Holocaust Through Primary Sources

"Who will look after me...and why can't we all go together?" Kurt Fuchel asked his father these questions, as the young boy prepared to embark on a journey to England...alone. Fuchel was one of ten thousand children who made this journey shortly before World War II began. In 1938, Jews searched for a way out of Germany, but anti-Jewish laws and nations unwilling to accept fleeing refugees made escape difficult or impossible. England's effort to save the children effort came to be known as the Kindertransport, and author Ann Byers discusses the heroes who organized the transports and the children who were saved from the Holocaust.

"Yet, my little Diary, I don't want to die, I still want to live..." Eva Heyman, a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl, wrote these words in her last diary entry in the spring of 1944. Soon after, she was deported and murdered at Auschwitz. During the Holocaust, the Nazis murdered more than one million people at Auschwitz. The largest of all the Nazi camps, Auschwitz was both a death camp and a forced labor camp. Author James M. Deem examines this place of unspeakable horror from the perspective of those who experienced it, from the construction of the camp to its final days.

The Warsaw ghetto uprising was a battle the Jews could not hope to win against the more powerful Nazis, but they decided not to go quietly to certain death. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, beginning World War II, the Nazis quickly destroyed Jewish life. After stripping Jews of all their rights, the Nazis forced them into a ghetto surrounded by brick walls. After more than three years of starvation, disease, and death, the Jewish people decided to resist. When the Nazis came to annihilate the ghetto, the Jewish fighters were ready to strike back. Author Linda Jacobs Altman chronicles this brave and heroic story from the Holocaust.

On November 10, 1938, Francis Schott slept peacefully in his bed. Suddenly, a group of Nazis broke into his house and began to destroy it. They wanted to demolish everything because Francis's family was Jewish. For days, violent attacks like this took place throughout Nazi Germany and came to be known as Kristallnacht, the "Night of Broken Glass." The Nazis destroyed thousands of Jewish homes and businesses, burned down hundreds of synagogues, and murdered many people. The brutal assault came to an end, but it marked the beginning of something much worse: the Holocaust.

Millions of Jews were murdered during the Holocaust. Those people fortunate enough to survive had their lives destroyed by the Nazis. Survivors had to rebuild their lives, often from nothing: no homes, no jobs, and no family. Author Betty N. Hoffman details stories of survival from the Holocaust and the liberation of Nazi Europe, from the Displaced Persons camps to the founding of the State of Israel.

Bent Melchior, a fourteen-year-old Danish Jew, was crammed into the hold of a fishing boat, but this was not a normal fishing trip. Surviving the crowded, filthy conditions on this trip meant reaching freedom. After many hours at sea, Melchior had reached safety in Sweden. The remarkable story of rescuing the Danish Jews has many heroic tales. In the midst of World War II and the slaughter of millions in the Holocaust, the Danes resisted Nazi brutality and saved thousands of people from death.