Signed in as:
filler@godaddy.com
Signed in as:
filler@godaddy.com
Lainey Thompson
Trinity Lutheran
7th grade
The Jewish people lived in fear for many years because of the Nazi Soldier. FEAR. "F" Frightened people boarding the cattle cars. "E" Evil Nazi Soldiers dehumanizing the Jews. "A" A pile of shoes from all the Jews that were massacred in the concentration camps. "R" Razor sharp barbed wire surrounding the camps to keep the Jews inside.
Bryce Royston
Trinity Lutheran
7th grade
My drawing shows the terror Jewish children felt. In the middle you can see a Jewish boy, as he wears the Star of David badge. Those blurred are not Jewish and can be seen looking at the boy. Maybe whispering about him or muttering under their breath. Being a Jewish child around that time would probably have you thinking "Are they looking at me?"
Kai McCoy
Trinity Lutheran
7th grade
This picture describes how different countries were affected by the Holocaust. It shows Britain as they adopted kindertransport for taking children who are Jews to safety. It shows Russia because Germany broke the Non-Aggression Pact and invaded Russia. It shows Israel with a star hanging from the flag and a baby. This shows how Israel will be a refuge for Jews. Underneath that it shows Austria and the Stairs of Death that Jews of camp Mauthausen had to carry stone blocks up those 186 steps. Right next to that picture is Poland with the most exterminated Jews there. That is where the biggest and most productive camp, Auschwitz, is. Finally, for Germany I showed Kristallnacht, also known as the night of broken glass. This was the Nazi declaration of war against Jews.
Maxwell Malkin
Gildersleeve Middle School
6th grade
I painted a timeline of the Holocaust which started with 1933 when the concentration camps opened and ended in 1945 which is when all concentration camps closed. My timeline also includes the following: Kristallnacht, Auschwitz, Birkenau, the first city blockade, J stamps on passports, the Jude armbands, Hitler's suicide, and the Jews being rescued.
Imagine peacefully eating breakfast with your family. Imagine suddenly learning your country has been invaded and being imprisoned in your own home. Imagine having your family slowly taken away from you one by one. Imagine being forced to slave away with only your friends to suffer alongside you for company. Imagine finally being liberated from this hell only to realize that, out of those you loved most, you alone were the only survivor.
What you just read isn’t some dystopian story out of science fiction. Rather, this was a historical event. Stories like these were common for a majority of Jews living in Europe during that time. This specific story is that of Gerda Weissman Klein, one of the lucky few who survived the tragedy known as the Holocaust. Her story is just one among millions of discrimination, persecution, and often execution.
The Nazi party had come to power in 1933 and began targeting Jews such as Gerda and her family. The Nazis were radically antisemitic, meaning they were strongly prejudiced against Jews. They enacted laws to slowly exclude Jews from German society and treat them as outcasts. This eventually culminated in what the Nazi leaders called the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” This was the Nazis’ plan to systematically eradicate all of Europe’s Jews. They began carrying out this plan in 1941. By the end of the Holocaust in 1945, the Nazis had ended millions of lives, including over six million Jewish lives.
The Nazis had created a racial hierarchy that ranked different groups of people, putting Jews at the very bottom. They didn’t start with killing. Instead, they used propaganda to influence the German people to believe in their ideas of antisemitism and a master race. They used their propaganda to dehumanize the Jews and to continue stereotypes about them., desensitizing the people to the thought of hatred and violence towards them. Eventually, culminated in the systematic discrimination and ostracization of the Jewish people.
Gerda Weissman Klein did encounter a few acts of kindness during her life in the Holocaust. Frau Kügler, a supervisor at a camp Gerda was at, knew an inspector was coming to take away the sick to be gassed. She dragged Gerda back to the factory from the sick room, saving her life. She gave Gerda the hope that maybe not all Germans were cruel. Kurt Klein, a fellow Jew who had escaped Nazi Germany, was one of Gerda’s liberators that had saved the lives of those who hadn’t been killed up to that point already. He, along with the other liberators, was what gave Gerda her restoration of dignity, humanity, and freedom.
The fact that so few were there to help Gerda’s family despite their suffering is abhorrent. Remember, Gerda’s experiences weren’t a one-off thing. The Nazi regime targeted millions of other Jews who shared similar experiences, many of which did not live to tell their story. The dreadfulness of Gerda’s story and the massive scale of the Holocaust inspires me to ensure prejudice doesn’t reach that scale ever again.
Prejudice, despite our best efforts, still exists around the world. While one person isn’t enough to make a difference, there are many actions we can all take to combat it.
We can strive to understand those we meet as individuals instead of generalizing them based on stereotypes. We can endeavor to educate our peers to do the same and have the courage to call out our friends when they’re being offensive or insensitive. We can aim not to spread the hate or negativity we see on the news. We can even aspire to have the courage to step out of the crowd to help someone in need.
The Holocaust was one of the most prolific genocides of the Western world. Millions of people in Europe at the time had similar stories to Gerda, similar stories of feeling dehumanized, ostracized, and alone. Gerda’s story had a melancholy end, but we can learn that even small things can give someone the hope that they’re not alone. We can take inspiration from her story, and from the stories of the millions of lives that were lost in this terrible time, and ensure prejudice doesn’t ever reach a similarly massive scale. We can’t necessarily rid the world of evil, but we can at least stop it from growing to the size of the Holocaust. Forgetting these stories is what can lead to history repeating itself. In the words of Holocaust survivor Walter Kase: “Change isn’t happening fast enough for men. You must make it happen faster. When you see injustice happening, stand up!”
Nazi Concentration Camps
“Up, now!” The gruff rumbling of the kapo resonated in the hearts of the prisoners, and they scurried to their feet to begin their day. The captives arranged their sleeping arrangements in a quick and orderly fashion, for not doing so could result in punishment. Putrid air wafted into the room; the oxygen was polluted by the atrocious living conditions in the Nazi’s concentration camps. Despair and pain carved fine lines into the faces of the Jewish held hostage as they were led outside for the roll call.
Nazi concentration camps were often similar in nature by routine, conditions, and treatment. Prisoners were forced to follow a strict and arduous agenda daily. They would rise early in the morning and have roll call. Calling names usually took an extensive amount of time because the officers would double check the list for any missing while anyone who didn’t attend or could not remain standing was severely punished. Mealtimes would be curt and limited as well as the quality of the food. Jews were allowed little free time at the end of the day where bartering and taking care of oneself were popular activities to partake in.
The conditions of the camps were horrific with disease, insects, and other vermin plaguing the area while the living spaces were inadequately supplied. The bugs carried illnesses such as typhoid to the inmates. Sanitation was a foreign term in the concentration camps and hunger was a commonality. Washing was impossible with the lack of clean water due to the septic system being nonexistent.
Alike to the camp’s conditions, Jews were treated far worse. A slight mishap could be fatal, and prisoners were often the subject of repulsive medical experiments. New drugs or treatments were tested on the Jewish people and often ended in catastrophic results. Prisoners were killed in masses in buildings dedicated for the vile felony. Limbs and bodies were often mutilated from the experimentation. The Jewish were not treated as humans, but as things that could be manipulated by someone’s will. Other similarities the camps shared were separation by gender upon entering the camps, methods of torture, labor, and camp system.
Additionally, there was also a fair share of differences in the camps. To illustrate, Auschwitz captives had their identification number tattooed into their arm while most other camps gave their inmates numbered clothing. Their number would mark them as a subject in the camp and were only referred to as by their number. Uniforms also varied depending on the camp but were usually striped attire and were forced to shave their heads. The Nazis stripped away anything that they could associate themself with including personal belongings and name. Moreover, the usage of the concentration camps varied. For example, Auschwitz was used as an annihilation and labor camp while Bergen-Belsen was used for holding captives.
The acts of the Nazis to the Jewish were inhumane and unjustifiable. The crimes they committed against the Jewish were utterly despicable and brought much grief when it occurred and to this day. Even though people may disregard this topic as irrelevant in our society today, we must look back at our past sins to become better people in the world we live in.
Jews; Before, During, and After the Holocaust
Anti Semitism is prevalent all throughout history. Discrimination and prejudice towards Jews was especially apparent during the Holocaust. Many people know or have heard of the horrific persecution directed towards Jews in World War Two, but few people know what Jews were treated like before and after the war. Although it is not well known by many, it is still relevant and important.
Antisemitism isn’t an idea that was created during World War Two, it has been going on long before the war. Jews were commonly treated as racially unequal to others, Jew were identified as a race in many cases, not just people that adopted the religion of Judaism. During the late 1800’s and early 1900’s in almost all European countries Jewish citizens were given the same rights as other citizens by law, but the law didn’t stop discrimination from people. Jews were commonly blamed by others for events that they didn’t start, for instance in World War One Jews battled on the frontlines and yet they were blamed for Germany’s loss in the war.
Hitler’s rise to power didn’t help the Jew’s case, it only grew worse and worse as he gained more power. Hitler used racism in his campaigns, he didn’t view Jews as equals or anything of the sort. And once Hilter gained chancellorship, it only got worse. Hitler and his followers boycotted Jewish businesses and began taking freedoms from Jews. In 1935 the Nazi regime produced a number of laws related to race called the Nuremberg Laws. Since the Nazis viewed Jews as so inferior that they wrote laws about their racial ideas, these laws stripped Jews of citizenship, political rights, forced Jewish parents to name their children from a list of government approved names, and took away many other basic freedoms. Most famously, on the night of broken glass, the Nazis destroyed Jewish shops and businesses and set synagogues ablaze. The discriminatory acts towards Jews didn’t stop there either, the Nazis degraded Jews and others that Hitler didn’t deem good enough. These acts continued, then 1939 rolled around.
1939 was the year that marked the beginning of World War Two. The Nazi party separated the Jews and other “inferior groups of people '' from the rest, they concentrated them in areas and forced them to work or exterminated them. These people were commonly forced into crammed, unsanitary slums called ghettos. Jews and many other groups of people were forced into labor at concentration camps. In ghettos and concentration camps, death and disease were common. The Nazis provided barely enough food and shelter to live. Many times people were deemed unfit for labor and since they were useless to them, they killed them on the spot. Non-Jewish people could also be threatened, if you were caught helping a Jew you would also be killed. The Nazis ran tests on Jews and others, they used them for all sorts of jobs.
Towards the end of the war, the Nazis knew that they were defeated. In a last ditch effort, they tried to eliminate as many Jews and other imperfect races as they could. In the end Hitler committed suicide and the Nazis lost, but they amassed a death toll of over 6 million Jews. Those who were still alive were liberated by the allies. Even after the war antisemitism still persisted in parts of Europe. Many of the survivors went to refugee and displaced persons camps, but there was still a struggle as to where they would go permanently.
Many of these people went to live in the United States and different parts of Europe. Plenty of Jews and Non-Jews were left homeless until the establishment of the State of Israel in May 1948. They still had to reestablish their lives, and for many this helped. These places welcomed the Jews, but in places like Poland there were still numerous pogroms going on post-war. Not everywhere looked nice for these survivors, but for the most part the lives of these survivors were looking better.
It is clear the persecution the Jews experienced over the years was wrong, and it is important that we remember it. We need to learn and teach more about what happened leading up to the Holocaust, what happened during it, and what happened after it. This happened because enough people didn’t stand-up for what was right and didn’t understand the consequences it would have on the lives of millions. We need to remember what happened so history doesn’t repeat itself.
Josephine Brindley
Hampton Roads Academy
10th grade
More Than Skin Deep
The watercolor painting depicts an arm with the number 6 million tattooed where a victim in a concentration camp would receive an identification serial number. In each digit there are symbols of the Holocaust; barbed wire, an emaciated body, Auschwitz II, a train car, and a crematorium smokestack.
Percy Bevilacqua
Hampton Roads Academy
10th grade
Can't Look Away
Many children of the Holocaust were not even kept alive upon arrival in concentration camps as they would be killed with no regard for the value of their lives both in the present and future. My piece features 257 names of children who died in concentration camps to never forget.
Elizabeth Smith
Hampton Roads Academy
10th grade
Set Ablaze
A Jewish kid is missing his parents and does not know what happened to them. He wonders if he will ever see them again, but he is held back by the barbed wire of Nazis. The background shows the truth with a pile of burning bodies lit aflame.
Isabella Candelario Clarke
Hampton Roads Academy
10th grade
In the poem "The Action in the Ghettos of Rohatyn, March 1942" by Alexander Kimel, he mentions "mothers searching for children in vain." That one line was the motivation for my work. The painting depicts a scene of a mother holding her child's skull, symbolizing the heartfelt loss and grief experienced during the Holocaust. Jewish children in Europe during that time had led a life full of fear, uncertainty, and in most cases, death. I did not want my artwork to just reflect the child, but also the impact that was left on the mother.
Kathryn Easterling
Hampton Roads Academy
10th grade
Reaching For Hope
In this painting, a boy in a concentration camp is reaching up to a dove stuck in the wire. The dove symbolizes hope. The boy will never be able to reach the dove because the tall fencing with the sharp and impassable barbed wire surrounding the camp. Despite his attempts to reach for hope, it remains outside of his grasp because of the cruel reality of the Holocaust.
“Nazi Germany and its collaborators killed about 1.5 million Jewish children” (“Children During the Holocaust”). Many children were lost and many others endured horrible conditions. The Nazis did not even spare infants. A child during the Holocaust had to go through many hardships such as hiding for long periods of time, starvation, and concentration camps.
Children during the Holocaust had to constantly hide. Hiding meant risking severe punishment, leaving behind relatives, and finding families that will provide refuge (“Life In Shadows”). It was especially hard to find families to provide Jewish people with refuge because the Nazis would severely punish people that helped them. If Jewish families found someone to help them, they often had to hide in cellars or attics. In these attics and cellars Jewish children had to be quiet and motionless for hours (“Jewish Victims”). Children in hiding had a hard time getting an education because they could not go out and get a formal education. Instead they had to try to educate themselves through reading and writing (“Jewish Victims”). When I visited Anne Frank’s museum in Amsterdam, I witnessed the harsh living conditions she had to endure during the Holocaust. She was only one of many children that had to endure these conditions. By using her diary, we can understand the harsh conditions she and other children had to go through during this devastating time. Jewish children often had to hide under different religions. Some Catholic convents hid Jewish children to help keep them safe from the Nazis, but they were also sometimes baptized without the consent of their parents (“Jewish Victims”). Hiding made Jewish children’s life difficult and often provoked fear from the constant threat of being discovered.
Starvation commonly occurred for Jewish families during the Holocaust. In concentration camps access to food was tightly controlled. The Nazis developed a general food plan for the concentration camps, but they rarely actually followed them (Bruaas). The camps did not distribute milk or enough food rations for infants, so many starved to death (“The Fate of the Children”). The combination of brutal physical labor and poor food led to many children falling ill from starvation. In places of German occupation, the Nazis took food supplies from the Slavs, Poles, and Jews because they thought that the German race was superior (Bruaas). Many civilians died of starvation when the Nazis took away their food supplies. Jewish children in hiding also faced starvation. It was hard for them to obtain food while staying in hiding. This starvation killed many kids throughout the Holocaust.
Concentration camps were extremely brutal, especially towards children. “They suffered from hunger and cold, were used as laborers, and were punished, put to death, and used as subjects in criminal experiments by SS doctors” (“The Fate of the Children”). Children were also at higher risk of getting chosen for the gas chambers because they could not work as much. Most children under the age of fifteen years old were selected to be put to death immediately upon arrival to concentration camps (“Children and the Holocaust”). “Only 6 to 11% of Europe’s prewar Jewish population of children survived as compared with 33% of the adults” (“Plight of Jewish Children”). I have personally seen one of these horrible concentration camps in Lithuania. The concentration camp called the Ninth Fort, was used by the Nazis. This camp murdered Jews through mass shootings. There were many shoes left over from these killings. Many of these shoes are children’s shoes. These shoes represent the amount of people killed not only by gas chambers but also by mass shootings. Children had to endure and try to survive all of these difficult conditions put in place by the Nazis.
Children during the Holocaust suffered many hardships. They had to go through hiding, starvation, and concentration camps. Many children were killed because of these hardships. This was a time of struggle and fear for Jewish children. They struggled physically and mentally throughout this time. Even once they were liberated they had physical and mental trauma from this time and many did not have family to go back to. Instead of forgetting this devastating time, we need to learn from it, so that it never happens again.
A Beginning with No End
Before the war was unpleasant.
But that was before we knew what Hell was.
We were treated unequal.
Separated into Shtetls[1],
Far apart from everyone else.
We were disapproved of by the Russians and Polish1
Who were strong antisemitists,
Who held prejudices against the Jewish.
Claiming we were the ones who caused them to lose the First World War1,
Even though they were the ones responsible for the second.
We lived in close-knit communities
Could employ as business workers and attend university,
And we could practice our religion for the time being.
But then they came for us, for our families, for our homes.
They began to attack us, saying our beliefs were wrong.
They murdered our friends and our families and took away our rights.
We were scared; we feared them.
But we hadn’t experienced a morsel of what was coming our way.
When the Nazis came for us
We weren’t expecting the horrors that came with them
Or the wretched places awaiting our arrival.
The shouting, the orders, the fear;
The gunshots, the screams, the pain;
The gas, the bodies, the end.
We didn’t know of the violence that came with the onset of the war.
We didn’t know how few survivors there would be.
They took us one by one.
Before we even knew what was happening.
The Star of David no longer protected us.
The Soviet Union was coming
And there was nothing we could do to stop it.
Shiny boots and uniforms knocked on our homes
And grabbed us by the arms and out the door,
Sometimes as a group, and sometimes just alone.
Some of us were forced into ghettos and some into camps
Where we spent the worst of our lives as slaves to the war.
In the ghettos, people suffering from starvation and disease dotted the streets
But there were dead bodies too;
Bodies that the Nazis were too careless to dispose of themselves.
Others were transported by cargo boxes to camps
Where we were sometimes forced to work
And were sometimes killed on the spot.
They branded us with numbers that replaced our former names
Stripped us of our clothes, our pride, and left us in shame.
They shattered our hope and sent us into darkness
We were no longer people living in a world
We were prisoners dying in the midst of the war.
They continued their shouting, their orders, spreading fear;
The gunshots still echoed with the screams, instilling pain;
And the gas, the bodies; the end was very near.
We didn’t know the violence would ever stop.
We didn’t know how few survivors there would be.
Day by day and hour by hour
We worked in the fields and did the Nazi’s labor.
We slept very little and ate even less.
Our bodies were tired,
Or at least the ones that were left.
We were malnourished and suffering
Of both disease and heartache.
We were tired of having no hope.
We were tired of the constant course of fear.
But most of all we were tired of living in what appeared to be a world no longer here.
But then came the spark hidden in the darkness.
That set on fire and caught ablaze.
Four long, unimaginable years of torture
And there was hope
The Soviet Union was starting to crumble.
The Allies were coming
They were coming to wake us from our nightmare
They were coming to set us free.
Except freedom didn’t set us free of the horrors faced because of the Nazis
It didn’t give us back our jobs, our homes, or our families[2].
It didn’t give us back the four most agonizing years in history.
We no longer heard their shouting, their orders, or felt fear;
But the gunshots still echoed with the screams, reminding us of the pain;
And the gas, the bodies; the end of six million lives.
We didn’t know that the violence could ever stop.
We didn’t know that even the survivors would continue to live on in their memories.
To try to think what a Jewish child’s life was like during the Holocaust is almost offensive. I can’t begin to imagine the type of suffering they endured. Although I have sympathy for them, my empathies only extend so far because I do not have the ability to wholly understand them. My culture has never been blamed, my skin not discriminated against, my life has never felt threatened, and I have never been hated. I do not know what such a period would really do to a child, but they do, and they wrote books, they produced movies, and they are inspiration for other books and movies. They are the ones who can tell their stories and I am the one who learns from it.
The Holocaust, considering European literature, is a popular topic for books and movies since it was a time with lots of emotional context. To this day, there are still those dealing with the inner consequences from it. Those who were children at the time. I assume that most of them live their lives routinely and go to the grocery store like normal civilians or watch their grandkids grow up, but I don’t assume they feel normal. Many Holocaust survivors today are older, and many are passing. Some adults still alive might have post-traumatic stress disorder and deal with the lasting effects. For what they suffered through, a “survivor” is an accurate label.
Hide and seek was my favorite game to play as a child, but for Jewish children it became a reality. Most Jews were threatened into hiding to save their lives, although it wasn’t a game anymore. In books like Number the Stars and The Hiding Place, I read two different points of view of the people in hiding and the people who were helping. The children had to leave their homes, which must have caused heartbreak and fear. Not knowing where your next destination will be and relying on friends and family to hide you creates a lifestyle of stress. Children left their homes, but they also left schools and friends.
For some of the children, family became all they had. The movie “A Bag of Marbles”, based off the novel, tells the story of two brothers who were separated from their parents during German invasions and had to travel on their own. This movie was a big realization for me of how strong these kids were. What they endured is something many adults today couldn’t handle. During the Holocaust, internet and modern technology didn’t exist, but I can’t decide whether that made it harder or easier for the brothers. They could have found their parents easier, but also could have been found by Nazis faster if they tracked a digital footprint. Without parents to depend on, the boys became all the other one had… and a bag of marbles.
In my life and looking at my situation, I cannot relate to what a child during the Holocaust went through. I enjoy learning about the history to gain a new perspective and understanding of them and their struggles. There are still threats today towards peoples’ beliefs and cultures, but no one deserves to experience a genocide like the Holocaust again.