THE HOLOCAUST

Holocaust

"They came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for me and by that time no one was left to speak up." A poem by Martin Niemöller.

The yellow triangle-Christy Moore

This song is very melancholic and it explains how the prisoners were obliged to wear fabric triangles on their uniforms. The triangles had different colours: Jews wore yellow triangle overlapped by a Devid star, political prisoners wore a red triangle, homosexuals a pink triangle, Jehovah's Witnesses a purple triangle, common criminals a green triangle, asocials a black triangle, brown triangle for the Gypsies, white triangle for the work strikers and, finally, blue triangle for the war prisoners.

Holocaust is a Greek word that means "total distruction". It is used to refer to the death of millions of people during the WWII. jHitler believed Jews, homosexuals, gypsies... didn't deserve a place in the German empire. Then in 1935 he passed the Nuremberg Laws, which stopped the marriage between Jews and non-Jews. From 1940s on, Jews were forced to live in ghettos where living conditions were terrible. In 1941 the Nazis built concentration camps in Eastern Europe, where the people were shot, poisoned and starved to death. One of this camps was Auschwitz, in Poland. The horror of Hitler's camps was fully revealed at the end of the war, in 1945, when the Allies marched into them.