What Was the Holocaust? [Paperback]

A thoughtful and age-appropriate introduction to an unimaginable event—the Holocaust.

The Holocaust was a genocide on a scale never before seen, with as many as twelve million people killed in Nazi death camps—six million of them Jews. Gail Herman traces the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, whose rabid anti-Semitism led first to humiliating anti-Jewish laws, then to ghettos all over Eastern Europe, and ultimately to the Final Solution. She presents just enough information for an elementary-school audience in a readable, well-researched book that covers one of the most horrible times in history.

This entry in theNew York Timesbest-selling series contains eighty carefully chosen illustrations and sixteen pages of black and white photographs suitable for young readers.Gail Herman has written several young biographies for children, includingWho Was Jackie Robinson?What Was the Holocaust?
 

May 1945: Volary, a small town in what is now the Czech Republic
 
Gerda Weissmann stood outside an old bicycle factory. She weighed sixty-five pounds. Her hair was white, although she was not even twenty-one. 
 
Inside the empty building, dozens of women lay on straw. Most were sick. Many were dying. Like Gerda, they were all Jewish. For many years they had suffered under the rule of Nazi Germany.
 
For Gerda, the horror had begun six years earlier.
 
It was late summer. She was fifteen years old. And she had just come home from vacation. On September 1, 1939, the weather was glorious, the sky a bright blue. Suddenly, German airplanes blocked the sun. They roared over Gerda’s home in Bielsko, Poland. Tanks rolled down the streets. The German army was invading Poland.
 
It was the start of World War II, which lasted in Europe until May of 1945.
 
Many local people waved Nazi flags. They cheered for their new leader, Adolf Hitler. They wel³°