The
Holocaust is a history of
enduring horror and sorrow. The charred skeletons, the diabolic experiments, the death camps,
the mass graves, the smoke from the chimneys ..
It seems as though there is
no spark of human concern, no act of humanity, to lighten that dark history. Yet there were acts of courage and kindness during the Holocaust - stories to
bear witness to goodness, love and compassion. To serve as eulogy to the millions with a yellow star who lived and
died during the dark years of the Holocaust:
In
Poland on the outskirts of Lvov eleven-year-old David Tennenbaum and his mother
Fanny miraculously survived the Nazi genocide.
In
Denmark a courageous German diplomat, Georg F. Duckwitz, risked everything
to assist the Danish Jews in
escaping to Sweden.
In
Poland the Chiger family managed to escape the liquidation of the ghetto by
hiding in stench in the sewers for 14 months amid
rats and filth.
In
Buchenwald a four-year-old boy, Joseph Schleifstein, survived the horrors of the KZ
camp, hidden from the Nazis until liberation.
During
the Nazi occupation of Lithuania a German Sergeant, Anton Schmid, disobeyed his superior officers and saved
250 Jewish men, women, and children.
In
Poland a teenager Julian Bilecki and his family hid 23 Jews in an
underground bunker, saving them from tne Nazi death squads.
In
Auschwitz the missionary Jane Haining refused to reject her children and
showed herself to be a saint. She was murdered in the gas chambers.
Oscar
Schindler came to Auschwitz to save 300 Schindler-women from certain death.
He did it - the only shipment out of the Nazi death camp during WW2 ..
In
1933 approximately nine million Jews lived in the 21 countries of Europe that
would be occupied by Germany during the war. By 1945 two out of every three
European Jews had been killed by the Nazis. The
Holocaust was the systematic annihilation of six million Jews.
1.5 million children
were murdered. This figure includes more than 1.2 million Jewish children, tens
of thousands of Gypsy children and thousands of handicapped children.
