The Holocaust had a devastating impact on Jewish families. Hitler systematically stripped Jews of their rights and confiscated their property, forcing them into ghettos and concentration camps. In these dire conditions, family bonds were strained as people struggled just to survive, sometimes abandoning or turning against their own family members for food or safety. Over a million Jewish children were killed, and families were torn apart as children were sent away to unknown places. Though the conditions were wretched, some Jewish families still attempted to stay together and maintain their family traditions and support systems within the ghettos. The Holocaust destroyed the family unit for many Jews and had long-lasting negative effects on relationships and Jewish communities.

1. Studies in European history: The Struggles of the Holocaust
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2. Holocaust 1
The Struggles of the Holocaust
Introduction
Amongst the gravest and the cruelest movements ever occurred in history, the 1Holocaust
has its distinctive and unmatchable place. Along with being a greatest dictator ever lived on
earth, 2Adolf Hitler is also known for his historical and brutally designed Jewish extermination.
Germany was defeated in the First World War and, hence, had to bear the consequences of
paying heavily to its allies and the worsening economical and social conditions. In order to
reinstate Germany’s position and his own as a leader, Hitler used Jews as scapegoats to procure a
vicious propaganda against the Jews’ community. Jews were prominent in the fields of
education, business, economics and other spheres of society, because of their stay in other parts
of the world, especially the ones that came under Germany’s rule; Jews had established
themselves in these parts concretely. Hitler regarded them as the corruptors of the land and
blamed them for the country’s downfall; Hitler was an iconic racist, which is quite evident from
his treatment of Jews in Germany. He believed Germany to be the land of superior, dominant and
pure Germans while every other race found on the German land was considered as a plaque and
intolerable disease meant for execution only.
1 The name refers to the mass killingof Jews in Hitler’s Nazi government.
2 Ruler of Germany from 1933 to 1945.

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Discussion
In order to carry out his act of ‘purifying’ the German land, Hitler gradually and
systematically 3stripped Jews of their rights as citizens. He passed bills and devised policies to
rid Jews of their property, society and other basics of life, he made an army of trained policemen,
Gestapo, who were assigned the task of arresting and executing Jews from all over the country.
The time period from 1933 to 1945 was the most horrific time ever faced by any nation. Hitler
was determined to extinct the Jew race from the entire Europe, Jews in the states that come under
Hitler’s reign were also subjected to the same violence and brutality. Their properties were
confiscated and they were socially condemned, Gestapo raised the issue of racism by using all
sources of media, especially the print media, to cut the Jews from every sphere of life and
society. The German police placed banners in front of the malls and shops owned by Jews to stop
the people from shopping there, Jews were forced to leave their homes and live in ghettos aimed
at annihilating them. The Jews living in the ghettos were in miserable condition, with no proper
shelter, food, medicine and sanitary conditions, the people were inflicted with diseases and dying
one after the other. Apart from ghettos, Jews were also sent to concentration camps and killing
centers, the ill, disabled and elderly and children were the first to go to killing centers. Gestapo
loaded thousands of Jews, Gypsies, and Polish and disabled Germans to the killing centers and
shot them with the automated machines at the edge of the mass grave. It has been reported that
within two days thirty to thirty five thousand Jews were killed and buried in the mass grave,
excluding the other races and ‘useless’ Germans.
Gestapo, under Hitler’s leadership, built concentration camps and killing centers in all the
states under Hitler’s control, which served the same purpose as in Germany. Hitler made six
3 Nuremberg Laws of 1935.

4. Holocaust 3
groups of trained policemen, as Gestapo, and dispersed them in all of his reigning states to
dispense their duty of Jew annihilation. Men were the very first to come under the harmful
influence of the hardships inflicted by Germans, they were stripped of their jobs and within a
fraction of time many Jew men including doctors, teachers, lawyers etc. were sent home without
any future prospect. With no job, no modes of earning and confined living conditions, men were
far more depressed than the women. Men were arrested and sent to concentration and killing
centers, they were exposed to hard and humiliating labor with very little and insufficient wages.
Men were forced to go through humiliating checkups where they were forced to strip in front of
German officials, they were made to give away their property, business, residence and in many
cases even their women and children. Elderly men, unable to work hard and misfits for forced
labor were deported to the killing centers and gas chambers as the very first batches. In the
beginning of the Holocaust, in the ghettos and concentration camps, young men and children
aging from 13 and above tried to protest and resist the German terrorization. They formed
resistance groups and attacked the German police roaming around the ghettos; other resistance
activities included stealing of food, providing the daily necessities to the people living in the
ghettos and the attempts to escape these torture centers. Though none of those proved to be
effective but still they were a source of hope for the Jews in those desolate and isolated
conditions. A large number of Jew men were sterilized to stop them from having children, a stab
on the Jew community to control and stop their race from increasing, though there was hardly
any survivor to continue to have family.
4Though the entire Jew community was affected by the Holocaust, but the children, being
the weakest, were exposed to its influence more than the adults, over a million of children were
4 www.ushmm.org

5. Holocaust 4
killed in the Holocaust. Majority of the children were killed at the time of their birth, many of
whom were born in the ghettos and were subjected to extreme conditions. The small children
aging up to 10 or 11 years were gathered and taken to the killing centers and were shot and
buried in the mass graves. Children aging from 13 and above had some chances of survival in the
shape of hard forced labor in concentration camps and later on killed. Many children died of
starvation at the ghettos and concentration and many were used as specimens for medical
experiments, which usually resulted in their deaths. A chief number of children died because of
their exposure to harsh and extremely inhuman weather and living conditions. Because of being
weak and fragile, children were amongst the first to be sent to the gas chambers and killing
centers as they were not suitable for hard labor and were considered as a brood of infectious and
useless race and a burden on the German economy. Innumerous Jew and other children,
orphaned as a result of war, were sent to convents, boarding schools, orphanages and to
strangers’ houses to escape the killing. The experience was often very horrifying for them,
travelling to strange and unknown places, fear of never seeing their parents and siblings again
and living with strangers.
The family unit of Jews was heavily and inversely affected by the Holocaust and the life
spent in the ghettos, family was an important factor of a Jew society and played a significant role
in contouring an individual’s personality and character. Long before the official initiation of Jew
massacre, the families had started to experience the racial discrimination in schools, workplaces
and their neighborhood. Women were the very first to notice the change in the behaviors of the
people around them, having household as the main object of duty, women had the dual role of
uplifting the wretched states of their partners and children as well as keeping the Jew traditions
and customs into practice. During the Holocaust, men remained into the safety of their homes to

6. Holocaust 5
escape the chances of capture and forced into hard labor at the concentration camps, thus adding
to the duties of the women. Instead of men, now women were the primary source of income to
the house, she had to look to the house and the children and earn also to keep body and soul
together. At the ghettos, families from different backgrounds and lifestyles came together, the
disintegration experienced by the families that were mostly without husbands/fathers played a
vital role in bringing them together. The survivor women reported of their activities at the
ghettos, they used to share their family stories, their life before the holocaust, the family and
holiday customs and other feminine issues of sharing tips about daily life. Even at the ghettos,
women managed to uphold their familial duties as the people living there had formed a single
family unit, each performing its duty.
5Where the Holocaust had affected the family unit, it also had a tremendous and largely
negative influence on the relations among the family members. The hardships and desolate living
circumstances not only stripped them of their property and belongings but also of their tender
and loyal emotions towards each other. The recordings of the ghettos mentioned that many a
siblings strangled and killed each other for their rations of food, wives, husbands and children
deserted each other for the sake of safety and food. The family life in ghettos was inflicted with
pain and uncertainty regarding their fate, but in such conditions also, many families attempt to
stay together and close. Women with their children and without their husbands and children
without their parents tend to stay connected with each other and their cousins, parents sent their
children away to unknown and distant lands in the hope of better future for them. Women had to
struggle to get their husbands out of jails and to think about their children, many testimonies,
from the Holocaust survivors, state how parents sent their children away with heavy heart. The
5 Jwa.org

7. Holocaust 6
families at the ghettos tried to uphold their sense of solidarity and to have a normal life in an
entirely anomalous surrounding in order to lessen the pain of their disintegration. The parents,
children and sibling never met each other again as there was hardly a survivor from the ghetto,
even after the collapsing of the family structure of Jews, the day of Shabbat was observed with
enthusiasm. The people used to have off after a half day’s work, or once in a week they were free
to walk about with their spouses and children, a rabbi with a Holy Scripture in his hands used to
visit the houses for prayers. Families used to have their meager provision of food together; hence
fortifying their relation to some degree. There was an air of fear and vagueness settled
permanently on the people living in ghettos.
Women suffered a lot during the Holocaust but their sufferings are often overshadowed
by the killing of six million Jews, a rare number of historical evidences talk about the hardships
of women during that period. At the start of the difficulties of the Holocaust, it was assumed that
the German police would not touch or harm the Jew women and children, because of the
assumption, preventive measures were adopted to protect men from Germans. During the
ransacking of the Jew houses for the search of men, thousands of women and children were
arrested and sent to jails. Where the history of the Holocaust threw light on the Jew suffering, it
had also magnified the courage of Jew women in facing the hardships inflicted up on their
families as well as struggling to free and emigrating their men and looking after the children. As
mentioned earlier, it was thought that Germans would only target men and spare women and
children, Jew men used to hide while women were to go out to the streets for their provision of
food rations, to find jobs and to get the things from their sealed residences. There were a large
number of families without men and with women as their sole earning bodies, Jew community
had a definite and staunch gender roles for both men and women under which men were the ones

8. Holocaust 7
that had learned the technical skills required for earning. Women were not encouraged to learn
such skills, but with the worsened conditions in Germany, it was compulsory for women to go
out and earn bread for her family. They were forced to work hard in industries and factories with
excruciatingly long working hour and very little wages, they were to leave their homes and
children alone at sunrise and return after the sunset. Because of insufficient money and food,
women used to save from their food provisions, given at their working places, for their children.
Amongst the people in the ghettos, women were found to have more sense and will of
survival than men, women developed recipes to make potato and other vegetable peels into
edible dishes. Women’s ability to make relations had enabled them to build a relation with one
another referred as ‘camp-sister’, which was absent in men. As were men forced into hard and
humiliating labor, so were the women, they were forced to clean streets with their clothes,
praying shawls and in many cases with their underclothes also. Though Jewish men, women and
children suffered during the Holocaust, but the humiliation faced by women was far more
agonizing for both men and women. Men were doubly mortified by the German conduct with
themselves and with their women, alike men; women were also forced to strip naked in front of
strange men and German officials. Women were also forced to stand naked in the streets and
have their heads shaven to add to their shame. In order to acquire bail and immigration
documents for their men, women had to bribe German authorities with their money, possessions
and many a times with their body. A chief number of young Jew women and girls were
kidnapped and forced into prostitution at brothels and at the German officials’ residences also.
Despite the fact that German government had passed the law that no German was to have any
physical relations with Jew women, there was a considerable reporting of routine rapes in ghettos
and concentration camps. Germans regarded them as inferior race and having any relations with

9. Holocaust 8
them was an insult for them, but this did not prevent German authorities from raping Jew
females.
6Some gender determined difficulties were faced by women, the pregnant, elderly and
young girls and women were more exposed to those extremities. Due to rape, many women were
found to be pregnant because of German officials, the fact which was also recognized as a way
of heightening the shame and pain endured by the Jew women, it was believed that by
introducing German seed into Jew womb, Germans were doing a favor to them. Women at
ghettos and concentration camps were forced to have abortions, which was carried out by the
German doctors in unsanitary ways and conditions, many women died as a result of such
abortions. Women were also used as the objects of medical and scientific experimentation by the
German physicians and scientists, followed by the deaths of hundreds of women further. Feeding
mothers’ breasts were taped by the doctors to stop them from feeding their infants, the procedure
continued until the babies were starved to death, like Jew men Jew women were also sterilized to
stop the Jew generation from increasing. Many children were snatched from their mothers’ arms
and killed in front of them, little grown children were sent to killing centers to be disposed. The
elderly, weak and pregnant women, who were unable to undergo hard and long labors were
extradited to the killing centers, many women accompanied their children to the gas chambers to
share their death. During the era of the Holocaust, there were a big number of families and even
German authorities who agreed upon providing concealment to Jew women and children, the
women often had to pay the price by their body. Since more precautionary measures were made
to protect the men from getting killed, being forced into hard labor and other inhumanly actions,
women and children were more exposed to them. Because of the sense of duty prevalent in
6 UnitedwithIsrael.org

10. Holocaust 9
women, many young Jew women and girls refused to leave their parents and other family
members behind, as an outcome with the passage of time more and more women were deported
to killing centers.
Conclusion
The Holocaust incidence is one of the most horrific events other than the bombarding of
the Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the number of killings are alarming and still there can nothing be
said about the exact number of deaths. The sufferings of Jewish people at the hands of Germany
are regarded as one of the cruelest acts against humanity, during the Nazi Germany; many Jews
immigrated to other parts of the world like Switzerland, Australia and Palestine. After so many
years of the brutal massacre of Jews in Germany, Jew immigrants and survivors are still leading
a hard and harsh life in Israel and other corners of the earth to go through their lives. The people
having their own businesses are now dependent on the government of Israel; testimonies of the
survivors living in Israel make it apparent that majority of them are living under the poverty line.
But still the country is doing its best to provide them with all the necessities of life, after
spending a hard and intolerable time in Germany, they are sure to deserve, if not the best, good
life in their own homeland.

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Endnotes
“Background: Life before The Holocaust,” The British Library Board, accessed October 2, 2013,
http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/voices/testimonies/life/backgd/before.html
“Children During The Holocaust,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, accessed
October 3, 2013, http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005142 (2013)
“Jewish Life During The Holocaust,” The Jewish Federations of North America, Inc. accessed
October 3, 2013, http://holocaustcenterpgh.org/page.aspx?id=148359
“The Holocaust,” Yad Vashem The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority,
accessed October 3, 2013, www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/holocaust/resource_center/index.asp
“The Holocaust: an introductory history,” American-Israeli Corporative Enterprise, accessed
October 2, 2013, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/history.html
Ofer, D. “Family During The Holocaust,” Jewish Women’s Archive, accessed October 2, 2013,
http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/family-during-holocaust
Ofer, D. and Weitzman, J. L. “Women in The Holocaust, accessed on October 3, 2013,
http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/women-in-holocaust
Avraham, R. “Jewish women’s suffering during the Holocaust,” United with Israel, accessed
October 3, 2013, http://unitedwithisrael.org/jewish-womens-suffering-during-the-holocaust/
Saidel, R. “Time to talk about sexual violence during the Holocaust,” The Times of Israel,
accessed on October 2, 2013, http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/time-to-talk-about-sexual-violence-
during-the-holocaust/