Disturbing History - DH Ep:62 The Holocaust

Episode Date: February 1, 2026

This episode takes you through the full, unflinching story of the Holocaust — from the ancient roots of antisemitism that made it possible, to the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in a broken and humiliated post-World War One Germany, and into the systematic, industrialized murder of six million Jews and millions of others deemed unworthy of life. We walk through the ghettos of Warsaw, where hundreds of thousands were starved behind walls and barbed wire. We follow the Einsatzgruppen death squads across Eastern Europe, where entire Jewish communities were marched to ravines and shot. We step inside the machinery of the death camps — Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec — where human beings were gassed by the thousands and their bodies burned in crematorium ovens running around the clock.But this episode is not only about death. It's about resistance — the fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Sonderkommando revolt at Auschwitz, and the countless small acts of defiance that kept the human spirit alive in the darkest of places. It's about the Righteous Among the Nations — people like Oskar Schindler, Raoul Wallenberg, Irena Sendler, and Chiune Sugihara — who risked everything to save lives when most of the world looked the other way.We cover the liberation of the camps by Allied forces, the Nuremberg trials, the hunt for escaped war criminals, and the founding of the State of Israel in the shadow of genocide.We address Holocaust denial head-on, dismantling the lies with the overwhelming mountain of evidence left behind by the Nazis themselves, by survivors, by perpetrators who confessed, and by the Allied soldiers who walked through the gates of hell and documented what they found.And we examine the generational trauma that continues to shape the descendants of survivors — the silence, the anxiety, the emerging science of epigenetic inheritance that suggests the wounds of the Holocaust may be written into the very biology of those who came after. This is one of the most important episodes we've ever produced. It is not easy to listen to. But it is necessary. Because the last survivors are dying, and when they're gone, it falls to us to carry this memory forward.Listener discretion is strongly advised. This episode contains graphic descriptions of violence, genocide, and human suffering. Never forget.

In every corner of the United Kingdom and in every shadowed place across the world, there are stories the daylight can't explain. Whispers of figures that vanish into thin air, footsteps that follow when you're alone, and encounters with the paranormal that leave the living forever changed. On the Haunted UK podcast, we journey into these mysteries, exploring chilling accounts of hauntings, terrifying paranormal events and real stories,

from listeners who've witnessed the impossible. Each episode is crafted with immersive soundscapes, meticulous research and storytelling that pulls you straight into the dark. So if you're captivated by the unexplained, if you seek the truth behind the world's most haunting experiences, then follow us, carefully, because once you begin listening, you may start to hear things too.

The Haunted UK podcast. Available now on all major podcast platforms. Ever wonder how dark the world can really get? Well, we dive into the twisted, the terrifying, and the true stories behind some of the world's most chilling crimes. Hi, I'm Ben. And I'm Nicole. Together we host Wicked and Grim,

a true crime podcast that unpacks real-life horrors, one case at a time. With deep research, dark storytelling, and the occasional drink to take the edge of, off. We're here to explore the wicked and reveal the grim. We are wicked and grim. Follow and listen on your favorite podcast platform. Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy

presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more. like fiction than fact. This is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corners of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes the history is disturbing to us and sometimes we have to disturb history itself just to get to the truth. If you like your facts with the side of fear. If you're not afraid to pull it threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place.

History isn't just written by the victors. Sometimes, it's rewritten by the disturbed. There is a place in southern Poland where the ground itself seems to mourn, where the soil is gray with the yite of human remains, where the silence is so absolute, so suffocating, that visitors often describe feeling physically ill, not from any lingering smell or sight. but from the sheer weight of what happened there. Auschwitz-Birkenau. The name alone carries a gravity that transcends language. It has become synonymous with the absolute worst

that human beings are capable of inflicting upon one another. But Auschwitz was not an aberration. It was not some isolated incident of madness in an otherwise rational world. It was the culmination of centuries of hatred, decades of political manipulation, and years of systematic dehumanization that transformed ordinary men into murderers

and an entire nation into accomplices to the greatest crime in human history. Welcome to the Disturbing History Podcast. I need to warn you, what you're about to hear over the next hour is not easy listening. This is not entertainment in the traditional sense. This is testimony. This is remembrance. This is a reckoning with the darkest chapter in the human story, the Holocaust.

Between 1933 and 1940s, the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler systematically murdered approximately 6 million Jewish men, women, and children. 6 million. Let that number settle into your consciousness for a moment. 6 million individual human beings, each with a name, a face, a family, hopes, dreams, fears, and loves. 6 million stories that ended in gas chambers, mass graves, and crematorium ovens. But the Holocaust's victims extended far beyond the Jewish population.

The Nazis also murdered approximately 200,000 Roma and Sinti people, whom they deemed racially inferior. They killed over 250,000 people with mental and physical disabilities through their so-called euthanasia program. They executed thousands of homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Political Dissidents, Soviet prisoners of war, and countless others who didn't fit their victims. vision of a pure Aryan race. When all is counted, the Holocaust claimed somewhere between 11 and 17 million lives, depending on how broadly one defines its victims. And here's what haunts me

most about this history. It didn't happen in some distant primitive era. It happened within living memory. There are survivors still alive today who can tell you what the inside of a cattle car smelled like as they were transported to the camps. Who can describe the selection process at the train platforms, the casual wave of a hand that sent some to forced labor and others directly to the gas chambers. Who can still see the faces of the family members they watched walk toward the smokestacks, never to return? This happened in the 20th century, in a modern, industrialized, educated nation that had produced Goethe and Beethoven and Einstein. It happened not because Germans were uniquely evil, but because ordinary people, teachers, doctors, lawyers, fact,

workers, farmers, mothers and fathers, allowed themselves to be swept up in a tide of hatred that they convinced themselves was justified. That's the most disturbing truth of all. The Holocaust wasn't perpetrated by monsters. It was perpetrated by human beings. And that means it could happen again. So we remember, we study, we bear witness. Not to wallow in darkness, but to understand how that darkness took root and how we might prevent it from ever growing again. This is the story of the Holocaust, from its origins and centuries of anti-Semitism, through the rise of Nazi Germany, into the death camps and gas chambers, and finally to the liberation, the trials, and the generational trauma that echoes to this day. This is disturbing history.

To understand how the Holocaust became possible, we have to travel back through centuries of European history, because the Nazis didn't invent anti-Semitism. They inherited it, refined it, and industrialized it. Jewish communities have faced persecution in Europe since the Roman Empire. The destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE scattered the Jewish population across the Mediterranean world and beyond. For nearly 2,000 years, Jews lived as a minority population in countries that were predominantly Christian,

and that Christianity carried within it the seeds of a particular kind of hatred. The early Christian church, in its effort to distinguish itself from its Jewish origins, began promoting the narrative that the Jewish people were collectively responsible for the death of Jesus Christ. This accusation of deicide, the killing of God, became embedded in Christian theology and teaching for centuries. It painted all Jews throughout all time as Christ killers deserving of punishment and contempt. During the Middle Ages, this religious anti-Semitism took on increasing. violent forms. Jews were expelled from England in 1290, from France multiple times between 1282 and 1394, and from various German territories throughout the medieval period. They were forced to live in

designated areas called ghettos, required to wear identifying badges or clothing, and excluded from most professions. The Crusades brought waves of anti-Jewish violence. Crusaders whipped into religious frenzy on their way to reclaim the Holy Land. often stopped to massacre Jewish communities along the route. The First Crusade alone saw the destruction of entire Jewish communities in the Rhineland, with thousands murdered in cities like worms, mints, and Cologne. Then came the Black Death. When the bubonic plague swept across Europe in the mid-1300s,

killing somewhere between 30 and 60% of the population, people were desperate for an explanation, and they found one in their Jewish neighbors. rumors spread that Jews had poisoned the wells, deliberately spreading the plague to destroy Christendom. It didn't matter that Jews were dying of the plague at the same rates as everyone else. Mobs attacked Jewish communities across Europe, burning entire neighborhoods and murdering thousands. This pattern repeated throughout the centuries. Economic hardship.

Blame the Jews. Political instability. Blame the Jews. Unexplained illness. Blame the Jews. Jews. The Jewish population became a perpetual scapegoat, a convenient target for whatever anxieties and frustrations plagued European society. By the 19th century, a new form of anti-Semitism began to emerge, one based not on religious differences, but on pseudoscientific theories of race.

Thinkers like Arthur de Gobine and Houston-Stewart Chamberlain developed elaborate racial hierarchies that placed Nordic or Aryan peoples at the top and Jews at the bottom. These theories claim that Jewish people were not merely practitioners of a different religion, but members of a fundamentally different and inferior race, one that was parasitic, degenerate, and dangerous to the health of European civilization. This racial anti-Semitism was particularly insidious because it offered no path to redemption. A Jew who converted to Christianity was still in this framework, racially Jewish. There was no escape, no way to become acceptable.

The very blood in their veins condemned them. In Russia and Eastern Europe, violent pogroms, organized massacres of Jewish communities, became horrifyingly common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Russian word pogrom means devastation or destruction, and that's exactly what these attacks brought. Jewish homes and businesses were burned. Families were beaten, raped, and murdered. Entire communities were wiped out. These pogroms sent waves of,

Jewish refugees fleeing westward, many to Germany, where they hoped to find safety in a more modern, enlightened society. They couldn't have known that they were fleeing toward the epicenter of what would become the greatest catastrophe in Jewish history, because Germany for all its cultural achievements and industrial progress, was not immune to anti-Semitism. In fact, German anti-Semitism had its own particular characteristics, a peculiar blend of romantic nationalism, pseudoscientific racism, and conspiracy theory that would prove especially deadly. German thinkers like Wilhelm Marr, who actually coined the term anti-Semitism in 1879, portrayed Jews not just as inferior, but as an existential threat to the German

nation. In this view, Jews were not simply different. They were actively working to undermine German culture, corrupt German blood, and destroy the German people from within. This was the intellectual soil. into which the Nazi party would plant its seeds. But it would take a catastrophic war and its bitter aftermath to make those seeds grow into the forest of death that would consume Europe.

On November 11, 1918, Germany surrendered, ending the First World War. For four years, the German people had been told they were winning. Their newspapers had reported victory after victory. Their leaders had promised triumph was just around the corner. And then, suddenly, it was over. Germany had lost. The shock was profound. German soldiers returned home to a country in chaos, revolutionary uprisings, food shortages,

and a new democratic government that many viewed with suspicion and contempt. And then came the Treaty of Versailles. The treaty signed in June 1919 was designed to punish Germany and prevented from ever waging aggressive war again. Germany lost significant territory, including Alsace-Lorraine to France and Parties. to France and parts of Prussia to the newly reconstituted Poland. The German military was reduced to a token force of 100,000 men with no air force, no submarines,

and no tanks. And most devastatingly, Germany was forced to accept sole responsibility for causing the war and to pay massive reparations to the Allied powers, a debt that would cripple the German economy for years to come. For many Germans, the Treaty of Versailles was not just unfair. was a humiliation, a deliberate attempt to destroy their nation. And in their bitterness, they searched for someone to blame. They didn't have to search long. The conspiracy theories were already circulating. Germany hadn't really lost the war on the battlefield. Germany had

been stabbed in the back by traitors on the home front. Communists, socialists, and above all, Jews. The so-called Dolkestos Legenda, or stab-in-the-back myth, took root in the German psyche and provided a convenient explanation for the inexplicable. Germany was great. Germany was strong. Germany could only have been defeated through treachery. It was into this volatile atmosphere that a young Austrian veteran named Adolf Hitler arrived in Munich in 1919. Hitler had served as a corporal in the German army during the war, earning the Iron Cross for bravery. By all accounts, he was an unremarkable soldier, a loner who didn't smoke or drink.

Instead, he spent his free time sketching and reading. But the war had given his life meaning, and Germany's defeat had shattered him. In Munich, Hitler found work as a police informant, attending meetings of various political groups to report on potential revolutionary activity. In September 1919, he attended a meeting of a tiny organization called the German Workers' Party.

Something about the group's combination of nationalism and socialist rhetoric. appealed to him, and he joined as member number 555, though the party had inflated its numbering to seem larger than it was. Hitler quickly discovered that he had a talent. He could speak, not in the measured rational tones of academic discourse, but in the raw emotional language of rage and resentment. He could take all the bitterness and humiliation that Germans were feeling and give it voice. He could point to the enemies responsible, the communists, the Versailles, traitors, and above all, the Jews, and promised that Germany would rise again.

By 1921, Hitler had taken control of the party, now renamed the National Socialist German Workers Party, the Nazis. He gave it symbols, the swastika, adapted from ancient religious iconography, the red, white and black flag, the raised arm salute. He gave it paramilitary muscle in the form of the SA, the brown-shirted Sturmub-Tilung or Strzsche. stormtroopers, who beat up political opponents and disrupted rival meetings, and he gave it an ideology. That ideology was laid out most completely in Hitler's book, Mind Kampf, My Struggle, which he dictated while imprisoned after a failed coup attempt in 1923. The book is rambling, repetitive, and often incoherent, but its central message is clear. Hitler believed that

human history was fundamentally a struggle between races for survival and dominance. At the top of his racial hierarchy were the Aryans, a mythical race of Nordic supermen who had created all worthwhile civilization. At the bottom were the Jews, whom Hitler described not as human beings but as parasites, vermin, a plague that infected healthy societies and destroyed them from within. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. In Hitler's worldview, the Jews were responsible for everything wrong with the world. They controlled international finance and used it to enslave nations.

They controlled the press and used it to spread lies and corruption. They had created both capitalism and communism, opposite ideologies that were somehow both part of a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world. They had orchestrated Germany's defeat in World War I and imposed the humiliating Versailles Treaty. The solution, Hitler made clear, was not merely to discriminate against Jews or even to expel them. The solution was elimination.

In Mind Kampf, he wrote that if 12 to 15,000 of these Hebrew corruptors of the people had been held under poison gas at the start of World War I, the sacrifice of millions of German soldiers would not have been in vain. This was not subtle. This was not hidden. Hitler told the world exactly what he intended to do, and the world didn't listen. Throughout the 1920s, the Nazi party remained a fringe movement,

occasionally winning a few seats in the Reichstag, but never approaching real power. Then came the Great Depression. When the American stock market crashed in October 1929, it sent shockwaves around the world. Germany, heavily dependent on American loans to pay its war reparations, was hit especially hard. Banks failed. Businesses closed. Unemployment soared to over 6 million, roughly a third of the workforce. Germans who had just begun to recover from the chaos of the post-war years found themselves once again plunged into poverty and uncertainty. And once again, they were looking for someone to blame.

The Nazi Party's message suddenly found a much larger audience. In the 1930 elections, the Nazis went from 12 seats in the Reichstag to 107, becoming the second largest party in Germany. Two years later, in July 1932, they won 230 seats, making them the largest party, though still short of a majority. Germany's traditional conservative politicians thought they could use Hitler. They thought they could bring him into the government, let him serve as a figurehead to appease his followers,

and then control him from behind the scenes. They were catastrophically wrong. On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. The road to the Holocaust had begun. Hitler moved fast. Within a month of taking power, the Reichstag building, the German Parliament, was set ablaze. The Nazis blamed communist terrorists and used the fire as a pretext to suspend civil liberties, arrest political opponents, and consolidate power.

By March, Hitler had pushed through the Enabling Act, which gave him the authority to pass laws without parliamentary approval. Democracy in Germany was effectively dead. For the Jewish population, the warning signs came immediately. On April 1st, 1933, just two months after Hitler became chancellor, the Nazi party organized a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses. SA stormtroopers stood outside Jewish shops, holding signs that read, Don't buy from Jews, and the Jews are our misfortune. They painted stars of David on windows and intimidated anyone who tried to enter.

It was just the beginning. Over the next several years, the Nazi regime passed law after law designed to systematically exclude Jews from German society. Jews were banned from the civil service, from universities, from the legal and medical professions. Jewish children were expelled from public schools. Jews were prohibited from owning land, from visiting public parks and swimming pools, from attending theaters and concerts. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 codified this persecution into the legal framework of the state. The Reich citizenship law stripped Jews of their German citizenship. making them merely subjects with no political rights.

The law for the protection of German blood and German honor prohibited marriages and sexual relations between Jews and citizens of German or related blood. The penalties for violation included imprisonment and later death. But who exactly was a Jew? The Nazis developed elaborate racial classifications based on ancestry. Anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was considered fully Jewish. Those with two Jewish grandparents were classified as Michelinah of the first degree. Those with one Jewish grandparent were Michelinah of the second degree.

These classifications would determine life or death for millions. The pressure on German Jews became unbearable. Businesses were Aryanized, a polite term for stolen. Homes were confiscated. Families who had lived in Germany for generations found themselves suddenly stateless, stripped of everything they had built. Many Jews tried to immigrate, but here they encountered a cruel irony. The same Western nations that would later condemn the Holocaust were largely unwilling to accept Jewish refugees.

The United States maintained strict immigration quotas and turned away shiploads of desperate Jews seeking entry. Britain restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine, which was under British mandate. Switzerland stamped Jewish passports with a large red jay and turned refugees back at the border. The message was clear. Nobody wanted them. In July 1938, representatives from 32 countries met at the French resort town of Evian to discuss the refugee crisis. The conference was a disaster. Country after country expressed sympathy but refused to accept more refugees. The Australian delegate infamously declared that as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one. Hitler drew the obvious conclusion. The world didn't care, what happened to the Jews. Then came Kristallnacht. On the night of November 9, 1938, the Nazi regime unleashed a coordinated wave of violence against Jews throughout Germany and Austria. The pretext was the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a young Jewish man whose parents had been deported to Poland. But the pogrom had been planned in advance, waiting only for an excuse. That night,

Nazi stormtroopers and ordinary German citizens smashed the wind of the wind of approximately 7,500 Jewish businesses. They burned over a thousand synagogues. They dragged Jews from their homes and beat them in the streets. 91 Jews were killed and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps. The name Kristall Nocht, Crystal Knight, or the Night of Broken Glass, refers to the shattered windows that littered German streets the next morning. It's an almost poetic name for an act of barbarism, and it marked a turning point.

Before Kristolnik, the persecution of Jews had been largely bureaucratic, oppressive laws, economic strangulation, social exclusion. After Kristolnacht, it became openly, violently physical. And then came the war. On September 1st, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Two days later, Britain and France declared war. World War II had begun. The conquest of Poland brought roughly two million Jews under Nazi control. joining the approximately 300,000 Jews remaining in Germany and 180,000 in Austria.

Suddenly, the Nazi regime faced what they called the Jewish question on an entirely new scale. The initial approach was ghettoization. Jews in occupied Poland were forced to leave their homes and relocate to designated areas of major cities, the ghettos. The largest was in Warsaw, where approximately 400,000 Jews were crammed, into an area of just over one square mile. The ghettos were surrounded by walls and barbed wire. Anyone caught trying to leave was shot. Conditions in the ghettos were deliberately designed to be lethal.

Food rations were set at starvation levels, officially around 200 calories per day, though smuggling provided some additional sustenance. Sanitation was virtually non-existent. Disease spread rapidly through the overcrowded tenements. In the Warsaw ghetto alone, approximately 83,000 Jews died from starvation and disease between 1940 and 1942, before the deportations to the death camps even began. Meanwhile, the Nazi regime was experimenting with more direct methods of mass murder.

In January 1940, the first systematic killing program began, not against Jews, but against disabled people. Code named Action T4, this so-called, called euthanasia program targeted Germans with physical and mental disabilities, whom the Nazis deemed life unworthy of life. Patients were transported to six specialized killing centers, where they were murdered using carbon monoxide gas. By August 1941, when the program was officially halted due to public protests, approximately 70,000 people had been killed. Action T4 was significant for two reasons. First, it demonstrated that the Nazi regime was willing to murder its own citizens, including children, in pursuit of racial purity.

Second, it provided a template and trained personnel for the mass murder that was to come. Many of the same doctors, administrators, and guards who ran the T4 killing centers would later be transferred to the death camps in occupied Poland. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Holocaust entered a new and more lethal phase. Following behind the advancing Vermecht came special mobile killing units called Einzatzgruppen, task forces composed of SS police and Vofen SS personnel. Their mission was simple, to kill every Jew they could find. The Einstein Skruppen operated with terrifying efficiency. They would arrive in a town or village round up the Jewish population, men, women, and children, march them to a nearby ravine or forest, and shoot them.

The victims were often forced to undress and hand over their vows. before being lined up at the edge of mass graves and gunned down. Those who weren't killed instantly were buried alive under the bodies of the dead. The most notorious of these massacres occurred at Bobby Yar, a ravine near Kiev, Ukraine. On September 29th and 30th, 1941, Einstein's group of C, with the assistance of local Ukrainian collaborators, murdered 33,771 Jews over the course of two days. Victims were marched to the ravine in groups, forced to lie face down on top of the bodies already there, and shot in the back of the head. One German truck driver later testified about what he witnessed.

The people who had got off the trucks, men, women, and children of all ages, had to undress upon the orders of an SS man who carried a riding or dog whip. They had to put their clothes on separate piles of shoes, top clothing, and undergarments. I saw a pile of shoes that must have been 800 to be. a thousand pairs, great heaps of underwear and clothing. By the end of 1941, the Einzatz-Gruppen had murdered approximately 500,000 Jews. But this method of killing presented problems for the Nazi leadership. Shooting people one by one was slow, expensive in terms of ammunition, and psychologically damaging to the killers themselves. Many Einzatz-Gruppen members suffered mental breakdowns, turned to alcoholism, or requested transfers.

The Nazi regime needed a more efficient method. They found it in the gas chamber. On January 20, 1942, 15 senior Nazi officials gathered at a villa on the shores of Lake Vonsei, outside Berlin. The meeting, chaired by SS General Reinhardt Heidrich, lasted only about 90 minutes. Its purpose was to coordinate the final solution to the Jewish question, the systematic murder of every Jew in Europe. The Vancey Conference did not create the Holocaust. Mass murder was already underway,

but it formalized the bureaucratic process by which the genocide would be organized. Minutes from the meeting, taken by Adolf Eichmann, discussed the logistics of transporting Jews from across Europe to killing centers in occupied Poland. The language was chillingly bureaucratic, referring to Jews as numbers to be processed rather than human beings to be murdered.

The death camps were already being constructed. Unlike concentration camps, which were designed primarily for forced labor, the death camps had one purpose, mass murder. Six of these facilities were built in occupied Poland. Chelmno, Belzeck, Sobibor, Treblinka, Maidonik, and Auschwitz Berkanao.

The process was industrialized. Jews from across Europe were loaded onto cattle cars, typically 80 to 100 people per car with no food, water, or sanitation, and transported to the camps. The journeys could take days. Many died en route, especially the elderly and young children. Those who survived arrived exhausted, dehydrated, and terrified. At the camp's SS doctors conducted selections on the platform. With a casual gesture, a wave to the left or the right, they divided the arrivals into two groups. Those deemed capable of labor were sent to barracks for temporary survival through work.

Those deemed useless, the elderly, the sick, young children, and pregnant women were sent directly to the gas chambers. Typically, 70 to 80% of each transport was killed within hours of arrival. The victims were told they were going to be disinfected. They were ordered to undress and hand over their valuables. They were led into what appeared to be shower rooms with fake shower heads, on the ceiling. Then the doors were sealed. At most camps the killing agent was carbon monoxide produced by diesel engines. At Auschwitz Birkenau the SS used a cyanide-based pesticide called Zyclan B which killed faster and was considered

more efficient. The gas crystals were dropped through openings in the roof. Death took anywhere from three to 20 minutes depending on the victim's proximity to the gas source. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. SS guards watched through peepholes to confirm when all movement had stopped. Afterward, Jewish prisoners called Sonder Commandos, special units, were forced to remove the bodies, extract gold teeth, and transport the corpses to crematoriums for burning. The Sonder Commandoz themselves were periodically murdered and replaced, to ensure there were no

witnesses. At its peak, Auschwitz-Burkenau could kill and cremate approximately 6,000 people. per day. Rudolph Husse, the Camp Commandant, later testified at Nuremberg that approximately 3 million people died at Auschwitz during his tenure, though modern historians placed the figure closer to 1.1 million, still an almost incomprehensible number. To understand the Holocaust, we must try, however inadequate our efforts, to imagine what it was like to live through it. The statistics, the policies, the logistics of genocide can distance us from the human reality. So let us step for a moment into that reality. Imagine you are a Jewish person living

in Warsaw in 1942. For two years, you have been confined to the ghetto, watching your neighbors die of starvation and typhus. You have seen bodies in the streets every morning, so common that they no longer shock you. You have heard rumors about what happens to those who are resettled to the east. One day, the roundups begin. SS troops and their Ukrainian auxiliaries go blocking. by block, building by building, dragging people from their apartments. Anyone who resists is shot on the spot. You are marched to the Umschlaug plots, the collection point, along with thousands of others. You are forced into a cattle car. The doors are sealed. For three days you stand packed against strangers in darkness. There's no room to sit. There's no food, no water, only a single

bucket in the corner for everyone's waste, which overflows within hours. People around you are crying, praying, fainting. Some die standing up, held in place by the press of bodies. When the train finally stops and the doors open, the light is blinding. SS guards are screaming orders in German. Dogs are barking. You stumble onto a concrete platform and are immediately separated from your family. Men to one side, women and children to the other.

An SS officer glances at you, points to the right. You don't know it yet, but you have just been selected to live. Your mother, your grandmother, your young niece, they have been pointed to the left. You will never see them again. You are marched to a building where you are ordered to strip naked. Your head is shaved. You are given a striped uniform and wooden clogs. A number is tattooed on your forearm.

From this moment forward, you are no longer a person. You are that number. The daily routine in the camps was designed to de-rengths was designed to de-rengths. dehumanize and destroy. Prisoners were awakened before dawn for roll call, Appel, which could last for hours regardless of weather. They stood at attention while SS guards counted and recounted, while those too weak to stand were beaten or shot.

Morning Appel was followed by 12 hours or more of grueling labor, quarrying stone, draining swamps, sorting the belongings of the murdered, building more camp facilities to murder more efficiently. Food rations were barely enough to sustain, sane life, watery soup, a small piece of bread, occasionally a bit of sausage. Prisoners rapidly became what the camps called Musulminner, Muslims, a term used because of their perceived resemblance to images of bowing worshippers, walking skeletons who had given up the will to live. Once a prisoner reached that state, death followed within days or weeks.

Disease was rampant. Typhus, dysentery, and typhoid fever swept through the crowded barracks. There was virtually no medical care. The camp infirmaries were places to die, not to heal, and periodic selections sent the sick directly to the gas chambers. The cruelty of the guards was systematic and casual. Prisoners were beaten for any reason or no reason at all. Those caught stealing food, or suspected of stealing food, were hanged publicly, with all prisoners forced to watch.

Some guards made sport of torture, forcing prisoners to do pointless exercises until they colloquial. lapsed, then kicking them to death. And then there were the medical experiments. At Auschwitz, SS physician Joseph Mangala conducted horrifying experiments on prisoners, with a particular focus on twins. He subjected them to unnecessary surgeries without anesthesia, injected chemicals into their eyes in an attempt to change their color,

and deliberately infected them with diseases to study their progression. When he was finished with his subjects, he typically killed them with injections of fiends, to the heart, then dissected their bodies. At other camps, physicians froze prisoners to death to study hypothermia for the Luftwaffe. They placed prisoners in pressure chambers until their lungs exploded. They deliberately infected wounds with bacteria to test the effectiveness of sulfonamide drugs. They sterilized women using radiation and surgery. The experiments had little or no scientific value. Their primary purpose seemed to be cruelty for its own sake.

Yet even in this hell, human beings found ways to resist, to maintain their humanity, to survive. Prisoners organized secret prayer services and celebrated holidays when they could. They smuggled in extra food for the sick and weak. They sabotaged production in the factories, working slowly or producing defective goods. They formed networks of mutual support, sharing information and resources. Some fought back directly. In August 1943, prisoners at Treblinka staged an armed uprising, seizing weapons from the camp armory and attacking the guards. Approximately 200 prisoners managed to escape, though most were

later recaptured and killed. The camp was closed soon afterward. In October 1944, members of the Sonder Commandoz at Auschwitz-Birkenau rose up against their captors, using explosives smuggled in by women working in a nearby munitions factory. They destroyed crematorium four and killed several SS guards before being overwhelmed. All of the rebels were killed, along with the four women who had provided the explosives. Rosa Robota, Ella Gartner, Regina Saferstein, and Esther Vikesblum, who were hanged in front of the assembled prisoners. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April through May 1943 was the largest act of Jewish resistance during the Holocaust. cost. When SS troops entered the ghetto to deport the remaining inhabitants to Treblinka,

they were met with armed resistance from the Jewish Fighting Organization and the Jewish military union. With only pistols, homemade grenades, and a few rifles and machine guns, several hundred fighters held off German forces for nearly a month. They knew they couldn't win. They fought anyway, choosing to die on their feet rather than in the gas chambers. The leader of the Jewish Fighting Organization, 23-year-old, old Mordecai Anelowich wrote in his final letter, The dream of my life has risen to become fact. Self-defense in the ghetto will have been a reality.

Jewish armed resistance and revenge are facts. I have been a witness to the magnificent heroic fighting of Jewish men of battle. Anjelich died when German troops discovered his bunker on May 8, 1943. He was one of approximately 13,000 Jews killed during the uprising. The remaining 50,000 were deported to the death camps. In the midst of this darkness, there were those who risked everything to help. They are remembered today as the righteous among the nations, non-Jews who, at great personal risk, saved Jewish lives during the Holocaust.

Their numbers were small, pitifully small, given the scale of the genocide. But their stories remind us that moral choice is always possible, even in the most extreme circumstances. Oscar Schindler was an unlikely hero. A German industrialist, Nazi party member, and war profiteer, he came to occupied Poland to make his fortune exploiting cheap Jewish labor. But something changed in him as he witnessed the brutality of the Nazi regime. He began protecting his workers,

bribing officials to keep them out of the camps, eventually relocating his factory to save over a thousand Jews from deportation to Auschwitz. His story was immortalized in Stephen Spitz. Spielberg's film Schindler's List. Raoul Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat stationed in Budapest in 1944 when the Nazi regime was deporting Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz at a rate of 12,000 per day. Using a combination of diplomatic bluster, bribery, and sheer audacity, Wallenberg issued thousands of protective passports and established safehouses throughout the city. He personally pulled Jews off deportation trains, waiving his protective documents and demanding

their release. He saved an estimated 100,000 lives. After the Soviet liberation of Budapest, Wallenberg was arrested by Soviet forces and disappeared into the Gulag, where he is believed to have died. Irene Sindler was a Polish social worker who organized the rescue of approximately 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto. She and her network smuggled children out in ambulances, suitcases, and coffins, hiding them with Catholic families and convents. She kept detailed records of the children's true identities, buried in jars, so they could be reunited with surviving family members after the war. Sindler was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 and tortured, but she refused to reveal any names. She was sentenced to death but escaped execution when her underground network bribed a guard.

Chyuna Sugihara was a Japanese diplomat stationed in Lithuania, who in 1940 issued thousands of transit visas, to Jewish refugees, allowing them to escape through the Soviet Union to Japan and beyond. He continued writing visas even as his train pulled out of the station after his recall, reportedly throwing his visa stamp to refugees on the platform so they could continue issuing documents themselves. He saved an estimated 6,000 lives. Myab Gis and her husband Jan were among the Dutch citizens who hid Anne-Frank's family in a secret annex in Amsterdam for over two years. After the family was betrayed and arrested, Maup recovered Anne's diary and preserved it,

later returning it to Anne's father Otto, the only family member to survive the camps. There were also entire communities that resisted. The village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in France, led by Pastor Andre Trochmey and his wife Magda, sheltered and estimated 5,000 refugees during the war, most of them Jews. The villagers, many of them descendants of Huguenots who had themselves faced religious persecution, created a network of safe houses, forged documents, and escape routes to Switzerland. Denmark stands alone among occupied countries and its organized resistance to the Holocaust. When the Nazi regime ordered the deportation of Danish Jews in October 1943,

Danish citizens, from fishermen to police officers to the king himself, organized a massive rescue operation, ferrying approximately 7,200 Jews to safety in neutral Sweden, in a matter of weeks. Only about 500 Danish Jews were captured and deported, and most of those survived because Denmark kept pressure on the Nazi regime to treat them well. These rescuers came from all backgrounds, all religions, all walks of life. Some were wealthy, many were poor, some acted from religious conviction, others from simple human decency. What they shared was a willingness to see Jews not as members of a despised group, but as human beings, deserving of compassion and protection.

They were too few, far too few. But they existed, and their existence proves that the Holocaust was not inevitable. That at every step, every level, individuals had choices, and that some chose humanity over hatred. By late 1944, the Nazi regime knew it was losing the war. And as Allied forces closed in from both east and west, a horrifying new phase of the Holocaust began. The death marches.

As Soviet forces approached the camps in occupied Poland, the SS evacuated prisoners westward, forcing them to march hundreds of miles in the dead of winter with little food, water, or adequate clothing. Those who fell behind were shot. Those who collapsed from exhaustion were left to die in the snow. An estimated 250,000 prisoners died on these death marches, murdered on the very eve of liberation.

Soviet forces, liberated Maidonik in July 1944 and Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen in April. American forces liberated Buchenwald, Dachau, and Mauthausen. What they found defied comprehension. General Dwight D. Eisenhower insisted on touring the camps personally and bringing journalists and photographers to document the evidence. I made the visit deliberately, he later wrote,

in order to be in a position to give firsthand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to propaganda. Even Eisenhower, a battle-hardened commander who had seen the carnage of modern warfare, was overwhelmed by what he witnessed at Ordruff, a sub-camp of Buchenwald. The things I saw a beggar description, he wrote to his wife. I have never felt able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency. The Liberators found mass graves. They found crematoria still containing human remains.

They found warehouses full of shoes, eyeglasses, human hair, and gold teeth extracted from the murdered. They found survivors who looked like living skeletons, too weak to stand, dying even after liberation because their bodies could no longer process food. The liberation itself was not without tragedy. In some cases, well-meaning soldiers gave starving survivors food that was too rich for their ravaged digestive systems, inadvertently killing those they were trying to save. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages.

Typhus and other diseases continued to claim lives for weeks after liberation. At Bergen-Belsen, approximately 14,000 survivors died after liberation. despite the efforts of British medical personnel. For those who survived, liberation was only the beginning of a new struggle. They emerged from the camps to find their families destroyed. Their communities erased. Their homes occupied by strangers who were often hostile to their return. They were displaced persons in a devastated continent with nowhere to go.

Many survivors found that they couldn't talk about what they had experienced. Their families, even when sympathetic, couldn't really understand. stand. Society wanted to move on, to rebuild, to forget. The Holocaust survivors were living reminders of horrors that people would rather not think about. The international community put some of the perpetrators on trial. At Nuremberg from November 1945 to October 1946, 22 major Nazi leaders faced judgment before an international military tribunal. 12 were sentenced to death, including Herman Goering, who cheated the hangman by committing suicide with cyanide the night before his scheduled execution. Others received prison sentences ranging from 10 years to life.

The Nuremberg trials established crucial legal precedents, including the principle that following orders is not a defense for crimes against humanity. But they barely scratched the surface of justice. The vast majority of those who participated in the Holocaust, the guards who operated the gas chambers, the bureaucrats who organized the transports, the soldiers who shot families into mass graves, were never prosecuted. Many lived out their lives in comfort, their crimes unknown or ignored. Some were hunted down.

Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the deportation system, escaped to Argentina after the war. In 1960, Israeli Mossad agents captured him in Buenos Aires and brought him to Jerusalem to stand trial. The televised proceedings which lasted four months brought the testimony of Holocaust survivors to a global audience for the first time. Eichmann was convicted and hanged on June 1st, 1962, the only execution ever carried out by the state of Israel. The creation of Israel itself was directly shaped by the Holocaust. The horrors of the genocide convinced many,

both Jewish and non-Jewish, that Jews needed a homeland where they could never again be persecuted. as a minority. In November 1947, the United Nations voted to partition British Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. On May 14, 1948, Israel declared independence. The state was populated largely by Holocaust survivors who had nowhere else to go, and refugees who had been turned away from every other country on Earth. And now we must address something deeply disturbing. There are people who claim the Holocaust never happened. Holocaust denial takes many forms. Some deniers claim that the gas chambers never existed,

that the death camps were simply labor camps, that the millions of documented deaths were fabricated or exaggerated. Others acknowledged that Jews died during the war but claimed the numbers were much smaller than reported, or that deaths resulted from disease and wartime conditions rather than deliberate murder. Still others engage in what scholars call soft denial or Holocaust distortion, acknowledging the basic facts while minimizing Nazi responsibility,

emphasizing supposed Jewish provocation, or drawing false equivalences between Nazi crimes and the actions of other nations. Let me be absolutely clear. Holocaust denial is not a legitimate historical debate. It is not a matter of differing interpretations of ambiguous evidence. It is a lie. A deliberate, malicious lie designed to rehabilitate Nazism and make anti-Semitism respectable again. The evidence for the Holocaust is overwhelming.

The Nazi regime kept meticulous records of its crimes. Transport lists document the shipment of millions of Jews to the camps. SS reports tally the numbers killed by the Einzatz Gruppem. The minutes of the Vonsai Conference outlined the plan for the final solution. Construction documents for the gas chambers in crematoria still exist. When confronted with this documentation, deniers typically claim it was forged, a claim that requires believing in a vast, impossible conspiracy spanning multiple countries and generations. The camps themselves still stand.

The gas chambers at Auschwitz, though partially destroyed by the retreating SS, have been preserved and studied. The mass graves at Bobby Yard and hundreds of other sites, have been excavated, revealing the remains of the murdered. The hair, the shoes, the suitcases of the victims fill warehouses and museums. Forensic evidence confirms that the facilities were used exactly as survivors described. Thousands of Nazi perpetrators confessed to their crimes in legal proceedings and private interviews. Rudolf Husse, the commandant of Auschwitz, provided detailed testimony about the operation of the gas chambers before his execution. Adolf Eichmann, on trial in Jerusalem, did not deny the Holocaust.

He merely claimed he was following orders. These confessions cannot be explained away as torture-induced false admissions. Many were given voluntarily without coercion by men who showed no remorse for what they had done. Tens of thousands of Holocaust survivors provided eyewitness accounts of what they experienced and witnessed. Their testimonies collected by organizations like the USC Shawah Foundation and Yad Vigranes, Shem constitute one of the largest oral history archives in human history. The details of these testimonies are consistent with each other and with the documentary and physical evidence.

Deniers claim the survivors are lying, all of them, in a coordinated conspiracy spanning decades. This claim is both absurd and obscene. Non-Jewish witnesses, neighbors, railway workers, local officials, also testified to what they saw. Farmers who live near Treblinka described the smell of burning bodies that permeated the air. Railway workers described the trains packed with Jews heading east, returning empty. German soldiers wrote letters home describing the mass shootings they had witnessed or participated in. The testimony of these witnesses corroborates the accounts of survivors and perpetrators. American, British,

and Soviet forces extensively documented what they found when they liberated the camps. Photographs, films, and written reports were produced by thousands of soldiers from multiple countries, including many who had no particular sympathy for Jews. General Eisenhower's insistence on documentation was specifically intended to prevent future denial. Before the war, approximately 9 million Jews lived in Europe. After the war, approximately 3 million remained. The missing 6 million did not immigrate en masse. immigration records from every possible destination country have been examined and cannot account for more than a small fraction.

They did not die of natural causes over a six-year period. They were murdered. This evidence has been examined and verified by thousands of historians from dozens of countries over more than 75 years. No legitimate historian disputes the basic facts of the Holocaust. The only people who claim it didn't happen are anti-Semites with a political agenda. Why does Holocaust denial matter? Because it is not merely an academic exercise. Denial serves to rehabilitate fascism and make future genocides more possible. If people can be convinced that the Holocaust was a hoax or an exaggeration,

the moral lessons of that history are lost. The prohibition against anti-Semitism loses its force. The vigilance that never again demands becomes unnecessary. Holocaust denial is also deeply painful to, survivors and their descendants. Imagine surviving the gas chambers, losing your entire family, carrying the trauma of that experience for the rest of your life, and then being told by strangers that it never happened, that you're lying, that your suffering was invented for political gain. In many European countries, Holocaust denial is illegal, not because those nations want to

suppress free speech, but because they recognize denial for what it is, a form of hate speech that defames the dead and encourages violence against the living. In the United States, Holocaust denial is protected speech under the First Amendment, but that legal protection does not make it any less morally reprehensible. If you encounter Holocaust denial, online in books and conversation, know what you're dealing with. It is not honest historical inquiry. It is bigotry dressed up in scholarly clothing.

It deserves not engagement, but contempt. The Holocaust did not end when the camps were liberated. Its effects continue to ripple through generations, shaping the lives of survivors' children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren in ways that researchers are only beginning to understand. Survivors of the Holocaust experienced trauma on a scale that defies conventional psychological categories. They witnessed the murder of their families. They endured years of starvation, brutality, and the constant threat of death.

They lost not just loved ones but entire communities, entire ways of life. And they emerged into a world that didn't want to hear about what they had experienced. Many survivors responded by never speaking of the camps at all. They built new lives, raised families, pursued careers, while carrying their memories in silence. Their children grew up knowing that something terrible had happened, sensing the weight of unspoken grief, but forbidden from asking questions that might cause pain.

This conspiracy of silence was intended to protect, but it often created its own damage. Researchers have documented what they call intergenerational trauma or transgenerational trauma, the transmission of psychological effects from Holocaust survivors to their descendants. Children of survivors often describe growing up with a pervasive sense of anxiety, a feeling that the world is fundamentally unsafe, an obligation to compensate for the lives that were lost. Some have called themselves memorial candles, living tributes to murdered relatives they never knew. Studies have shown that children of Holocaust survivors have higher rates of PTSD, depression, and anxiety than comparison groups.

They often report difficulty forming attachments, excessive worry about the safety of loved ones, and a heightened startle response. Some research suggests that the effects extend even to the third generation, the grandchildren of survivors, though these findings are more contested. Perhaps most remarkably there is emerging evidence of epigenetic transmission of trauma, changes in gene expression that can be passed from traumatized individuals to their offspring. A landmark study by Rachel Yehuda and her colleagues found that children of Holocaust survivors had altered levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, and changes in the gene that regulates cortisol all production. The finding suggests that extreme trauma may literally change the biology of future

generations. This research is still in its early stages, and its implications are debated. But it points to something that survivors and their families have long known intuitively. The Holocaust did not just kill six million people. It wounded countless others, and those wounds have not fully healed. For Jewish communities worldwide, the Holocaust remains a defining trauma. It shapes religious observance, with new holidays and rituals commemorating the dead. It shapes Israeli policy, with the memory of persecution and forming security decisions. It shapes Jewish identity itself, the sense of belonging to a people that the world once tried to destroy, and that must remain vigilant against such attempts in the future.

But the legacy of the Holocaust extends beyond the Jewish community. It has shaped international law with the Nuremberg-Prince. and the Genocide Convention establishing that certain crimes are offenses against humanity itself. It has shaped education, with Holocaust studies now taught in schools around the world. It has shaped art, literature, and film, from Ailey Weasel's Knight to Art Spiegelman's Mouse, to the countless movies and documentaries that have grappled with this history. And it has, or should have, shaped our understanding of human nature itself. The Holocaust forces us to confront uncomfortable truths about what ordinary people are capable of under certain conditions.

It shows us how propaganda and dehumanization can lead to mass murder. It warns us about the dangers of unchecked nationalism, racism, and authoritarianism. As I bring this episode to a close, I find myself reflecting on why this history still matters, why we must continue to tell these stories, to visit these sites, To bear witness to what happened. It matters because genocide did not end with the Holocaust. Since 1945, the world has witnessed mass atrocities in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, and elsewhere. The cry of Never Again has become bitterly ironic, a pledge honored more in the breach than the observance.

Understanding how the Holocaust happened, how an educated, civilized society descended into industrialized murder, is essential if we are to have any hope of preventing future genocides. It matters because anti-Semitism is not a relic of the past. In recent years, anti-Semitic incidents have risen sharply in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere. Synagogues have been attacked. Jewish cemeteries have been vandalized. Jewish students on college campuses report feeling unsafe.

Online platforms are awash in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that echo the rhetoric of the 1930s. The hatred that fueled the Holocaust is not dead. It is merely dormant, waiting for conditions that will allow it to flourish again. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. It matters because the last survivors are dying.

Soon there will be no one left who can say, I was there. I saw it with my own eyes. It happened. When that day comes, the Holocaust will pass from living memory into history, and history can be distorted, denied, forgotten. We must preserve the testimonies of survivors while they still live, and honor those testimonies after they are gone. It matters because memory is an act of resistance. The Nazi regime did not just want to kill Jews.

It wanted to erase all evidence that they had ever existed. The SS burned documents, demolished gas chambers dug up and burned mass graves in a desperate attempt to hide their crimes. By remembering, by saying their names, by telling their stories, by refusing to let them be forgotten, we defy that intention. We insist that these six million people mattered, that their lives had value, that their deaths must not be consigned to oblivion. And it matters because we are all capable of both great evil and great good. The Holocaust was not committed by monsters from another planet. It was committed by human beings. Human beings who loved their families, who celebrated holidays, who laughed at jokes and worried about their jobs. If they were capable of such crimes, so are we. But the rescuers

who risked their lives to save strangers were also human beings. If they were capable of such courage, so are we. The choice between those paths is not made once in some dramatic moment of decision. It is made every day, in small choices, in how we speak about people who are different from us, and whether we speak up when we witness injustice, and whether we teach our children to see the humanity in everyone. The weight of the Holocaust is heavy, but we must carry it. We must carry it so that the dead are not forgotten, so that the survivor's testimony is honored, so that the lessons of history are not lost. Because if we forget, If we allow this memory to fade, then we condemn ourselves to face this darkness again.

I want to end this episode differently than usual. I'm not going to leave you with a clever closing line or a teaser for next week. Instead, I want to read some names. These are just a few of the six million, a tiny fraction, a few drops in an ocean of loss. But each name was a person, a life as complex and valuable as your own. Anne Frank, you know her name. A teenage girl who dreamed of being a writer, who hid in an Amsterdam attic for two years, who died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen just weeks before liberation.

Her diary, preserved by Miep. Gies, has been translated into over 70 languages. Janusz Kourchak, a Polish-Jewish pediatrician and children's author who ran an orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto. When the children were deported to Treblinka, Korchak was offered the chance to save himself. He refused, accompanying his 200 orphans to the gas chambers so they would not face death alone. Eddie Hillisome, a young Dutch Jewish woman whose diaries and letters chronicle her spiritual growth during the Nazi occupation. She volunteered to accompany deportees to the transit camp at Westerbork, where she worked in the hospital. She was murdered at Auschwitz at age 29. Maximilian Colba, a Polish Franciscan friar who volunteered to take the place of a

stranger selected for death by starvation at Auschwitz. He died after two weeks in the starvation bunker, finally killed by lethal injection of carbolic acid. The man he saved, Franchizek Gajevnik, survived the war and lived until 1995. Mala Zemitbaum and Edek Galensky, lovers who attempted to escape from Auschwitz together in 1944. They were captured and sentenced to death. Before she could be hanged, Mala slashed. her wrists with a razor blade and slapped the SS officer who tried to stop her. She was taken to the crematorium alive, Emmanuel Ringleblum, a historian who organized a secret archive of life in the Warsaw ghetto, hiding documents in milk churns and metal boxes buried beneath the ruins. The archive

known as Oneg Shabbat was recovered after the war and remains one of the most important primary sources on the Holocaust. Ringleblum was discovered in hiding and executed in 14, Hannah Sinesh, a Hungarian-born Jewish poet who immigrated to Palestine and later parachuted behind enemy lines as a British special operative to rescue Hungarian Jews. She was captured, tortured, and executed by firing squad at age 23. Her poetry is still recited in Israel today, these names, and six million more. Each won a universe, extinguished.