What made the Holocaust such a memorable event? Why does it stand out from every other atrocious event in world history? In order to get a clear answer to these questions, we must first go over what exactly the Holocaust was. In the book Understanding The Holocaust, author George Feldman gives a very clear description of the Holocaust. He states that "A 'holocaust' is the total destruction of something, as when a terrible fire consumes everything in its path". The Holocaust continues to shape our history to this day.
Understanding The Holocaust takes place in Europe, from 1933 to 1945. In addition to information about the Holocaust, the book provides the reader with information about how Anti-Semitism began, and in-depth analysis on the after effects of total war. The book is written very much like a textbook. It has dates, biographies, specific locations, and many more
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The total destruction of Europe left many homeless, severely injured, and even dead. This is terrible, but is nothing in comparison to what happened to the millions of European Jews in concentration camps. Auschwitz was a well known death camp, but there were thousands more like it. They all only served one purpose; to eradicate the Jews. Concentration Camps took the lives of millions, but mostly Jewish lives. In the beginning of concentration camps, they held prisoners of war, but Hitler's desire to terminate the Jewish people quickly brought Jewish-Only concentration Camps into existence. In such camps, Jews were killed systematically. They were brought into shower-like contraptions, but instead of water coming out of the shower heads, Zyklon B did. Zyklon B is a deadly gas that led to the suffocation of innocent people. From the chambers, their bodies were dragged into piles of corpses who had previously suffered the same horrible fate. The piles were incinerated, but not before Nazi soldiers took everything valuable from the