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Upon reading The Diary of a Young Girl, it was apparent that Jews suffered physically and pshycologically during the Holocaust. The procedures Germans carried out in order to demean Jewish morale most definitely worked and made the Jews susceptible to any kind of torture. Strict rules on ration cards made it hard for Jews to purchase food, thus emaciating them. Not all Jews were resilient and the dramatic changes they underwent during the Holocaust affected each one drastically. The Holocaust disregarded Jewish life by placing them in the most wretched situations including passing anti-semitic laws, ghettos, extermination camps, and forcing some into hiding.
In January 1933, Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. Throughout his rise to power, he blamed Jews for Germany’s defeat in World War I. This was the beginning of his Anti-Semitic lesson. Little by litle, the German Jews were isolated from society and the passage of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935 proved it. The Nuremberg Laws “deprived Jews of their German citizenship and forbade intermarriage with non-Jews. They were removed from schools, banned from professions, excluded from military service, and were even forbidden to share a park bench with a non-Jew” (Zinn). November 9, 1938 marks the actual beginning of the Holocaust which was The Night of Broken Glass also known as Kristallnacht. As a result of Kritallnacht, ninety Jews were killed and 500 synagogues were burned and most Jewish shops had their windows smashed. Compared to what will occur later in the Holocaust, the Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht were nothing.
After Germany defeated Poland in September 1939, Polish Jews were extricated from their homes and forced to move to the Jewish ghettos in Lodz, Krakow, and Warsaw. The squalid living conditions in the ghettos were result of thousands of deaths from hunger and disease. Soon after ghettos were put in place, the Germans realized that the “Final Solution” was the most appropriate way in...