Children…

ment were realised in Europe and the United States during
the first half of the 20th century with the sterilisation
of hundreds of thousands of people, mostly women.
The First World War, 1914-1918, demonstrated the
capacity of industrialised societies to kill men on a massive
scale. Many of the Nazi Party’s members were veterans
who experienced Germany’s defeat first-hand.They
blamed this catastrophe on the country’s small Jewish
population, creating a desire for revenge.The Nazis said
that Germany’s redemption and rebirth could only be
accomplished by introducing racial biology, eugenics
and antisemitism into politics. They wished to create
a “racially pure”, homogeneous society in which the
“natural” differences between people were recognised
and legalised. The so-called Nuremberg Laws of 1935
were an expression of this.The laws were initially aimed
at Jews, but soon came to include “Gypsies, negroes and
their bastard offspring”. Only “citizens of German or
kindred blood” were granted full civil rights. The legal
experts who drafted the laws commented: “Against the
teachings of the equality of all people (…) National
Socialism brings forth the hard but necessary awareness
of the basic differences between people…”
Such factors laid the necessary ideological foundations
for the Holocaust, and paved the way for its
psychological and technological realisation. From 1933
to 1945, persecution and genocide were perpetrated
throughout Europe: the practical result of Hitler’s
regime and its racist ideology.
Anny Horowitz identified
After the Germans occupied France in 1940, all Jews were registered.
This was the first step towards the Holocaust in France.
Anny Horowitz was a French Jew born in Strasbourg in 1933,
yet classified as a “foreigner under surveillance” as her identity
card indicates. First interned at a camp near Tours, she was then
sent to the Drancy camp, located in a Parisian suburb. On 11
September 1942 she was deported to Auschwitz with the 31st
deportation train from France. With her on the train were her
mother Frieda and her 7-year-old sister Paulette. On the transport
were 1,000 men, women and children. Upon arrival on 13
September, more than 600 of them, including all children, were
taken straight to the gas chambers. Anny and Paulette were only
two of the approximately one and a half million Jewish children
murdered during the Holocaust. On average, only one in ten survived
the war. In countries like Poland and the Baltic States, and
in occupied areas such as the Soviet Union, the chances of Jewish
children surviving were extremely low.
11