The Holocaust: Still Destroying Lives Since 1933

The Nazi regime referred to the Second World War as the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’. An estimated sixty million people lost their lives during this war and the effects from its destruction can still be felt today. In Europe, Jews were hunted down, mistreated, taken to concentration camps, and eventually killed. One camp, Auschwitz, became an ideal model of what these camps should be. Millions of people were taken to this camp, tortured and killed (Grahovac & Herman, 2006). Consequently, what happened to the “lucky” ones who survived and how did the Holocaust effect them? After abundant research, I have discovered that great suffering continues after the liberation from captivity. After the dust settled there were children with no mother or father, childless parents, married people with no spouses, families were literally destroyed.

In a study done by Robinson, M.D., et al. (1997) they interviewed over one-hundred Holocaust survivors who were children under thirteen years of age at the time of their imprisonment. The study examined the way the holocaust effected these people and suggested a substantial relation between the intensity of persecution suffered by a child whose parents did not survive while in the camps. Therefore, if you lost your parents as a child while in captivity you spent most of your adolescence living in the ghetto, in labor camps, in death camps, and you were sent on death marches. It also made a difference what age you were; the younger the child the better chance of survival for child and parent. The study also showed that fifty-eight percent of parents who survived these death camps had children under the age of ten. (Robinson, M.D., et al., 1997). Although many suffered from survi...

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Robinson, M.D., S., Rapaport-Bar-Server, M., & Rapaport, J. (1997, July). Orphaned child survivors compared to child survivors whose parents also survived the holocaust. Retrieved from Echoes of the holocaust: http://www.holocaustechoes.com/5robinson.html

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