The Shoah

The story

An ancient hatred

Jews had lived in Europe for more than two thousand years, as in many other parts of the world, and for centuries they had suffered prejudice and discrimination: antisemitism, that is, hostility towards Jews simply because they were Jewish. In many countries, for example, they could not own land or do certain jobs, and they were often unfairly blamed for society's problems. In the 19th century, with emancipation, many Jews had gained the same rights as other citizens and had made a great contribution to science, art, culture and the economy. But the prejudice had not gone away.

With the rise of Nazism, antisemitism became state policy. Hitler and his followers, inspired by an invented racist theory, claimed that Jews were a dangerous “race”, guilty of all of Germany's ills. From 1933 the persecutions began: Jews were shut out of many jobs, their shops were boycotted, and in 1935 the Nuremberg Laws took away their citizenship and their right to marry non-Jews. On the night of 9 to 10 November 1938, “Kristallnacht” (the Night of Broken Glass), hundreds of synagogues and shops were destroyed all over Germany, and thousands of Jews were arrested.

Ghettos and shootings

When the war began in 1939, the persecutions got worse. In the occupied territories, such as Poland, Jews were shut into fenced-off districts, the ghettos, where they lived crammed together, with little food and with disease. About four hundred and fifty thousand lived in the Warsaw ghetto. In the summer of 1941, when Germany attacked the Soviet Union, special units, followed by soldiers and local collaborators, began to kill Jews, with mass shootings, in the villages and towns of the East.

Then the Nazis decided to organise the extermination on an industrial scale. On 20 January 1942, at Wannsee, near Berlin, senior officials of the regime met to coordinate what they called the “final solution”. Jews from all over occupied Europe were arrested, loaded onto goods trains and taken to concentration and extermination camps in Poland, such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibór and others. Many, above all children, old people and women, were killed soon after arriving; others were forced into extremely hard labour, in inhuman conditions.

Italy

In Italy, in 1938 the Fascist regime had passed the racial laws: Italian Jews were expelled from schools, universities and public offices, and their rights were restricted. After 8 September 1943, when Germany occupied the centre and north of the country, arrests and deportations began too. On 16 October 1943, in Rome, more than a thousand people were taken from the old ghetto and sent to Auschwitz: only sixteen came back. From Milan Central Station, from “Platform 21”, trains full of deportees departed. In all, about seven thousand Jews were deported from Italy (estimates range from 6,800 to 7,500), and fewer than a thousand came back.

Those who helped, those who resisted

While many looked the other way or collaborated, some people risked their lives to help Jews: they hid them in houses and convents, and forged documents. These people are now given the title “Righteous Among the Nations”. Among the victims, too, there were those who resisted: in 1943 the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto rose up with makeshift weapons, and for almost a month held out against the German soldiers.

The end and remembrance

On 27 January 1945 soldiers of the Red Army entered Auschwitz and freed the few prisoners who were left. In total, Nazism and its allies killed about six million Jews, almost two thirds of those living in Europe, and millions of other people: Roma and Sinti, political opponents, people with disabilities, prisoners of war, Jehovah's Witnesses and homosexuals. Jews call this tragedy the “Shoah”, a Hebrew word meaning “catastrophe”. 27 January is now Holocaust Memorial Day all over the world.