History Special: The Holocaust

Most people know about the Holocaust and why it is important to remember in history such as the estimated 6,000,000 people that were either killed by gunshot, gas chambers, or rogue Nazi experiments, but many people don't know the full story as to why other countries such as the United States didn't see this happen and try to stop it in the first place. Imagine being a Polish, Czech, or other Eastern European citizen and you wake up in the morning to an abrupt knocking at the door. On the other side are Nazi soldiers waiting for you to answer so they can beat you and put you in their prison car. After being put in the car and waiting for hours, you arrive to a rather prison like building and are shoved into a room that gives you a prison outfit in which issues you a block, and are given a tattoo to show who you are. You are forcibly working everyday, all day, and are constantly being beaten and are never getting adequate food. Once a week, some of your friends are sent to the showers/bathhouse, but you soon begin to realize that you never see them once they are sent there. Then, after about a month of being in the prison, you are suddenly freed by American soldiers who discover the horrors that await beyond the shower doors. Although this short account isn't a real Holocaust survival story, real facts lie in it, and it is truly troublesome to have to write about the tragedy that the Holocaust was. Being that today is the Holocaust Remembrance Day, I'm going to explain some of the historical anomalies that show why the Holocaust wasn't stopped sooner than it was, and why we as a society remember more about the Holocaust and WWII rather than most other wars as a whole.

The year is 1939 and an entire ship of 900 Jewish refugees were refused entry into the US despite the US knowing about Hitler and the German Reich. The Jews on the ship were worried about their own lives because of intolerance from the Nazi party, and were even called racial slurs/had death threats because of this. After being sent back to Europe where they desperately didn't want to go to, nearly a third of the passengers were murdered and the others were barely alive due to the concentration camps starving the others. Although the United States already had a standard immigration policy, a temporary exception for the Jews could've helped combat a lot of deaths in the Holocaust from Jews desperately seeking asylum in the United States. Even though in modern times most people don't think of our country to have ever of been racist to white people, during the mid 20th century most countries weren't fond of Jewish people and most countries wouldn't let Jews seek asylum. This in turn left the Jewish people to one solid option: to face the Nazi's headfirst in the Warsaw Ghetto and hopefully result in their freedom... Nearly 13,000 Jews died and more than half of them were either burnt alive or suffocated from the gas. Due to the Jews not being trained properly, they only got the chance to kill 150 Nazis. This ended up being the largest Jewish revolt during WWII and with the mass amount of casualties against the Nazis led to a sort of surrender which put the rest in concentration camps. Lastly in January of 1945, the Jews slowly got freed from concentration camps. Once freed, most went to their country of origin, but the Jews that had the chance to experience the generosity of the American soldiers had the chance to move to the United States as full citizens because of their strength to survive the concentration camps as a whole. Even though they had this chance, some Nazis slipped in as well, but that's a topic for another History Blog.