The Importance Of Hiding Places During The Holocaust

For example, Gerda and her parents were forced to live in the basement of their home after a German family moved in. Likewise, Anne and her family had to hide in the Secret Annex which was located in the building of her father’s business. The Secret Annex is described by Anne as “… an ideal place to hide in. It may be damp and lopsided, but there's probably not a more comfortable hiding place in all of Amsterdam. No, in all of Holland” (Website).

James Hillstrom 2/2/23 LA8 accel The Heroes of the Holocaust During the Holocaust, an estimated 26,000 people hid Jews in their basements, attics, and anywhere in between. In the Book Thief and in the chapter “The Secret Room” in the novel The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom many people risked their lives to help the Jews. Nazi Germany was a very dark and horrific place during the Holocaust. There, Germans had all the power and Jews were treated inhumanely. Many of them could not even show their faces or they would be punished.

(Elvgren 15). The people living in the town knew about Carl and his mom hiding in Anett’s basement and they all liked to help them. When they heard about the plan they agreed to help even though they could get caught. Many Jews were forced into hiding because of hate and intolerance, but there were people who were willing to help conceal them even though it was life

But this was only a small fraction of their troubles. Soon walls were built around the area, and the true horrors began. During their days in the ghetto the jews had to deal with finding food to eat, finding a way to be useful and help their families, and if they were taking classes, which were done in secret, to be careful and hide their books from the germans. The jews were also sent to camps, where they were worked to death, shot to death, and starved to death. Their items were stolen, and they couldn 't do anything about it.

They would hide them in different places like some would hide them in there pharmacy, churches, and even somewhere in their homes. A family  hid 37 Jews in there pharmacy they knew if the Nazis found out they would get killed. There was 20,000 Jews Hiding from the Nazis. People like Miep Gies were heroes because they were risking their lives for Jews. Miep was hiding Anne Frank and her family and another family.

Shortly before the outbreak of war, SS and police officials incarcerated Jews, Roma, and other victims of ethnic and racial hatred in these camps. To concentrate and monitor the Jewish population as well as to facilitate later deportation of the Jews, the Germans and their collaborators created ghettos, transit camps, and forced-labor camps for Jews during the war years. The German authorities also established numerous forced-labor camps, both in the Greater German Reich and in German occupied territory.

The topic of the holocaust is what I am interested in for my research assignment. More specifically, I want to focus on the social aspect and the life of those inside the concentration camps. I want to learn about how life changed throughout the peoples time there rather than how they got there exactly. A tentative question I wish to answer would be along the lines of: “how did the survivors of the holocaust, whom lived in the concentration camps, actually survive?” I believe most people, including myself, have a general understanding that life in a concentration camp was horrible, so there must have been something that gave some people the will, hope, or luck to survive and I hope to find out what it was.

The Jews were forced to move to the ghettos because the Nazis wanted to limit Jews freedom (Blohm Holocaust Camps 10). The Nazi convinced people that the Jews were infectious and this was one of their favorite tactics to use (Altman The Holocaust Ghettos 9). They used that tactic to say that they were moving Jews into “quarantine” to protect the public from disease (Altman The Holocaust Ghettos 9). Unfortunately, the Jews were only moved to ghettos for the short-term solution of extermination (Altman The Holocaust Ghettos 13).

If they got caught hiding, they would be sent to a concentration camp, just because they are Jewish. They are being forced to hide, it’s the only way that they could survive. When the Germans ended up finding the families in the annex Anne wrote in her diary and said “They have allowed us 5 minutes to pack our things.” (Frank, 511.) While Anne and her family have many sentimental things, they only allowed them to pack for 5 minutes, they have to grab whatever they can.

The Nazis did this because they discriminate and hate the Jews. “German authorities established camps to handle the masses of people arrested as alleged subversives.” (www.ushmm.org) Germany blamed the Jews for their loss of World War I. “Concentration camps held two purposes, these purposes were to demoralize and dehumanize the prisoners.” (www.owlspace-ccm.rice.edu) The Nazis tortured them and made them break on the inside.

Closed ghettos consisted as the most common ghettos during the Holocaust. Most closed ghettos existed in German-occupied Poland and the occupied Soviet Union. It closed off by walls or by fences with barbed wire for isolation. Epidemics and high mortality rate became effects from starvation, chronic shortages, winter weather, and unheated housing.

The concentration camps were Hitler’s as well as the Nazi’s answer to the “Final Solution” of the eradication, elimination, and extermination of the Jewish population in Germany. A little after Germany’s annexation of Austria in March, 1938, tons of Nazis had arrested German and Austrian Jews. There were many invasions that had led the Germans to force labor, which they had gotten the name “Prisoner of War Camps”. As soon as you knew it camps were being spread worldwide and they had finally been given the name concentration camps. Inside each one many gas chambers were being constructed to increase the killing efficiency to the max.

The Holocaust was an execution of 8 million Europeans, and “ 6 million of the Europeans killed were Jewish women, children, and men that were brutally murdered” (Strahinich 7). It “was a catastrophe in our modern history” (Strahinich 7) now staining our history pages with hundreds of innocent people’s blood, forever lost in the grounds of the Holocaust. It took “place in Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Latvia, and Czechoslovakia” (Altman 9) is some of the places where hundreds died. Thanks to “Adolf Hitler” (Strahinich 8) and “the Nazis government” (Strahinich 10), they “plunged most of Europe” (Allen 7) into turmoil, taking lives that did not need to go.

This was such a tragic time in history and we should all be thankful that our world isn 't like this. The Concentration Camps were made because Hitler hated the jews and wanted to kill all and they were kind of brainwashing them to tell them it is a wonderful place to live. When they were making the camps the Nazis would go around just shooting people for no reason. So Hitler and the Nazis captured the majority of the Jews and put them into these camps saying they should be here and that they deserve to died and it is all their fault.

These ghettos were the worst part of the cities that the Nazis took over which they converted into living areas for captured Jews. “They used these places to “store” Jews they didn 't have room for at the concentration camps yet” (Bachrach 38). The Nazis had one very big ghetto in Warsaw, Poland called, simply, the Warsaw Ghetto (Bachrach 39). Warsaw was the biggest ghetto that the Nazis had but the Jews used that to their advantage.