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‘I ask nothing of the Jews except that they should disappear.’ Hans Frank, Nazi governor of Poland. In 1933 there were over 9 million Jewish people living in Germany. By 1945, the Nazis had killed 2 out of every 3 European Jews. The leader of the Nazi Party, Adolf Hitler, believed that Germans were ‘racially superior’ and that the Jews were ‘inferior’ and responsible for the economic problems in the country since World War 1. In order to monitor the Jewish population, areas of large cities were closed off and designated as an area where all Jews must live. The ghettos served to isolate the Jews from the rest of the population. The conditions were horrendous – in the Warsaw ghetto in Poland, over 400,000 Jews were crowded into an area 2Km². The Nazi authorities created a number of forced-labour camps where Jewish men and women were sent each day. Jewish workers were given physical tasks such as stone quarrying as well as being responsible for the manufacture of weapons for the German armies. From 1933-1945, the Nazis established 20,000 camps to imprison their Jewish prisoners. Some of the camps were used as labour camps, others as holding stations until the prisoners could be moved on, and some as extermination camps for mass murder. The extermination, or killing, camps were established to allow efficient mass murder. German soldiers and the police murdered nearly 2,700,000 Jews either by shooting them or gassing them to death in large chambers. The Nazis used the term ‘The Final Solution’ to refer to their plans to wipe out the Jewish people. In 1941, massive killing operations began. Three centres were built in Poland with the sole purpose of exterminating Jews. One of the most famous was called Auschwitz-Birkenau. The gates to Auschwitz with their infamous motto. By spring 1944, as many as 6,000 Jews were being gassed to death each day at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Prisoners were stripped naked and marched into a large chamber where poisonous gas was flooded in whilst they stood under shower heads. Most had no idea what was happening to them. Approximately 6 million Jewish men, women and children were murdered during the holocaust. At the killing camps, huge furnaces were built to burn the dead bodies of those gassed. Jewish prisoners were often made to dig mass graves for the bodies that could not be cremated. Two-thirds of the European Jewish population were murdered during the holocaust. Of the millions sent to concentration camps during the war, it is estimated that only 100-150,000 survived. At least 802 prisoners attempted to escape Auschwitz, 144 were successful. The fates of 331 of the escapees is still unknown. Q. What evidence is there in Maestro to suggest that Herr Keller is haunted by his past? Q. Why does Herr Keller’s relationship with music alter? Q. Does Paul ever appreciate the impact of the holocaust on Keller? Why? Q. Why does Keller willingly admit to being Jewish when he wasn’t?