After

The persecution of Jewish people in Europe prior to the rise of the Nazis in the early 1930s was not a historical anomaly. Severe persecution of Jewish people has occurred periodically over the millennia; this pattern resulted in certain, more accepting regions becoming home to a higher percentage of Jewish citizens. In Eastern Europe prior to WWII, Poland had the largest Jewish population (3,000,000), followed by the Soviet Union with 2,500,000, about two-thirds of whom lived in Ukraine. Germany had more than 560,000 Jewish residents and former Czechoslovakia, which shared a border with Germany, had 375,000 Jewish citizens.

As is frequently the case with the rise of totalitarian leaders who choose a group to demonize, Adolph Hitler and the Nazis chose to blame the Jewish people for all the woes of German society. This prejudicial practice and attitude against Jewish people is called antisemitism. The Nazis’ persecution of the Jewish people allowed them to polarize society, solidify their power, and completely control their nation. The Nazis systematically incited hatred against all Jewish people, ultimately resulting in the infamous “Kristallnacht” attack on Jewish businesses, homes, and synagogues in Berlin on November 9, 1938.

Germany instigated WWII by following its occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938 with the invasion of Poland in 1939. As the war progressed, the Nazis progressively restricted and confined Jewish citizens, first to “ghettos” in large cities like Warsaw, then to concentration camps. As the tide of the war turned against them, the Nazis marched surviving camp prisoners to other camps within the borders of Germany. Approximately 6,000,000 people, the majority of them Jewish, died in the ghettos, concentration camps, and work camps established by the Nazis. Jewish historians collectively refer to this as the “Shoah,” and it is more commonly known as the Holocaust. Gleitzman pointedly describes the unspeakable carnage that occurred in these camps by the war’s end as Felix Salinger searches for his parents among the survivors. During the Nuremberg war crimes trials after WWII, German leaders stated that the Nazis developed the idea of concentration camps from the United States custom of restricting Indigenous American people to reservations.