Surviving The Holocaust: A Short Story

I’m Lore Heumann I was 13 years I died in the holocaust here is my life story.

Giving up in a perilous situation can be the easy way out. It's like taking a nap after a long day, except you die. After being put down and berated so much it can make you feel worthless and give up. When it others don't care about you, it's easy to not care about yourself. The conditions and situations the victims of the Holocaust were so extreme that it wasn't uncommon for someone to give up and just want to die.

The book Daniel’s Story describes events that happened during the Holocaust through a fictional character, Daniel. The way the Nazis treated the Jewish people was awful and cruel. Many of these actions made me sick to my stomach, knowing that this actually happened. From his uncle’s ashes being sent in the mail, people beating up the Jews, a SS officer shooting a young boy, and the living conditions of the Jews in the ghetto, these are some of the events that were horrifying.

Everyone who has learned about World War II should know about the Holocaust. The Holocaust was during the same period of World War II. “What is it called the Holocaust?” you may ask. The Holocaust originates from the Greek language and means “completely burnt offering to God.” How does this relate to the Holocaust where almost 8 million Jewish people died? In this essay, you will be informed about the main leader of the Nazis, why saying that Hitler only captured Jews is historically inaccurate, concentration camp treatment, and five atrocious experiments done by the Nazi soldiers to innocent prisoners.

After the war against the Nazis, there were very few survivors left. For the survivors returning to life to when it was before the war was basically impossible. They tried returning home but that was dangerous also, after the war, anti-Jewish riots broke out in a lot of polish cites. Although the survivors were able to build new homes in their adopted countries. The Jewish communities had no longer existed in much part of Europe anymore. After that people tried to return to their homes from the camps or there hiding places, but they found out that their homes had been taking over by others or looted.

The Holocaust lasted for four years, a mass genocide executed by Nazi Germany, with the goal to eradicate all Jews. Six million Jews were successfully murdered, and hardly anyone lifted a finger to help the thousands killed daily. Elie Wiesel was right in saying that 'Being a neutral bystander helps those who are evil; that remaining silent encourages even more evil to happen '. This is true, since evil always comes back and causes so many people so much pain.

Historiography essentially is “the history of history”. It looks into what historians have said about a given historically relevant event or topic, how their interpretations have changed over time and where, what and why are the disagreements between the historians. This paper tries to look into these aspects for the topic the Holocaust and explain how knowledge of the historiography of any given event is important in understanding the event itself. The Intentionalist historians like Lucy Dawidowicz see Hitler as a strong leader believe that the Holocaust was something that Hitler had planned for years Structuralist perspective

Imagine if you were a kid that was unable to leave an awful place they called a camp, who had lost all of your possessions, including your own mother and father. What else can they take? They wished there was someone on this earth, caring enough to take tortured children and put them into a home away from evil Nazi’s. Well there is, and it’s called the OSE. Let’s begin by comparing the OSE to moral courage and how they display how much courage humans really have. In fact we will see how it relates back to the very terrible holocaust. Finally, by examining how the OSE is still an astounding example of moral courage, playing a huge role in the holocaust, and how it has had such an impact on my life it is clear that the OSE organization showed tremendous moral courage throughout World War 2.

Historians have been debating how the spirit triumphed during the Holocaust for years. The spirit triumphed through the Holocaust through many, many distractions, nature, and the support and love of family and friends. The Nazis had killed, and enslaved so many Jewish people in concentration camps. But, the Nazis couldn’t take their spirit from them. Even though the Holocaust had so many deaths, there were also so much love, and so many good people. People like Anne Frank, Etty Hillesum, and Syvia Perlmutter had to live in ghettos in cities, had to wake up to a heart pounding, scary feeling of death, and were put in and killed in concentration camps. The spirit triumphed through the Holocaust because many still had hope and happiness throughout the Holocaust.

Self-preservation is defined as the protection of oneself from harm or death, especially regarded as a base instinct in human beings and animals. It drives us to do things we otherwise would not do, to accomplish things we didn’t know were possible. Self-preservation can often be found throughout history and literature, always in the most desperate of times. Nowhere is it more prominent than in the history and literature surrounding the Holocaust, during which over six million Jews, including 1.5 million children, were brutally murdered in what has become known as one of history’s most deadly and widely publicized genocides. For almost 80 years, historians and Jewish survivors have authored and published their firsthand accounts of the pain they were forced to endure. One such piece of literature is Elie Wiesel’s Night, a memoir illustrating his own experiences in German concentration camps, where every day was dominated by the impulse to stay alive. As Wiesel demonstrated repeatedly in his novel, during the Holocaust, self-preservation forced millions of victims to abandon family members and friends; commit desperate, sometimes suicidal, acts; and blinded many victims to the reality of their situations throughout the genocide.

This was the end, I survived here for a little over 2 years. I wasn’t Marshal Schwartz, a 35 year old man anymore, I was 566732. I needed to stay alive until I was free, I wanted to tell my tale. My first job was working in the bathrooms, however, the guards realized that my strength could be used to sweep up dead bodies. I hated that job, it was so hard to see the helpless little children. My brother, Judah and I were very strong, people would compare us to Hercules. I came from a wealthy family, my father was a banker so he always away. I used to take care of Judah and my cousin, Sarah. My brother was a genius, he was a regular Einstein. Sarah was 4 years old when her mother and father died in a horrible car crash. I loved them both more

I have always had this odd fascination with the Holocaust. I don’t have a familial history attached to it or anything, yet I’ve still felt connected to it. My first encounter with the Holocaust was in elementary school. A Ukrainian Jew, a survivor of the Holocaust, came into my classroom and talked with the students through a translator. What I remember most clearly is when he mentioned every nationality that he met while in a concentration camp: Russians, Slovaks, Germans, Polish, the list goes on and on. It was when he was listing these places that we no longer needed the translator to understand him. We knew what he was saying. I’ve never understood why this memory has been stuck in my mind for so long. But, our trip to Poland and Greece has given me an idea as to why this memory has stuck with me for over a decade.

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.

Over the course of World War Two, the Nazis murdered over six million Jews. Killing factories known as concentration camps exterminated Jews and other enemies of the Nazis throughout Europe. Hitler used these camps to eliminate anybody who threatened the ‘perfect Aryan race’ that he wished to create.The deadliest camp of all was known as Auschwitz, and it is where a fifteen year old Elie Wiesel is brought in 1944. He remained in concentration camps until their liberation in 1945. By the end of World War Two, Wiesel was desensitized and lost his faith in God and humanity after experiencing unspeakable horrors, such as the execution of children and the death of his father.

The annex was a safe place to be in during the holocaust. Jews could no longer be in the streets or go out to get groceries, they had to tell people who were legal in germany to go buy stuff for them. You cannot take a lot of stuff to the annex because you do not have enough space to put everything because their are going to be a lot of people in such a tight space. If you do bring a lot of stuff where are you going to put them. The small amount of stuff that I would bring i would keep it right by my bed and not let anyone touch it. If i were in that situation I would bring my favorite journal because I would sometimes get very bored and wright random stuff on it, also because it is the only thing that I could trust to let out all my problems and secrets that nobody else will know about, and also I like to read everything I wrote and added on through the months and days.