※We had a family life. I had four grandparents. Family#.there were a lot of certainties. But the certainties ended when I was fourteen years old. They never came back again, of course.§

每 Frieda Menco-Brommet (1925每2019)  

Oral history conducted by Deb車rah Dwork, Amsterdam, Netherlands, June 1986. Deb車rah Dwork, ※Children With A Star§ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), p.7 

 


 

JEWS HAD LIVED AS A MINORITY in Europe for two thousand years before Hitler and his Nazi Party came to power in Germany in 1933. Jewish people were diverse, maintaining Jewish and national identities. Some were pious, some secular; some were poor, some working class, others middle class. After the Nazi regime took control, all Jews caught in their web were at risk. By 1945, six million 每 two-thirds of Europe's prewar Jewish population 每 were annihilated, and the life and culture that had existed for millennia irrevocably ruptured. The same fate was true for the many Roma and Sinti communities, whom the Nazis persecuted, murdering some 500,000 每 a quarter of Europe*s Roma and Sinti population. 

THESE PREWAR PHOTOGRAPHS below from Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, the former Czechoslovakia and the former Yugoslavia capture the everyday life of the Jewish world and of Roma and Sinti on the eve of the Holocaust. 

 

The Holocaust: 1933-1945 Aftermath

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