What Is The Holocaust and Who Started It?

What is the Holocaust / who started it all Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) was the founder and leader of the Nazi Party and the most influential voice in the organization, implementation, and execution of the Holocaust, the systematic extermination and ethnic cleansing of six million European Jews and millions of other non-arynes. On January 30, 1993, the Holocaust began to occur in Nazi Germany. Insert here Eva Schloss was born in Vienna, Austria on May 11, 1929. is the step-sister of Anne Frank?

Eva and her mother were in hiding for two years. In June 1942 Eva’s brother got a call-up notice to be sent to a death camp and it was at that time Eva and her family went into hiding. Eva and her family could not find a family who could take four people in because it was very dangerous to hide Jews at the time, so Eva and her family were forced to separate. Eva and her mother went to a school teachers house, different from the place her father went. Occasionally Eva and her mother went out using false identification and papers. About once a month they went out visit Eva’s father and brother, but other than that for two years they were stuck in a room. While the family who took them in were out living their lives Eva and her mother had to remain quiet because the neighbors might hear them. Eva and Anne were the same age. In 1938 Eva’s family left Austria when Hitler came in with is armies, but her father went to Holland. By the time the rest of the family were ready to follow the father the Dutch border had been closed so they snuck into Belgium.

In 1939 a war was already declared, and her father decided the rest of the family should go on a visiting permit to Amsterdam so the whole family would be in the same country. In February 1940 they moved to the Rembrandtplein plan which was a square in Amsterdam and across the street lived the Frank family because it was a newly built area, many German and Austrian Jews lived there. At the time Eva and Anna were both eleven years old and after school, all of the children would go out to play in the big square and that is where Eva met Anna for the first time. On May 11th, 1944 is was Eva’s birthday, that morning she and family went down for breakfast and heard loud knocks on the door. The gentlemen of the family went down to open the door not expecting anything to happen; as soon as he opened the doormen pushed him aside and ran up the stairs. When the family was seen the told them to put on their coats and come along with them. Eva’s mother tried to tell the men that they were guest and that Eva is not her child nor is she Jewish trying to avoid her daughter from getting arrested, but they knew exactly who they were, so they had no choice but to follow the order.

The men took them to Gustavo Headquarters this was a fearsome experience for Eva; they threatened to kill her brother if she did not talk because they wanted to know who helped them find places to hide and who provided them with false identification papers. Shortly after Eva’s interrogation, she was first sent to a Dutch camp which was named Westerbork. Westerbork was ran by German and majority of the people in the camp were Jews. Eva and her family were only at the camp for a couple of days, then she and a hundred other Jews were for forced in a truck that had no facilities and deported to Oswiecim, Poland. The journey to Poland took days because some trucks went east, and the German troop’s other transports went west; due to the troops going east some trucks had to wait on the side of the road. While being on the side of the road the Germans driving the truck would open the door and collect anything that they thought was valuable and threated that if the Jews would not give up what they have they would be killed. After several days of traveling in terrible condition, the door opened and the Jews were ordered to get out. After getting out the Jew saw the sign on the station platform that says Auschwitz until then the Jews had no idea where they were going. The first command, when they arrived at the camp, was that men and women go to different sides because Auschwitz was the men’s camp and the woman was kept in Auschwitz Birkenau; this marked the separation of families.

Eva and her mother stayed together for quite some time then eventually they were separated. Eva was one of lucky the ones, on about two or three occasions got to see her father but she never saw her brother again; this was very unusual because most people never saw their family again. While being in the camp Eva feared that would be killed any day, that fear was with her every minute of the day. Every night and day people were selected to be killed; certain groups, work, and commanders instead of going to work they marched straight to the gas chambers. Once a week they were allowed showers which were in a shower block, and those blocks look from the outside as if they were the same as the gas chamber blocks. Every week the people in the camps did not go to the same showers; when Eva marched there she never if she was going to the showers or to be killed in a gas chamber, so this fear was always with her.

With fear being the worst part about the camp the second worst was the hunger. The prisoners were so hungry that they were nearly out of their mind and they were under fit because they got a very monotonous diet. Dr. Joseph Mongla speared Eva’s mother. Once when Eva went to hospital blocks where Mongla worked doing mainly horrific experiments on people. He operated without an ascetic and took out certain organs to see how long people could survive, most people did not survive long after. The only people Mongla speared were twins because he was very interested in the study.

Immediately when people arrived at the hospital blocks the called out ‘any twins, babies, and old people stand aside’ any type of twins was speared but he eventually did some type of experiment on them as well. Eva once went to the hospital block because she had a terrible boil on her neck and she just wanted to get some cream, but the bunk maid wanted her to stay in the hospital. She knew that if she were to stay in the hospital she would never come out. Eva always told her self that she must survive and have a family, but of course, it might never have had happened. By her having this mindset she stayed certain, strong, and going perhaps more than people who were weaker and gave up at a certain point.

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