Children During The Holocaust Analysis

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Over one million of the six million people killed during the Holocaust were children (“Children during the Holocaust,” 2014). Children were much more vulnerable to the cruelties and hardships of the Holocaust and had a much lesser chance of survival. Some children found new lives while living with Christian families and were forced to forget all about their Jewish heritage in order to pass as a Christian child. The children were the future and continuation of the Jewish existence making them the prime focus of the mass murder (Livnat, n.d.). Children during the Holocaust suffered oppression through anti-Semitism, exposure to violence, and gruesome medical experiments. Anti-Semitism is the hostility towards Jews. For children during the Holocaust, anti-Semitism took place everywhere,…show more content…
After children were shunned from the community they were exposed to emotional and physical violence that came with being Jewish. When the Ghettos were invaded, several children would get left behind and end up starving to death (Livnat, n.d.). The children that did make it out of the Ghettos had an even smaller chance of survival once arriving to the concentration camps. At the entrance to the camps is where selection began. Several of the older children were used for slave labor, but the majority was sent straight to the infirmaries. Almost all of the new born babies and disabled children were killed immediately upon arrival. The children that were able to work were hardly ever fed because they were useless (“A Teacher’s Guide to the Holocaust,” n.d.). The work was much harder for children. Many children were expected to tend to the dead and dig massive holes for bodies and set them on fire. Their work was traumatizing especially if it were their family (Altman, 2004). All of the violence during the Holocaust has mentally scared many, if not all of the surviving

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