Cornell Notes: The HolocaustName ____________
Civics Period #
Date _____________
Directions: Read the article below and complete notes using the Cornell format.
Guiding Question: What was the Holocaust all about? Take notes on each paragraph & how it makes you feel/ yourthoughts.
Summative Statement: Please make a haiku poem using the word HOLOCAUST.
UNREAL
The Holocaust
1 Led by dictator Adolf Hitler, the Nazi Party in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s believed that certain people – particularly Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and the disabled – were inferior and didn’t deserve to live.
2 The Nazis were anti-Semitic, which means they hated Jews. Although many Jews were doctors, lawyers, businesspeople, bankers, and teachers who contributed a great deal to German society, Hitler blamed them for Germany’s economic problems. The truth was that Germany was going through a difficult time economically because ithad been badly defeated in World War I, which had ended in 1918.
3 Hitler and his parliament passed laws that required Jews to give up their jobs, their homes, their businesses, and their rights. To enforce these laws, the police organization known as the Gestapo and an elite army corps known as the SS imprisoned, beat, and even murdered Jews – simply because they were Jewish. Non-Jews who opposed the Nazis’ authority suffered similar treatment. Many Jews and political enemies of the Nazis were sent to brutally-run prisons known as concentration camps.
4 Hitler was determined to protect at all costs “German blood and German honor” for the country’s Aryans, the name given to white, non-Jewish Germans. He was also determined to invade and take control of all of Europe.
5 In March 1938, Germany conquered Austria and enacted harsh new laws strippng Austrian Jews of their rights. Then, in September 1939, German troops invaded Poland. This caused Great Britain and France, who were allies of Poland, to declare war on Germany, thus triggering the start of World War II. The following year, Nazi forces invaded and occupied the European nations of Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg. Then France fell, and Great Britain was battered by German air assaults. In December 1941, the United States entered the war and joined the Soviet Union (which included Russia), Great Britain, and the Free French (an organization fighting for the liberation of France) to form the Allied forces, which battled to stop the German war machine.
6 Also fighting the Nazis in German-occupied territory were secret groups of brave citizens known as the underground, the Resistance, or the Partisans. They used sabotage against the German army and helped Jews escape. In addition, courageous non-Jews (known typically in the Jewish community as Righteous Gentiles) risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazis.
7 As country after country fell under German occupation, Jews were singled out for mistreatment and lost their rights. They had to wear the six-pointed Star of David, a symbol of Judaism, on their sleeves, chests, or backs to distinguish them from non-Jews. They couldn’t walk freely in the streets or do many of the things Europeans took for granted. Signs in theaters, cafés, restaurants, and other public places warned that Jews weren’t allowed to enter.
8 During the war years, the Nazis created ghettos – small sealed areas inside cities where Jews were forced to live in unhealthy and crowded conditions. Every month, tens of thousands of Jews were deported to forced-labor camps, concentration camps, and death camps, where, unless they were useful to the Nazis, they were killed in gas chambers or murdered in some other way. It was all part of Hitler’s “Final Solution” – the Nazi plan to eliminate all the Jews of Europe.
9 As the war came to an end in 1945, the allies liberated the imprisoned Jews, although hundreds of thousands were barely alive because of Nazi cruelty. The world was shocked to discover that of the 9 million Jews who had lived in Europe before the war, 6 million had been murdered or had died from starvation or disease in Nazi camps. Another 4 million civilians, including 3 million Polish Catholics, died at the hands of the Nazis. Of the Jewish children who failed to escape Europe after 1939, more than a million and a half were murdered by the Nazis or were deported to camps, where they died of illness or hunger.
10 This horrific mass murder is called the Holocaust, a word derived from ancient Greek and meaning “sacrifice by fire.”
11 Out of the ashes of the Holocaust emerged a new country – Israel – where in 1948 hundreds of thousands of Jews started a new life free from the tyranny of hate. Many other Holocaust survivors chose to remain in Europe, come to America, or settle in other continents, hoping to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives. They each had a story to tell, but over the decades the world still has heard too few of them. Now, with each passing year, the number of Holocaust survivors dwindles as they pass on from old age.
12 Their stories deserve to be told before it is too late.
(From: Survivors: True Stories of Children in the Holocaust, by Allen Zullor and Mara Borsun, Scholastic, 2004.)
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