust. United Nations .

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World History Project - Origins to the Present

Course: world history project - origins to the present   >   unit 7.

• BEFORE YOU WATCH: The Fallen of World War II
• WATCH: The Fallen of World War II
• READ: The Second World War
• READ: Economics in the Second World War
• BEFORE YOU WATCH: World War II
• WATCH: World War II

READ: The Holocaust

• READ: Nuclear Weapons
• READ: Thirty Years of Continuous War
• World War 2

First read: preview and skimming for gist

Second read: key ideas and understanding content.

• In what ways did the Nazis kill their victims?
• What ideas did the Nazis use to create hostility towards Jewish people?
• What are some early ways in which the Nazis restricted Jewish rights?
• Why were Jewish pregnant women, children, and mothers particularly targeted for gassing?
• According to the author, many enslaved Jews worked in private companies and were killed by people who knew them. Why is this point important?

Third read: evaluating and corroborating

• The author argues that, “We need to be on the lookout for when we, too, become “used to” the casual oppression of others, when our everyday compassion for people different from us disappears.” Can you think of examples from your own life or from your society of people getting “used to” bad treatment of others? Are there ways in which we can act to avoid repeating this kind of atrocity?

The Holocaust

A spiral of fascism, origins and first steps before the second world war, intensification after 1939, the “final solution”, who were the killers.

This kind of killing was very different from the industrial, relatively insulated, and impersonal mass murder in gas chambers, which distinguished the Holocaust from other genocides. Instead, it was intimate, face-to-face mass murder in towns where the victims, perpetrators, and bystanders often knew each other beforehand and where no one was entirely passive or could claim not to have seen, heard, or known about the killing.

• Eugenics is a pseudo-science (fake science) that claims you can create a better race of people by preventing the reproduction of people you believe are inferior due to race, ability, sexuality, or other reasons.

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Teaching the Holocaust through Literature

• Witnesses and Testimony
• Dear Diary, I Don't Want to Die
• "I Wanted to Fly Like a Butterfly"
• Lesson Plan: Teaching the Holocaust through Literature
• The German-Jewish Artist Charlotte Salomon
• The Holocaust and the Arts
• Primo Levi,  The Reawakening,  Collier Books, New York 1987, trans. from the Italian: Stuart Woolf.
• Ida Fink, “The Shelter”,  A Scrap of Time,  Northwestern University Press, 1995, trans. from the Polish: Francine Prose and Madeline Levine. Permission to reprint the excerpt has been granted by Writers House, LLC on behalf of the Proprietors.
• From  Songs of the Ghettos,  Ghetto Fighter’s House, Israel, 1998, p. 21.

“The historical, by its nature, tends to accent the unfolding of events while indicating social and political trends. Art, on the other hand, has always sought out the individual, his inner [world], and from that, it tries to understand the [outside] world. Art, perhaps only art, is the last defense against the banal, the commonplace and the irrelevant, and, to take it even further, the last defense against simplicity.” Aharon Appelfeld, Speech on the eve of Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day, 1997, Yad Vashem

In the field of Holocaust education, teachers face a daunting two-fold task: they must impart the vital historical information on the Holocaust, and at the same time ensure its continued emotional relevance to a generation removed from the actual events. Needless to say, the first aim, on its own, is challenging. As most teachers know, the hours allotted to the subject usually are insufficient to comprehensively cover the topic, and they can often feel that precedence must be given to studying facts and figures.

The International School for Holocaust Studies, as part of its pedagogical approach, strives to assist educators in better understanding and presenting the Holocaust as a human story. By using literature in the classroom, primarily postwar poetry and memoirs written by survivors, the Holocaust can be translated from a massive historical process to a series of events which directly affected the life of the individual. In addition, Holocaust literature touches on the historical and the literary, making the field relevant to teachers of history, literature and English alike.

A lot has been written about the challenge for post-Holocaust writers to “describe the indescribable”, to find words that manage to convey what it was like to have been there, or what it’s like to continue living in the Holocaust’s wake. A fundamental distinction exists in the approach writers take to this subject: while some authors will recount events as they occurred, coupled with their insights on their own feelings and impressions at the time, others will take a more abstract approach. As Wagner and Raveh write in the teaching unit “Liberation”:

“One of the ways that Holocaust literature treats the unthinkable reality it represents is by avoiding a precise description of horror, and assuming instead different strategies of displacement. Strategies of displacement are stylistic devices which shift the fictional action away from the center of historical reality, toward marginal areas. This displacement occurs at different levels – in time and space, in the description of seemingly minor human states, by concentrating on the interior world of the protagonists, and so on.” – Rotem Wagner & Inbar Raveh, “Liberation”, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 1999, p. 3.

In this article we will present a sample of works by several authors, and demonstrate the different ways in which their work can highlight the human dimension of the Holocaust.

[Note: for literature teachers, a literary analysis exists in print for the first two of the following texts. See the “Liberation” teaching unit, listed in the right hand margin of the beginning of this article.]

“The Thaw” – Primo Levi

Primo Levi was born in Torino, Italy, in 1919 to a Jewish family. In 1941 he completed his chemistry studies at the local university. When the Germans invaded Italy in 1943, he joined a group of partisans. He was captured by Italian fascists, and when found to be Jewish, he was deported to the Monowitz-Auschwitz camp, where he remained until January 1945. It was thanks to his work as a chemist that he avoided an almost certain death. When he returned home, he wrote a concentration camp diary of sorts, which was published in 1947 under the name “If This is a Man”, which has become a classic of Holocaust literature. He continued writing and publishing until his death by suicide in Torino in 1987. Primo Levi is one of the most important writers of the age.

In “The Thaw”, the first chapter of Levi’s book  The Reawakening,  he describes the mingled optimism and exhaustion of the last days in Auschwitz before the liberation. With the Germans in retreat, after having abandoned Auschwitz in the face of the rapid Russian advance, the few remaining inmates who have not already succumbed to the cold, hunger, illness or the Nazis’ atrocities, face an uncertain future. Levi mostly writes in an immediate, vivid style, but he will sometimes touch on the poetic. This will occur during sequences that attempt to convey a particular emotion or the gravity of an important event. He describes the moment the camp prisoners first see their rescuers:

To us they seemed wonderfully concrete and real, perched on their enormous horses, between the grey of the snow and the grey of the sky, immobile beneath the gusts of damp wind which threatened a thaw. It seemed to us, and so it was, that the nothing full of death in which we had wandered like spent stars for ten days had found its own solid center, a nucleus of condensation; four men, armed, but not against us: four messengers of peace, with rough and boyish faces beneath their heavy fur hats. 1

Levi’s description has the obvious advantage of transporting the reader very realistically into a certain time and place. It touches upon the camp life that Levi is leaving, and the uncertain, rocky future he is facing. This alone is a significant contribution to the education process, presenting a palpable, detailed story of one person. However, Levi also raises issues and dilemmas that go above and beyond a simple chronological testimonial, and it is here that his texts can truly serve a broader pedagogical function – that of true empathy with the plight of the survivors, and the extremely difficult situations that they faced.

At one point, Levi describes the bittersweet feeling shared by liberator and liberated alike:

They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funereal scene. It was the shame we knew so well, the shame that drowned us after selections, and every time we had to watch, or submit to, some outrage. 1

Here Levi raises the issues of guilt, the total loss of personal freedom, and of the helplessness to stop unjustified cruelty. These are three vitally important themes in Holocaust education, generating classroom discussion on the meaning of genocidal acts of violence, and on the moral consequences of passivity.

Naming the chapter “The Thaw”, and not “Liberation”, a seemingly more appropriate title, is also telling. Levi wishes to show that the physical liberation was only the beginning of a long and troubled journey. The many hurdles that Levi would still have to clear before his eventual return to his home country of Italy, and the mental torment that would follow him to his eventual suicide in 1987, mean that he was never completely liberated in the classic sense. Hence the ostensibly straightforward description gets an additional, symbolic meaning:

In the meantime, the thaw we had been fearing for so many days had started, and as the snow slowly disappeared, the camp began to change into a squalid bog. 1

Levi’s factual, first-hand depiction of events and feelings stands at the more straightforward end of the spectrum. In contrast, many authors choose the aforementioned strategy of displacement from the actual events. One such example is “The Shelter”, a short story by Ida Fink.

“The Shelter” – Ida Fink

Ida Fink was born in Zbarazh, Poland in 1921. She studied music in Lvov, but was forced to put an end to her studies in 1941, upon the outbreak of war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. During the war she was in the Zbarazh ghetto, but then fled and lived under false papers on the “Aryan side.” In 1957 she immigrated to Israel. She has written short stories, a novel and a play, which have been translated from Polish into various languages.

In “The Shelter,” Fink depicts a chance encounter on a train with a married couple, on their return journey from a jarring visit. They proceed to recount their story. During the war, the couple had been kept hidden by a “foster family.” Already desperately poor when the family had agreed to take them in, the couple had promised them enough money to build a new house after the war. In the story’s riveting climax, the couple discovers a hiding area in the new home, just like the one they had constructed in the old house. The anonymous woman, describing the visit, says:

We began in the kitchen, then we went into the living room, the bedroom, and another room for the son who had returned from the army. We thought they had shown us everything, but then they said, "And we kept you in mind, too. Here, take a look!" The husband pushed aside a wardrobe and I looked – a white, blank wall. But when he went down and touched the floor, I grabbed Olek’s hand [...] He lifted a red, waxed board and told us to look closely. "There, now, just in case something happens, you won’t have to roost like chickens, a shelter as pretty as a picture, with all the comforts!" [...] “What are we supposed to make of that?” asked the man. “Sentenced to a hiding-place, sentenced to death once again? And by whom? By good people who wish us well. It’s appalling. To build a hiding-place out of the goodness of one’s heart! That’s what’s so horrible. There, in that house, it was as if I were kneeling above my own grave.” 2

By removing the setting from a direct account of experiences during the war to a chance encounter on a train, Fink alludes to the all-pervasive nature of a survivor’s trauma. Their extreme reaction to the ostensible gesture of good will by their “foster family” is evidence of this. The story’s main contribution to the classroom is its open-endedness: it stops short of attaching an unequivocal value judgment to what happened. Students can debate whether this foster family’s intent was genuine or not, or whether that even matters. Was the couple’s reaction heavy-handed? Is the extra room really a symbolic grave, as the couple had put it, or the excusable result of wartime trauma?

The frame story, placing events after the war, touches also on another aspect for discussion. The first-person narrator behaves very naturally in the story, in that s/he struggles to say the right words. The narrator says at one point:

"Horrible," I repeated. I said something else about how the war twisted people, and I felt ashamed; it was so banal, so polite. 2

The narrator’s behavior is typical of how a casual listener to such a story may react. Fink does not sugarcoat the reaction, despite being a survivor herself. Using this story, a teacher can start a discussion about the difficulty of feeling empathy towards the survivors experiences and, more fundamentally, towards the Holocaust. Levi’s story primarily focuses on the difficulties during the Holocaust, whereas Fink’s emphasis is in the  here and now.

“Our Town is Burning” – Mordechai Gebirtig

“Our Town is Burning”, by Mordechai Gebirtig, was written in Yiddish in 1938, after a pogrom in Przytyk (prounounced “pshitic”), Poland. It is considered extraordinarily prophetic, in that it was written before the war. Gebirtig’s poems became very popular throughout the Jewish communities of Eastern Poland. The language and theme of this poem are less complex than the above stories, and therefore this text may be suitable for junior high school students.

Our Town is Burning  / Mordechai Gebirtig

Our town is burning, brothers, burning Our poor little town is burning. Angry winds are fanning higher The leaping tongues of flame and fire, The evil winds are roaring! Our whole town burns!

And you stand looking on with folded arms, And shake your heads. You stand looking on, with folded arms, While the fire spreads!

Our town is burning, brothers, burning, Our poor little town is burning. Tongues of flame are leaping, The fire through our town goes sweeping, Through roofs and windows pouring. All around us burns.

Our town is burning, brothers, burning, Any moment the fire may Sweep the whole of our town away, And leave only ashes, black and gray, Life after a battle, where dead walls stand, Broken and ruined in a desolate land.

Our town is burning, brothers, burning, All now depends on you. Our only help is what you do. You can still put out the fire With your blood, if you desire.

Don’t look on with folded arms, And shake your heads. Don’t look on with folded arms While the fire spreads. 3

This poem raises the important issues of personal accountability, of the potential power of the individual in resisting the majority. That it was written before the Holocaust is instrumental for classroom discussion: using this poem, a teacher can demonstrate the value of precaution, of setting barriers that prevent a situation from spiralling into a volatile state. During the early teens, this lesson is particularly appropriate.

These texts are but a small selection of the post-Holocaust literature available. It is our hope that they have stimulated your interest, and have provided some ideas on how to approach teaching this difficult subject in the classroom. The next section of this e-newsletter is a sample lesson plan, outlining in greater detail how to discuss a similar text with students.

All the sample texts provided in this article are available, together with guidelines for classroom discussion, in various workbooks and teaching units designed by the International School for Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem.

More information on Yad Vashem educational literature units on the Holocaust is available in the right margin at the top of this article.

• 1. a. b. c. 1

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DISPLACED COMMUNITIES

Allied advancements across Europe led to the liberation of ghettos, concentration, and death camps across the continent, but it took the total surrender of Germany on May 8, 1945, to end the state sponsored persecution of Europe’s Jews, Roma and Sinti, LBGT, Asocial, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others deemed “enemies of the Nazi” state. Much of Europe lay in ruins by the end of the Second World War and an estimated 55,000,000 people had been displaced across the continent between 1939 and 1947. Whole communities were destroyed and two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population had been murdered. While the end of World War II was embraced and celebrated globally, there was one group of people unable to rejoice upon liberation: Europe’s surviving Jews. For these individuals, the end of the war brought with it the certain knowledge most of their loved ones had been murdered, they had no home where they could return, and their futures remained out of their control.

An estimated 11,000,000 people remained displaced in Europe in the wake of the Second World War. Of the total number of European United Nations Displaced Persons or UNDPs (DPs for short) more than 8,000,000 were in Germany in the immediate postwar period where 6,000,000 foreign civilian workers, 2,000,000 prisoners of war, and somewhere around 700,000 survivors of concentration camps were liberated at the close of the War. While most Jews from Western and Central Europe were able to resettle in their prewar home countries, this was not an option for the majority of East European Jews. The ones who attempted to return to their prewar homes in search of family, friends, often found their communities destroyed, their loved ones murdered, no chance of regaining stolen property, and often angry neighbors who were in a state of total disbelief that any Jews had survived the war. Some of them fled to Germany, where they were housed in centers that were built to house 2,000 people but usually held between 4,000 and 6,000 DPs. Armed guards and barbed wire surrounded the centers. This led many Jews to argue that they were liberated but not free. The DPs were divided into groups based on their prewar nationalities. This meant that Jewish Holocaust survivors were often forced to live among their former oppressors, persecutors, and anti-Semites.

Having lost most of their family members in the Holocaust, many Jewish Displaced Persons began to quickly marry and start new families. In one of history’s greatest ironies, Germany had the highest Jewish birthrate worldwide in 1946. The birth of Jewish babies caused a number of unforeseen issues. The loss of elderly female family members in the Holocaust meant there were few people in the camps who could help teach young women how to nurse their children, be mothers, and keep house. The number of Jewish DPs in postwar Germany increased rapidly in 1946 and 1947 reaching between 250,000 and 300,000 as Jews who had survived the War in the furthest reaches of the Soviet Union were allowed to return to their prewar homes. Meeting violent antisemitism, the vast majority of these Jews fled westward into Germany. The majority of these Jews settled in camps in the American occupation zone where they remained for years awaiting a visa abroad.

IMMIGRATION

Securing visas for resettlement abroad was an incredibly difficult task as many countries continued to have incredibly restrictive immigration quotas. However, changes to United States’ immigration laws, and the creation of the state of Israel allowed many DPs to finally resettle abroad. Somewhere around 800 Jewish DPs remained in camps in Germany until the final center was closed in 1957. The remaining Jews were resettled in various states throughout Germany.

LONG TERM TRAUMA

Many survivors suered from continued traumas from their war experiences and were too sick to be considered attractive immigrants. Many of these Jewish DPs suffered from tuberculosis, mental and physical disabilities.

In order to punish those involved in massacres during the Holocaust, the Allies held the Nuremberg Trials, 1945-46, which brought Nazi atrocities to horrifying light. Countries around the world secretly granted visas to top Nazis and their collaborators in their efforts to advance science (the atom bomb in the U.S.) and fight the “Red Terror” (Communism in the U.S., France and Great Britain, among others) in the East.

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Auschwitz: Oral History Excerpts

The largest of its kind, the Auschwitz camp complex was essential to implementing the Nazi plan for the “Final Solution.” Learn about survivors’ experiences there in the following oral histories.

Irene Hizme and Rene Slotkin describe deportation to Auschwitz

Irene and Rene were born Renate and Rene Guttmann. The family moved to Prague shortly after the twins' birth, where they were living when the Germans occupied Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939. A few months later, uniformed Germans arrested their father. Decades later, Irene and Rene learned that he was killed at the Auschwitz camp in December 1941. Irene, Rene, and their mother were deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto, and later to the Auschwitz camp. At Auschwitz, the twins were separated and subjected to medical experiments . Irene and Rene remained separated for some time after their liberation from Auschwitz. The group Rescue Children brought Irene to the United States in 1947, where she was reunited with Rene in 1950.

Barbara Marton Farkas describes deportation from Hungary to Auschwitz

Barbara was born in the province of Arad in northern Transylvania, Romania . She went to school until the Hungarian army occupied the area in 1940 and she was no longer allowed to attend. After the Germans occupied Hungary in 1944, discrimination against Jews intensified. Barbara and her family were forced into the Oradea ghetto. She worked in the ghetto hospital until she was deported to the Auschwitz camp . At Auschwitz, she worked in the kitchens to receive extra food. She was deported to another camp, and later forced on a death march . Toward the war's end, the Red Cross rescued Barbara. She returned to Arad after World War II and worked as a biochemist.

Bart Stern describes deportation to Auschwitz

Following the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, Bart was forced into a ghetto established in his home town. From May to July 1944, the Germans deported Jews from Hungary to the Auschwitz killing center in occupied Poland. Bart was deported by cattle car to Auschwitz. At Auschwitz, he was selected to perform forced labor , drilling and digging in a coal mine. As Soviet forces advanced toward the Auschwitz camp in January 1945, the Germans forced most of the prisoners on a death march out of the camp. Along with a number of ill prisoners who were in the camp infirmary, Bart was one of the few inmates who remained in the camp at the time of liberation.

Cecilie Klein-Pollack describes mother's actions to save Cecilie's sister's life upon arrival at Auschwitz

Cecilie was the youngest of six children born to a religious, middle-class Jewish family. In 1939, Hungary occupied Cecilie's area of Czechoslovakia. Members of her family were imprisoned. The Germans occupied Hungary in 1944. Cecilie and her family had to move into a ghetto in Huszt and were later deported to Auschwitz . Cecilie and her sister were chosen for forced labor ; the rest of her family was gassed upon arrival. Cecilie was transferred to several other camps, where she labored in factories. Allied forces liberated her in 1945. After the war she was reunited with and married her fiance.

Cecilie Klein-Pollack describes arrival at Auschwitz

Fritzie weiss fritzshall describes deportation in cattle car to auschwitz.

Fritzie's father immigrated to the United States, but by the time he could bring his family over, war had begun and Fritzie's mother feared attacks on transatlantic shipping. Fritzie, her mother, and two brothers were eventually sent to Auschwitz . Her mother and brothers died. Fritzie survived by pretending to be older than her age and thus a stronger worker. On a death march from Auschwitz, Fritzie ran into a forest, where she was later liberated.

Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall describes receiving help from a prisoner in the "Kanada" detail upon arrival at Auschwitz

Hana mueller bruml describes arrival procedures at auschwitz.

In 1942, Hana was confined with other Jews to the Theresienstadt ghetto, where she worked as a nurse. There, amid epidemics and poverty, residents held operas, debates, and poetry readings. In 1944, she was deported to Auschwitz . After a month there, she was sent to Sackisch, a Gross-Rosen subcamp, where she made airplane parts at forced labor . She was liberated in May 1945.

Helen Lebowitz Goldkind describes treatment of new prisoners at Auschwitz

Volosianka was annexed by Hungary in 1939 and occupied by the Germans in 1944. Helen was about 13 when she and her family were deported to the Uzhgorod ghetto. They were then deported to various camps. Helen and her older sister survived Auschwitz , forced labor at a camp munitions factory, and Bergen-Belsen . When Helen was too weak to move, her sister would support her during roll call and drag her to work, knowing that labor was the only chance for survival.

Leo Schneiderman describes conditions on a freight car during deportation from Lodz to Auschwitz

The Germans invaded Poland in September 1939. Leo and his family were confined to a ghetto in Lodz. Leo was forced to work as a tailor in a uniform factory. The Lodz ghetto was liquidated in 1944, and Leo was deported to Auschwitz . He was then sent to the Gross-Rosen camp system for forced labor . As the Soviet army advanced, the prisoners were transferred to the Ebensee camp in Austria. The Ebensee camp was liberated in 1945.

Leo Schneiderman describes arrival at Auschwitz, selection, and separation from his family

Lilly appelbaum malnik describes the process of registration in auschwitz.

Germany invaded Belgium in May 1940. After the Germans seized her mother, sister, and brother, Lilly went into hiding. With the help of friends and family, Lilly hid her Jewish identity for two years. But, in 1944, Lilly was denounced by some Belgians and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau via the Mechelen camp. After a death march from Auschwitz, Lilly was liberated at Bergen-Belsen by British forces.

Miso (Michael) Vogel describes arrival at Auschwitz

In 1939, Slovak fascists took over Topol'cany, where Miso lived. In 1942, Miso was deported to the Slovak-run Novaky camp and then to Auschwitz . At Auschwitz, he was tattooed with the number 65,316, indicating that 65,315 prisoners preceded him in that series of numbering. He was forced to labor in the Buna works and then in the Birkenau "Kanada" detachment, unloading incoming trains. In late 1944, prisoners were transferred to camps in Germany. Miso escaped during a death march from Landsberg and was liberated by US forces.

Miso (Michael) Vogel describes the brutality of SS guards towards new arrivals at Auschwitz

Miso (michael) vogel describes the crematoria at auschwitz-birkenau, morris kornberg describes arrival at auschwitz.

Morris grew up in a very religious Jewish household and was active in a Zionist sports league. When the Germans invaded Poland in September 1939, Morris's town was severely damaged. Morris's family was forced to live in a ghetto , and Morris was assigned to forced labor . After a period of imprisonment in Konskie, a town about 30 miles from Przedborz, Morris was deported to the Auschwitz camp. He was assigned to the Jawischowitz subcamp of Auschwitz. In January 1945, Morris was forced on a death march and was sent first to the Troeglitz subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp and then to Theresienstadt . After the war, he stayed for a time in Czechoslovakia and Germany before immigrating to the United States.

Sam Itzkowitz describes the gas chambers in Auschwitz

The Germans invaded Poland in September 1939. When Makow was occupied, Sam fled to Soviet territory. He returned to Makow for provisions, but was forced to remain in the ghetto . In 1942, he was deported to Auschwitz . As the Soviet army advanced in 1944, Sam and other prisoners were sent to camps in Germany. The inmates were put on a death march early in 1945. American forces liberated Sam after he escaped during a bombing raid.

Irene Hizme describes medical experiments at Auschwitz

Rene slotkin describes medical experiments at auschwitz.

Rene and his twin sister Irene were born Rene and Renate Guttman. The family moved to Prague shortly after the twins' birth, where they were living when the Germans occupied Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939. A few months later, uniformed Germans arrested their father. Decades later, Rene and Irene learned that he was killed in the Auschwitz camp in December 1941. Rene, Irene, and their thier mother were deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto, and later to Auschwitz. There, the twins were separated and subjected to medical experiments . After the war Rene stayed with a doctor's family in Kosice, Czechoslovakia, before moving to the United States and being reunited with Irene.

Mayer Adler describes surviving as a child in Auschwitz

Mayer grew up in a rural town that was occupied by Hungary in 1940. After Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944, Mayer and his family were forced into a ghetto . They were then deported to the Auschwitz camp in Poland, where Mayer's parents and brothers perished. Mayer was selected for forced labor , and was later transferred to a satellite camp of Dachau , in Germany. He was liberated from Dachau in 1945. Sponsored by a children's committee, he immigrated to the United States.

Bart Stern describes how he survived to be liberated in the Auschwitz camp

Following the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, Bart was forced into a ghetto established in his home town. From May to July 1944, the Germans deported Jews from Hungary to the Auschwitz killing center in occupied Poland. Bart was deported by cattle car to Auschwitz. At Auschwitz, he was selected to perform forced labor , drilling and digging in a coal mine. As Soviet forces advanced toward the Auschwitz camp in January 1945, the Germans forced most of the prisoners on a death march out of the camp. Along with a number of ill prisoners who were in the camp infirmary, Bart was one of the few inmates who remained in the camp at the time of liberation. He survived to be liberated by hiding in the camp even after many other prisoners had been forced on a death march in January 1945.

Ruth Webber describes escaping from a selection held in the Auschwitz infirmary

Ruth was four years old when the Germans invaded Poland and occupied Ostrowiec. Her family was forced into a ghetto . Germans took over her father's photography business, although he was allowed to continue working outside the ghetto. Before the ghetto was liquidated, Ruth's parents sent her sister into hiding, and managed to get work at a labor camp outside the ghetto. Ruth also went into hiding, either in nearby woods or within the camp itself. When the camp was liquidated, Ruth's parents were split up. Ruth was sent to several concentration camps before eventually being deported to Auschwitz . When Ruth became sick, she was sent to the camp infirmary, managing to escape just before a selection. After the war, Ruth lived in an orphanage in Krakow until she was reunited with her mother.

Ruth Webber describes the Auschwitz crematoria

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Peacock’s ‘The Tattooist of Auschwitz’ tackles a Holocaust love story based on real events

( JTA ) — A Holocaust romance, sparked when a prisoner at Auschwitz-Birkenau is forced to tattoo a number on another prisoner’s arm and they fall in love at first sight, sounds almost implausibly uplifting for a story set in a concentration camp.

But “The Tattooist of Auschwitz,” a new television series , is based on two Slovakian Jewish prisoners — Lali Sokolov and Gita Furman — who really did meet at Auschwitz, survive, marry and move to Australia together after the war. The six-part drama premiering May 2 on Peacock and Sky draws from a 2018 novel of the same name by Heather Morris, who interviewed Sokolov over three years before his death in 2006.

“It’s what drew me in, when I read the book a few years ago — that something like this could happen was so surprising,” Jonah Hauer-King , who plays young Lali at Auschwitz, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Any kind of love at first sight is surprising, let alone in a context like this.”

Alongside Hauer-King, known for his role as Prince Eric in Disney’s live-action “The Little Mermaid,” Academy Award nominee Harvey Keitel plays Lali’s older counterpart in his late 80s, recounting his experiences to Morris (Melanie Lynskey) from his home in Melbourne shortly after Gita (Anna Próchniak) has died.

Directed by Tali Shalom-Ezer and executive produced by Claire Mundell, the series will also feature an end-title song by the legendary Jewish artist and EGOT holder Barbra Streisand. “Love Will Survive” is Streisand’s first recording for a TV series, set to release on April 25 ahead of the series premiere.

“Because of the rise in antisemitism around the world today, I wanted to sing ‘Love Will Survive’ in the context of this series, as a way of remembering the six-million souls who were lost less than 80 years ago,” Streisand said in her announcement . “And also to say that even in the darkest of times, the power of love can triumph and endure.”

“The Tattooist of Auschwitz” joins a crop of World War II-period TV series inspired by buzzy bestselling novels. Hulu recently launched “We Were the Lucky Ones,” based on Georgia Hunter’s 2017 novel about her Jewish family’s dispersion across the world. And in just the past year, Netflix adapted “All the Light We Cannot See” from Anthony Doerr’s 2014 war novel and aired “Transatlantic ,” about Varian Fry’s mission to rescue Holocaust refugees, based on Julie Orringer’s 2019 book “The Flight Portfolio.”

Harvey Keitel plays the elderly Lali Sokolov, depicted here in his Melbourne apartment, in “The Tattooist of Auschwitz. (Martin Mlaka/Sky UK)

Like the other networks, Peacock has billed its series as “inspired by the real-life story,” with the added interest of a real-life romance “in the most horrific of places.” But preserving the authenticity of Lali’s story in a TV show, based on a novel that fictionalized his testimony 12 years after his death, comes with a new set of challenges — especially when the novel was critiqued for inaccurately portraying life in Auschwitz.

Morris’s “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” raised eyebrows from the Auschwitz Memorial in 2018, which said the book “cannot be recommended as a valuable position for those who wish to understand the history of the camp” and is “almost without any value as a document.”

A report from Wanda Witek-Malicka of the Auschwitz Memorial Research Center said the book’s “based-on-facts” marketing, combined with its international success — selling over 12 million copies with translations into more than 40 languages — raised concern that many readers might treat it as a historical source on the realities of Auschwitz, despite several errors and misleading representations.

These inaccuracies include the number that Lali was forced to tattoo on Gita’s arm in the story’s pivotal scene. In the book, she is branded with the number 34902, but Gita herself said in a testimony to the USC Shoah Foundation that her number was 4562, a claim supported by evidence from the Auschwitz Memorial.

Witek-Malicka also disputed a plot line in which Lali obtains penicillin for Gita’s typhus in January 1943, saying this event was “impossible” because penicillin only became readily available after the war. Elsewhere, the book depicts a revolt by the “Sonderkommando,” predominantly Jewish prisoners who were forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoriums. Though the Sonderkommando did revolt at Auschwitz in 1944 and set fire to one crematorium, the book says they blew up two.

The sexual relationship between an SS commander and a Jewish prisoner in the book also raised questions for Witek-Mailcka, who said the possibility of such a long-term relationship was “non-existent.” She also pointed out that the building where the characters supposedly rendezvoused was only completed in January 1945 and never put into use.

Meanwhile, Lali’s son Gary told the New York Times he was bothered to see his father’s name misspelled “Lale” in the book.

Some of these inaccuracies have been corrected in the TV series, which depicts Gita’s original number and corrects the spelling of Lali’s name. But Shalom-Ezer told JTA that she relied heavily on the judgment of Morris, who worked as a story consultant for the show.

Author Heather Morris and actress Melanie Lynskey attend the Gala Screening of Sky Original “The Tattooist Of Auschwitz” at BAFTA on April 9, 2024 in London. (Dave Benett/Getty Images for Sky)

“Heather devoted her life to this,” Shalom-Ezer told JTA. “I’m not just talking about the last three years of Lali’s life, when she spent three times a week sitting with him for hours, listening to his story — all the 11 years it took her to find a publisher for the book and even later, she just devoted herself to this. So I felt confident enough that I believe her, that she’s trying to tell us the story in the most genuine way she can, as close as possible to his truth.”

Morris herself has said that she did not aim to write an academic historical account, only to share Lali’s memories of his life.

“It is Lali’s story,” she told the New York Times in 2018. “I make mention of history and memory waltzing together and straining to part, it must be accepted after 60 years this can happen but I am confident of Lali’s telling of his story, only he could tell it and others may have a different understanding of that time but that is their understanding, I have written Lali’s.”

In its TV form, “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” nods to the fickle nature of memory, particularly the memory of a traumatized person. Sometimes the viewer sees one version of events — for example, Lali discovering that a younger friend was selected for the gas chamber at random — and then the older Lali remembers a different story, in which his own number was on that selection list, only changed to his friend’s after the Nazis employed Lali as a tattooist.

The character Lali shares some of these revisions with the character Morris. Others come to him after she has left, when he is alone and haunted by the dead who occupy his kitchen at night. The series shows Lali talking to these ghosts, bargaining with his memory and making deals with the guilt of survival.

“I think that this is the nature of trauma, it creates a kind of dissociation from what happened so you cannot really remember it correctly,” said Shalom-Ezer. “So the team and I, we thought that this is the most authentic way to portray a man with a trauma that for the first time is trying to share his story with someone.”

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