Sacrifice by Fire

Sacrifice by fire. The pleading children, the debilitating elderly, and the cynical women all have the same look of fear when they hear the word “Holocaust.” Approximately six million brave Jews were brutally murdered during the dreadful era of the Holocaust. These Jews were ordinary humans who hadn’t committed a crime, hadn’t encouraged any riots and hadn’t leveled any threats. They were citizens of their home countries who had the capability of contributing several intellectual achievements to the world. In the concentration camps, they were tortured, both physically and psychologically, starved, beaten, forced to live like animals and literally worked to death.

Perhaps the most famous personal interpretation of the Holocaust, The Diary of Anne Frank was written in Amsterdam in the years 1942 and 1944. The story is based on a Jewish family, originally from Germany, and was forced to move to the Netherlands to escape Nazi massacre. The Franks family lived in relative peace until 1940, when Germany occupied the Netherlands and enforced rigorous anti-Semitic laws. These extreme measures prohibited Jews from riding streetcars, forced Jews to attend separate schools, imposed boycotts of Jewish-owned businesses, and required Jews to wear yellow stars to identify themselves as Jewish. The essence of life of even highly intellectual Jews, like the Franks, became ambiguous. Two years after these anti-Semitic laws were enforced, the Nazis harassed, arrested, and sent many Jews in the Netherlands to concentration camps where they were herded together and assassinated. The Franks immediately went into hiding and Anne Frank kept a diary of all the events that had occurred during the war. She recorded every page with grisly details about t...

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...o were brutally tortured because we want to, not because we think we have to.

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Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1986.

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Spark Notes Editors. “Spark Note on Diary of a Young Girl.” SparkNotes.com. Spark Notes LLC. 2003. Web. 17 Mar. 2011.

Yahil, Leni. The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry, 1932-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.