The Holocaust remains one of the darkest chapters in human history, filled with unimaginable suffering as well as extraordinary courage, resilience, and acts of compassion. These 30 facts explore lesser-known stories and events that continue to shape our understanding of the Holocaust and why its lessons remain so important today.
Secret Auschwitz Images
1. The Sonderkommando photographs are four blurry images secretly captured in August 1944 by a prisoner at Auschwitz. They are the only known photographs of events near the gas chambers.
2. Rutka Laskier was a Jewish girl from Poland who died in Auschwitz at age 14. She kept a diary that described her experiences under Nazi occupation. Her diary was published in 2006, and she became known as the “Polish Anne Frank.”
3. Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish priest who offered to die in another man’s place in Auschwitz after hearing him cry out for his wife and children. The man he saved, Mr. Gajowniczek, died in 1995 at the age of 93.
4. The Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust, the first of its kind in the United States, was established in 1961 by a group of Holocaust survivors who met in ESL classes at Hollywood High School. Their personal artifacts, photographs, and memories formed the museum’s first main collection.
5. During the Holocaust, Jews put God on trial and found him guilty.
6. Gay men who were victims of the Holocaust and wore the downward-pointing pink triangle were still treated as criminals after being released from concentration camps. They were frequently sent back to prison to complete their sentences.
7. In the Holocaust, Polish physicians Eugene Lazowski and Stanisław Matulewicz rescued 8,000 Jews by inventing a false typhus outbreak. Rather than risk an epidemic, the Germans quarantined the area instead of sending them to concentration camps.
8. When Holocaust survivor Mila Pfefferberg, shown second from the left in the image, met Ralph Fiennes on the set of Schindler’s List, she started trembling uncontrollably because he reminded her far too much of the real Amon Goeth.
9. While Adolf Eichmann, known as the architect of the Holocaust, was being tried for his war crimes, he could not pay for the lawyer he wanted. To avoid giving anyone grounds to doubt the trial’s legitimacy, the Israeli government covered the cost of having him represented by the attorney he selected.
10. Up to 40% of Belarus’s population was killed during the Holocaust there. The Minsk ghetto held 100,000 Jews, each given 1.5 meters of space and no space at all for children. The Nazis intended to murder 75% of Belorussians, while those with blond hair and blue eyes would be permitted to live as slaves for Germans.
Child Rescue in Warsaw
11. Polish social worker Irena Sendler smuggled about 2,500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto, then gave them false identity papers and shelter outside the Ghetto, saving those children from the Holocaust.
12. Holocaust denial is illegal in 16 countries, especially Hungary, where it can lead to up to 3 years in prison.
13. During the Holocaust, a Jewish woman named Stella Kübler turned in between 600 and 3000 hiding Jews to the Gestapo so her family would not be sent to a concentration camp. Even after the Nazis sent her parents and husband to Auschwitz anyway in 1943, she kept working for the Gestapo until 1945.
14. The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin has an anti-graffiti chemical, and it was made by the same company that produced the Zyklonn B gas used in concentration camp gas chambers during World War 2.
15. The screams of people being gassed during the Holocaust were so disturbing that SS Officers would rev motorcycles to drown them out. This did not work, so they built gas chambers offsite.
16. As surrealist poet Robert Desnos began reading the palms of fellow prisoners headed for the Nazi gas chambers, his enthusiasm spread so strongly as he foretold long life, many children, and plenty of happiness that the guards could not carry out the executions.
17. Pregnant women in Auschwitz were told they would get twice as much food, but instead they were sent to the gas chambers.
18. In 1945, Dwight D. Eisenhower anticipated that people would attempt to dismiss the Holocaust as untrue, and he ordered countless photographs of Nazi crimes to be taken to block such efforts.
19. After Reinhard Heydrich died, his brother Heinz Heydrich read Reinhard’s SS and Gestapo files and then assisted Jews in escaping the Holocaust.
20. A Jewish boxer named Salamo Arouch was held in Auschwitz and made to fight other prisoners. Those who lost were sent to the gas chambers or shot. He lived through more than 2 years and 200 fights, and was eventually freed when the camp was liberated.
Grandfather Saved Jewish Lives
21. Helena Bonham Carter’s maternal grandfather, Eduardo Propper de Callejon, rescued thousands of Jews during World War 2 and the Holocaust.
22. Following World War 2, a Jewish group calling themselves the “Avengers” devised a plan for Holocaust revenge to poison the water supplies of many German cities and kill 6 million Germans. British police stopped the plan while the poison was being transported.
23. A Hungarian Jew who had survived the Mathausen concentration camp joined the U.S. Army. During the Korean War, an anti-Semitic sergeant intentionally gave him dangerous duties, and he was later captured as a P.O.W. For 30 months, he kept himself and his unit alive by slipping out and stealing food, a technique he had learned in the German concentration camp.
24. A Holocaust denial organization promised $50,000 to anyone able to show that gas chambers were used to deliberately kill people at Auschwitz. A judge compelled them to pay that sum, plus another $40,000, to Auschwitz survivor Mel Mermelstein after he supplied proof of that exact fact.
25. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, ordered gas chambers to be built because he worried about the effect firing squads were having on his men.
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