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Sunday, April 12, 2020

Who Were the Six Million Jews of Holocaust?

Nadene Goldfoot                                           
What Auschwitz Concentration Camp Was Like
Those who lived to be freed
                                                                     
Ari Shavit reminds us in his book, "My Promised Land," of who the 6 million Jews were.  We hear that number often, six million, and it doesn't mean anything.  People might think of $6,000,000 (6 million)  as nothing today when we hear that there are billionaires in this world.  Ari presents some numbers that make it more realistic.
                                                   


Holland had 140,000 Jews.  
                  102,000 Jews killed.  Remember the story of Anne Frank?  

Romania had 817,000 Jews.
                   380,000 Jews were killed.

Hungary had 825,000 Jews.
                   565,000 Jews were killed

The Soviet Union had 3,020,000 Jews.
                                  995,000 Jews were killed.

Poland had 3,325,000 Jews.
                 3,000,000 Jews were killed.
                                               

Description

The Auschwitz concentration camp was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II and the Holocaust.

He just named a few countries.  
                                                    

Germany was one of the first to lose the Jewish population to the Nazis.  Jews were feeling the grip of hatred early on in the 30s, and my Uncle Werner Oster,
born in 1916 in Westerburg, Hildesheim, Niedersachsen, Germany,  was put in Auschwitz then for beating a cow on the way to his father's slaughter house with a stick.  He was walking it along a path.  His father made sausages. He wasn't hurting the cow, but the Nazis certainly hurt him in Auschwitz, and that was early on before they starting killing Jews there.  What a pretense for taking him away from his family.  It was because he was Jewish!  
                                                        

 The family pooled all their money for a ticket to get him out of Germany first and he managed to be on the ship, SS Washington,  in May 1939, 4 months before Germany entered Poland.  He might have been the last Jew out of Germany then because the door closed and he was unable to get his parents and 16 year old sister out, so they perished in the Holocaust.  
                                                     
New Arrivals: Children taken to Auschwitz
Germany had 523,000 Jews in January 1933.  
                      37,000 emigrated by June 1933.  
                    505,000 Jews remained in June 1933.
Germany's population in 1933 was 67,000,000.
Jews made up 0.75% of the population, not even 1%.  
The largest Jewish population center was Berlin.  
                   214,000 Jews in 1937 left to be exterminated. 
In all, the Germans and their collaborators killed between 160,000 and 180,000 German Jews in the Holocaust, including most of those Jews deported out of Germany.  

Austria had 191,458 Jews in 1934.
                 120,000 Jews emigrated by November 1939
                  Deportation began in October 1939.
Vienna had 90% of the Jews with 176,000 
The population of Vienna was:      191,481.  2/3 of these Jews escaped to
other countrie only to die there later.    
                    65,000 Plus Jews from Austria died in the Holocaust.  

Lithuania was hit hard in the Holocaust.  Our grandmother (Bubba). Zlata Goldfus nee Jermulowske, was from Lazdey (Lazdijai) and both grandparents were in Oregon by 1906.  
On November 3, 1941, 1,535 Jews from the Lazdey district, men, women and children were murdered by the Nazis and their local helpers.  
Our grandfather, Nathan Abraham Goldfus, was from Telsiai (Telz)
                                                    
Lithuanian Helpers Encircling Jews
Who Were Forced Out of Their Homes

WW II started with the German invasion of Poland on 1st of September, 1939. 
Earlier, on March 20, 1939, Hitler had given the ultimatum to Lithuania to leave Memel(now renamed Klaipeda-a port city)  in 24 hours.  7,000 Jews lived there and around this city had to escape, leaving their belongings behind and many took asylum in Telz, where the Jewish community took care of them. By June 22, 1941, the Nazis invaded Lithuania and the Jews tried to escape to Russia.  On the 23rd, the Nazis bombed the town.  Before the army arrived, there were  armed Lithuanians with white stripes on their sleeves who took over the town.   On Friday, June 27th, the Jews were expelled from their homes and were told to leave their homes unlocked.  They were circled by armed Lithuanians under German command.  The Jews were told to go to the shore of the lake there.  Eventually they were all slaughtered.  

In 1941 about 7,000 Lithuanian Jews; children, women, men were cruelly murdered by the Nazis and their local collaborators.  
                                           

       
Resource: My Promised Land by Ari Shavit
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/germany-jewish-population-in-1933
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/austria
https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199840731/obo-9780199840731-0080.xml
Preserving Our Litvak Heritage, a History of 31 Jewish Communities in Lithuania by Josef Rosin, Joel Alpert, Editor; published by JewishGen.Inc.  

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