Transcript - Office Mix

HOLOCAUST SURVIVALS
DIRECTIONS
• You will be looking at information about holocaust survival from dates,
specific experiences, and even researching a holocaust survivor of your
choice.
• You will be reading or listening to this mix and filling in the blanks and
answering the questions
• Eventually, you will be researching one of your own and creating your own
notes and questions.
• Finally, you will create 6-question kahoot to share with the class about your
survivor.
1938: On Kristallnacht, the "Night of
Broken Glass," Nazis terrorize Jews
throughout Germany and Austria- 30,000
Jews are arrested, 91 are killed. Thousands
of shops and businesses are looted and
over 1000 synagogues are set on fire.
1942: At the Wannsee Conference, Nazi
officials turn over the "Final Soulution"their plan to kill all European Jews- to the
government officials.
March: About 20 to 25 percent of the Jews
who would die in the Holocaust have
already been murdered.
WHEN?
WHEN (CONTINUED)
• 1943: February: About 80 to 85 percent of the Jews who would die in
the Holocaust have already been murdered. Jews in the Warsaw
Ghetto resist as the Nazis begin new rounds of deportations. These
Jews hold out for nearly a month before the Nazis put down the
uprising.
• 1945: Hitler is defeated and World War II ends in Europe. The
Holocaust is over and the death camps are emptied. Many survivors
are placed in displaced persons camps until they find a country
willing to accept them.
AREK HERSCH
• Arek was born and brought up in Poland, the son of a boot-maker for the army. He had four
siblings and was brought up in the Jewish faith in a tight-knit, loving family.
• On 1 September 1939 the Germany army attacked Poland. Arek's family had to leave their
home town and stay with relatives in Lodz, a big industrial city similar to Manchester. They
walked there in a 65-km journey that took them three days. Arek remembers seeing the
German motorbikes, tanks and planes that far outclassed anything the Polish army had to fight
with. He also remembers seeing German soldiers laughing and joking while they humiliated
Jewish men by cutting their beards off.
• In August 1942 the Nazis decided to liquidate the ghetto. 4000 people were made to assemble
in the church. Arek ran away on pretence of getting some water and went to join a group of
people who had been selected to work. Those in the church were taken to Chelmno death
camp where they were gassed and buried in mass graves.
AREK 2.
• After a few weeks Arek was chosen with a group of other boys and
taken to Auschwitz 1. He was put into a block with political
prisoners of different nationalities and the food was a little better.
• In January 1945 Arek could see and hear American and British
bombers and knew the Germans were losing the war. On 18
January the Germans decided to clear Auschwitz camp. They took
the remaining prisoners on a forced march, known as the death
march, for three days with no food, wearing only their striped
camp uniforms in deep snow and temperatures as low as minus 25
degrees.
• The survivors found themselves in Buchenwald in Germany where
Arek was put into a children's barrack. In April he and 3000 other
people were taken to the city of Weimar in Germany, There they
were liberated by the Russian army.
VAL GINSBERG
• On 15 August 1941 the Jewish population was crammed into a ghetto in a small suburb of
Kaunas, surrounded by barbed wire and armed sentries. They had no fuel and barely any
food. Val was sent out as a slave labourer and kept his remaining family alive by scrounging
potato peel which his mother cleaned and cooked. Val's most upsetting memories are of the
massacres: the 'Big Action', in which 10,000 people were taken away and shot, and the
'Children's Action' in spring 1944 when all the ghetto children, along with anyone who was
old, sick or disabled, were forcibly taken away and murdered.
• By 1944 only about 12,000 of Kaunas's Jews remained alive. The German army was in
retreat. The remaining Jews were ordered onto cattle wagons and taken into Germany to
work as forced labourers building factories for the production of Messerschmidt jet
fighters. After a three-day journey Val arrived in Dachau where he was forced to do backbreaking work on starvation rations. By the time he was liberated by the American armed
forces on 1 May 1945, Val was 'a walking skeleton'.
VAL CONTINUED
• Val's liberation euphoria soon turned into a deep depression. Of
the 14 family members who had gathered to decide whether to
stay or go, he was the only one left alive. Out of the 35,000
Jewish citizens of Kaunas, only 2000 were left alive. Val spent six
months in hospital he met his future wife Ibi.
• Val describes their meeting as 'therapeutic' and together they
decided to embark for England and start a new life. They married,
arrived in England in October 1948, and quickly became British
citizens. They spent their working lives in the textile industry in
West Yorkshire and brought up their two children.
• Val and Ibi remained a devoted couple for over 60 years. It
wasn't until their children were growing up that they began to
talk about their Holocaust experiences.
EVE KUGLER
• They had heard the tale of one mother who had been given an ultimatum to kill her baby or leave the hideout for
fear that the Nazis would hear the infant's crying and wreak even more terror on the people assembled there. She
chose to smother her baby. Then there were the children who grew up in the sewers with rats as daily companions
as they hid away.
• She can recall her mother walking down the street with a line of Nazis in the middle of the road. "If she didn't raise
her arm and shout 'Heil Hitler', she would be arrested," she says. She also remembers her mother being terrified
one day as a Nazi picked Eve up and started swinging her about. "I was fair, blue-eyed and [she begins to blush]
pretty," she says. "You may be congratulated for having such a beautiful Arian child," he told her mother.
• His mistake meant she was safe. Her father tried to get a visa to go to Palestine, made it on to the waiting list and
"crept up it – but they wanted people with skills like construction, plumbing, doctors as a priority". A younger
sister, Lea, was born in 1936 and delivered at home after the Nazis had decreed that no Jewish woman could have
access to hospital facilities to give birth.
• Her father's business then started to ebb away. "Some people were afraid to go into a Jewish store and some
people didn't want to do business in a Jewish store," she says.
EVE 2
• It was in 1938 that her grandfather became the first victim in their family as the Nazis arrived
and took him away to a concentration camp. Ten days later, they came back in the middle of
the night and took her father, too. That night – the infamous purge of Jews on Kristallnacht –
the store was smashed up, leaving broken grass everywhere. Her mother spent the following
day clearing it up on the orders of the Nazis. "Throughout that night there had been a frenzy
of destruction of Jewish businesses," Kugler says.
• Her father was taken to a concentration camp and was told: "If you want to get out, get a
visa." It was impossible but her mother was able to find a forger to help her devise one. The
first attempt was torn up and thrown away by the Nazis but the second visa was successful –
largely because it was accompanied by a sum of money. Eventually the family fled to France
and, after the Nazis invaded, Kugler and her elder sister, Ruth, were evacuated to the United
States where they lived with a succession of foster parents.
EVE 3
• "Lea became a hidden child – in 1942, there was a major round-up of all
the Jews in France," Kugler says. "Lea, who by then was five-and-a-half
years old, was taken away by an ambulance – the Germans accepted
ambulances were still needed [so it was not checked]." She was forced to
hide in the fields when the Germans arrived at the farmhouse in which she
had taken refuge.
• The family met up again in the U.S. after the war. "It took five weeks for my
parents to be reunited with Lea because she was so well hidden," says
Kugler.
CHOSEN SURVIVOR RESEARCH DIRECTIONS
• 6 Holocaust Survivors- link for research
• Choose one survivor to research
• Read the survivor’s story, listen to their audio, and
examine the images on their website page.
• Take notes using the organizer.
• Create leveled questions using the chart at the top of
the organizer.
• Complete the exit ticket and extension question.