All but My Life by Gerda Weissman Klein

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All but My Life by Gerda Weissman Klein

• An autobiography of the life of Gerda Weissman,
  a young Polish Jew
• The novel tells the story of Gerda and her
  family as they are slowly forced out of their
  home in Bielitz, Poland.
• Eventually Gerda was separated from her family
  and transported to textile camps to work as an
  unpaid laborer for the Germans.
• Klein was born in 1924 and liberated from the
  work camps in 1945, when she was 21.
• Now Klein lives in America and lectures on the
  Holocaust.

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Holocaust History 1933-1938

• Adolf Hitler, leader of Nazi Party, became
  Germanys chancellor.
• Hitler was a harsh anti-Semite who began to
  strip Jews of their rights and privileges.
• Jews originally resettled in ghettos, to
  separate them from Germans
• November 9-10, 1938 Kristallnacht an organized
  attack on Jews and their homes and businesses,
  began deporting Jews to work camps

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The War in Europe 1939-1945

• 1939 Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and Poland,
  hoping to begin building a great German empire
  called the Third Reich.
• Great Britain, France, and other Allies declared
  war on Hitler.
• Hitlers takeover of European nations was so
  quick and so brazen that it was called blitzkrieg
  (lightning war).
• 1939-1945 a process of holding back the German
  armys advances while the Allies pressed in
  toward Germany

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The Holocaust

• By 1941, Nazis began mass exterminations of Jews
  in concentration camps.
• Auschwitz, Treblinka, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen,
  Buchenwald ...

• Conditions at the camps were harsh little food,
  hard labor, unsanitary conditions, and constant
  brutality from the Nazi guards.
• By the spring of 1945, when Allied victory
  seemed certain, Nazis began killing as many Jews
  as they could before they were liberated.
• By the wars end, May 1945, about 2 out of every
  3 Jews in Europe had been murdered.

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