PERCORSO: UN MONDO A COLORI

Inglese – Slide Schindler

In 1933, Adolf Hitler won the German elections and became the Chancellor of
Germany. The name of his political party was the National Socialist German Workers'
Party. In German people called it the Nazi Party. The Nazis believed that only their
party should control Germany. They destroyed all other political parties. The Nazis
were also anti-Semitic. This meant that they hated Jews, so Hitler made laws against
the jewish people. Jews had to wear yellow stars so that everyone could see that they
were Jews. They couldn't teach in schools for example. The Nazis sent the Jews to
prison camps, called concentration camps. Life in the camps was hard and there was
no food. Many people died from exhaustion and hunger. But this was not enough for
Hitler. He built gas chambers and thousands more Jews died from the poison gas. The
largest concentration camp was Auschwitz in Poland. The Nazis built it in 1940, and in
the five years until the end of the war in 1945, more than one million people died
there. In total, around 6 million Jewish people died because of the Nazis. This
destruction of human life is called the Holocaust. Today many countries have a
Holocaust Memorial Day, including Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Israel. Israel has
its own special memorial day. The first international Holocaust Memorial day was in
2001. Every year it is on 27th January, the day that the Soviet army liberated the
Auschwitz concentration camp. On Memorial Day people remember the crimes against
humans in history, and make promises to accept everyone in the future.
Un important witness of the life in this period of war is the diary of Anne Frank. The
Frank family were German Jews. They moved to Holland in 1933 to escape from the
Nazis, but in 1940 Germany invaded Holland. The Frank family hid in secret rooms in a
house in Amsterdam for two years. The daughter, Anne, wrote a diary which is now
very famous. In 1944, soldiers discovered Anne and her family and took them to
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The whole family, apart from Anne's father, died
there. Anne died a month before the Allies liberated Belsen in 1945.
Oskar Schindler was a German industrialist who became a hero of World War II when
he saved hundreds of Jews from death in Nazi concentration camps. Oskar Schindler
was born in 1908 in Moravia, which is now the Czech Republic. His family was Catholic
and his father had a small factory. When Oskar finished school, he worked there. He
married Emilie in 1928 and did a lot of different jobs, but he was never very successful.
In 1938, the Czech police arrested him because he was working as a spy for the Nazi
party, but they freed him. The next year he joined the Nazi party. After the German
occupation in Poland, Schindler bought a factory in Krakow who called ‘Emalia’: it
made cooking equipment; he employed workers from the large Jewish community of
the city. Schindler became friendly with some Nazi officers to protect the Jewish
workers in his factory. In 1944, Schindler had to move his factory to Brunnlitz, so he
made a list of all the workers he needed for his business. In this list there were more
than 1200 people, in this way he saved them from the Nazi concentration camp. The
new factory produced arms for the Nazis, but Schindler made sure that they were
useless. The day after the war ended, Schindler and his wife escaped to Argentina
because he was afraid of arrest for war crimes. The Jewish people was grateful to
Oskar, they gave him the honour of Righteous Gentile in Israel. He died in 1974 and
was buried in Israel. In 1993, Steven Spielberg made a film about him, called
Schindler’s list. In some scenes we can see some colored parts that are symbolic in the
film such as the candles and the girl with the red coat. They were special effects
created by the director. It was a cinema revolution.