Children during the Holocaust
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See Nili Keren, “The Family Camp,” in Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp, ed. Yisrael Gutman and Michael Berenbaum (Bloomington: Indiana University Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1994), 428–40.
Treblinka: Planners of the “Final Solution” chose the site for this third Operation Reinhard killing center in an isolated area some eighty kilometers (fifty miles) northeast of Warsaw. The most fully developed and deadly of the Reinhard camps, Treblinka began killing operations in late July 1942. Commandants of the Treblinka killing center were Dr. Irmfried Eberl (July–August 1942), Franz Stangl (August 1942–August 1943), and Kurt Franz (August 1943–November 1943). Deportations to Treblinka came mainly from the Warsaw ghetto and from smaller ghettos in the Warsaw and Radom districts of the General Government. Jews from Germany, Austria, France, Slovakia, Thrace, and Macedonia were also murdered there, as were thousands of Roma and Poles. On August 2, 1943, Treblinka inmates organized a prisoner revolt at the camp, spurring liquidation of the site in the autumn of 1943. From July 1942 through November 1943, camp authorities killed 870,000 to 925,000 Jews at the killing center.
Typhus: This acute, contagious disease is caused by rickettsial microorganisms and usually transmitted by an animal vector, such as fleas or lice. It should not be confused with typhoid, an unrelated disease. Typhus epidemics claimed thousands of lives in ghettos and concentration camps in German-occupied Europe.
Umschlagplatz (transfer point): Located on the corner of Zamenhof and Niska streets, the Umschlagplatz was an area separating the Warsaw ghetto from the Polish, or “Aryan,” side of the city. Originally the official transit point through which manufactured goods from the outside were transported into the ghetto, the site, with its adjacent railroad siding, became the assembly point for the thousands of Jews deported from the Warsaw ghetto, predominantly to the Treblinka killing center, between July 1942 and May 1943.
United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA): The UNRRA agency was established in November 1943 in response to the unfolding displaced persons crisis in Europe. Subject to the authority of the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF) in Europe, UNRRA facilitated repatriation of non-German refugees under Allied control, administering hundreds of displaced persons camps in Germany, Italy, and Austria. Twenty-three volunteer relief agencies worked through the UNRRA, including the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, ORT, and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS). The International Refugee Organization succeeded UNRRA in 1947 in caring for some 650,000 remaining displaced persons.
Ustaša/Ustaše (also anglicized: Ustasha): This Croatian fascist party controlled the Independent State of Croatia, as a puppet state of Nazi Germany, from 1941 to 1945 and helped to implement the Holocaust in Croatia. Under leader Ante Pavelić, the Croatian state persecuted its Serb, Jewish, and Roma populations. Thirty thousand Jews and 325,000 to 333,000 Serbs were murdered in the territory of the Independent State of Croatia under the Ustaša government.
Versailles Treaty: Drafted by the victors in World War I and signed by Reich officials amid widespread German protests in June 1919, the Versailles Treaty laid out the conditions of the German defeat. The treaty imposed harsh financial sanctions, territorial demands, and military limitations on Germany, undermining the troubled democratic Weimar Republic. Many blamed the treaty’s provisions for having provided the essential precondition for the Nazi Party’s success, but other domestic factors also proved critical in contributing to the demise of Germany’s Weimar democracy.
See Conan Fisher and Alan Sharp, After the Versailles Treaty: Enforcement, Compliance, Contested Identities (London: Routledge, 2008).
Vichy France: Following the German defeat of France in May 1940, French and German officials signed an armistice on June 22 of that year. Under its terms, northern France came under direct German occupation. Southern France remained unoccupied and was governed by a French administration, headquartered in the city of Vichy. In July the French National Assembly voted to suspend the constitution of the Third Republic and placed the new “Vichy regime” under the leadership of the aging Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain. Officially neutral, Vichy France collaborated closely with Germany. In the autumn of 1940, Vichy administrators began to promulgate antisemitic legislation closely patterned on that of German anti-Jewish decrees and ordinances in place in the German-occupied zone. In March 1941, a central agency, the General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs (Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives), was established to coordinate anti-Jewish legislation and policy. Thousands of Jews were interned under deplorable conditions in French-administered detention camps, where at least three thousand individuals died during the war years. As deportation of Jews from western Europe began, German officials, aided by French police, conducted roundups of Jews in both occupied and unoccupied zones of France throughout the summer of 1942. In November 1942, German troops occupied Vichy’s formerly “free” zone.
See Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1981); Renée Poznanski, Jews in France during World War II (Hanover, NH : University Press of New England for Brandeis University Press in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2001).
Volk: Acquiring currency from romantic writers in the nineteenth century, the German word Volk, meaning “folk” or “people,” became a catchword used by National Socialists to define a nation or people united by culture, language, and ethnicity. For Nazi ideologues, it suggested a “community of the blood” in racial terms.
Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans): This National Socialist term included people of German ethnic origin who lived outside the borders of the German Reich and were not Reich citizens. Large communities of ethnic Germans lived in the Baltic countries and in southeastern and eastern Europe. Nazi ideologues were particularly eager to integrate these individuals into the Volksgemeinschaft. Following the invasion of Poland, German authorities established a central registration bureau, the German People’s List (Deutsche Volksliste, or DVL), to register ethnic Germans. The Ethnic Germans’ Central Agency (Volksdeutsche Mittelstelle, or VoMi) organized the spoliation of property from Jews and Poles and its redistribution to ethnic Germans. In line with Reich policy of Germanization, thousands of ethnic Germans were resettled in German-annexed territories of the Reich, either voluntarily or under compulsion.
See Doris Bergen, “The Nazi Concept of ‘Volksdeutsche’ and the Exacerbation of Anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, 1939–45,” Journal of Contemporary History 29, no. 4 (October 1994): 569–82.
Volksgemeinschaft: This was the Nazi term for the German ethnic and racial community, as defined by National Socialist ideology.
Volksschule: This is a primary school in German-speaking lands.
Waffen-SS: The Waffen-SS represented the military wing of the SS, itself a Nazi Party organ. In accordance with Adolf Hitler’s wishes, the Waffen-SS was never incorporated into the regular German army. Its thirty-eight divisions fought beside the regular army (Wehrmacht). It was also a multiethnic force, as nearly 60 percent of its troops were foreign recruits and volunteers by war’s end. Waffen-SS divisions were implicated in numerous war crimes, including the Malmedy, Ardeatine, and Oradour-sur-Glane massacres.
Wannsee Conference: On January 20, 1942, fifteen high-ranking Nazi Party and German government officials met at a villa in the Wannsee suburb of Berlin to discuss and coordinate the implementation of the “Final Solution.” Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, convened the Wannsee Conference to secure support from government ministries and other interested agencies. The participants did not deliberate whether such a plan should be undertaken but instead discussed the implementation of a policy decision already made at the highest level of the Nazi regime.
See Mark Roseman, The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002).
Warsaw ghetto: On O
ctober 12, 1940, the Germans decreed the establishment of the Warsaw ghetto. Containing over four hundred thousand inhabitants, the ghetto was sealed off from the rest of the city in November 1940. Food allotments rationed to the ghetto by the German civilian authorities were not sufficient to sustain life; between 1940 and mid-1942, eighty-three thousand Jews died of starvation and disease. From July 22 until September 12, 1942, German SS and police units carried out mass deportations from the Warsaw ghetto, sending 265,000 Jews to the Treblinka killing center. On April 19, 1943, German authorities commenced finally to liquidate the ghetto. Led by the Jewish Fighting Organization (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa), ghetto fighters and residents resisted for nearly a month, mounting the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. German troops overcame the insurgency on May 16, 1943, deporting forty-two thousand Warsaw Jews to forced labor camps and killing centers. Perhaps as many as several thousand Warsaw Jews continued to live in hiding on the “Aryan side” of Warsaw after the liquidation of the ghetto.
See Barbara Engelking and Lacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).
Wartheland/Warthegau: The Reichsgau of Wartheland (Reichsgau of Posen until 1940) was one of four incorporated territories of the Reich that were part of prewar Poland but annexed by the Nazi state following the Polish defeat in 1939. German authorities marked the Warthegau for Germanization. The native Polish and Jewish populations were forcibly resettled in the non-incorporated territory of the Reich known as the General Government, while ethnic Germans were resettled in the Warthegau territory in order to restructure the region ethnically.
Wasser, Hersh and Bluma (1912–1980 and 1912–1990): Hersh Wasser played an important leadership role in the Warsaw ghetto and was active as secretary of the Oneg Shabbat archive. After the war, Wasser helped to recover much of the archive’s materials, which had been buried in milk cans and other containers within the Warsaw ghetto. Along with his wife, Bluma, a teacher and contributor to the archive, Wasser emigrated to Israel, where he served as director of the J. L. Peretz Publishing House
See Hersh Wasser, “Daily Entries of Hersh Wasser,” ed. and trans. Joseph Kermish, in Yad Vashem Studies 15 (1983): 201–82.
Wehrmacht: The Wehrmacht (defense force) included the combined German armed forces from 1935 until 1945. It comprised the Heer (army), the Kriegsmarine (navy), and the Luftwaffe (air force).
Weimar Republic: This German democracy formed at the end of World War I was named after the city in which its national constitution was adopted in February 1919. Following a phase of relative internal stability, the Weimar Republic underwent a massive crisis, triggered by the worldwide economic downturn in 1929. Elite manipulation of the republic’s constitution, combined with the economic crisis, produced the rapid erosion of political support for democratic parties. Against this backdrop, conservative elites negotiated Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor on January 30, 1933.
See Detlev J. K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (New York: Hill & Wang, 1993).
Westerbork: The Dutch government established Westerbork in the Dutch province of Drenthe in October 1939 to intern Jewish refugees who had entered the Netherlands illegally. The camp continued to function after the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940. In 1941, it had a population of eleven hundred Jewish refugees, mainly from Germany. From 1942 to 1944, Westerbork served as a transit camp for Dutch Jews before their deportation to concentration camps and killing centers in German-occupied Poland. Westerbork was liberated on April 12, 1945, by Canadian forces.
Yad Vashem: Located on the Mount of Remembrance (Har Hazikaron) in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem is Israel’s official remembrance authority to commemorate, document, research, and educate concerning the Holocaust. In 1953, the Israeli Knesset enacted the Law of the Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority proposed by Education Minister Ben-Zion Dinur. Among its activities, the institution is responsible for awarding the title “Righteous Among the Nations” to non-Jewish individuals who, at personal risk to themselves, aided Jews during the Holocaust.
See Bella Gutterman and Avner Shalev, To Bear Witness: Holocaust Remembrance at Yad Vashem (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2005); James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993).
YIVO (Yiddisher Visnshaftlekher Institut, or Jewish Scientific Institute): The YIVO Institute was founded in Vilna, Poland (today Vilnius, Lithuania), in 1925 to document and research the language, literature, history, and culture of eastern European Jewry. In 1940, YIVO moved its headquarters to New York City. Today its library holds over 385,000 books and periodicals in twelve major languages.
Żegota (Council for the Aid to Jews; Rada Pomocy Żydom, or RPŻ): This secret organization was created in the fall of 1942 by the Bureau for Jewish Affairs of the Polish government in exile to assist Jews in hiding in occupied Poland with financial support, housing, employment, medical care, forged documentation, and child welfare. The organization predominantly comprised non-Jewish social and political activists. At least four thousand Jews received direct assistance from Żegota, and tens of thousands more benefited under its auspices.
See Irene Tomaszewski and Tecia Werbowski, Żegota: The Council for Aid to Jews in Occupied Poland, 1942–1945 (Montreal: Price-Patterson Ltd., 1994) and David Engel, Facing a Holocaust: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the Jews, 1943–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).
Zelkowicz, Josef (1897–1944): Born in Konstantynow, near Łódź, Josef Zelkowicz began to write for Yiddish newspapers and publications in the 1920s. In 1929 he became a member of the board and staff of the YIVO Institute branch in Łódź. Incarcerated in the Łódź ghetto, he became a teacher of Yiddish and a leading writer and archivist of The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto. Zelkowicz also kept a personal diary, twenty-seven notebooks of which are now reposited in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. In August 1944, Zelkowicz was deported to Auschwitz during the liquidation of the Łódź ghetto and was murdered there.
See Josef Zelkowicz, In Those Terrible Days: Writings from the Lodz Ghetto, ed. Michal Unger, trans. Naftali Greenwood (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2002).
Złoty: This unit of Polish currency comprises one hundred groszy. During the German occupation of Poland in World War II, the złoty was the official currency of the General Government and was pegged at a fixed exchange rate to the German Reichsmark.
Zyklon B: The Nazi authorities used this lethal hydrogen cyanide (prussic acid) gas as a method of mass killing in the Nazi concentration camp system. First used on September 3, 1941, in a test gassing of 650 Soviet prisoners of war and 200 ailing prisoners at Auschwitz, Zyklon B, in pellet form, was procured from private chemical firms that employed the acid as a pesticide for fumigation. Nazi authorities had previously used carbon monoxide gas as a means of gas killing and continued to do so at the camps of Operation Reinhard. Zyklon B was utilized to kill predominantly Jewish prisoners at Auschwitz II–Birkenau and Majdanek.
Index
Entries which appear in boldface can be found in the Glossary. Cities and countries are listed according to 1933 borders; references to variations on place names in other languages are also included. References to notes are included when unique (otherwise page references are used). Italicized page numbers refer to photographs.
Abel, Wolfgang, 200
abortion, xxxiv, 62; eugenic, 203n25; in ghettos, 142, 143; laws against, 203
Academy Award, 36n3
actions (Aktionen), 108, 132–33. See also specific actions
adoption, 193, 204–9
AFSC. See American Friends Service Committee
“Ahoy,” 256
Aktionen (actions), 108, 132–33. See also specific Aktionen
Aktion 1005 (Operation 1005), 87n26
Aktion R (Operation R), 171n30
Aktion Reinhard (Operation Reinhard), 150, 152, 170. See also specific concentration camps
Aliyah. See Youth Aliyah
All Alone (Landau, N.), 319
Allied forces: in Amsterdam, 335; in Austria, 395–96; in Buchenwald, 378; D-day invasion by, 58, 276; German occupation by, 395–96; in Neuengamme, 232; partisans cooperating with, 49; pilots of, 253n18
Ältestenrat (Council of Elders), 115, 143
amenorrhea, 141
American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), 367–68
American Jewish Congress, 6
American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), 77–78, 101, 128, 401
Amsterdam (Netherlands), 356
Anderson shelters, 46, 47
And the World Remained Silent (Wiesel, E.), 410, 412–14
Anielewicz, Mordecai, 315n48, 324, 326
Anschluss (Austro-German unification), 15
antisemitism: towards businesses, 6, 7–8, 266–67; towards children, 4, 5, 9, 16–18, 19, 27–28; in education, 13, 14–15, 26, 27–28, 264–65; humiliation, 16–18, 19; international, 20; violence with, 15–16, 25
Apitz, Bruno, 187
Appelfeld, Aharon, 415
Appells (roll calls), xiii, 167, 168
Aptowicz, Adam, xxxviii, xxxix