HOLOCAUST

I choose to speack about the holocaust because it passed on my mind the haunting words of George Santayana, wich says that Thoose who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. Maybe, nowadays, it seems that the peace reigns in the word, but in reality, there are over 50 wars, carried out, in the entire word. It seems that this horrifying story is now forgeted, the crimes and atrocities are repeated, maybe not in the same way like in the past, but leaving behind the same paine. Thats why I choose to speak about this subject, about Holocaust, to remember the atrocities wich have been made, and wich ,unfortunately, are happening again. There is so much information about the Holocaust that it is impossible to describe it all in a simple essay. We can, however, tell that it was the effort of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany to exterminate the Jews and other people that they considered to be inferior. As a result about 12,000,000 people - about half of them Jews - were murdered. The crimes were done by every means imaginable but most of the victims perished as a result of shooting, starvation, disease, and poison gas. Others, were tortured to death or died in horrible medical experiments. Hitler took power in Germany in 1933 and almost immediately began the plan to the Holocaust. This first phase was the persecution of Jews in Germany and the other countries invaded by Hitler. It lasted until 1941- during this period, while Hitler built his power, Jews were persecuted and brutalized but there was no organized effort to systematically murder them. In 1939 Hitler invaded Poland, beginning the Second World War. In 1941 Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. At about the same time, Hitler decided that there should be a "Final Solution" to "the Jewish question." The "Final Solution" was in reality, an elaborated plan wich reffered at the murder of the Jews by a military group known as the SS and a security service known as the SD. The Gestapo was part of the SD. They arrested Jews and other victims, ran the concentration camps and organized the murder squads. During the first part of this extermination over 1,500,000 Jews and other people were murdered by military groups by shooting them. Gradually, the emphasis changed to concentration camps, where the prisoners were worked to death as slave laborers (working without receiving food, or receiving only a slice of bread on day) and extermination camps, (where they were murdered in the gas chambers). The most famous of these was Auschwitz, which was both a labor camp and an extermination camp. About 1,300,000 people perished at Auschwitz; approximately 1,000,000 of those people died in the gas chambers. Sometime in 1944 it became obvious to most Nazi leaders (excepting Hitler) that they would soon be defeated and put on trial for what they had done. Several, including one of the worst of the criminals, Heinrich Himmler, tried to make deals with the Allies closing in on Nazi Germany. As a direct result, the actual extermination stopped in November 1944, but although , thousands of people continued to die in the concentration camps. The war in Europe ended six months later, in May 1945. The Nazis targeted many groups for persecution - among them Catholics, Poles, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Communists - but only three groups were targeted for systematic extermination: Jews, the handicapped, and the Sinti - known also as Gypsies. One of the Holocaust survivor, the author Elie Wiesel, wrote: "In those times there was darkness everywhere. In heaven and on earth, all the gates of compassion seemed to have been closed. The killer killed and the Jews died and the outside world adopted an attitude either of complicity or of indifference. Only a few had the courage to care." So we can say now, even that the history is repeating because the word is confrontting with wars, we can try to change this situation. We must involve in the word problems, we can take attitude to help the people who confront with war and making that the murders and atrocities do not happening again. We must learn that even a person can count on this problem and have the power to change something.