Why Mothers Blindfold Their Children During The Warsaw Ghetto

“All jews, outside! Hurry!” This was very common for Elie Wiesel and his father in the concentration camp. In Elie Wiesel’s book, Night, he tells about the horrible atrocities that the Nazis commit on a daily basis. When Elie was only fifteen him and his family were shipped away to a concentration camp, and they may have left as a family but there was only one left in the end. There was many ways the Nazis dehumanize the Jews, with starving and torturing were two of the many things that the Germans did.

The article that I found about a Holocaust survivor named Fania Wedro written by Yolande Cole. Wedro talks about her experience with the holocaust and how her family and her neighbors were affected by the holocaust. Cole (2017), states that Wedro was 14 years old when the Nazis came to her town of Koretz, Poland. They took away her father first. In her interview with Cole, Wedro recalled that her father told her to “go home and tell her mother that he will be back in the evening” (Cole, 2017). Sadly, her bother never returned. Wedro also remembered watching women getting shot by the Nazis for steeping out of line. After some time, the Nazis came back for her and her mother. Wedro recalls meeting another young girl who suggested that they “stand

The innocent Jewish children and babies are “thrown into flames.” They were also “tossed into the air and used as targets for machine guns. (6)” The memoir Night retells the experience of a 15-year old Jewish boy, Elie, who spends many months in WWII concentration camps with his father Shlomo. In Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie and many others are dehumanized both mentally and physically.

“The ghetto was to be liquidated entirely. Departures were to take place street by street, starting the next day” (Wiesel 13). Days later after they felt safe again, they would be taken to the camps, to be worked to death. They were dehumanized from that

However, thousands still died every day at Treblinka, a concentration camp in Poland. “At the peak of operations, 15,000 men, women and children died there each day. Death on that scale took enormous labor, and towards the end, when the SS began to fear discovery, the mass graves were opened and the rotting bodies burned.” The Sonderkommando, a group of prisoners, were responsible of disposing bodies of other prisoners. The purpose of surviving till the end was to tell the horrific stories of the Warsaw Ghetto. Such as the filthy living conditions. “In Nazi camps especially,

Their main goals were to organize uprisings, break out of the ghettos, and join partisan units in the fight against the Germans.The Jews knew that uprisings would not stop the Germans and that only a handful of fighters would succeed in escaping to join the partisans. Still, some Jews made the decision to resist. Weapons were smuggled into ghettos. Inhabitants in the ghettos of Vilna, Mir, Lachva , Kremenets, Częstochowa, Nesvizh, Sosnowiec, and Tarnow, among others, resisted with force when the Germans began to deport ghetto populations. In Bialystok, the underground staged an uprising just before the final destruction of the ghetto in September 1943. Most of the ghetto fighters, primarily young men and women, died during the fighting.The Warsaw ghetto uprising in the spring of 1943 was the largest single revolt by Jews. Hundreds of Jews fought the Germans and their auxiliaries in the streets of the ghetto. Thousands of Jews refused to obey German orders to report to an assembly point for deportation. In the end the Nazis burned the ghetto to the ground to force the Jews out. Although they knew defeat was certain, Jews in the ghetto fought desperately and

Also included were the host families themselves, who took the frightened children into their homes and showered them with affection, love, and patience. Tens of thousands of children survived the Holocaust by living under new identities for lengthy periods of time with adoptive parents, or in institutions, such as religious orphanages, many of these stories also appeared in the Hidden Child bulletins over the years. In the Eastern side of Europe “the Germans executed not only the people who sheltered Jews, but their entire family as well” (The Holocaust). Western Europe was much more lenient, but many of the righteous individuals were incarcerated in camps or murdered randomly here too. Anyone who assisted in helping Jews “lived under constant fear of being caught; there was always the danger of denunciation by neighbors or collaborators” (The Holocaust). Jews were hidden in rescuers’ homes and property, they were provided false papers and identities, and were smuggled out of ghettos and concentration camps. As the entire race of Jews was being destroyed, a trace of hope and strength arose as the Righteous Gentiles sheltered Jews from the whole world that was against them.

The Jews that survived all of this were evacuated out of the camps by train or by ship. As winter approached, the Allies reached the border of Germany, and the Germans thought they ruled all of Germany because of the Allies reaching the border. The SS were still evacuating prisoners from the camps from the East and the West by foot. The search for the family always ended in tragedy. For the parents, it was to find their child dead or missing. For the hidden children, it was to find their family members dead and no one to claim them. For months and years, the Jewish parents searched for their children that the Nazis had sent into hiding. Parents would look in newspapers, tracing services, and survivor registries in hopes of finding their children. Although they would often find their children with the original rescuers, sometimes the rescuers would refuse to give the children back.

In 1940s Germany, during Hitler’s “Third Reich”, Jewish families were determined to be a threat to the economic and spiritual development of the nation. In order to “save” Germany, the first solution was simply to force Jews into ghettos. Later this led to them being forced into concentration camps where they were systematically destroyed. Millions died in such a manner and of the survivors, many families were destroyed. Jewish families were separated primarily because during the forced labor expeditions of the concentration camps, they were separated according to gender. Men went one direction and women went another; after the war was over, many assumed their families were dead and if anyone had survived they hoped that they might one day reconvene somewhere far safer than Germany. Nazi emphasis on utility and practicality led to the separation of many Jewish families, as they gladly relocated Jews according to their needs and killed those who they had no use for.

As a mother your biggest mission in life is to be a protector and everything that your children will ever need and that’s exactly what Sonia was. June 30, 1941 Nazis gained control of the town Zhetel, a small town in Poland that Sonia and her family resided in. The Nazis immediately began to persecute the Jewish population. On July 23, 1941, the Nazis executed 120 prominent Jews. Among those innocent lives was Sonias brother. On February 22, 1942, the Germans ordered that all the Jews in Zhetel be forced into a ghetto called among these names: The Zdzięcioł Ghetto, Dzyatlava Ghetto or Zhetel Ghetto. Two months later they rounded up and killed about 1000 Jewish residents. After this first slaughter, on April 30, a few dozen people escaped from the ghetto into the nearby woods and began to organize into partisan groups. On August 6, 1942, the Germans began the final liquidation of Zhetel. Sam, Sonias husband, was rounded up in a mass sweep of the town and locked together with hundreds of other Jews in the town's synagogue. In the middle of all the confusion, he and a few others hid for about two days and nights. Once it was quiet, they escaped into the woods and joined up with the Jewish Partisans. Meanwhile Sonia hid with her two children in a hiding place her husband established soon after World War 2. They would stay there for three nights with other friends and family until the Nazi massacres

Have you ever been in a room so crowded you thought you might implode? Or been so sick you questioned if you were still alive? How about so hungry you felt as though you would shrivel up and simply cease to exist? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then you may almost be able to imagine what life was like in the Jewish ghettos. There were ghettos before the Holocaust, the first being in Venice in the 16th century, there are ghettos today, and there will be ghettos in the future, but the Jewish ghettos of the Holocaust are by far the most prominent.

At the age of 15, Elie Wiesel and his family were sent to Auschwitz as a part of the Holocaust. He was sent to many labor camps with his father where they were forced to work under inhumane conditions. However, his mother and younger sister were killed upon entering the camps. Wiesel recalled, “I didn’t know that this was the moment in the time and the place where I was leaving my mother and Tzipora forever.” (Wiesel, 29) After this, Wiesel and his father witnessed many atrocities. One of the first horrible sights Elie shared in his story was where he saw babies being

Some of the Jews were able to hide out in the ghettos. Others were able to escape from the concentration camps. In some cases organized resistance was formed in the ghettos amongst the Jews. For example, in the Polish capitol of Warsaw, individual Jews continued to hide themselves in the ghetto ruins for many months after they were forcefully told to leave by the Nazis. These resistance fighters often attacked German police officials on patrol. Approximately 20,000 Warsaw Jews continued to live in hiding in Warsaw long after the liquidation of the ghetto.

The Holocaust is a very large topic with many subtopics within, which many people have never heard of. One in particular is the Hidden Children of the Holocaust. Like a majority of individuals, I never heard of this topic before, until I started my inquiry work. Hiding children during the holocaust was an effort to save thousands of children’s lives. The children were hidden in different ways, either with false identities, underground, and with or without their parents. The children with false identities were allowed to participate in everyday life activities, like attend school and socialize with children their age, which in the long run this lead to less emotional and mental issues. However, the children that were hidden and not allowed to leave their hiding spots often faced boredom, pain, and torment. Some children were capable of being hid with their parents while other children were not. Depending on the situation the child was in, depends on the effects it had on the child during this time. In this paper, I will be discussing works by two scholars, Natalia Aleksiun’s Gender and Daily Lives of Jews in Hiding in Eastern Galicia and Judy Mitchell’s Children of the Holocaust. Aleksiun’s article talks about the daily lives of Jews in hiding and also about how they prepared their hideouts. Aleksiun’s article mainly focuses on children that were hidden with their families. In Mitchell’s article, he focuses on the hidden children and gives examples/survivor stories on what it

The Nazis and other Germans not only killed over six million people during the Holocaust, but one and a half million of people killed were children. Over a million of them were Jewish and many of the others were Gypsy, Polish, and others living in Europe at the time. In the novel Night by Elie Wiesel, Elie shares his personal experience during the Holocaust starting in Sighet and ending when he was freed from Buchenwald. Children of all ages risked their lives for survival and many were only able to live for a very short time because of the difficult situations and conditions. Many were killed in the gas chambers as soon as they arrived at the concentration camps because they were considered useless. The younger children were killed right away like his sister Tzporia, but as Elie got older he got beaten and tortured by the Nazis and was treated like an animal not a human being.