![]() It’s no wonder this script is regarded as one of the greatest ever. Now, we know the gruesome end to the story, and the rest of the film is all about how we got there. When we see the dead body, we assume the narrator is omniscient, but it soon becomes clear the narrator is the dead body. This trope works because it capitalizes on intrigue and disorientation. A slip of the tongue, improperly prepared false documents, or gossip could lead to arrest and deportation.The script formatting isn’t what we’d see today, but the trope is here: we are introduced to the character well into the plot of the story, and he comes in with a voice over to explain. Jews in hiding were discovered by chance during raids seeking conscripts for forced labor, resistance cells, black marketers, or by random searches of documents. In German-occupied Poland, blackmailers squeezed money or property from Jews by threatening to turn them in to the authorities. In other countries, neighbors betrayed others for money or out of support for the regime. By spring 1945, when the Nazi regime lay in ruins, these informers had turned in as many as 2,000 Jews. Beginning in March 1943, the Gestapo (the German secret state police) granted some Jews in Germany reprieve from deportation in exchange for tracking down their co-religionists who had gone underground. German officials and their collaborators harshly penalized those who aided Jews and offered rewards to individuals willing to turn in Jews. Throughout German-occupied Europe, the Nazis made a concerted effort to locate Jews in hiding. The Nazis further discouraged rescue by threatening severe penalties for those caught helping Jews. The Nazis portrayed the Jews as carriers of contagion, as criminals, or as “Bolshevik” agents anxious to subvert European society. Even in countries where hatred for the German occupiers ran deep, anti-Nazism did not necessarily generate aid for Jews. Sadly, the willingness or ability of the non-Jewish populations to rescue Jewish lives never matched the Nazis' vehement desire to destroy them. Many Jews, no doubt, held out the hope that the threat of death would pass or that they could survive until the Allied victory. Hiding meant leaving behind relatives, risking immediate and severe punishment, and finding an individual or family willing to provide refuge. The vast majority of Jews in German-occupied Europe never went into hiding, for many reasons. ![]() Theirs was a life in shadows, where a careless remark, a denunciation, or the murmurings of inquisitive neighbors could lead to discovery and death. With identities disguised, and often physically concealed from the outside world, these youngsters faced constant fear, dilemmas, and danger. Thousands of Jewish children survived this brutal carnage, however, many because they were hidden. All of Europe's Jews were slated for destruction: the sick and the healthy, the rich and the poor, the religiously orthodox and converts to Christianity, the aged and the young, even infants. More than one million of the victims were children.ĭriven by a racist ideology that viewed Jews as “parasitic vermin” worthy only of eradication, the Nazis implemented genocide on an unprecedented scale. When World War II ended in 1945, six million European Jews were dead, killed in the Holocaust. ![]()
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