Notes for Holocaust script

Jews in Hiding

To avoid capture Jews built extensive hideouts called “bunkers”.

In the ghetto the place for living was rated not only by the few amenities it offered but mostly for the quality of the bunker.
At night the ghettos were humming with live, emaciated human skeletons, were running like ants dragging pails with dugout dirt to dispose it in the few available open spaces, before dawn. They were constructing bunkers.

The Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust– A Christian Interpretation

By: David P. Gushee

Righteous Gentiles tried to help save the Jews from the horror of the Holocaust.
When Jews were forced to sell their businesses, Gentiles bought them in name only, funneling the profits back to their rightful owner.
Many Gentiles helped Jews to ship possessions abroad or to find hiding places for their treasured or expensive items.
Some Gentiles did things for Jews like, shopping, going to the pharmacy, doing laundry, even making trips to the library for books.
Gentiles were able to get Jews false papers and train tickets to escape.
For Jews lacking false papers, the only other option was to hide. Famous stories would be, Anne Frank and her family, hiding in the annex of an office building. And, Corrine Ten Boom, hiding Jews in her family’s home in the city of Harlem.
Finding hiding places was rarely easy, in some places, next to impossible. Particularly true in the east, where German terror, the threat of death for helping Jews, the problem of black-mail and anti-Jewish sentiment combined to shut off most hiding oppurtunities.
Some rescuers specialized in building hiding places– those with architecture and carpentry skills built false walls, bunkers and other specially designed hideouts.
Helping Jews leave Europe anytime between 1933 and 1941, was a life-saving form of Gentile help.
Despite Jewish and Gentile efforts, most Jews did not succeed in escaping from the Nazis. The great majority of Jews in Nazi’s hands, were killed.
The Righteous Gentiles By: Victoria Sherrow

· About 1 million Jews managed to escape from Nazi Germany and the lands it invaded and occupied.

· When the war ended, about 25,000 German-Jews survived. Some were aided by organized groups, but most were saved by individuals.

· Oskar Schindler is one of the most well known Righteous Gentiles, saved more than 1,200 Jews. He joined the Nazi party in 1938. Although Schindler gradually grew apart from Hitler, he remained a party member. Schindler heard more about Nazi brutality and witnessed it first hand in Krakow’s ghetto. On June 8, 1942, he saw squads of SS men, with attack dogs beating unarmed Jews during a roundup. Stunned by their actions, he decided to save as many people as possible. He later said, “No thinking person could fail to see what would happen. I was now resolved to do everything in my power to defeat the system.”