In the article entitled “Jewish Life During the Holocaust”, there are several topics discussed. These topics include the following: Jewish Immigation, Jews in Hiding, Life in the Ghettos, Jewish Resistence, and Life and Treatment in the Concentration and Death Camps. One of the center points of this article was that the Holocaust was not just an event for European Jews, it was life.
The Holocaust truly began when Jews in Germany began to be gradually more and more restricted under Hitler’s regime. First, they were labeled with the star of David. Second, they were to confined to cruel ghettos such as the Warsaw Ghetto where 400,000 Jews were crammed into a 2.5 acre are. Third, they were sent to the concentration or death camps where they were either worked to death or simply killed.
The article makes it clear that this wasn’t simply grown up stuff. Rather, it effected every generation of Jew that existed. This is why the horrors of this “event” live on today. Children may have been exempt from wearing the star of David, but they were often sent away from their families as a means of escape from the pending doom that awaited many of their parents. Those that met the same ultimate fate as their parents in the concentration or death camps usually found themselves at the bottom of the gas chambers, stepped on by the panicking Jews who were about to die for their religion and culture.
Some Jews did try to resist. However, those who did were met with a tough choice, attempt to resist and succeed or attempt to resist, fail, and sign the death warrant of all of the Jews you were residing with. An example of this principle is seen in the Warsaw Ghetto riot in 1943. After a month of deal with rioting Jews, the Germans took the easy way out and burned the ghetto with all of the Jews inside.
The Holocaust was defined by two main things: conditioned racism and “The Final Solution.” Hitler created racism in the Germans by glorifying the Aryan race and trashing the Jewish race by covering them in the filth of the overcrowded ghettos. “The Final Solution” was the extermination of the Jews as if they were bugs. This cannot happen again.
I find a lot of lens value for this essay in regards to the graphic novel, Maus II.
Here is the article's link: http://jewishfederationpittsburgh.org/page.aspx?id=148359
