# data[].attributes.body
We receive a letter from our uncle, to was addressed to dad but we had to tell uncle that he was already gone. Uncle never the less though offered to get us over to America. The thought at first was amazing, but Elli remembered her poems and about how she gave it to the nice soldier to hold onto them and then she decided that she didn't want to go to America. In the end thought through a family decision they decided to go to America.

# data[].attributes.body
Elli and her family were free, but Elli didn't feel free, even after all the survive were being driven away to a town where they can eat and find shelter. Its there at the shelters did Elli and the rest of her family find that their father past away two months ago, just two weeks before his camp got liberated.

# data[].attributes.body
After the planes have left there are men coming from the sides of the boxcars checking to see if anyone is alive. There are 12 dead in the car and everyone is taken out. Elli gets complemented by a woman for making it this long. Elli was confused, and after a while the woman said that it must have been hard for someone so old, she said this because Elli look at least sixty if not sixty-two. After Elli tells the woman that she is sixteen, the woman screams and runs away.

# data[].attributes.body
We ride all through the night with the doors open. Then during some point in the day the train stops and we see German soldiers running into the forest repeating "They coming!". All at once everyone who is still alive run into the forest, but Elli, her mother, and Budi hide under the boxcar. They see a plane come and fly over them. Its an American plane.

Textual Evidence: "Everyone about me falls to the floor. Blood is bubbling from the shoulder form the girl next to me...I grab her lower leg, and with my two hands press it against the bloody knee stumpy. It is still attached by a shred of skin." (193-194)

# data[].attributes.body
Everyone at the camp was loaded into the boxcars again, two hundred per boxcar. We rode fro a while then all of a sudden we stopped and the doors were unlocked. Everyone instantly got out and ran either to the town or to the corn field to eat. It remain like that for about 30 minutes and then BANG guns started going off and shooting people who were in the corn fields, then Elli, Budi an their mother were off again riding in the boxcars. When they stopped and were told to bring there bowls to get soup from the Red Cross trucks, and Bang guns started going off again, but shooting at the boxcars this time. Budi get git in the head and instantly Elli and her mother try to help Budi but it is no use.

# data[].attributes.body
While their mother was in the kitchen working, Elli and Budi got a chance to talk and Elli found out the truth about the elders and all the young children. At first she didn't believe her brother, then he had to explain that he had friends that work in the unit that carried the bodies to the oven to burn after removing all valuable from their bodies. So Elli had to stomach the truth that her grandmother, cousins, along with her aunts and uncles, were all gassed and burned.

# data[].attributes.body
Elli and her mother got word that her brother was at a camp on the other side of the campus, and so they volunteered to work over there so they can be near him. Elli and her mother give Budi one of their food rations to try and improve his health. Eventually as time passed he got stronger. One day when they woke up all the guards were gone, Budi came and visited his mother and Elli.

Textual Evidence: ¨There are several bruises on the high cheekbone . Its face unlike anything i have ever seen. It resembles the face in science fiction magazines my brother Budi used to read.¨ (176)

# data[].attributes.body
It was cold outside and Elli and the other wanted to get there coats but the "Goat¨ said no. So Elli along with nine other hid behind the trash cans, but they were immediately found and they were punished. They were required to stand there all day and all night with out moving or eating anything at all.

Textual Evidence: ¨ Our shoulders slump. Our heads hang to one side. Our lips and our hands tremble" (165)

# data[].attributes.body
We reach our new home and meet our new masters, we are question if we are women and where is our luggage. Elli and the others were taken to there room which was massive and had some bedding, they were fed that night with two courses of soup, along with being given scented soap and a towel each for showering.

Textual Evidence: " A wave of disbelief ripples through the ranks of the assembled army personal. Woman? Our  freshly shaven heads, gray prison garb, and stick like bodies are not very convincing.¨ (149)

# data[].attributes.body
Everyone who passed the selection, was told to go to the showers and wash up. Elli was helping her mother get dressed when her mother got grabbed and twisted for taking too long. Elli lost control for a split second and jumps at the SS officer and shoves her to the wall. As a result of attacking an SS officer Elli was beaten brutally, but she was lucky she wasn't killed for what she did.

Textual Evidence: ¨ Her fist sends me reeling. A second punch knocks me to the slippery floor. She is kicking me in the face, in the chest, in the abdomen.¨(145)

# data[].attributes.body
Elli and her cell block were undressed and lined up for inspections to choose who will leave and who won't. Elli's biggest concern is that her mother wont make it due to her being paralyzed. A big surprise happens when Elli's mother passes inspection and Elli herself doesn't due to a knot on her leg that is shooting out puss. She is able to sneak into the group with her mother and ends up leaving Auschwitz.

# data[].attributes.body
They were trying to sleeping when the bed above them broke and landed on Elli's mother. The impact of the bed ended up paralyzing  her from the waist down, when Elli tries to get help she get punished for asking.

# data[].attributes.body
There was a rumor going around the camp that Hitler was dead. which would explain why all the Kapos and SS officers were going kook-coo. many women were loaded 100 people per boxcar and they drove off. Everyone thought that they were going home but they were surprised when they got off that they had gone back to Auschwitz. Turns out that Hitler wasn't dead after all.

# data[].attributes.body
They are ordered to start digging once they arrive, if they is any complaining its considered an act of sabotage and they are whipped. Some people ended up passing out from the heat and the lack of food and water, but once they are given food Elli noticed that there are worms in the food. Her and her mother get into a disagreement about either eating the worms or dying.

# data[].attributes.body
They are shaved,  showered and loaded into wagons that weren't quite as crowded. Everyone is loaded off the wagon once they reached Krakow, from there they are driven by army trucks to Camp Plaszow ( the most notorious forced labor camp in Poland).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Historical pictures and documents / Gallery / Auschwitz-Birkenau

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Main page > Gallery > Historical pictures and documents

# data[].attributes.body
When you were allowed to eat and drink,  every group of 5 people got one bowl of soup and water, and luckily for Elli, some of her cousins were already there. So they decided to become a family of five that way they can look out for each other and all get somewhat even amounts of food.

Textual Evidence: ¨  Suri says that it is much easier to survive in Auschwitz if you are five. read and food is distributed on Zahlappell. Every five get one portion of bread and one bowl of food.¨(89)

# data[].attributes.body
All women and children were rounded up into boxcars and traveled for four days without stopping. Until they reached their destination, Auschwitz. They are sorted into two groups, one consists of women anywhere within the ages of 16-45, and the other groups contains the others. Elli was only 13 at the time but she was tall enough to pass as 16, so the SS officer told her from now on she was 16 if anybody asked.

Textual Evidence: ¨Your tall for your age. Is this your mother?...Go and from now on remember from now on your sixteen." (73)

https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/18/us/immigration-family-separations-questions/index.html

# data[].attributes.body
They were eventually notified that they would be leaving the ghetto to be sent to labor camps. Before they were allowed to leave though they had to leave all possessions behind and burn their books, Elli was able to sneak her book of poems to a very kind officer,  who agreed to hold onto them until she returned.

Textual Evidence: ¨My heart is pounds with panic as I reveal the secret of my notebook with the poems.¨ (68)

# data[].attributes.headline
Germans are starting to give orders (2) 

# data[].attributes.subject
Germans are starting to give orders (2) 

# data[].attributes.body
There were orders given to everyone such as closing the schools, but there were also certain orders given to just Jews. A few examples is having to wear a gold star on all clothing and having to turn all valuables (jewelry, radio, vehicle). The next law that they ordered was that all Jews were to be evacuated from the city, to be sent to ghettos.

Textual Evidence: " In a daze I follow Daddy and my brother to the courtyard of the town hall... jewelry, silverware, radios, and cameras are piled high on long tables.¨ (26)

# data[].attributes.body
The Germans invaded Budapest, which is where Elli´s brother goes to school. Many people who were taken from there were either killed or taken as prisoners to ghettos.

Textual Evidence: ¨ But, Dad, I saw them- the tanks, the flag with swastikas. Everywhere. And the crowds, I heard them shout, ¨Heil Hitler!¨ (20)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Origins of the Holocaust

The ideas and emotions that lay behind the Holocaust were not new, nor were they uniquely German. The Nazis were the heirs of a centuries-old tradition of Jew-hatred, rooted in religious rivalry and found in all European countries. When the Nazis came to carry out their genocidal programme, they found collaborators in all the countries they dominated, including governments that enjoyed considerable public support. Most people drew the line at mass murder, but relatively few could be found to oppose it actively or to extend help to the Jews.

Though it had ancient roots, Nazi ideology was far from a primitive, medieval throwback - it was capable of appealing to intelligent and sophisticated people. Many high-ranking Nazis had doctoral degrees and early supporters included such eminent people as philosopher Martin Heidegger, theologian Martin Niemoeller, and commander-in-chief of German forces in the First World War, General Erich Ludendorff. Hitler appealed with a powerful vision of a strong, united and 'racially' pure Germany, bolstered by pseudo-scientific ideas that were popular at the time.

Antisemitism, the new racist version of the old Jew-hatred, viewed the Jews as not simply a religious group but as members of a 'Semitic race', which strove to dominate its 'Aryan' rivals. Among the leading ideologues of this theory were a French aristocrat, the Comte Joseph de Gobineau, and an Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Antisemitism proved a convenient glue for conspiracy theories - since Jews were involved in all sorts of ventures and political movements, they could be accused of manipulating all of them behind the scenes. Thus Jews were held responsible for Communism and capitalism, liberalism, socialism, moral decline, revolutions, wars, plagues and economic crises. As the Jews had once been demonised in medieval Europe, so the new antisemites (including many Christians) found new, secular ways of demonising them.

The Nazis brought their own strain of radical ruthlessness to these ideas. They glorified war and saw the uncompromising struggle for survival between nations and races as the engine of human progress. They rejected morality as a Jewish idea, which had corrupted and weakened the German people. They maintained that a great nation such as Germany had the right and duty to build an empire based on the subjugation of 'inferior races'. They looked eastwards to Poland and Russia (where, as it happened, the great majority of European Jews lived) for the territorial expansion of their 'living space' ( Lebensraum).

Nazism was thus an unscrupulous and warlike ideology, which always had the potential for genocide. But it took some time for an organised killing programme to evolve.

The war years

Organised killing began with the outbreak of war in September 1939, but the first victims were not Jews. The Nazis set about killing people with physical and mental disabilities, whom they regarded as a burden on the state and a threat to the nation's 'racial hygiene'. About 170,000 people were eventually killed under this so-called Euthanasia programme, which also pioneered techniques and employed many of the people later used to kill Jews.

When the Nazis occupied western Poland in 1939, two-thirds of Polish Jews - Europe's largest Jewish community - fell into their hands. The Polish Jews were rounded up and placed in ghettos, where it is estimated that 500,000 people died of starvation and disease. Nazi policy at this point was aimed at forced emigration and isolation of the Jews rather than mass murder, but large numbers were to die through attrition.

Mass killing begins

With the invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22 1941, the Nazis launched a crusade against 'Judaeo-Bolshevism', the supposed Jewish-Communist conspiracy. Behind the front lines, four police battalions called Einsatzgruppen (operations groups) moved from town to town in the newly occupied Soviet territories, rounding up Jewish men and suspected Soviet collaborators and shooting them. In subsequent sweeps, making heavy use of local volunteers, the Einsatzgruppen targeted Jewish women and children as well. In total, the Einsaztgruppen murdered some two million people, almost all Jews.

The Final Solution

While these massacres were happening, the Nazis elsewhere were laying plans for an overall 'solution to the Jewish question'. Death camp operations began in December 1941 at Semlin in Serbia and Chelmno in Poland, where people were killed by exhaust fumes in specially modified vans, which were then driven to nearby sites where the bodies were plundered and burnt. 250,000 Jews were killed this way at Chelmno and 15,000 at Semlin.

More camps opened in the spring and summer of 1942, when the Nazis began systematically clearing the ghettos in Poland and rounding up Jews in western Europe for 'deportation to the East'. The killing of the Polish Jews, code-named 'Project Reinhardt', was carried out in three camps: Treblinka, near Warsaw (850,000 victims); Belzec, in south-eastern Poland (650,000 victims); and Sobibor, in east-central Poland (250,000 victims). Some Jews from western Europe were sometimes taken to these camps as well, but most were killed at the biggest and most advanced of the death camps, Auschwitz.

The outside world

The discovery of Belsen brought home the shocking truth about Nazi atrocities, but the facts had been known for some time. As early as the summer of 1941, British signals intelligence had intercepted and decoded radio messages from German police units co-operating with the Einsatzgruppen, and details of the killings of Jews were included in the monthly summaries that were sent to Churchill. Churchill responded with a speech on August 24 1941 in which he called the massacres 'a crime without a name' but erroneously identified the victims as 'Russian patriots defending their native soil'. Otherwise, these facts were not made public.

In June 1942, a report from the Jewish Workers' party in Poland reached London. The report described the massacres in the east and estimated that 700,000 Jews had been killed; but when a Polish courier mentioned this number to a British journalist he was advised to 'drop a zero or two' if he wanted to be believed.

Another Polish courier, Jan Karski, reached the west in November 1942, carrying messages from Jewish leaders in Poland. He had himself witnessed the conditions in the Warsaw ghetto and in what he believed to be the Belzec death camp, and was eager to inform the world. Karski saw the British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, and US President Roosevelt, but they seemed to be more interested in military intelligence than in atrocity stories. Partly as a result of Karski's mission, however, the Allies agreed to a joint declaration, read to the British Parliament on 17 December, which acknowledged Nazi war crimes and threatened punishment for the perpetrators. Subsequently millions of leaflets were dropped in the course of bombing raids on German cities to inform Germans of the facts, but these had little or no effect.

By the spring of 1944, detailed descriptions of the killing operations at Auschwitz-Birkenau received from escaped prisoners were published. This prompted calls for the camp or its railway approaches to be bombed, but these proposals were rejected on technical grounds.

Britain's attitude to Jewish refugees from Nazi-controlled areas was strongly influenced by its role as the mandatory power in Palestine, where it had to mediate between Jewish and Arab interests. In December 1941, the Struma, a ship carrying 769 Jewish refugees, left the Romanian port of Constantsa hoping to reach Palestine. Towed into Istanbul harbour when its engines failed, it became the subject of diplomatic discussions between Britain and Turkey. Britain's chief concern was to discourage what it regarded as an undesirable traffic, and it proposed that the ship be returned to Romania. After ten weeks of wrangling the Struma was towed out to sea, its engines still disabled, where it was sunk by a Soviet submarine. There was one survivor.

Jewish refugees were the subject of two international conferences, at Evian in 1938 and Bermuda in 1943. Neither conference resulted in any concrete action. In general, Britain treated refugees from Nazi Germany as economic migrants, and took in only those who would be of economic benefit to the country. About 10,000 Jewish children were brought to Britain in 1939 under the Kindertransport scheme, and placed with British families, but their parents were excluded and had to pay for their children's support. The best that can be said for Britain's refugee policy is that it was less ungenerous than that of most other European states at the time.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The ideas and emotions that lay behind the Holocaust were not new, nor were they uniquely German. The Nazis were the heirs of a centuries-old tradition of Jew-hatred, rooted in religious rivalry and found in all European countries.