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1.5
million children were murdered during
the Holocaust. This figure
includes more than 1.2 million Jewish children, tens of
thousands of Gypsy children and thousands of
institutionalized handicapped children.
Nazi
persecution, arrests, and deportations were directed against
all members of Jewish families
without concern for age. Plucked from their homes and
stripped of their childhoods, the children had witnessed the
murder of parents, siblings, and relatives. They faced
starvation, illness and brutal labor, until they were consigned to the gas chambers.
Anne
Frank never lived to see her 16th birthday, but her
innermost thoughts scribbled on scraps of paper challenge
us a full fifty years after her death.
She began on her 13th birthday and finished at age 15. Since its initial
publication in 1947, The Diary of Anne Frank has sold more
than 25 million copies, one of the best-selling books of
all time, second only to the Bible.
Her short life leaves us with a sense of tragedy and joy,
strangely blended. It serves as eulogy to the millions of children
with a yellow star
who lived and died during the dark years of the Holocaust,
victims of the Nazi regime ...
The
SS Men
Adolf Hitler surrounded himself with a small
clique of fanatical, ruthless henchmen - a violent
group of outsiders who rose to power in the Third
Reich and established political and economic
institutions of legitimized terror.
These masterminds of death were found to be quite
psychologically normal. They were men of fine
standing, husbands who morning and night kissed
their wives, fathers who tucked their children
into bed.
But murders, brutalities, cruelties, tortures,
atrocities, and other inhuman acts were an
everyday occurrence.
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