Download Hebrew Word of the Month

Hebrew Word of the Month
rAkz"
"Remember"
Hebrew expression: zachor
Pronunciation: zā∙ ôr
April 7th is Holocaust remembrance day, also known as
Yom HaShoah
Source: The World War 2 diaries. http://www.world-war-2-diaries.com/holocaust-facts.html. Accessed 3/22/13.
26 Holocaust Facts
1. MEANING OF THE NAME: The term Holocaust comes from the Greek word hólos meaning
“whole”, and kaustós meaning “burnt”. The word Holocaust had been used in English for hundreds of
years to refer to huge massacres, but since the 1960s it’s come to usually just refer to the genocide of
Jews in World War II.
2. ALTERNATIVE NAME: The Holocaust is also known as the Shoah, meaning “catastrophe” in
Hebrew.
3. FINAL TOLL: About six million Jews were killed by the Nazi regime. Keep in mind there were
only nine million Jews living in Europe before the war began. About three million victims were men,
two million were women and one million were children.
4. OTHERS KILLED: Although the term “Holocaust” is often used to refer to the Jewish tragedy,
between five and 11 million members other minority groups were victims of Nazi genocide. These
included Polish, blacks, homosexuals, Romani and other “gypsy” groups, people with disabilities,
Jehovah’s Witnesses, Freemasons, criminals, political prisoners and Soviet civilians and prisoners of
war.
5. SYMBOLS: Imprisoned Jews were identified by a yellow star on their uniforms. Homosexuals had
to wear pink inverted triangles and Jehovah’s Witnesses wore purple ones. Criminals wore green
triangles, Roma and other groups wore black or brown.
6. RELOCATION: Jews were often first sent to ghettos or concentration or labor camps, where they
would either be worked or starved to death or sent on to extermination camps (also called death camps).
7. GHETTOS: These were parts of a city where Jews were compelled to live. In the beginning many
ghettos were “open", meaning Jews were allowed to come and go, but later they were all walled off.
The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest with other 445,000 Jews packed into 3.4 square km (1.3 square
miles). In just two months in 1942 over 250,000 Jews were sent from the Warsaw Ghetto to their deaths
at the Treblinka extermination camp.
8. HITLER: Nazi leader Adolf Hitler voiced his plans for the Holocaust as early as 1922. He then told
a journalist: “Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews.
As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows – at the Marienplatz in Munich,
for example – as many as traffic allows. Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will
remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As
soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last
Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all
Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews.”
9. WANNSEE: The Holocaust was organized in Berlin at the Wannsee Conference on 20 January
1942. Senior Nazi Reinhard Heydrich presented a plan for the deportation and eventual extermination
of all Jews from Europe and French North Africa.
10. THE FINAL SOLUTION: Hitler called the Holocaust die Endlösung der Judenfrage, the “Final
Solution to the Jewish Problem”. To justify the killings Nazis also used the phrase Leben unwertes
Leben – “Life unworthy of life”.
Source: The World War 2 diaries. http://www.world-war-2-diaries.com/holocaust-facts.html. Accessed 3/22/13.
11. ZYKLON-B: This was the cyanide-based pesticide used in gas chambers at Auschwitz and other
camps. In quantitative terms only 5% of Zyklon-B delivered to Auschwitz was used in the gas
chambers, the rest was used for delousing prisoners. This poison has become a central symbol of the
Holocaust.
12. HIMMLER: SS commander Heinrich Himmler is, other than Hitler, the Nazi considered most
responsible for the Holocaust. Himmler considered the annihilation of the Jews a necessary step in the
Germanization of Eastern Europe. He was arrested by British soldiers at the end of the war and
committed suicide in his cell. In 2008 German news magazine Der Spiegel called Himmler “the
greatest mass murderer of all time”.
13. COLLABORATION: Practically every part of Nazi German society was in some way, at least
indirectly, involved with the Holocaust. Universities refused to admit Jews, the Post Office delivered
deportation and denaturalization orders, churches and the Interior Ministry supplied birth records to
show who was Jewish. In addition, companies fired Jewish workers, drug companies used camp
prisoners as guinea pigs and the victims’ personal property was sent back to Germany to be reused.
14. PUBLIC REACTION: Despite this after the war most Germans claimed to be at most “vaguely
aware” of the genocide. The common belief was that the concentration camps in Germany itself were
just prisons and the Jews were being “resettled” in the East.
15. OTHERS RESPONSIBLE: Holocaust killings were not only perpetrated by Germans. Local
populations in occupied Soviet territories, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania were also involved in the
genocide.
16. EXCEPTED: People of Jewish ancestry were sometimes able to escape being sent to the camps if
their grandparents had converted to Christianity before 18 January, 1871. This date marked the start of
Germany’s unification and the start of the German Empire (Reich).
17. ORIGINS: Some scholars maintain that anti-Semitism had pervaded German society since the
Middle Ages. In the 1800s something called the Völkisch movement arose viewing the Jews as locked
into mortal combat with the “Aryans” for world domination. Scientific racists also believed that some
people were more “valuable” than others.
18. SOLITARY HORROR: Never before in world history had there been places like the Holocaust
extermination camps – places which existed for the sole purpose of killing en masse.
19. EXTERMINATION CAMPS: There were three types of extermination camps. At Aktion
Reinhardt extermination camps prisoners were gassed upon arrival. At Concentration–
extermination camps some prisoners were chosen for slave labor instead of immediate death and
minor extermination camps operated as prisons and transit camps until late in the war, when portable
gas chambers and gas vans were used to execute the prisoners.
20. NUMBERS OF VICTIMS: The deadliest extermination camps were Auschwitz-Birkenau (where
1,100,000 died), Treblinka (700,000 – 800,000), Majdanek (360,000), Chelmno (320,000) and Sobibor
(250,000).
21. AHNIHILATION: About 90 percent of Jews living in Germany, Austria, Poland and the Baltic
states were annihilated in the Holocaust.
22. MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS: German doctors often used prisoners in macabre medical
Source: The World War 2 diaries. http://www.world-war-2-diaries.com/holocaust-facts.html. Accessed 3/22/13.
experiments. These included freezing victims, amputations of awake victims’ limbs, transplantations,
placing them in pressure chambers, drug testing and experiments with poison, malaria and mustard gas.
23. ANGEL OF DEATH: One of the most notorious of these physicians was Josef Mengele, known as
the “Angel of Death”. Mengele had a particular fascination with twins and performed experiments on
nearly 1500 sets of twins at Auschwitz. He escaped after the war and lived in South America until
1979, despite being hunted as a Nazi war criminal.
24. RESISTANCE: Jews often tried to resist the genocide. The most famous case of resistance was the
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in January 1943 which went on for four weeks. Jews also fought as partisans
in Eastern Europe and were highly active in the French Resistance.
25. DENIAL: Some people believe the Holocaust never happened and is the work of deliberate Jewish
conspiracy. Holocaust denial is universally condemned by scholars and is a crime in Germany, France,
Poland, Switzerland, Belgium, Austria and Lithuania.
26. SCHINDLER: German businessman Oskar Schindler was a German businessman who secretly
opposed the Holocaust and saved over 1000 mostly Polish-Jewish refugees by employing them in his
factories. The film Schindler’s List, based on the novel Schindler’s Ark, tells his story.
Source: The World War 2 diaries. http://www.world-war-2-diaries.com/holocaust-facts.html. Accessed 3/22/13.