Drawing the Holocaust: A Teenager's Memory of Terezín, Birkenau, and Mauthausen

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Following the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, the study of The Nazis did not carry out the Holocaust alone. Their descent into genocide was assisted and carried out by collaborators: individuals, groups and governments that helped the Nazis to persecute and murder their victims. Without the aid of these collaborators, the Nazis would not have been able to carry out the Holocaust to the same extent or at the same pace. A smaller number of Jews survived inside German-controlled Europe. They often did so with the help of rescuers. Rescue efforts ranged from the isolated actions of individuals to organized networks, both small and large. Throughout Europe, there were non-Jews who took grave risks to help their Jewish neighbors, friends, and strangers survive. For example, they found hiding places for Jews, procured false papers that offered protective Christian identities, or provided them with food and supplies. Other Jews survived as members of partisan resistance movements. Finally, some Jews managed, against enormous odds, to survive imprisonment in concentration camps, ghettos, and even killing centers. Aftermath As part of the “Final Solution,” Nazi Germany committed mass murder on an unprecedented scale. There were two main methods of killing. One method was mass shooting. German units carried out mass shootings on the outskirts of villages, towns, and cities throughout eastern Europe. The other method was asphyxiation with poison gas. Gassing operations were conducted at killing centers and with mobile gas vans. Mass Shootings in 1919. The Treaty of Versailles forced Germany to admit complete responsibility for the war; pay large amounts of

The rise of antisemitism over the course of the early twentieth century was extremely dangerous. It allowed an overtly antisemitic party such as the Nazis to come to power in 1933. To say those books informed my thinking, or even to say I was thinking about this at all in my early teens, would give me too much credit. It was all just part of The Big Taboo. It occurs to me right now, though, that perhaps the whole taboo-smashing ethos of the underground comix scene did allow me to stir up the buried connections to the unspeakable that my mother’s secret bookshelf opened up. After the Wannsee Conference of 1942, the Nazis built additional extermination camps at Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka. These camps were specifically built near railway lines to make transportation easier. Instead of vans, stationary gas chambers, labelled as showers, were built to murder people with carbon monoxide poisoning created using diesel engines.But what about “bystanders” who were not “passive,” “indifferent,” or “apathetic”? Many people became involved to various degrees over time in events of the Holocaust than is usually implied by the catch-all “bystander” tag and the characterizations associated with it. Levels of Involvement Bed-ridden British mother, 39, battling long Covid 'death sentence' wants to end her life in Switzerland after almost two years of suffering that has left her in constant agony and unable to care for her four children

Most Jewish artists working in Germany in the 1930s experienced persecution. Many, including Kurt Schwitters, David Ludwig Bloch, Nandor Glid and Arno Nadel, were interned in labor or concentration camps. These experiences had a significant, long-lasting impact on their work.Twelve-year-old Michael Kraus began keeping a diary while he was still living at home in the Czech city of Nachód but continued writing while a prisoner at Theresienstadt (Terezín). When he was shipped with other prisoners to the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, all of his writings were confiscated and destroyed. After his liberation and while convalescing, he began to draw and make notes again about his experiences in Theresienstadt, in Auschwitz, the first death march out of Mauthausen and its satellite camps in Melk and Gunskirchen. The first days where I had to go in the school to tell my history, my horrible history, it was very difficult for me. I am crazy when I have to tell something what happened in the concentration camps. The most active, direct and deadly collaboration took place in the countries occupied by, or aligned with, the Nazis across Europe. The invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 further escalated lethal actions towards Jews. In the lead up to the invasion,