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Holocaust
The
holocaust is a word that in ancient times indicated a sacrifice that was
made in order to worship and thank God. Nowadays, this word has another
meaning which actually has become the most frequently used. The Oxford
English dictionary defines the Holocaust as “the mass murder of the Jews
by the Nazis in the war of
1939-1945”.
The holocaust actually began in the years that preceded the Second World
War; the persecution and the massacre of Jewish race was planned by a mad
German painter called Adolph Hitler with anti-Semitic ideas, who came to
power in
1933.
His main goal was to impose the superiority of the “pure German race”
making the Jewish people completely disappear. During the first years of
Hitler’s tyranny Jews were humiliated and deprived of their rights and
dignity; but that was just the beginning of the persecution and massacre
of the helpless Jewish population. An endless number of Jewish families
were deported to the concentration camps. The means that brought them to
their burying place were trains in which they died before getting to
destination because people could not afford to be literally squeezed for
hours in small wagons that transported hundreds of people. Probably, those
who died were actually the luckiest ones because they would not face the
absurd reality of the concentration camps, in which the prisoners were
treated like animals and were subjected to dreadful experiments before
being killed.
The historical relevance of the holocaust or “Shoa”, the term used by
Jewish people to remember one of the saddest moments of mankind’s history,
is then enormous and has left an indelible mark in recent history. |
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