The bureaucratic, systematic murder of 6 million innocent souls. A whole ethnic group forced into submission, living in ghettos and killed. The Nazi regime wreaking havoc on the European Jewish population. Holocaust is a word of Greek origin meaning ‘Sacrifice by fire’. Genocide on this scale cannot happen without very serious impacts on the European Jewish people. The Holocaust has a mammoth impact on the Jewish people during 1936 -1945. Not only the immediate impact of the immense death toll but also what they had to experience and endure after the collapse of the Nazi Regime in 1945 and the end of the Holocaust. This was very intense for the Jewish people, going back to the places that had taken so much from them. A world they hadn’t a clue where they fit in or whether they would be accepted by this post-war world. For all the Jewish people knew, they could be the victim of another genocide. The Holocaust supplied the world with many new problems after it had reached its completion. How the Jewish people could rebuild after suffering such losses to the masses and where they could relocate to after everything was taken from them. The Jewish people did not have it easy at all after the Holocaust. The task of rebuilding their lives from scratch in an unfamiliar world was already daunting enough. After being freed, many Jewish people were scared to return to their homes due to the antisemitism which was definitely present in parts of Europe after World War Two (WWII). Holocaust survivors who had just had taken from their homes, forced to live in ghettos, starved and undernourished and most terribly, watched their friends and family walk away into chambers and never return. These very people had to endure more suffering after all of this, fearing for their lives as they returned to their homes. These people, the Jewish community, needed a new homeland where they could rebuild without having to fear for their lives. The Jewish people still faced many hardships after the Holocaust. The holocaust was a terrible part of the word's history. It led to an extreme death toll, a new homeland of Israel for the Jewish people and the traumatic upbringing and life for second-generation Jews (Children of the survivors)
The holocaust was a terrible incident that claimed an insane number of Jewish lives, which was a huge impact on their people and this extreme death toll reflected at what lengths the Nazi regime was willing to go to. Adolf Hitler was an anti-Semitic Nazi leader. In his opinion, the Jewish people were an inferior race to the Germans. They were a threat to the German community and racial purity. Thus, Hitler decided to exterminate all the Jews. Throughout the 1940’s, Hitler expanded his empire in Europe and at the beginning of 1941 thousands of European Jews were transported into Polish ghettos. In June of the same year, Hitler took his brutality to another level when he invaded the Soviet Union. Mobile killing units would murder 500,000 Jews, usually by shooting. However, shooting proved ineffective. When you have the goal of mass extermination, a genocide, shooting isn’t fast enough and wastes resources. So, the ‘final solution’ was made. This lead to the Nazi Regime gassing masses of Jews leading to their deaths. This is known as the Holocaust. By 1945, the Germans had killed almost 2 out of 3 of all European Jews. This means that the very few survivors most likely would have had to endure the suffering of losing a loved one. These people did not deserve this. Up to 6 million Jews were murdered. It is a disgusting fact. It is a known fact that other ethnic groups were killed as well in this event. However, many Jews were included in this. For example, 7 million Soviet Civilians were killed and out of them, 1.3 million were Soviet Jewish civilians. From the concentration camps, many lives were taken. Around 1 million Jewish deaths came from Auschwitz, 925,000 died in Treblinka, 434,508 died in Belzec, at least 167,000 died in Sobibor and 156,000–172,000 died in Chelmno. This shows the vast majority of areas the Jewish people were killed. The whole ethnic group was targeted in unimaginable ways. The Germans tortured people as well. 23,000–25,000 people were shot or tortured to death in Croatia under the Ustaša regime. This shows how merciless the Nazi Regime was. They would not stop the brutal mass killings of the Jews. The Holocaust claimed millions of innocent Jewish and other European lives, which left a horrifying mark on the Jewish society and clearly reflected the merciless nature of Hitler and the Nazi Regime throughout WWII.
The Jewish survivors of the Holocaust were still heavily hated in society and were in much danger of violent acts, they moved around a lot and migrated to other places and a new homeland was born known as Israel. Their lives were no longer the same. Their homes were destroyed and most were to mentally scared to go back home. For the few survivors, the prospect of returning home was a very daunting one, due to the antisemitism. This was far from eradicated in Europe. Some Jewish people who returned home genuinely feared for their lives. For example, in Poland, there were plenty of violent anti-Jewish riots. These were called ‘pogroms’. The largest one of these occurred in Kiece in 1946. It caused
the deaths of 42 Jewish people and rioters also beat many more. This shows that even after all the Jewish people had been through, post their liberation they were still heavily burdened by an anti-Semitic society. They were still thought of as inferior and a threat to other ethnic groups. Due to such behaviour by the vast majority, the Jewish people had to seek other means for a safe life free from unnecessary violence inflicted upon them. However, there were very few avenues and possibilities for emigration. This forced tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors to migrate west to other European territories that were freed by the western allies. From there, they were housed in hundreds of refugee centres and displaced person camps. An example of this was Bergen-Belsen in Germany. These camps were administrated by the The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. Also, the armies of France, Great Britain and the United States of America administrated such camps. However, it wasn’t all done by the allies. A variety of Jewish agencies worked to help the Jewish displaced persons. The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee helped to best provide the Holocaust survivors with food, water, and clothing. The Organisation for Rehabilitation through Training offered their help by providing vocational training. All the groups associated with helping the Holocaust survivors did their part. This lead to the actual survivors being capable enough to form their own organisations. Also, many worked very hard for the establishment of an independent Jewish state in Palestine. The biggest holocaust survivor organization was called ‘Sh'erit ha-Pletah’. This was Hebrew for "surviving remnant” and this group strongly advocated and worked for greater emigration opportunities for the Holocaust survivors. Unfortunately for them, opportunities for legal immigration to the United States above the current quota restrictions were still very small and the British didn’t allow immigration to Palestine. Many borders in Europe were shut down to these homeless people so they didn’t really have much in the way of leaving these refugee centres. However, the survivors battled these setbacks. The Jewish Brigade Group was formed in the later staged of 1944. It was a Palestinian Jewish unit of the British army. They joined forces with former partisan fighters displaced in central Europe and the Jewish Brigade Group created the Brihah, a new group. It is Hebrew for ‘escape’, which is something the holocaust survivors certainly wanted to achieve. This organisation wanted to allow the exodus of Jewish refugees from Europe to Palestine. Jewish people already residing in Palestine organised immigration by ship, also known as Aliyah Bet. This was illegal. The British authorities caught and turned back most of these ships. In May 1948, a huge step was taken in the right direction for the Holocaust survivors. The State of Israel was established. Jewish displaced persons and refugees now could legally leave and reside in a safe place. These survivors started to flood into the newly established sovereign state. As many as 170,000 Jewish refugees and displaced persons had immigrated to Israel by 1953. In December 1945, President Harry Truman made a directive that lessened quota restrictions on immigration to the US. This was for displaced people by the Nazi regime, meaning they could enter the US much more freely. Roughly 28,000 Jews migrated their immediately. The US Congress passed the Displaced Persons Act in 1948. This made 400,000 US immigration visas for displaced persons. 68,000 Jews followed in the light of this act. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Western Europe, Mexico, South America, and South Africa is where the other Jewish Holocaust survivors ended up. This shows that the Jewish people had to deal with more hardships in the refugee camps and displaced person camps but they held strong and with the help of others, they were able to stay afloat and create their own organisations. From there, they fought for their immigration rights which ultimately led to the establishment of Israel and much fewer restrictions on immigration laws in other countries such as the United States of America. The Jewish Holocaust survivors had to rebuild their lives from scratch, in a community that despised them, returning home was very scary and their lives were at risk. They fought for their immigration rights and were able to move to a new home and start their lives again.
Children who lived through the Holocaust and after were called ‘Second Generation’ survivors also lived a difficult upbringing as their parents were either very disclosing about what had happened which meant the children were missing a huge chunk of their identity or they were overwhelmed by so much traumatic information. Which every way you put it, a child whose background involves the Holocaust in some way, shape or form may very much so experience some hardships in their development. However, learning about these hardships may provide the children with some helpful skills that can be used throughout their lives. Parents have a very large impact and influence their children in more ways than one. Most would believe that their parents' history is also a part of them, but to what extent? Understandably, after experiencing such terrible trauma it would be extremely hard to cope with the demons associated with this. Lots of them had done an extremely good job of starting a new life and starting a family. Some of the survivors took the approach of not talking about the Holocaust at all as a way to cope with the enormity of the suffering and pain. A daughter of a Warsaw ghetto said that her father refused to talk about it at all and insisted that she had no right to ask questions about it. This was his way to cope with it and he didn’t want his daughter to know about how terrible it was. Thus, the kids grew up missing a whole part of themselves and this silence led to repression in these families. On the other end of the spectrum, some survivors were very open about their experiences and this was too much for the children as it was such a confronting experience. In both of these cases, traumatisation may have occurred in these second-generation children. According to the American Academy of Experts in Traumatic Stress, children of Holocaust survivors may be at higher risk for psychiatric symptoms including depression, anxiety, and PTSD. This is a very bad thing for these children to have to experience as it has many terrible impacts such as nightmares. However, resilience may be another impact of their parents' experiences. To survive the Holocaust, you had to be hard. These characteristics such as tenacity, adaptively and initiative could have been passed onto their kids, thus giving them tools to face the world.
The holocaust was a terrible time in the world's history. It involved the Nazi Regime essentially kidnapping and killing the majority of European Jews from 1936-1945. There was a huge impact on the Jewish people with the sheer number of deaths and trauma they faced in the Concentration Camps. However, their battle did not cease after the end of the Holocaust. They were faced with many challenges after as they were still not very much accepted in society and faced much danger to return home. Even once they rebuilt and established a family, their children (second generation survivors) faced complications but some could have got some benefits. Some short-term impacts of the Holocaust were the number of deaths (6 million Jewish lives), the battles they faced after the Holocaust as where to live and trying to achieve better immigration laws and a new Jewish province and their children faced challenges as their parents had been through so much, some of them were traumatised and some inherited qualities of resilience from their surviving parents. The Jewish ethnic group had to endure so many hardships and suffering. Even after the main trauma of the Holocaust, they couldn’t catch a break. They had no homes, no family, and no life. They were still in danger. However, they strived hard to get themselves into a better position and they made some amazing headway. Their selfless actions and amazing efforts are to be commended. The survivors are truly some of the most courageous people to have ever walked this Earth.