In America today between our responsibilities to our family and our duties to our work and school, their is not much time to sit around and remember the past. Possibly the worst thing we could do would be to pretend the past never happened or to ignore it. As the old proverb said, "Remember the past, or you are condemnend to repeat it". So once again is  the seemingly mythical tale of a madman trying to wipe out a innocent race. Always remember to remember.

 Holocaust: a conflagration; a great raging fire consuming in it's path all that lives.

      In the 1930's in Germany a small man who did not look like a loony murderer wiped out almost a third of all Jews on earth. He carefully calculated a diabolical plan to wipe out all Jewish people on the planet.Jews were victims of one of the most intelligent, horrific, and unspeakable acts in human history. But perhaps, the most scary thought of all is that in a recent poll 1 out of every 3 people thought no more of the Holocaust than as a faire tale. Here is what happened so that no other race shall have to suffer that painfully again.

     Adolf Hitler's plan began like this, He would slowly phase out Jews as human beings, while slowly growing his power by conquering other major countries in Europe, including France and England. As time went on Jews were not allowed to send their children to public school or have other such privileges everyone else had. It began to get worse and worse until nazi's started to kill children that they felt did not deserve to live, the retarded and disabled mainly. Then they began to kill anyone who had one or more Jewish grandparents. This was the Nazi definition of a Jew. 

      Hitler used many ways to kill Jewish people including simply shooting them and burying them in massive graves. One unnamed man reported that people were ordered to take off their clothes and a husky man with a submachine gun shot about 200 men, women, and children to death. They were sent by train or bus to get to these pits and living conditions were reported horrible. But after a while Hitler and his cronies decided that this way of killing Jews was too slow and messy. They searched for a new way of killing the Jews,and then Hitler had a idea.....

        When Adolf Hitler was a soldier in World War 2 he remembered when he and his platoon was under a gas attack. He remembered how deathly helpless and bitter he had felt and the gripping fear that was upon him. He believed that the least expensive and messy way to get rid of the Jews was to gas them. A gas company in Germany was hired to mass produce a poison gas called Zyklon B, also used to kill vemonous lice and insects. This was the main way the Holocaust killings were acted out on the Jews.

       After some time the Nazi's decided that they needed places to carry out these killings. They finally decided on "death camps" we call concentration camps. This is where many of the Jews were sent to be killed. The Jews were so crippled by fear that they could do nothing about the killings of their friends and loved ones, only sit and wait in agony for what was in store.

       Many Jews thought that they were better off dead and suicide seemed like a privilege. Those seemingly lucky enough to get out of the transport buses and into the camp, had to go through a type of hell on earth. The Jews in the camp had only one bathroom for a hut of about four hundred people and all they were fed was a thin paste the Nazi's called "soup". People searched through garbage for food and had to sleep with about 5 other people in a bed. 

     If any Jews were late for a roll call they would have to stand in the snow and rain for hours at a time. If any Jew dared to be late, the culprit was beaten so badly that most of the time he died of it. Most of the Jews were either sick and/or dying and no medicine except for 300 tablets of aspirin for about 3,000 people. This hell on earth was sometimes to much for some Jews. A good portion killed themselves by throwing themselves against the Nazi electrified fences.

   Still more crime and cruelty was thrown upon the Jews. One Jewish woman testified that that the Nazi soldiers used Jews as target practice and when they were no longer useful an "practice" they would finish them off with a bullet between the eyes. Most people today wonder how the Jews could stay sane and not become animals. The truth is that some Jews consoled themselves by their faith in god and their families warmth and love. It became very hard for the Jews not to kill themselves but some Jews thought by staying alive, that they could silently strike back at the Nazi atrocities.

         The last stop for the Jews were the smoking death traps which the Nazi's jokingly called "showers". Jewish people were packed in as tightly as they could be and they held each other tight as they died a horrible death. Before they died mothers consoled their children by singing to them and stroking them. Nearly six million Jewish people were killed inside these camps. When they were sure that all the Jews were dead they made other Jews sift through the bodies and dump the corpses inside huge furnaces. At the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp the inscription on the wall still reads "This is the gate of the Lord in which Righteous shall enter". These words bitterly tell of the atrocities of the Holocaust and of the tales of a dying race of people.