ABSTRACT
The Nazis were indiscriminate in their targeting of the Jews—every Jew, male and female, was condemned to death. Both men and women were forced to endure the acute shortages and degradation of the ghettos, the uncertainties and fear of life in hiding and the hitherto unimaginable sufferings of the concentration and death camps. Worse still, they were helpless to stop the countless cruelties inflicted on their loved ones—their children, their husbands, their wives, their parents—and ultimately were forced to accept their almost inevitable deaths whether in the disease-ridden ghettos of Eastern Europe, the killing fields of Belorussia, Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Yugoslavia or the gas chambers of places such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka and Majdanek. The vast majority of the Jews in occupied Europe—6 million is the figure named by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in its final judgement, or, in other words, about twothirds of European Jewry and one-third of the world’s Jewish population at that time—were murdered without ever testifying to the agonies they were forced to endure on the way to their deaths ( Marrus 1993: 195).
