The Holocaust, Samantha Matousek

Essay by sammayy17High School, 10th gradeA+, November 2008

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Taken out of their homes, killed, put to work in unimaginable conditions, and if lucky living the rest of their lives with the awful images of the ghettos and the concentration camps. Jews during World War II had to deal with all of these things. The Nazis, led by Adolf Hitler, held no compassion for the Jewish people of Germany, Poland and the other countries that the Nazis had taken over at that time. Jews throughout the Holocaust had to deal with unfair laws, terrible living conditions, unreasonable working conditions, and after being released from the camps, the pictures in their minds of the horrors they had been through.

During the Holocaust, Jews had to deal with many unfair laws passed and false crimes put against them. On September 16, 1935, two Jewish girls, named Eva and Mally Heimann, living in Germany were no longer citizens of Germany. They also had no chance of being part of the future of Germany.

They had to wear the Jewish star of David and were “classified as Jews in accordance with §5, section 2 of the first Ordinance to the Reich Citizenship Law.” (18), that said “Jew is he who is descended from at least three grandparents who are fully Jewish by race.”(14.) After the passage of the Nuremberg Laws, the explicit harassing of the Jews intensified in Germany. On November 7, 1938, a young German Jew, Herschel Grynszpan, shot an officer at the German embassy in Paris. Grynszpan’s family had just been moved from Germany to Poland and Hershel was furious about their treatment. On November 9, a terrifying wave of organized violence broke out against Jews living in Germany. This was called the Kristallnacht, or night of broken glass, and during this time thousands of Jewish synagogues, houses, and businesses...