Holocaust Essay

The Holocaust, also referred to as the Shoah, was a genocide in which some six million European Jews were killed by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany and the World War II collaborators with the Nazis. In other words Holocaust also means Genocide, Ethnic cleansing, Deportation or Mass murder. The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. Holocaust is a word of Greek origin meaning “sacrifice by fire.” The Nazis, who came to power in Germany in January 1933, believed that the Germans were racially superior and that the Jews, considered inferior, were an alien threat to the so-called German racial community. During the era of the Holocaust, the German authorities also targeted other groups because of their apparent racial inferiority. Roma (Gypsies), the disabled, and some of the Slavic people (Poles, Russians, and others). Other groups were persecuted on political, ideological and behavioural grounds.

Alexander Kimel is a Holocaust survivor of the ghetto. Originally from Podhajce, Western Ukraine, Kimel and his family moved to Rohatyn which is also located in Western Ukraine in 1939 after the Red Army occupied his hometown and threw his family out of his house. As a result, he grew up in the ghetto, subjected to the constant state of fear within his community. In 1942, 7200 Jews from his ghetto were shot and gassed. In May of 1943, he ran away from Rohaytn and lived in the