THE JEWISH HOLOCAUST

Watch this and keep notes of vocabulary related to the Holocaust.

Example of a K-W-L chart


36 questions about the Holocaust




"The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference." (Ian Kershaw)

People in the Holocaust

PERPETRATORS, COLLABORATORS, BYSTANDERS, RESISTORS (UPSTANDERS), RESCUERS (link here).

  • Perpetrators (Amon Goeth)
  • Collaborators (Citizens of Kovno, Lithuania)
  • Bystanders (Regina Prudnikova)
  • Resisters (The White Rose)
  • Rescuers (Irena Gut Opdyke)

The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. “Holocaust” is a word of Greek origin meaning “sacrifice by fire.” The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that Germans were “racially superior” and that the Jews, deemed “inferior,” were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community.

During the era of the Holocaust, German authorities also targeted other groups because of their perceived “racial inferiority”: Roma, the disabled and some of the Slavic peoples (Poles, Russians and others). Other groups were persecuted on political, ideological and other grounds, including socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses and homosexuals.

As Nazi tyranny spread across Europe, the Germans and their collaborators persecuted and murdered millions of other people. Between two and three million Soviet prisoners of war were murdered or died of starvation, disease, neglect or maltreatment. From the earliest years of the Nazi regime, German authorities persecuted homosexuals and others whose behavior did not match prescribed social norms. German police officials targeted thousands of political opponents (including communists, socialists and trade unionists) and religious dissidents (such as Jehovah’s Witnesses). Many of these individuals died as a result of incarceration and maltreatment. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Encyclopedia of the Holocaust)


LOOK AT THE PARAGRAPH. RE-WRITE IT, USING GAPS WHERE NECESSARY

Holland'srailwaycompany,NS,willcompensateHolocaustvictims.NS
willcompensatepeopletakentoNaziconcentrationcampsontheirtrain
s.AfterGermanyinvadedHollandin1940,NStrainstookthousandsofJe
wsandotherminoritiestoGermantrains.By1944,mostJewsinHollandh
adgone.NSwillpaytensofmillionsofeurostoabout500survivorsandme
mbersoftheirfamily.NSwillpaybetween5,000eurosto15,000eurosto
eachvictim.NSsaidthepaymentsarethecompany'shistoricalresponsi
bility.TheNazispaidNStotakepeopletotheborder.Germantrainsthent
ookthemtothecamps.NSsaiditwas"ablackpage"initshistory.Itadded
:"Thereisno...amountofmoneythatcancompensate...forthesufferin
g[of]thevictims."Itcalledthepayments"amoralgesture".NSaccepted
itsroleinthesufferingofthevictimsandtheirfamilymembers.








Read and complete:

aware / tragedies / date / on / members / acts / created / memory 

January 27 is the International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It is the day 1. __________ which the world remembers one of the greatest 2. __________ in human history, the Nazi Holocaust in Germany during World War II. The United Nations 3. __________ this day in a special Resolution in 2005. 4. __________ of the UN General Assembly wanted a day in 
5. __________ of the 6 million European Jews who perished in the Nazi concentration camps. The day is also to make future generations 6. __________ of the horrors of what happened in the camps in the hope that this will prevent future 7. __________ of genocide. January 27 is the 8. __________ in 1945 when the Russian Army liberated the largest such camp, Auschwitz.

beyond / utmost / launch / include / stands / holds / apply / survivors

The United Nations 9. __________ a week of events that ends on January 27. These 
10. __________ exhibitions on the Holocaust in its New York headquarters, the 11.__________ of special websites, concerts and videoed messages from world leaders and Holocaust 12. __________. In 2008, then-UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon gave the following speech: “We must go 13. __________ remembrance, and make sure that new generations know this history. We must 14. __________ the lessons of the Holocaust to today’s world. And we must do our 15. __________ so that all peoples must enjoy the protections and rights for which the United Nations 16. __________.” Special events also take place at Holocaust museums in the USA and Israel.


Take This Giant Leap

Sonia Weitz was born in Kraków, Poland. She was 11 years old when her family and other Polish Jews were herded into ghettos by the Nazis. Of the 84 members of her extended family, she and her sister Blanca were the only survivors of years in ghettos and concentration camps during the Holocaust. At an early age, she turned to poetry to help her cope with her emotions. Years after the Holocaust, Weitz wrote the poem “For Yom Ha’Shoah.” Yom Ha’Shoah is Hebrew for “Day of Holocaust Remembrance.”

Come, take this giant leap with me
into the other world . . . the other place
where language fails and imagery defies,
denies man’s consciousness . . . and dies
upon the altar of insanity.

Come, take this giant leap with me
into the other world . . . the other place
and trace the eclipse of humanity . . .
where children burned while mankind stood by
and the universe has yet to learn why
. . . has yet to learn why.

Connection Questions

  1. What does this poem mean to you? What questions does it raise for you?
  2. Sonia Weitz has been called “a survivor with a poet’s eye.” How can poetry deepen one’s study of the Holocaust? What can we learn from poetry that more traditional historical accounts might not capture?
  3. Re-read the poem and highlight the verbs Weitz uses. How do the verbs help to intensify her description of “the other world”?
  4. Do you think that Weitz believes it is possible to understand the horrors of the Holocaust? What can we gain by studying the brutality of the Holocaust? 

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