The word antisemitism means prejudice against or hatred of Jews. The Holocaust—the state-sponsored persecution and murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945—is history’s most extreme example of antisemitism.
Antisemitic cartoon
An antisemitic cartoon published in Dr. Kurt Plischke's Der Jude als Rassenschaender: Eine Anklage gegen Juda und eine Mahnung an die deutschen Frauen und Maedchen (The Jew as Race Defiler: An Accusation against Judah and a Warning to German Women and Girls). Germany, ca. 1935.
Item ViewAntisemitic children's book
Antisemitic children's book published in 1936 in Nuremberg, Germany. The title, in German, is translated as "You Can't Trust a Fox in the Heath and a Jew on his Oath: A Picture Book for Young and Old." The cover depicts a fox in the heath and a caricature of a Jew taking an oath.
Item ViewHanne Hirsch Liebmann describes harassment and anti-Jewish sentiment in Germany
Hanne's family owned a photographic studio. In October 1940, she and other family members were deported to the Gurs camp in southern France. In September 1941, the Children's Aid Society (OSE) rescued Hanne and she hid in a children's home in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Her mother perished in Auschwitz. In 1943, Hanne obtained false papers and crossed into Switzerland. She married in Geneva in 1945 and had a daughter in 1946. In 1948, she arrived in the United States.
Item ViewBenjamin (Ben) Meed describes Warsaw after the German occupation in 1939 and first experiencing antisemitism
Ben was one of four children born to a religious Jewish family. Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. After the Germans occupied Warsaw, Ben decided to escape to Soviet-occupied eastern Poland. However, he soon decided to return to his family, then in the Warsaw ghetto. Ben was assigned to a work detail outside the ghetto, and helped smuggle people out of the ghetto—including Vladka (Fagele) Peltel, a member of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), who later became his wife. Later, he went into hiding outside the ghetto and posed as a non-Jewish Pole. During the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943, Ben worked with other members of the underground to rescue ghetto fighters, bringing them out through the sewers and hiding them on the "Aryan" side of Warsaw. From the "Aryan" side of Warsaw, Ben witnessed the burning of the Warsaw ghetto during the uprising. After the uprising, Ben escaped from Warsaw by posing as a non-Jew. Following liberation, he was reunited with his father, mother, and younger sister.
Item ViewErnest G. Heppner
Ernest was one of three children born to a Jewish family in the commercial city of Breslau, which had one of the largest Jewish communities in Germany. His father, a World War I veteran, owned a factory that made matzah, the unleavened bread used during the Jewish holiday of Passover. Ernest was 12 when Hitler took power in 1933.
1933-39: Ernest often got in trouble at school because people called him names. "Christ-killer" and "your father kills Christian babies for Passover" were common taunts. Many thought the Nazis were a passing political fad but by 1935 their laws were menacing. Signs appeared declaring, "Jews are forbidden." In 1938, after his synagogue was burned (during Kristallnacht), his family realized they had to flee Germany. Since his family could only get two tickets, Ernest and his mother boarded a ship for Asia, leaving their family behind.
1940-44: Ernest ended up in Japanese-controlled Shanghai, the only place refugees could land without a visa. There, as a volunteer driving a truck for the British army's Shanghai Volunteer Force, he got meals and was better off than many other refugees. After Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, conditions among the city's refugees worsened--American relief funds, the refugees' lifeline, could not reach Shanghai. In 1943, under pressure from Germany, the Japanese set up a ghetto.
Ernest spent two years in the Shanghai ghetto before the city was liberated in 1945. After the war, he worked for the U.S. Air Force in Nanking, China, for several years, and later immigrated to the United States.
Item ViewGerhard (Gad) Beck
Gerhard (Gad) Beck was born in 1923 in Berlin. He had a twin sister, Margot (Miriam). Their father, Heinrich, was a Jewish businessman who moved to Berlin from Austria. Their mother, Hedwig, converted to Judaism to marry her husband. The family celebrated both Christian and Jewish holidays. When Gad and Miriam were born, the Becks lived in the Scheunenviertel, a poor district in central Berlin that was home to many Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. In 1929, the family moved to a larger apartment in a suburban district of the city.
1933-39: Gad was nine years old when the Nazis came to power in 1933. As one of about a dozen Jewish children in his school, he became a target of antisemitic bullying. Gad recalled a classmate asking "Can I sit somewhere else, not next to Gad? It smells like stinking Jewish feet here." As a result of the discrimination he faced in his school, Gad's parents enrolled him in a Jewish school. When he was 12, his parents could not afford the tuition and he had to quit. Gad found work as a shop assistant. In 1938, the Becks were required to give up their beautiful, large apartment and move back to their old neighborhood.
1940-44: In 1940 Gad planned to emigrate to British-controlled Mandatory Palestine. However, he was injured and unable to travel. Around this time, he joined a Jewish youth group. There, he met Manfred Lewin and developed a romantic and sexual relationship with him. In November 1942, Manfred and his family were ordered to report to an assembly camp. The Lewins were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center. Manfred did not survive the Holocaust.
Because the Nazis classified Gad’s mother as “Aryan,” Gad, Miriam, and their father had some protection from Nazi anti-Jewish policies. They were not deported to the east, like Manfred’s family and most other German Jews. But in February 1943, Gad, Miriam, and their father were arrested. They were detained alongside other Jews with Aryan relatives. They were held in the Jewish Community Center located on Rosenstraße. Gad’s mother joined the Aryan women protesting for their loved one’s safe return. After about a week, the Becks were released.
Gad was involved in the Zionist underground resistance, helping Jews escape to Switzerland. In early 1945, he and a number of his friends from the underground were denounced to the Gestapo and arrested. He remained in prison in Berlin until the Red Army conquered the city in April 1945.
Gad’s parents and sister also survived the Holocaust in Berlin. In 1947, Gad immigrated to Mandatory Palestine. He returned to Germany in the late 1970s. He was one of the first openly gay Holocaust survivors to speak about his experiences. His memoir is available in English as An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin. Gad lived in Berlin until his death in 2012 at 88 years old.
Item ViewLiliana Guzenfiter
An only child of middle-class Jewish parents, Liliana was raised in a mixed neighborhood of Christians and Jews in Poland's capital. Her father ran a jewelry business and was a reserve officer in the Polish army; her mother was a housewife. Liliana dreamed of going to the Sorbonne and becoming Poland's second female district attorney.
1933-39: The worst part of going to school was being harassed and called a "filthy Jew." Liliana petitioned to enter a prestigious Catholic high school where she was exempted from attending Saturday classes, but like other Jewish students, she was seated separately and shoved in the halls and staircases. After a few weeks she quit, and attended a Jewish high school until it was closed by the occupying Germans in September 1939.
1940-44: After the Jews were forced into the ghetto, Liliana became a slave laborer in the Toebbens factory. By April 1943 her family was dead and the ghetto was ablaze and in revolt. She hunkered down in her factory until the Germans came to get them on May 8. In a rage Liliana grabbed a pair of scissors, but before she could do anything a German smashed her in the head with his rifle butt. She lifted her arm to protect herself and he smashed her again and again, knocking her out. When Liliana woke up the next day she was in a dark, crowded cattle car.
Liliana survived as a slave laborer in the Majdanek and Skarzysko-Kamienna camps before being liberated in Czestochowa on January 18, 1945. She immigrated to America in 1950.
Item ViewSamuel Gruber describes a German girl's reaction to learning that he was Jewish
A Polish soldier, Samuel was wounded in action and taken by Germany as a prisoner of war. As the war continued, he and other Jewish prisoners received increasingly harsh treatment. Among the camps in which he was interned was Lublin-Lipowa, where he was among those forced to build the Majdanek concentration camp. In 1942, he escaped from the Germans, spending the rest of the war as the leader of an armed partisan group.
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