My Journal

August 2008

2008-08-10T15:48:00.002-05:00

Well, it's been like almost 3 months since i last posted, and if i remember correctly i wrote about the vacation i took and about the last few days of my first year of college....

Not a whole lot has happened since then except at the beginning of July i went on a mission trip to the Rosebud Indian Reservation which is about 5 hours from where i live, and we taught kids about God, and played games with them, and provided care for them from ten in the morning till three in the afternoon. At the end of the day i was tired but managed to stay awake until i went to bed. It was a fun week because my little sister also went so i had her with me. Also, my sister's friend came with us so we had so much fun. One of the kids who went with us, is a foster child so we learned all about how he is a ward of the state. That mens, that the state owns him but his foster parents are given rights to him. It was a very interesting conversation and i enjoyed learning about the foster system and what happens to foster kids when they come of age (age 18).

A few days ago, we got back from our family reunion in Iowa. We pitched tents in my uncles yard and went on hikes, and went to the pond and took pictures of the sunset, and took pictures of each other being goofy. We had a professional picture taken this year and my Uncle Lee said that we should not bring anything trendy, it just had to be approriate, BUT, me and my cousin were wondering what trendy was. So we both agreed to bring our "trendiest" clothes, we really didn't bring anything trendy but we wanted to see how the others would react when we told them that we only brought our trendiest clothes along with us.

It did not rain the entire reunion which was awesome, but it was hot, and the first morning we woke up and the tent was alll dewy..which wasn't that bud but my mistake was i bumped the tent and all the water dripped inside of the tent. so i made a mistake the very first morning. BUT i learned from it and the next times i did not bump the side of the tent so all the water soaked into the tent. The last day of our reunon we walked to the pond which was about a ten minute walk and went for a boat ride on the pond. it was fun, i was in the first crew, when the second set of cousins went, we threw rocks in the water to try to freak them out...it actually worked and my sister Malorie looked so scared..even though the little ones got a kick out of it, i was afraid that one would actually hit one of my little cuties in the boat. I am very glad that nothing injured one of my little cousins.

This coming Thursday i'm going to Chicago and i will be staying their for the 3 days after that..I am really excited to go, i'm going on a plane all by myself..YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

But i'll write more about that when i get back..

Until next time!!!!

The past week..

2008-05-25T21:06:00.002-05:00

The past week has been AWESOME, let me start from the beginning starting with Friday May 16th Which would turn out to be the start of the week of fun.!!!!! WOOT WOOT!!!!!!!

Friday May 16 started out like any ordinary day except that i was up at six thirty in the Morning which is NOT cool because i could have slept an extra half hour. but, Oh well, it was ok that i did because well, i went to bed earlier then i usually do on the fifteenth. ANYWAYS...after school i went to work as usual until 11:30 am. Then work, but the thing was i got off work at 3:30. And this is where the FUN begins...

So, after getting off of work at 3:30 i went home, changed into a pair of shorts, said good-by to my sister Sarah hoped into the SUV and we were on our way to our FUN weekend in Chicago!!! But, we had a problem Malorie forgot her laptop in her room so we had to drive back home to get it from Starbuchs which is about a 10 minute drive from where we live. So, we went back, got it and about a minute and a half later we were on our way...Again...this time we drove 3 hours before we stopped in Missouri Valley for dinner, and oh was it good :)

After Missouri Valley, we drove to Des Moines, which was probably another hour and a half drive and checked into our hotel, it had TEN FLOORS....i was awesome the elevators lit up when they went up and down!! The internet was stupid tho, it wouldn't let us on Facebook. Maybe the Sheraton outlawed facebook since all the guests were going on it and staying on it way to long. Who knows, oh well, life does not revolve around facebook. ANYWAY, i slept on the most uncomfy matteress in the world but i slept OK because i woke up at six twenty on Saturday morning. But that meant, we left earlier to go to Chicago then we planned, and by early i mean fourty five minutes :)!! WOOT WOOT..

Then we drove until Iowa City, at BRUNCH breakfast and lunch squashed into one Pretty tight if u ask me. Then we got to the great city of Chicago at around 12:30 which was exactly when i sad we would get their...BOY AM I GOOD EH!!!!!!!!!!! Then, when we got their we drove around and saw everything we LOVED when we lived their 4 years ago and the 9 years before that!!! It was so so so so so cool!!!! I spent from like 5 hours with my friend Danae at her house..She has 7 siblings, and i knew who each one was, even after not seeing em for the past four years...i gave myself a pat on the back!!!!

We stayed in a hotel, my dad said "we are going their for sleeping not for swimming" because he wasn't sure if their was a pool..it wasn't a problem because we didn't have time to go for a swim anyway because our schedule was so packed with FUN!!! ANYWAY, we had so much fun, we went to the park, played on the computer, went on facebook (OK i admit it i am so so so very much addicted to facebook!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) he he he i'm a lil rebel ha ha ha ha ha ha

Well the end of our awessome 3 days was Sunday at 2:30 when we piled into our SUV and hoped on I-80 and drove home. But, the one thing that changed the trip was the phone call saying that a lady who my family was really close to died five minutes before we jumped on the hiway....that changed the trip because we didn't really talk the rest of the trip, we were all just sort of quiet n somber, but, we cheered up again..no need to worry bout that part!!!! We got home at about quarter to eleven that night so then i took a shower went right to bed and started the week freshly when i woke up!!!

Then this past Wednesday I STARTED SUMMER BREAK WHOOO HOO!!!!! so now i work everyday from ten in the morning till three in the afternnon which ROCKS!!!!!!!!!!! so yea

Well, i'll close this post with a question..

WHAT IN THE WORLD IS A FALAFEL????????? my thought before i saw the spelling was that it was a philosopher and a waffle squashed together....What do u think??? What exactly is a falafel???????????????

YOU, can be the judge of that!!!!!!!!

May 14

2008-05-14T23:21:00.003-05:00

Here is a picture that i believe i am thinking

MY SISTER IS GOING TO KILL ME... when in actuality, my mom just needed to finish up the roll of film beccause my parents haven't evolved into the new technological era and haven't bought a digital camera...

ENJOY THE PICTURE!!!

LOL

Lemme know what you think!!! OH, and i'm n the gray sweatshirt, and since this was taken, i got my hair cut to above my shoulders so yea i think i look pretty sexy now...LOL

BON VOYAGE

My Adventures..

2008-05-12T08:42:00.002-05:00

Friday night, i babysait Lily, she is really fun. she has a load of energy that i hope my future kids have one day. she is into climbing things so she climbed up the piano and was standing on the keys..it was pretty cute but i didn't want her to fall so i took her down before a major disaster happened. Then, she started to climb up her dresser which is right next to her crib and sat on it and played with her lamp on the dresser, that was the cutest thing EVER.

Right now they are building a new house becasue their current house is really small and they are expecting their second baby the first week of August. so, they need a bigger house, their house right now is like a big square with about 3 smaller squares attached, so, it's time to upgrade to a bigger house. I personally hope that Lily gets a baby sister because Baby girls are so much fun!! i hope that someday i get married and my first baby is a girl, i'd totally name her Lily, after my lil friend i babysat. I absolutely LOVE that name.

When Candy (Lily's mom) brougth me home, she asked me what my rate was, when i told her i didn't have one, she said i should get one..so how bout i say like 5 bucks an hour....is that reasonable??????? but what if i babysit like 10 hours for one kid????? HA HA, i'm pretty sure that wouuld NEVER happpen but, someday i might. I have to admit though that at my job now, it's kind of like babysitting. so yea. that was my adventures on Friday night

The rest of the weekend was pretty blah....but, hopefully it will get better...HOPEFULLY!!!!!!

Well

I'll write more later

HASTA LUEGO

untitled post

2008-05-08T19:14:00.004-05:00

My sister Sarah Graduates from Dordt tomorrow.. i, as well as my sister are not going, we are actually going to be learning. Malorie will not be working, but i will be, and then i'll be babysitting..YAY

Also tomorrow i get to babysit my friend Lily, she is a year and a half old and she is just the cutest kid EVER, she is my old small group leader's kid. i miss small groups, that's the thing about small groups, when you get into college, you no longer have one. I wish there was a small group for college sudents. i may just have to bring that up with the church council..hmmmm it would be so cool to have a group just for college kids to hang out and talk!!!!!

Next week Friday my mom, dad, sister Malorie, and I are going 2 Chicago Illinois. This is the town where we lived for like 19 years or something like that i honestly do not remember because i was a baby when we moved their, so yea, i guess about 2o years, because I will turn 20 on July 29!! YAY. I may want to have a party, i may just plan it myself. I wonder who would come to my awesome party...For my party i'd probably invite Rachel, Nathan, Jenae, Steve, Chris, Brittany, Jonah, Kyle, Aaron, Jessica, Sarah, Erin. and many more of my friends but i can not remember their names right now. Sorry guys!!

I know my last post was REALLY LONG!! but, it had a lot of awesome content, and some parts of it made me teary eyed because of what happened to the innocent Jews. Some of the Pictures are very awesome to. i don't remember if the pictures got onto the post BUT, they were life changing for me. I have to admit that the Holocaust was the worst time in our world's history, and that it was considered cruel and unusual punishment. I wish i could just write a nice long book about how much i despise certain things that happened in our nations history. Maybe i will actually go through with it in a year or 2, or three, or four, or five, or whenver i feel like it.

The first day of May we had a huge storm with rain, hail, thunder, AND lightning. It was pretty much the coolest thing in the entire world. then, the next night, or the night after that it repeated itself. I am so in love with really big thunderstorms because they show that God is in control and he can control the weather and make it how he wants it to be, including letting it snow about 3 days before the end of the month of April..)

On my Xanga blog, i asked a question that goes something like this: What is your favorite memory? I answered my own question in my post. you willl have to go and read it, the URL (universal resoucre locater) is www.xanga.com/ktgirl465 I hope you will also become a member, and tell me what you Favorite memory is. Memories are a good thing to have, Especially when you have to create a memory book your Senior year of High school so your teacher can read all bout your favorite things that you remember from throughout your entire life.

Well, i better go, i'm pretty sure i have to be up earlier then i usually am tomorrow morning so my parents can get to my sisters graduation ceremony on time. SO..

I'll write again sometime

Hopefully that time won't be that far away

BON VOYAGE!!!

Something about the Holocaust

2008-05-08T13:58:00.002-05:00

Here is som pretty cool information i found about the Holocaust on the internet:

The Holocaust (from the Greek ὁλόκαυστον (holókauston): holos, "completely" and kaustos, "burnt"), also known as Ha-Shoah (Hebrew: השואה), Churben (Yiddish: חורבן), is the term generally used to describe the genocide of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by the National Socialist regime in Germany led by Adolf Hitler.[2]
Other groups were persecuted and killed by the regime, including the Roma; Soviets, particularly prisoners of war; ethnic Poles; other Slavic people; the disabled; gay men; and political and religious dissidents, such as Jehovah's witnesses.[3][4] Many scholars do not include these groups in the definition of the Holocaust, defining it as the genocide of the Jews,[5] or what the Nazis called the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question." Taking into account all the victims of Nazi persecution, the death toll rises considerably: estimates generally place the total number of victims at nine to 11 million.[6]
The persecution and genocide were accomplished in stages. Legislation to remove the Jews from civil society was enacted years before the outbreak of World War II. Concentration camps were established in which inmates were used as slave labour until they died of exhaustion or disease. Where the Third Reich conquered new territory in eastern Europe, specialized units called Einsatzgruppen murdered Jews and political opponents in mass shootings. Jews and Roma were crammed into ghettos before being transported hundreds of miles by freight train to extermination camps where, if they survived the journey, the majority of them were killed in gas chambers. Every arm of Germany's bureaucracy was involved in the logistics of the mass murder, turning the country into what one Holocaust scholar has called "a genocidal state."[7]
The Holocaust
Early elements
Racial policy · Nazi eugenics · Nuremberg Laws · Forced euthanasia · Concentration camps (list)
Jews
Jews in Nazi Germany 1933–9
Pogroms: Kristallnacht · Bucharest · Dorohoi · Iaşi · Kaunas · Jedwabne · Lviv
Ghettos: Łachwa · Łódź · Lwów · Kraków · Budapest · Theresienstadt · Kovno · Vilna · Warsaw
Einsatzgruppen: Babi Yar · Rumbula · Ponary · Odessa · Erntefest
Final Solution: Wannsee · Operation Reinhard · Holocaust trains
Extermination camps: Auschwitz-Birkenau · Bełżec · Chełmno · Majdanek · Sobibór · Treblinka
Resistance: Jewish partisans · Ghetto uprisings (Warsaw)
End of World War II: Death marches · Berihah · Displaced persons
Other victims
Roma · Homosexuals · Disabled individuals · Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians · Poles · Soviet POWs
Responsible parties
Nazi Germany: Hitler · Himmler · Kaltenbrunner · Heydrich · Eichmann · SS · Gestapo · SA
Collaborators
Aftermath: Nuremberg Trials · Denazification · Reparations Agreementbetween Israel and West Germany
Lists
Survivors · Victims · Rescuers
Resources
The Destruction of the European Jews Functionalism versus intentionalism
v • d • e
Contents[hide]
1 Etymology and use of the term
1.1 Definition
2 Distinctive features
2.1 Compliance of Germany's institutions
2.2 The dominance of ideology and the scale of the genocide
2.3 Medical experiments
3 Victims and death toll
3.1 Jews
3.2 Slavs
3.2.1 Soviet POWs
3.2.2 Ethnic Poles
3.2.3 South and East Slavs
3.3 Roma
3.4 Disabled and mentally ill
3.5 Gay men
3.6 Freemasons and Jehovah's Witnesses
3.7 Political activists
3.8 Christians
4 Development and execution
4.1 Origins
4.2 Increasing persecution and pogroms (1938–1942)
4.3 Madagascar plan
4.4 Early measures in Poland
4.5 Concentration and labor camps (1933–1945)
4.6 Ghettos (1940–1945)
4.7 Death squads (1941–1943)
4.8 Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution (1942–1945)
4.9 Extermination camps
4.9.1 Gas chambers
4.10 Jewish resistance
4.11 Climax
4.12 Escapes, publication of news of the death camps (April–June 1944)
4.13 Death marches (1944–1945)
4.14 Liberation
5 See also
5.1 Involvement of other countries and nationals
5.2 Aftermath and historiography
5.3 Miscellaneous
6 Notes
7 Further reading
//

Etymology and use of the term
Main article: Names of the Holocaust
The term holocaust originally derived from the Greek word holókauston, meaning a "completely (holos) burnt (kaustos)" sacrificial offering to a god. Its Latin form (holocaustum) was first used with specific reference to a massacre of Jews by the chroniclers Roger of Howden [8] and Richard of Devizes [9] in the 1190s. Since the late 19th century, it has been used primarily to refer to disasters or catastrophes.
The biblical word Shoa (שואה) (also spelled Shoah and Sho'ah), meaning "calamity," became the standard Hebrew term for the Holocaust as early as the 1940s.[10] Shoa is preferred by many Jews for a number of reasons, including the theologically offensive nature of the original meaning of "holocaust."

Definition
The word "holocaust" has been used since the 18th century to refer to the violent deaths of a large number of people.[11] For example, Winston Churchill and other contemporaneous writers used it before World War II to describe the Armenian Genocide of World War I. [12] In the 1960s the word was most commonly used as a reference to nuclear war. Since the mid 1970s its use has been increasingly restricted, and it is now mainly used to describe the Nazi Holocaust, spelled with a capital H.[13]
"Holocaust" was adopted as a translation of "Shoah" — a Hebrew word connoting catastrophe, calamity, disaster and destruction [14] — which was used in 1940 in Jerusalem in a booklet called Sho'at Yehudei Polin, and translated as The Holocaust of the Jews of Poland. "Shoah" had earlier been used in the context of the Nazis as a translation of "catastrophe"; for example, in 1934, Chaim Weizmann told the Zionist Action Committee that Hitler's rise to power was an "unvorhergesehene Katastropha, etwa ein neur Weltkrieg" ("an unforeseen catastrophe, perhaps even a new world war"); the Hebrew press translated "Katastropha" as "Shoah."[15] In the spring of 1942, the Jerusalem historian BenZion Dinur (Dinaburg) used "Shoah" in a book published by the United Aid Committee for the Jews in Poland to describe the extermination of Europe's Jews, calling it a "catastrophe" that symbolized the unique situation of the Jewish people.[14][16] The word "Shoah" was chosen in Israel to describe the Holocaust, the term institutionalized by the Knesset on April 12, 1951, when it established Yom Ha-Shoah Ve Mered Ha-Getaot, the national day of remembrance. By the 1950s, its translation, "Holocaust," popularized by Yad Vashem, had come routinely to refer to the genocide of the European Jews.[10][15]
The usual German term for the extermination of the Jews during the Nazi period was the euphemistic phrase Endlösung der Judenfrage (the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question"). In both English and German, "Final Solution" is widely used as an alternative to "Holocaust".[17] For a time after WWII, German historians also used the term Völkermord ("genocide"), or in full, der Völkermord an den Juden ("the genocide of the Jewish people"), while the prevalent term in Germany today is either Holocaust or increasingly Shoah.
The word "holocaust" is also used in a wider sense to describe other actions of the Nazi regime. These include the killing of around half a million Roma and Sinti, the deaths of several million Soviet prisoners of war, along with slave laborers, gay men, Jehovah's Witnesses, the disabled, and political opponents. The use of the word in this wider sense is objected to by many Jewish organizations, particularly those established to commemorate the Jewish Holocaust. Jewish organizations say that the word in its current sense was originally coined to describe the extermination of the Jews, and that the Jewish Holocaust was a crime on such a scale, and of such specificity, as the culmination of the long history of European antisemitism, that it should not be subsumed into a general category with the other crimes of the Nazis.
Even more hotly disputed is the extension of the word to describe events that have no connection with World War II. The terms "Rwandan Holocaust" and "Cambodian Holocaust" are used to refer to the Rwanda genocide of 1994 and the mass killings by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia respectively, and "African Holocaust" is used to describe the slave trade and the colonization of Africa, also known as the Maafa.

Distinctive features

Compliance of Germany's institutions

Ghettos were established in Europe in which Jews were confined before being shipped to extermination camps.

The Nazis methodically tracked the progress of the Holocaust in thousands of reports and documents. Pictured is the Höfle Telegram sent to Adolf Eichmann in January, 1943, that reported that 1,274,166 Jews had been killed in the four Aktion Reinhard camps during 1942.
Michael Berenbaum writes that Germany became a "genocidal state."[7] Every arm of the country's sophisticated bureaucracy was involved in the killing process. Parish churches and the Interior Ministry supplied birth records showing who was Jewish; the Post Office delivered the deportation and denaturalization orders; the Finance Ministry confiscated Jewish property; German firms fired Jewish workers and disenfranchised Jewish stockholders; the universities refused to admit Jews, denied degrees to those already studying, and fired Jewish academics; government transport offices arranged the trains for deportation to the camps; German pharmaceutical companies tested drugs on camp prisoners; companies bid for the contracts to build the ovens; detailed lists of victims were drawn up using the Dehomag company's punch card machines, producing meticulous records of the killings. As prisoners entered the death camps, they were made to surrender all personal property, which was carefully catalogued and tagged before being sent to Germany to be reused or recycled. Berenbaum writes that the Final Solution of the Jewish question was "in the eyes of the perpetrators … Germany's greatest achievement."[18]
Saul Friedländer writes that: "Not one social group, not one religious community, not one scholarly institution or professional association in Germany and throughout Europe declared its solidarity with the Jews."[19] He writes that some Christian churches declared that converted Jews should be regarded as part of the flock, but even then only up to a point.
Friedländer argues that this makes the Holocaust distinctive because anti-Jewish policies were able to unfold without the interference of countervailing forces of the kind normally found in advanced societies, such as industry, small businesses, churches, and other vested interests and lobby groups.[19]

The dominance of ideology and the scale of the genocide
In other genocides, pragmatic considerations such as control of territory and resources were central to the genocide policy. Yehuda Bauer argues that:
[T]he basic motivation [of the Holocaust] was purely ideological, rooted in an illusionary world of Nazi imagination, where an international Jewish conspiracy to control the world was opposed to a parallel Aryan quest. No genocide to date had been based so completely on myths, on hallucinations, on abstract, nonpragmatic ideology—which was then executed by very rational, pragmatic means."[20]
The slaughter was systematically conducted in virtually all areas of Nazi-occupied territory in what are now 35 separate European countries.[21] It was at its worst in Central and Eastern Europe, which had more than seven million Jews in 1939. About five million Jews were killed there, including three million in occupied Poland, and over one million in the Soviet Union. Hundreds of thousands also died in the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Yugoslavia, and Greece. The Wannsee Protocol makes clear that the Nazis also intended to carry out their "final solution of the Jewish question" in England and Ireland.[22]
Anyone with three or four Jewish grandparents was to be exterminated without exception. In other genocides, people were able to escape death by converting to another religion or in some other way assimilating. This option was not available to the Jews of occupied Europe.[23] All persons of recent Jewish ancestry were to be exterminated in lands controlled by Germany.[24]

Medical experiments

A cold water immersion experiment at Dachau concentration camp presided over by Professor Holzlohner (left) and Dr. Rascher (right).
Further information: Nazi human experimentation
Another distinctive feature was the extensive use of human subjects in medical experiments. German physicians carried out such experiments at Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen and Natzweiler concentration camps.[25]
The most notorious of these physicians was Dr. Josef Mengele, who worked in Auschwitz. His experiments included placing subjects in pressure chambers, testing drugs on them, freezing them, attempting to change eye color by injecting chemicals into children's eyes, and various amputations and other brutal surgeries.[26] The full extent of his work will never be known because the truckload of records he sent to Dr. Otmar von Verschuer at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute were destroyed by von Verschuer.[27] Subjects who survived Mengele's experiments were almost always killed and dissected after the experiments.

Romani children in Auschwitz, victims of medical experiments.
He seemed particularly keen on working with Romani children. He would bring them sweets and toys, and would personally take them to the gas chamber. They would call him "Onkel Mengele."[28] Vera Alexander was a Jewish inmate at Auschwitz who looked after 50 sets of Romani twins:
“
I remember one set of twins in particular: Guido and Ina, aged about four. One day, Mengele took them away. When they returned, they were in a terrible state: they had been sewn together, back to back, like Siamese twins. Their wounds were infected and oozing pus. They screamed day and night. Then their parents—I remember the mother's name was Stella—managed to get some morphine and they killed the children in order to end their suffering.[28]
”

Victims and death toll

Jews
Further information: The Destruction of the European Jews, The War Against the Jews

Members of the Sonderkommando burn corpses in the firepits at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Photographer Alberto Errera, August 1944. Courtesy of the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum, Poland. [29]

Figures from Lucy Dawidowicz showing the annihilation of the Jewish population of Europe.[30]
Since 1945, the most commonly cited figure for the total number of Jews killed has been six million. The Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem, writes that there is no precise figure for the number of Jews killed. The figure most commonly used is the six million cited by Adolf Eichmann, a senior SS official. Early calculations range from 5.1 million from Raul Hilberg, to 5.95 million from Jacob Leschinsky. Yisrael Gutman and Robert Rozett in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust estimate 5.59–5.86 million.[31] A study led by Wolfgang Benz of the Technical University of Berlin suggests 5.29–6.2 million.[32][33]Yad Vashem writes that the main sources for these statistics are comparisons of prewar and postwar censuses and population estimates, and Nazi documentation on deportations and murders. Yad Vashem reports that it has the names of four million of the victims.[32]
Hilberg estimate of 5.1 million, in the third edition of The Destruction of the European Jews, includes over 800,000 who died from "ghettoization and general privation"; 1,400,000 killed in open-air shootings; and up to 2,900,000 who perished in camps. Hilberg estimates the death toll of Jews in Poland as up to 3,000,000.[34] Hilberg's numbers are generally considered to be a conservative estimate, as they typically include only those deaths for which records are available, avoiding statistical adjustment.[35]
British historian Martin Gilbert used a similar approach in his Atlas of the Holocaust, but arrived at a number of 5.75 million Jewish victims, since he estimated higher numbers of Jews killed in Russia and other locations.[36] Lucy S. Dawidowicz used pre-war census figures to estimate that 5.934 million Jews died (see her figures (left) here).[37]
There were about 8 to 10 million Jews in the territories controlled directly or indirectly by the Nazis (the uncertainty arises from the lack of knowledge about how many Jews there were in the Soviet Union). The six million killed in the Holocaust thus represent 60 to 75 percent of these Jews. Of Poland's 3.3 million Jews, over 90 percent were killed. The same proportion were killed in Latvia and Lithuania, but most of Estonia's Jews were evacuated in time. Of the 750,000 Jews in Germany and Austria in 1933, only about a quarter survived. Although many German Jews emigrated before 1939, the majority of these fled to Czechoslovakia, France or the Netherlands, from where they were later deported to their deaths. In Czechoslovakia, Greece, the Netherlands, and Yugoslavia, over 70 percent were killed. More than 50 percent were killed in Belgium, Hungary, and Romania. It is likely that a similar proportion were killed in Belarus and Ukraine, but these figures are less certain. Countries with notably lower proportions of deaths include Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Italy, and Norway.
Year
Killed[38]
1933–1940
under 100,000
1941
1,100,000
1942
2,700,000
1943
500,000
1944
600,000
1945
100,000
The number of people killed at the major extermination camps is estimated as: Auschwitz-Birkenau: 1.4 million;[39] Treblinka: 870,000;[40] Belzec: 600,000;[41] Majdanek: 360,000;[42] Chelmno: 320,000;[43] Sobibór: 250,000;[44] and Maly Trostinets: 65,000.[45] This gives a total of over 3.8 million; of these, 80–90% were estimated to be Jews. These seven camps alone thus accounted for half the total number of Jews killed in the entire Nazi Holocaust. Virtually the entire Jewish population of Poland died in these camps.
In addition to those who died in the above extermination camps, at least half a million Jews died in other camps, including the major concentration camps in Germany. These were not extermination camps, but had large numbers of Jewish prisoners at various times, particularly in the last year of the war as the Nazis withdrew from Poland. About a million people died in these camps, and although the proportion of Jews is not known with certainty, it was estimated to be at least 50 percent. Another 800,000 to one million Jews were killed by the Einsatzgruppen in the occupied Soviet territories (an approximate figure, since the Einsatzgruppen killings were frequently undocumented).[46] Many more died through execution or of disease and malnutrition in the ghettos of Poland before they could be deported.

Slavs
Main article: Generalplan Ost

Soviet POWs

Soviet POWs in German captivity
Non-Jewish victims
Killed
Source
Soviet POWs
2–3 million
[47]
Ethnic Poles
1.8-2 million
[48][49]
Roma
220,000–500,000
[50]
Disabled
200,000–250,000
[51]
Freemasons
80,000–200,000
[52]
Gay men
5,000–15,000
[53]
Jehovah'sWitnesses
2,500–5,000
[54]
Main article: Extermination of Soviet prisoners of war by Nazi Germany
According to Michael Berenbaum, between two and three million Soviet prisoners-of-war—57 percent of all Soviet POWs—died of starvation, mistreatment, or executions between June 1941 and May 1945, most of them during their first year of captivity. According to other estimates by Daniel Goldhagen, an estimated 2.8 million Soviet POWs died in eight months in 1941–42, with a total of 3.5 million by mid-1944.[55] The USHMM has estimated that 3.3 million of the 5.7 million Soviet POWs died in German custody—compared to 8,300 of 231,000 British and American prisoners.[56] The death rates decreased as the POWs were needed to work as slaves to help the German war effort; by 1943, half a million of them had been deployed as slave labor.[47]

Ethnic Poles
Main articles: Nazi crimes against ethnic Poles, Occupation of Poland (1939–1945), and Pacification operations in German-occupied Poland

Execution of Poles by Einsatzkommando — Leszno, October 1939
One of Hitler's ambitions at the start of the war was to exterminate, expel, or enslave most or all Slavs. "All Poles," Heinrich Himmler swore, "will disappear from the world." The Polish state under German occupation was to be cleared of ethnic Poles and settled by German colonists.[57] Of the Poles, by 1952 only about 3-4 million of them were supposed to be left residing in the former Poland, and then only to serve as slaves for German settlers. They were to be forbidden to marry, the existing ban on any medical help to Poles in Germany would be extended, and eventually Poles would cease to exist. On August 22, 1939, about one week before the onset of the war, Hitler "prepared, for the moment only in the East, my 'Death's Head' formations with orders to kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language. Only in this way can we obtain the living space we need."[58]
Between 1.8 and 2.1 million non-Jewish Polish citizens perished in German hands during the course of the war. Including ethnic Poles and other ethnic minorities of Ukrainians and Belarusians, the vast majority of them civilians.[59][49] At least 200,000 of these victims died in concentration camps. Many others died as a result of general massacres such as in the Warsaw Uprising where between 120,000 and 200,000 civilians were killed.[60] In German occupied Poland there general shortage of food, fuel for heating and medical supplies, and there was a high death rate among the Polish population as a result. Overall, about 5.1 million of the victims of Nazism were Polish citizens, both Jewish and non-Jewish, and over the course of the war Poland lost over 16% of its pre-war population; 3.1 million (90%) of the 3.4 million Polish Jews died in German Hands—compared to 2.0 million ( 6%) of 31.7 million non Jewish Polish citizens.[61]Over 90% of the death toll came through non-military losses, as most of the civilians were targeted by various deliberate actions by Germans and Soviets.[60]
A common German practice in occupied Poland was to round up random civilians on the streets of Polish cities. The term "łapanka" carried a sardonic connotation from the word's earlier use for the children's game known in English as "tag." Between 1942 and 1944 there were around 400 victims of this practice daily in Warsaw alone, with numbers on some days reaching several thousand. For example, on September 19, 1942, close to 3000 men and women caught in the round-ups all over Warsaw the previous two days were sent by train to Germany.[62] Additionally, between 20,000 and 200,000[63] Polish children were forcibly separated from their parents and, after undergoing scrutiny to ensure that they were of "Nordic" racial stock, were sent to Germany to be raised by German families.[64]

South and East Slavs

The Kragujevac massacre
Main articles: World War II persecution of Serbs, Occupation of Belarus by Nazi Germany, and Reichskommissariat Ukraine
In the Balkans, up to 500,000 Serbs were killed in Yugoslavia [65] [66] . Hitler's high plenipotentiary in South East Europe, Hermann Neubacher, later wrote: "When leading Ustaše state that one million Orthodox Serbs (including babies, children, women and old men) were slaughtered, this in my opinion is a boasting exaggeration. On the basis of reports I received, I estimated that threequarters of a million defenceless people were slaughtered."[67]German forces, under express orders from Hitler, fought with a special vengeance against the Serbs, who were considered Untermensch [68] The Ustaše collaborators conducted a systematic extermination of large numbers of people for political, religious or racial reasons. The most numerous victims were Serbs The USHMM reports between 56,000 and 97,000 persons were killed at the Jasenovac concentration camp [69] [70] However, Yad Vashem reports 600,000 deaths at Jasenovac. [71]
In Belarus, the Germans imposed a brutal racist regime, burning down some 9,000 Belarusian villages, deporting some 380,000 people for slave labour, and killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. More than 600 villages, like Khatyn, were burned along with their entire population and at least 5,295 Belarusian settlements were destroyed by the Nazis and some or all of their inhabitants killed. Altogether, 2,230,000( 24 % of the population)people were killed in Belarus during the three years of German occupation.[72]including 370,000 military dead [73] and 245,000 Jews killed by the Einsatzgruppen [37]
In Ukraine, the total human losses during the war and German occupation are estimated at between 5.5 to 7.0 million (13-17% of the population), including 1.366 million military dead[74], and around 600,000 to 900,000 Jews killed by the Einsatzgruppen .

Roma
Main article: Porajmos

Roma arrivals in the Belzec extermination camp, 1940.

Map of persecution of the Roma.
Because the Roma and Sinti are traditionally a secretive people with a culture based on oral history, less is known about their fate than about that of any other group.[75][76] Yehuda Bauer writes that the lack of information can be attributed to the Roma's distrust and suspicion, and to their humiliation, because some of the basic taboos of Romani culture regarding hygiene and sexual contact were violated at Auschwitz. Bauer writes that "[m]ost [Roma] could not relate their stories involving these tortures; as a result, most kept silent and thus increased the effects of the massive trauma they had undergone."[77]
Donald Niewyk and Frances Nicosia write that the death toll was at least 130,000 of the nearly one million Roma and Sinti in Nazi-controlled Europe.[75] Michael Berenbaum writes that serious scholarly estimates lie between 90,000 and 220,000.[78] A detailed study by the late Sybil Milton, formerly senior historian at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, calculated a death toll of at least 220,000, and possibly closer to 500,000.[79][80] Ian Hancock, Director of the Program of Romani Studies and the Romani Archives and Documentation Center at the University of Texas at Austin, has argued in favour of a higher figure of between 500,000 and 1,500,000.[81] Hancock writes that, proportionately, the death toll equaled "and almost certainly exceed[ed], that of Jewish victims."[82]
“
… they wish to toss into the Ghetto everything that is characteristically dirty, shabby, bizarre, of which one ought to be frightened and which anyway had to be destroyed.
”
—Emmanuel Ringelblum on the Roma.[83]
Before being sent to the camps, the victims were herded into ghettos, including several hundred into the Warsaw Ghetto.[84] Further east, teams of Einsatzgruppen tracked down Roma encampments and murdered the inhabitants on the spot, leaving no records of the victims. They were also targeted by the puppet regimes that cooperated with the Nazis, e.g. the Ustaše regime in Croatia, where a large number of Roma were killed in the Jasenovac concentration camp.
In May 1942, the Roma were placed under the same labor and social laws as the Jews. On December 16, 1942, Heinrich Himmler, Commander of the SS and regarded as the "architect" of the Nazi genocide,[85] issued a decree that "Gypsy Mischlinge (mixed breeds), Roma Gypsies, and members of the clans of Balkan origins who are not of German blood" should be sent to Auschwitz, unless they had served in the Wehrmacht.[86] On January 29, 1943, another decree ordered the deportation of all German Gypsies to Auschwitz.
This was adjusted on November 15, 1943, when Himmler ordered that, in the occupied Soviet areas, "sedentary Gypsies and part-Gypsies (Mischlinge) are to be treated as citizens of the country. Nomadic Gypsies and part-Gypsies are to be placed on the same level as Jews and placed in concentration camps."[87] Bauer argues that this adjustment reflected Nazi ideology that the Roma, originally an Aryan population, had been "spoiled" by non-Romani blood.[88]

Disabled and mentally ill
Main articles: Nazi eugenics, Aktion T4, Erbkrank, Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, Rhineland Bastard, and Schloss Hartheim

"60,000 RM is what this person with genetic defects costs the community during his lifetime. Fellow German,[89] that's your money too …"[90]
“
Our starting point is not the individual: We do not subscribe to the view that one should feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, or clothe the naked … Our objectives are different: We must have a healthy people in order to prevail in the world.
”
—Joseph Goebbels, 1938.[91]
Aktion T4 was a program established in 1939 to maintain the genetic purity of the German population by killing or sterilizing German and Austrian citizens who were disabled or suffering from mental illness.[92]
Between 1939 and 1941, 80,000 to 100,000 mentally ill adults in institutions were killed; 5,000 children in institutions; and 1,000 Jews in institutions.[93] Outside the mental health institutions, the figures are estimated as 20,000 (according to Dr. Georg Renno, the deputy director of Schloss Hartheim, one of the euthanasia centers) or 400,000 (according to Frank Zeireis, the commandant of Mauthausen concentration camp).[93] Another 300,000 were forcibly sterilized.[94]
The program was named after Tiergartenstraße 4, the address of a villa in the Berlin borough of Tiergarten, the headquarters of the Gemeinnützige Stiftung für Heil und Anstaltspflege (General Foundation for Welfare and Institutional Care),[95] led by Philipp Bouhler, head of Hitler’s private chancellery (Kanzlei des Führer der NSDAP) and Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician.
Brandt was tried in December 1946 at Nuremberg, along with 22 others, in a case known as United States of America v. Karl Brandt et al., also known as the Doctors' Trial. He was hanged at Landsberg Prison on June 2, 1948.

Gay men
Main articles: Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, Pink triangle, and History of homosexual people in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust

The Homomonument in Amsterdam, a memorial to the gay victims of Nazi Germany.
Between 5,000 and 15,000 gay men of German nationality are estimated to have been sent to concentration camps.[53] James D. Steakley writes that what mattered in Germany was criminal intent or character, rather than criminal acts, and the "gesundes Volksempfinden" ("healthy sensibility of the people") became the leading normative legal principle.[96] In 1936, Heinrich Himmler, Chief of the SS, created the "Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion." Homosexuality was declared contrary to "wholesome popular sentiment,"[53] and gay men were regarded as "defilers of German blood." The Gestapo raided gay bars, tracked individuals using the address books of those they arrested, used the subscription lists of gay magazines to find others, and encouraged people to report suspected homosexual behavior and to scrutinize the behavior of their neighbours.[53][96]
Tens of thousands were convicted between 1933 and 1944 and sent to camps for "rehabilitation," where they were identified by yellow armbands[4] and later pink triangles worn on the left side of the jacket and the right pant leg, which singled them out for sexual abuse.[96] Hundreds were castrated by court order.[97] They were humiliated, tortured, used in hormone experiments conducted by SS doctors, and killed. The allegation of homosexuality was also used as a convenient way of dealing with Catholic priests.[53] Steakley writes that the full extent of gay suffering was slow to emerge after the war. Many victims kept their stories to themselves because homosexuality remained criminalized in postwar Germany. Nevertheless, only a small percentage (around 2%) of German homosexuals were persecuted by Nazis.[96]

Freemasons and Jehovah's Witnesses

A memorial for Loge Liberté chérie, founded in November 1943 in Hut 6 of Emslandlager VII (KZ Esterwegen), the only Masonic lodge founded in a Nazi concentration camp.
Main articles: Suppression of Freemasonry#Nazi Germany and Occupied Europe, Nacht und Nebel, and Persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses
In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that Freemasonry had "succumbed" to the Jews: "The general pacifistic paralysis of the national instinct of self-preservation begun by Freemasonry is then transmitted to the masses of society by the Jewish press."[98] Freemasons were sent to concentration camps as political prisoners, and forced to wear an inverted red triangle.[99] It is estimated that between 80,000 and 200,000 were killed.[100][101] However , the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum believes “because many of the Freemasons who were arrested were also Jews and/or members of the political opposition, it is not known how many individuals were placed in Nazi concentration camps and/or were targeted only because they were Freemasons.”[102]
Refusing to pledge allegiance to the Nazi party or to serve in the military, roughly 12,000 Jehovah's Witnesses were forced to wear a purple triangle and placed in camps, where they were given the option of renouncing their faith and submitting to the state's authority. Between 2,500 and 5,000 were killed.[54] Historian Detlef Garbe, director at the Neuengamme (Hamburg) Memorial, writes that "no other religious movement resisted the pressure to conform to National Socialism with comparable unanimity and steadfastness."[103]

Political activists
Main article: Nacht und Nebel
Nacht und Nebel (German for "Night and Fog") was a directive (German: Erlass) of Adolf Hitler on December 7, 1941 signed and implemented by Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces Wilhelm Keitel, resulting in kidnapping and disappearance of many political activists throughout Nazi Germany's occupied territories.

Christians
Around 5 million Christians were also killed by the Nazi regime,[104] although is considered more incidental than systematic (that is, Christians were not necessarily subject to the same type of systematic extermination as the other groups listed above, but rather were killed based on a more individual resistance to Nazi politics and ideals). Famous examples of Christians killed by the Nazis are Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Maximilian Kolbe, and members of the family of Corrie ten Boom.

Development and execution

Origins

At 10 a.m. on April 1, 1933, members of the Sturmabteilung moved into place all over Germany, positioning themselves outside Jewish-owned businesses to deter customers. These stormtroopers are outside Israel's Department Store in Berlin. The signs read: "Germans! Defend yourselves! Don't buy from Jews." ("Deutsche! Wehrt Euch! Kauft nicht bei Juden!")[105] The store was ransacked during Kristallnacht in 1938, then handed over to a non-Jewish family.
The Nazi Party under Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany on January 30, 1933, and the persecution and exodus of Germany's 525,000 Jews began almost immediately. In his autobiography Mein Kampf (1925), Hitler had been open about his hatred of Jews, and gave ample warning of his intention to drive them from Germany's political, intellectual, and cultural life. He did not write that he would attempt to exterminate them, but he is reported to have been more explicit in private. As early as 1922, he allegedly told Major Joseph Hell, at the time a journalist:
“
Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. As soon as I have the power to do so, I will have gallows built in rows—at the Marienplatz in Munich, for example—as many as traffic allows. Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink; they will hang there as long as the principles of hygiene permit. As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up, and so on down the line, until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated. Other cities will follow suit, precisely in this fashion, until all Germany has been completely cleansed of Jews.[106]
”
Jewish intellectuals were the first to leave. The philosopher Walter Benjamin left for Paris on March 18, 1933. Novelist Leon Feuchtwanger went to Switzerland. The conductor Bruno Walter fled after being told that the hall of the Berlin Philharmonic would be burned down if he conducted a concert there: the Frankfurter Zeitung explained on April 6 that Walter and fellow conductor Otto Klemperer had been forced to flee because the government was unable to protect them against the "mood" of the German public, which had been provoked by "Jewish artistic liquidators."[107] Albert Einstein was visiting the U.S. on January 30, 1933. He returned to Ostende in Belgium, never to set foot in Germany again, and calling events there a "psychic illness of the masses"; he was expelled from the Kaiser Wilhelm Society and the Prussian Academy of Sciences, and his citizenship was rescinded.[108] Saul Friedländer writes that when Max Liebermann, possibly Germany's best-known painter and honorary president of the Prussian Academy of Arts, resigned his position, not one of his colleagues expressed a word of sympathy, and he died ostracized two years later. When the police arrived in 1943 with a stretcher to deport his 85-year-old bedridden widow, she committed suicide with an overdose of barbiturates rather than be taken.[108]
Throughout the 1930s, the legal, economic, and social rights of Jews were steadily restricted. Friedländer writes that, for the Nazis, Germany drew its strength for its "purity of blood" and its "rootedness in the sacred German earth."[109] In 1933, a series of laws were passed to exclude Jews from key areas: the Civil Service Law; the physicians' law; and the farm law, forbidding Jews from owning farms or taking part in agriculture. Jewish lawyers were disbarred, and in Dresden, Jewish lawyers and judges were dragged out of their offices and courtrooms, and beaten up.[110] Jews were excluded from schools and universities, and from belonging to the Journalists' Association, or from being newspaper editors.[109] The Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung of April 27, 1933 wrote:
A self-respecting nation cannot, on a scale accepted up to now, leave its higher activities in the hands of people of racially foreign origin … Allowing the presence of too high a percentage of people of foreign origin in relation to their percentage in the general population could be interpreted as an acceptance of the superiority of other races, something decidedly to be rejected.[111]
In 1935, Hitler introduced the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped German Jews of their citizenship and deprived them of all civil rights. In his speech introducing the laws, Hitler said that if the "Jewish problem" cannot be solved by these laws, it "must then be handed over by law to the National-Socialist Party for a final solution (Endlösung)."[112] The expression "Endlösung" became the standard Nazi euphemism for the extermination of the Jews. In January 1939, he said in a public speech: "If international-finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed once more in plunging the nations into yet another world war, the consequences will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation (vernichtung) of the Jewish race in Europe."[113]
The question of the treatment of the Jews became an urgent one for the Nazis after September 1939, when they occupied the western half of Poland, home to about two million Jews. Heinrich Himmler's right-hand man, Reinhard Heydrich, recommended concentrating all the Polish Jews in ghettos in major cities, where they would be put to work for the German war industry. The ghettos would be in cities located on railway junctions, so that, in Heydrich's words, "future measures can be accomplished more easily."[114] During his interrogation in 1961, Adolf Eichmann testified that the expression "future measures" was understood to mean "physical extermination."[114]

Increasing persecution and pogroms (1938–1942)
Main articles: Pogrom, Babi Yar, Dorohoi Pogrom, Iaşi pogrom, Jedwabne Massacre, Kristallnacht, Legionnaires' Rebellion and Bucharest Pogrom, Lviv pogroms and the Holocaust, Ponary massacre, and Odessa massacre

Berlin's Fasanenstrasse synagogue after Kristallnacht, November 9–10, 1938.
Many scholars[who?] date the start of the Holocaust to the anti-Jewish riots of Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass, on November 9, 1938, in which Jews were attacked and Jewish property was vandalized across Germany. Approximately 100 Jews were killed, and another 30,000 sent to concentration camps, while over 7,000 Jewish shops and 1,668 synagogues (almost every synagogue in Germany) were damaged or destroyed. Similar events took place in Austria, particularly Vienna.
A number of deadly pogroms by local populations occurred during the Second World War, some with Nazi encouragement, and some spontaneously. This included the Iaşi pogrom in Romania on June 30, 1941, in which as many 14,000 Jews were killed by Romanian residents and police, and the Jedwabne pogrom, in which between 380 and 1,600 Jews were killed by local Poles in July 1941.

Madagascar plan
In 1940, the Nazis thought they had found a solution to the "Jewish problem", through the unrealistic Madagascar Plan, which however futile in retrospect did constitute an important psychological step on the path to the Holocaust.[13] The planning was carried out by Eichmans office; Heydrich called it a "territorial final Solution". The plan was to ship all European Jews to a new "homeland" in the African island of Madagascar. In view of the difficulties of supporting more population in the German run Polish "General Government" in July 1940 Hitler, still hoping for success with the Madagascar plan, stopped the deportation of Jews there.[14] This was however very temporary as the military situation, with no peace with Britain in sight, soon showed that the Madagascar plan would not take place. The plan may have been foreseen as a remote and slower genocide through the unfavorable conditions on the island.[15] The plan was formally abandoned on February 10, 1942, when the German Foreign Office was informed of Hitlers decision that due to the war with the Soviet Union the opportunity had been opened for sending the Jews to the territories in the east instead of Madagascar, since other territories now were available for the final solution.[16]

Early measures in Poland
Main articles: Armia Krajowa, History of the Jews in Poland, History of Poland (1939-1945), Invasion of Poland (1939), Invasion of Poland, and Polish government in Exile

Germany 1941, including occupied Poland and the General Government area.

German policemen tormenting a Jew in Rzeszów, Poland.
“
I ask nothing of the Jews except that they should disappear.
”
— Hans Frank, Nazi governor of Poland.[115]
Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, leading Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, and France to declare war. Hans Frank, a German lawyer, was appointed Governor-General in October.
In September, Himmler appointed Reinhard Heydrich head of the Reich Security Head Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt or RSHA), a body overseeing the work of the SS, the Security Police (SD), and the Gestapo in occupied Poland and charged with carrying out the policy towards the Jews described in Heydrich's report. (This body should not be confused with the Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt or Race and Resettlement Main Office, RuSHA, which was involved in carrying out the deportation of Jews.) The Jews were herded into ghettos, mostly in the General Government area of central Poland, where they were put to work under the Reich Labor Office headed by Fritz Saukel. Here many thousands were killed in various ways, and many more died of disease, starvation, and exhaustion, but there was still no program of systematic killing. There is no doubt, however, that the Nazis saw forced labor as a form of extermination. The expression Vernichtung durch Arbeit ("destruction through work") was frequently used.
When the Germans occupied Norway, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, and France in 1940, and Yugoslavia and Greece in 1941, anti-Semitic measures were also introduced into these countries, although the pace and severity varied greatly from country to country according to local political circumstances. Jews were removed from economic and cultural life and were subject to various restrictive laws, but physical deportation did not occur in most places before 1942. The Vichy regime in occupied France actively collaborated in persecuting French Jews. Germany's allies Italy, Finland, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria were pressured to introduce anti-Jewish measures, but for the most part they did not comply until compelled to do so. The German puppet regime in Croatia, on the other hand, began actively persecuting Jews on its own initiative.
During 1940 and 1941, the murder of large numbers of Jews in Poland continued, and the deportation of Jews from Germany, Austria and the "Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia" (today's Czech Republic) to Poland was undertaken. Eichmann was assigned the task of removing all Jews from these territories, although the deportation of Jews from Germany, particularly Berlin, was not officially completed until 1943. (Many Berlin Jews were able to survive in hiding—it is an irony of the Holocaust that Berlin was one of the few places where this was possible.) By December 1939, 3.5 million Jews were crowded into the General Government area.
The Governor-General, Hans Frank, noted that this many people could not be simply shot. "We shall have to take steps, however, designed in some way to eliminate them." It was this dilemma which led the SS to experiment with large-scale killings using poison gas. This method had already been used during Hitler's campaign of euthanasia in Germany (known as "T4"). SS Obersturmführer Christian Wirth seems to have been the inventor of the gas chamber.
Although it was clear by 1941 that the SS hierarchy led by Himmler and Heydrich was determined to embark on a policy of killing all the Jews under German control, there were important centers of opposition to this policy within the Nazi regime. The grounds for the opposition were mainly economic, not humanitarian. Hermann Göring, who had overall control of the German war industry, and the German army's Economics Department, representing the armaments industry, argued that the enormous Jewish labor force assembled in the General Government area (more than a million able-bodied workers) was an asset too valuable to waste while Germany was preparing to invade the Soviet Union.
A small part of the German army disapproved of atrocities against Jews on principle, and during this period there were a few conflicts between the Army and the SS over policy in Poland. Ultimately, neither Göring nor the army leadership was willing or able to challenge Himmler's authority, particularly since Himmler made it clear he had Hitler's support.

Concentration and labor camps (1933–1945)

April 12, 1945: Lager Nordhausen, where 20,000 inmates are believed to have died.
Further information: Extermination through labour, List of Nazi German concentration camps, Nazi concentration camps, Nazi concentration camp badges.
The major concentration and extermination camps: Auschwitz, Belzec, Bergen-Belsen, Chełmno, Dachau, Flossenbürg, Grini, Jasenovac, Klooga, Majdanek, Maly Trostinets, Mauthausen-Gusen, Ravensbrück, Treblinka.
Camp badges: Black triangle, Pink triangle, Purple triangle, Yellow badge.
Leading up to the 1933 elections, the Nazis began intensifying acts of violence to wreak havoc among the opposition. With the cooperation of local authorities, they set up camps as concentration centers within Germany. One of the first was Dachau, which opened in March 1933. These early camps were meant to hold, torture, or kill only political prisoners, such as Communists and Social Democrats.[116]
These early prisons—usually basements and storehouses—were eventually consolidated into full-blown, centrally run camps outside the cities. By 1942, six large extermination camps had been established in Nazi-occupied Poland.[116] After 1939, the camps increasingly became places where Jews and POWs were either killed or forced to live as slave laborers, undernourished and tortured.[117] It is estimated that the Germans established 15,000 camps in the occupied countries, many of them in Poland.[118][119]
New camps were focused on areas with large Jewish, Polish intelligentsia, communist, or Roma and Sinti populations, including inside Germany. The transportation of prisoners was often carried out under horrifying conditions using rail freight cars, in which many died before reaching their destination.
Extermination through labour, a means whereby camp inmates would literally be worked to death—or frequently worked until they could no longer perform work tasks, followed by their selection for extermination—was invoked as a further systematic extermination policy. Furthermore, while not designed as a method for systematic extermination, many camp prisoners died because of harsh overall conditions or from executions carried out on a whim after being allowed to live for days or months.
Upon admission, some camps tattooed prisoners with a prisoner ID.[120] Those fit for work were dispatched for 12 to 14 hour shifts. Before and after, there were roll calls that could sometimes last for hours, with prisoners regularly dying of exposure.[121]

Ghettos (1940–1945)
Further information: Emanuel Ringelblum, Judenrat, Ghettos in occupied Europe 1939-1944, Oyneg Shabbos
Main ghettos: Cluj Ghetto, Kraków Ghetto, Łachwa Ghetto, Łódź Ghetto, Lwów Ghetto, Theresienstadt Ghetto, Warsaw Ghetto, Wilna Ghetto

A child dying in the streets of the crowded Warsaw Ghetto, where hunger and disease killed 43,000 in 1941 alone.[84]
After the invasion of Poland, the Nazis established ghettos throughout 1941 and 1942 to which Jews and some Roma were confined, until they were eventually shipped to death camps and killed. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest, with 380,000 people, and the Łódź Ghetto the second largest, holding 160,000. They were, in effect, immensely crowded prisons, described by Michael Berenbaum as instruments of "slow, passive murder."[122] Though the Warsaw Ghetto contained 400,000 people[84]—30% of the population of Warsaw—it occupied only 2.4% of the city's area, averaging 9.2 people per room.
From 1940 through 1942, starvation and disease, especially typhoid, killed hundreds of thousands. Over 43,000 residents of the Warsaw ghetto died there in 1941,[84] more than one in ten; in Theresienstadt, more than half the residents died in 1942.[122]
“
The Germans came, the police, and they started banging houses: "Raus, raus, raus, Juden raus." … [O]ne baby started to cry … The other baby started crying. So the mother urinated in her hand and gave the baby a drink to keep quiet … [When the police had gone], I told the mothers to come out. And one baby was dead … from fear, the mother [had] choked her own baby.
”
—Abraham Malik, describing his experience in the Kovno ghetto.[123]
Each ghetto was run by a Judenrat (Jewish council) of German-appointed Jewish community leaders, who were responsible for the day-to-day running of the ghetto, including the provision of food, water, heat, medicine, and shelter, and who were also expected to make arrangements for deportations to extermination camps. Heinrich Himmler ordered the start of the deportations on July 19, 1942, and three days later, on July 22, the deportations from the Warsaw Ghetto began; over the next 52 days, until September 12, 300,000 people from Warsaw alone were transported in freight trains to the Treblinka extermination camp. Many other ghettos were completely depopulated.
Berenbaum writes that the defining moment that tested the courage and character of each Judenrat came when they were asked to provide a list of names of the next group to be deported. The Judenrat members went through the tried and tested methods of delay, bribery, stonewalling, pleading, and argumentation, until finally a decision had to be made. Some argued that their responsibility was to save the Jews who could be saved, and that therefore others had to be sacrificed; others argued, following Maimonides, that not a single individual should be handed over who had not committed a capital crime. Judenrat leaders such as Dr. Joseph Parnas in Lviv, who refused to compile a list, were shot. On October 14, 1942, the entire Judenrat of Byaroza committed suicide rather than cooperate with the deportations.[124]
The first ghetto uprising occurred in September 1942 in the small town of Łachwa in southeast Poland. Though there were armed resistance attempts in the larger ghettos in 1943, such as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Białystok Ghetto Uprising, in every case they failed against the Nazi military, and the remaining Jews were either killed or deported to the camps, which the Germans euphemistically called "resettlement in the East."[125]

Death squads (1941–1943)
Main article: Einsatzgruppen

A member of Einsatzgruppe D is about to shoot a man sitting by a mass grave in Vinnitsa, Ukrainian SSR, in 1942. Present in the background are members of the German Army, the German Labor Service, and the Hitler Youth.[126] The back of the photograph is inscribed "The last Jew in Vinnitsa".
The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 opened a new phase. The Holocaust intensified after the Nazis occupied Lithuania, where close to 80% of Lithuanian Jews were exterminated before the end of the year.[127][128] The Soviet territories occupied by early 1942, including all of Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, and Ukraine, and most Russian territory west of the line Leningrad-Moscow-Rostov, contained about four million Jews, including hundreds of thousands who had fled Poland in 1939. Despite the chaos of the Soviet retreat, some effort was made to evacuate Jews, and about a million succeeded in escaping further east. The remaining three million were left at the mercy of the Nazis.
In these territories, there were fewer restraints on the mass killing of Jews than there were in countries like France or the Netherlands, where there was a long tradition of tolerance and the rule of law, or even Poland where, despite a strong tradition of antisemitism, there was considerable resistance to Nazi persecution of Polish Jews. In the Baltic states, Belarus, and Ukraine, native antisemitism was reinforced by hatred of Communist rule, which many people associated with the Jews. Thousands of people in these countries actively collaborated with the Nazis. Ukrainians and Latvians joined SS auxiliary forces in large numbers and did much of the dirty work in Nazi extermination camps. Raul Hilberg writes that these were ordinary citizens, not hoodlums or thugs; the great majority were university-educated professionals.[129] They used their skills to become efficient killers, according to Michael Berenbaum.[126]
Despite the subservience of the Army high command to Hitler, Himmler did not trust the Army to approve of, let alone carry out, the large-scale killings of Jews in the occupied Soviet territories. This task was assigned to SS formations called Einsatzgruppen ("task groups"), under the overall command of Heydrich. These had been used on a limited scale in Poland in 1939, but were now organized on a much larger scale. Einsatzgruppe A (commanded by SS-Brigadeführer Dr. Franz Stahlecker) was assigned to the Baltic area, Einsatzgruppe B (SS-Brigadeführer Artur Nebe) to Belarus, Einsatzgruppe C (SS-Gruppenführer Dr. Otto Rasch) to north and central Ukraine, and Einsatzgruppe D (SS-Gruppenführer Dr. Otto Ohlendorf) to Moldova, south Ukraine, the Crimea, and, during 1942, the north Caucasus. Of the four Einsatzgruppen, three were commanded by holders of doctorate degrees, of whom one (Rasch) held a double doctorate.[130]
According to Ohlendorf at his trial, "the Einsatzgruppen had the mission to protect the rear of the troops by killing the Jews, gypsies, Communist functionaries, active Communists, and all persons who would endanger the security." In practice, their victims were nearly all defenseless Jewish civilians (not a single Einsatzgruppe member was killed in action during these operations). By December 1941, the four Einsatzgruppen listed above had killed, respectively, 125,000, 45,000, 75,000, and 55,000 people—a total of 300,000 people—mainly by shooting or with hand grenades at mass killing sites outside the major towns.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum tells the story of one survivor of the Einsatzgruppen in Piryatin, Ukraine, when they killed 1,600 Jews on April 6, 1942, the second day of Passover:
I saw them do the killing. At 5:00 p.m. they gave the command, "Fill in the pits." Screams and groans were coming from the pits. Suddenly I saw my neighbor Ruderman rise from under the soil … His eyes were bloody and he was screaming: "Finish me off!" … A murdered woman lay at my feet. A boy of five years crawled out from under her body and began to scream desperately. "Mommy!" That was all I saw, since I fell unconscious.[126]
The most notorious massacre of Jews in the Soviet Union was at a ravine called Babi Yar outside Kiev, where 33,771 Jews were killed in a single operation on September 29–30, 1941. The killing of all the Jews in Kiev was decided on by the military governor (Major-General Friedrich Eberhardt), the Police Commander for Army Group South (SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln) and the Einsatzgruppe C Commander Otto Rasch. It was carried out by a mixture of SS, SD and Security Police, assisted by Ukrainian police.
On Monday the Jews of Kiev gathered by the cemetery, expecting to be loaded onto trains. The crowd was large enough that most of the men, women, and children could not have known what was happening until it was too late: by the time they heard the machine-gun fire, there was no chance to escape. All were driven down a corridor of soldiers, in groups of ten, and then shot. A truck driver described the scene:
“
Kikes of the city of Kiev and vicinity! On Monday, September 29, you are to appear by 08:00 a.m. with your possessions, money, documents, valuables, and warm clothing at Dorogozhitskaya Street, next to the Jewish cemetery. Failure to appear is punishable by death.
”
—Order posted in Kiev in Russian and Ukrainian, on or around September 26, 1941.[131]
[O]ne after the other, they had to remove their luggage, then their coats, shoes, and overgarments and also underwear … Once undressed, they were led into the ravine which was about 150 meters long and 30 meters wide and a good 15 meters deep … When they reached the bottom of the ravine they were seized by members of the Schutzpolizei and made to lie down on top of Jews who had already been shot … The corpses were literally in layers. A police marksman came along and shot each Jew in the neck with a submachine gun … I saw these marksmen stand on layers of corpses and shoot one after the other … The marksman would walk across the bodies of the executed Jews to the next Jew, who had meanwhile lain down, and shoot him.[131]

From left to right; Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and Karl Wolff (second from the right) at the Obersalzberg, May 1939. Wolff wrote in his diary that Himmler had vomited after witnessing the mass shooting of 100 Jews.[132]
In August 1941 Himmler travelled to Minsk where he personally witnessed 100 Jews being shot in a ditch outside the town, an event described by SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff in his diary. "Himmler's face was green. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his cheek where a piece of brain had squirted up on to it. Then he vomited." After recovering his composure, he lectured the SS men on the need to follow the "highest moral law of the Party" in carrying out their tasks.
In December 1941, a few cases of typhus broke out in the Bogdanovka concentration camp in Transnistria, where over 50,000 Jews were held.[133] A decision was made by the German adviser to the Romanian administration of the district and the Romanian District Commissioner to murder all the inmates. The Aktion began on December 21, and was carried out by Romanian soldiers and gendarmes, Ukrainian police and civilians from Golta,[134] and local ethnic Germans under the commander of the Ukrainian regular police, Kazachievici. Thousands of disabled and ill inmates were forced into two locked stables, which were doused with kerosene and set ablaze, burning alive all those inside. Other inmates were led in groups to a ravine in a nearby forest and shot in the neck. The remaining Jews dug pits with their bare hands in the bitter cold, and packed them with frozen corpses. Thousands of Jews froze to death. A break was made for Christmas, but the killing resumed on December 28. By December 31, over 40,000 Jews had been killed.[135]
By the end of 1941, however, the Einsatzgruppen had killed only 15 percent of the Jews in the occupied Soviet territories, and it was apparent that these methods could not be used to kill all the Jews of Europe. Even before the invasion of the Soviet Union, experiments with killing Jews in the back of vans using gas from the van's exhaust had been carried out, and when this proved too slow, more lethal gasses were tried. For large-scale killing by gas, however, fixed sites would be needed, and it was decided—probably by Heydrich and Eichmann—that the Jews should be brought to camps specifically built for the purpose.
In his Nuremberg testimony on April 15, 1946, Rudolf Höß, the commandant of Auschwitz, testified that Heinrich Himmler personally ordered him to prepare Auschwitz to carry out the 'final solution':
In the summer of 1941 I was summoned to Berlin to Reichsfuehrer SS Himmler to receive personal orders. He told me something to the effect—I do not remember the exact words—that the Fuehrer had given the order for a final solution of the Jewish question. We, the SS, must carry out that order. If it is not carried out now then the Jews will later on destroy the German people. He had chosen Auschwitz on account of its easy access by rail and also because the extensive site offered space for measures ensuring isolation.[136][137][138][139]
Laurence Rees writes that Höß may have misremembered the year this was said to him. Himmler did indeed visit Höß in the summer of 1941, but there is no evidence that the Final Solution had been planned at this stage. Rees writes that the meeting predates the killings of Jewish men by the Einsatzgruppen in the East and the expansion of the killings in July 1941. It also predates the Wannsee Conference. Rees speculates that the conversation with Himmler was most likely in the summer of 1942.[140] The first gassings, using an industrial gas derived from prussic acid and known by the brand name Zyklon-B, were carried out at Auschwitz in September 1941.[141]

Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution (1942–1945)

The dining room of the Wannsee villa, where the Wannsee conference took place. The 15 men seated at the table on January 20, 1942 to discuss the "final solution of the Jewish question"[142] were considered the best and the brightest in the Reich.[143]

Facsimiles of the minutes of the Wannsee Conference. This page lists the number of Jews in every European country.

Auschwitz I

The railway line leading to the death camp at Auschwitz II (Birkenau).

Empty poison gas canisters used to kill inmates and piles of hair shaven from their heads are stored in the museum at Auschwitz II.

What remains of the gas chambers at Auschwitz II (Birkenau); photographed in 2006.

Corpses in Auschwitz; from Yad Vashem.
Further information: Operation Reinhard, Wannsee Conference.
Those present at the conference: Josef Bühler, Adolf Eichmann, Roland Freisler, Reinhard Heydrich, Otto Hofmann, Gerhard Klopfer, Friedrich Wilhelm Kritzinger, Rudolf Lange, Georg Leibbrandt, Martin Luther, Heinrich Müller, Erich Neumann, Karl Eberhard Schöngarth, Wilhelm Stuckart
By the end of 1941, Himmler and Heydrich were increasingly impatient with the progress of the Final Solution. Their main opponent was Göring, who had succeeded in exempting Jewish industrial workers from the orders to deport all Jews to the General Government and who had allied himself with the Army commanders who were opposing the extermination of the Jews out of mixture of economic calculation, distaste for the SS and (in some cases) humanitarian sentiment. Although Göring's power had declined since the defeat of his Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain, he still had privileged access to Hitler and had great obstructive power.
Heydrich therefore convened a conference—the Wannsee Conference—on January 20, 1942 at a villa, Am Großen Wannsee No. 56-58, in the suburbs of Berlin to finalize a plan for the extermination of the Jews.[144] The plan became known (after Reinhard Heydrich) as Aktion Reinhard (Operation Reinhard). Present were Heydrich, Eichmann, Heinrich Müller (head of the Gestapo), and representatives of the Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, the Ministry for the Interior, the Four Year Plan Office, the Ministry of Justice, the General Government in Poland (where over two million Jews still lived), the Foreign Office, the Race and Resettlement Office, and the Nazi Party, and the office responsible for distributing Jewish property.[143] Also present was SS-Sturmbannführer Rudolf Lange, the SD commander in Riga, who had recently carried out the liquidation of the Riga ghetto.[144] He seems to have been there to advise the officials on the practicalities of killing people on an industrial scale.
Michael Berenbaum writes that the 15 men seated at the table were considered the best and the brightest; more than half of them held doctorates from German universities. Butlers served brandy as they talked.[143]
The men were presented with a plan for killing all the Jews in Europe, including 330,000 Jews in England and 4,000 in Ireland,[144] although the minutes taken by Eichmann refer to this only through euphemisms, such as " … emigration has now been replaced by evacuation to the East. This operation should be regarded only as a provisional option, though in view of the coming final solution of the Jewish question it is already supplying practical experience of vital importance."[144]
The officials were told there were 2.3 million Jews in the General Government, 850,000 in Hungary, 1.1 million in the other occupied countries, and up to 5 million in the Soviet Union (although only 3 million of these were in areas under German occupation) —a total of about 6.5 million. These would all be transported by train to extermination camps (Vernichtungslager) in Poland, where those unfit for work would be gassed at once. In some camps, such as Auschwitz, those fit for work would be kept alive for a while, but eventually all would be killed. Göring's representative, Dr. Erich Neumann, gained a limited exemption for some classes of industrial workers.

Extermination camps
Approx. number killed at each extermination camp (Source: Yad Vashem [145])
Camp name
Killed
Ref.
Auschwitz II
1,400,000
[39][146]
Belzec
600,000
[41]
Chelmno
320,000
[43]
Jasenovac
600,000
[147]
Majdanek
360,000
[42]
Maly Trostinets
65,000
[45]
Sobibór
250,000
[44]
Treblinka
870,000
[40]
During 1942, in addition to Auschwitz, five other camps were designated as extermination camps (Vernichtungslager) for the carrying out of the Reinhard plan.[148][149] Two of these, at Chelmno (also known as Kulmhof) and Majdanek were already functioning as labor camps: these now had extermination facilities added to them. Three new camps were built for the sole purpose of killing large numbers of Jews as quickly as possible, at Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka. A seventh camp, at Maly Trostinets in Belarus, was also used for this purpose. Jasenovac was an extermination camp where mostly ethnic Serbs were killed.
Extermination camps are frequently confused with concentration camps such as Dachau and Belsen, which were mostly located in Germany and intended as places of incarceration and forced labor for a variety of enemies of the Nazi regime (such as Communists and gays). They should also be distinguished from slave labor camps, which were set up in all German-occupied countries to exploit the labor of prisoners of various kinds, including prisoners of war. In all Nazi camps there were very high death rates as a result of starvation, disease and exhaustion, but only the extermination camps were designed specifically for mass killing.
“
There was a place called the ramp where the trains with the Jews were coming in. They were coming in day and night, and sometimes one per day and sometimes five per day … Constantly, people from the heart of Europe were disappearing, and they were arriving to the same place with the same ignorance of the fate of the previous transport. And the people in this mass … I knew that within a couple of hours … ninety percent would be gassed.
”
—Rudolf Vrba, who worked on the Judenrampe in Auschwitz from August 18, 1942 to June 7, 1943.[150]
The extermination camps were run by SS officers, but most of the guards were Ukrainian or Baltic auxiliaries. Regular German soldiers were kept well away.

Gas chambers
At the extermination camps with gas chambers all the prisoners arrived by train. Sometimes entire trainloads were sent straight to the gas chambers, but usually the camp doctor on duty subjected individuals to selections, where a small percentage were deemed fit to work in the slave labor camps; the majority were taken directly from the platforms to a reception area where all their clothes and other possessions were seized by the Nazis to help fund the war. They were then herded naked into the gas chambers. Usually they were told these were showers or delousing chambers, and there were signs outside saying "baths" and "sauna." They were sometimes given a small piece of soap and a towel so as to avoid panic, and were told to remember where they had put their belongings for the same reason. When they asked for water because they were thirsty after the long journey in the cattle trains, they were told to hurry up, because coffee was waiting for them in the camp, and it was getting cold.[151]
According to Rudolf Höß, commandant of Auschwitz, bunker 1 held 800 people, and bunker 2 held 1,200.[152] Once the chamber was full, the doors were screwed shut and solid pellets of Zyklon-B were dropped into the chambers through vents in the side walls, releasing a toxic gas. Those inside died within 20 minutes; the speed of death depended on how close the inmate was standing to a gas vent, according to Höß, who estimated that about one third of the victims died immediately.[153] Joann Kremer, an SS doctor who oversaw the gassings, testified that: "Shouting and screaming of the victims could be heard through the opening and it was clear that they fought for their lives."[154] When they were removed, if the chamber had been very congested, as they often were, the victims were found half-squatting, their skin colored pink with red and green spots, some foaming at the mouth or bleeding from the ears.[153]
The gas was then pumped out, the bodies were removed (which would take up to four hours), gold fillings in their teeth were extracted with pliers by dentist prisoners, and women's hair was cut.[155] The floor of the gas chamber was cleaned, and the walls whitewashed.[154] The work was done by the Sonderkommando prisoners, Jews who hoped to buy themselves a few extra months of life. In crematoria 1 and 2, the Sonderkommando lived in an attic above the crematoria; in crematoria 3 and 4, they lived inside the gas chambers.[156] When the Sonderkommando had finished with the bodies, the SS conducted spot checks to make sure all the gold had been removed from the victims' mouths. If a check revealed that gold had been missed, the Sonderkommando prisoner responsible was thrown into the furnace alive as punishment.[157]
At first, the bodies were buried in deep pits and covered with lime, but between September and November 1942, on the orders of Himmler, they were dug up and burned. In the spring of 1943, new gas chambers and crematoria were built to accommodate the numbers.[158]
Another improvement we made over Treblinka was that we built our gas chambers to accommodate 2,000 people at one time, whereas at Treblinka their 10 gas chambers only accommodated 200 people each. The way we selected our victims was as follows: we had two SS doctors on duty at Auschwitz to examine the incoming transports of prisoners. The prisoners would be marched by one of the doctors who would make spot decisions as they walked by. Those who were fit for work were sent into the Camp. Others were sent immediately to the extermination plants. Children of tender years were invariably exterminated, since by reason of their youth they were unable to work. Still another improvement we made over Treblinka was that at Treblinka the victims almost always knew that they were to be exterminated and at Auschwitz we endeavored to fool the victims into thinking that they were to go through a delousing process. Of course, frequently they realized our true intentions and we sometimes had riots and difficulties due to that fact. Very frequently women would hide their children under the clothes but of course when we found them we would send the children in to be exterminated. We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz.
– Rudolf Höß, Auschwitz camp commandant, Nuremberg testimony.[159]

Jewish resistance
Further information: Jewish resistance during the Holocaust.
For uprisings: Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Białystok Ghetto Uprising, Marcinkance Ghetto Uprising, Sobibór extermination camp, Żydowski Związek Walki, Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa.
For Jewish partisans, volunteers, and escapees: Yitzhak Arad, Bielski partisans, Masha Bruskina, Eugenio Calò, Jewish Brigade, Jewish partisans, Abba Kovner, Dov Lopatyn, Moše Pijade, Haviva Reik, Special Interrogation Group, Hannah Szenes, Rudolf Vrba, Alfréd Wetzler, Shalom Yoran, Simcha Zorin.
For how stories were preserved in the Warsaw Ghetto: Emanuel Ringelblum, Oyneg Shabbos (group).

An image from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

A man jumping out of a window of a burning house during the Warsaw uprising.
Yehuda Bauer and other historians argue that resistance consisted not only of physical opposition, but of any activity that gave the Jews dignity and humanity in humiliating and inhumane conditions.[160]
In every ghetto, in every deportation train, in every labor camp, even in the death camps, the will to resist was strong, and took many forms. Fighting with the few weapons that would be found, individual acts of defiance and protest, the courage of obtaining food and water under the threat of death, the superiority of refusing to allow the Germans their final wish to gloat over panic and despair.
Even passivity was a form of resistance. To die with dignity was a form of resistance. To resist the demoralizing, brutalizing force of evil, to refuse to be reduced to the level of animals, to live through the torment, to outlive the tormentors, these too were acts of resistance. Merely to give a witness of these events in testimony was, in the end, a contribution to victory. Simply to survive was a victory of the human spirit."
– Martin Gilbert. The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy.[161]
There are many examples of Jewish resistance, most notably the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of January 1943, when thousands of poorly armed Jewish fighters held the SS at bay for four weeks, and killed several hundred Germans before being crushed by overwhelmingly superior forces. This was followed by the uprising in the Treblinka extermination camp in May 1943, when about 200 inmates escaped from the camp after overpowering the guards. Two weeks later, there was an uprising in the Bialystok ghetto. In September, there was a short-lived uprising in the Vilnius ghetto. In October, 600 Jewish and Russian prisoners attempted an escape at the Sobibór death camp. About 60 survived and joined the Soviet partisans. On October 7, 1944, the Jewish Sonderkommandos at Auschwitz staged an uprising. Female prisoners had smuggled in explosives from a weapons factory, and Crematorium IV was partly destroyed by an explosion. The prisoners then attempted a mass escape, but all 250 were killed soon after.
An estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Jewish partisans (see the list at the top of this section) actively fought the Nazis and their collaborators in Eastern Europe.[162] The Jewish Brigade, a unit of 5,000 volunteers from the British Mandate of Palestine fought in the British Army. German-speaking volunteers from the Special Interrogation Group performed commando and sabotage operations against the Nazis behind front lines in the Western Desert Campaign.
In Poland and the occupied Soviet lands, thousands of Jews fled into the swamps and forests and joined the partisans, although the partisan movements did not always welcome them. In Lithuania and Belarus, an area with a heavy concentration of Jews, and also an area which suited partisan operations, Jewish partisan groups saved thousands of Jews from extermination. No such opportunities existed for the Jewish populations of cities such as Amsterdam or Budapest. Joining the partisans was an option only for the young and the fit who were willing to leave their families. Many Jewish families preferred to die together rather than be separated.
For the great majority of Jews resistance could take only the passive forms of delay, evasion, negotiation, bargaining and, where possible, bribery of German officials. The Nazis encouraged this by forcing the Jewish communities to police themselves, through bodies such as the Reich Association of Jews (Reichsvereinigung der Juden) in Germany and the Jewish Councils (Judenrate) in the urban ghettos in occupied Poland. They held out the promise of concessions in exchange for each surrender, enmeshing the Jewish leadership so deeply in well-intentioned compromise that a decision to stand and fight was never possible. Holocaust survivor Alexander Kimel wrote: "The youth in the Ghettos dreamed about fighting. I believe that although there were many factors that inhibited our responses, the most important factors were isolation and historical conditioning to accepting martyrdom."[163]
The historical conditioning of the Jewish communities of Europe to accept persecution and avert disaster through compromise and negotiation was the most important factor in the failure to resist until the very end The Warsaw Ghetto uprising took place only when the Jewish population had been reduced from 500,000 to 100,000, and it was obvious that no further compromise was possible. Paul Johnson writes: "The Jews had been persecuted for a millennium and a half and had learned from long experience that resistance cost lives rather than saved them. Their history, their theology, their folklore, their social structure, even their vocabulary trained them to negotiate, to pay, to plead, to protest, not to fight."[164]
The Jewish communities were also systematically deceived about German intentions, and were cut off from most sources of news from the outside world. The Germans told the Jews that they were being deported to work camps — euphemistically calling it "resettlement in the East" — and maintained this illusion through elaborate deceptions all the way to the gas chamber doors to avoid uprisings. As photographs testify, Jews disembarked at the railway stations at Auschwitz and other extermination camps carrying sacks and suitcases, clearly having no idea of the fate that awaited them. Rumours of the reality of the extermination camps filtered back only slowly to the ghettos, and were usually not believed, just as they were not believed when couriers such as Jan Karski, the Polish resistance fighter, conveyed them to the western Allies.[165]

Climax
Heydrich was assassinated in Prague in June 1942. He was succeeded as head of the RSHA by Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Kaltenbrunner and Eichmann, under Himmler's close supervision, oversaw the climax of the Final Solution. During 1943 and 1944, the extermination camps worked at a furious rate to kill the hundreds of thousands of people shipped to them by rail from almost every country within the German sphere of influence. At Auschwitz, up to 8,000 people were gassed every day by the spring of 1944.[166]
Despite the high productivity of the war industries based in the Jewish ghettos in the General Government, during 1943 they were liquidated, and their populations shipped to the camps for extermination. The largest of these operations, the deportation of 100,000 people from the Warsaw Ghetto in early 1943, provoked the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, which was suppressed with great brutality. At the same time, rail shipments arrived regularly from western and southern Europe. Few Jews were shipped from the occupied Soviet territories to the camps: the killing of Jews in this zone was left in the hands of the SS, aided by locally-recruited auxiliaries. In any case, by the end of 1943 the Germans had been driven from most Soviet territory.
Shipments of Jews to the camps had priority on the German railways, and continued even in the face of the increasingly dire military situation after the Battle of Stalingrad at the end of 1942 and the escalating Allied air attacks on German industry and transport. Army leaders and economic managers complained at this diversion of resources and at the killing of irreplaceable skilled Jewish workers. By 1944, moreover, it was evident to most Germans not blinded by Nazi fanaticism that Germany was losing the war. Many senior officials began to fear the retribution that might await Germany and them personally for the crimes being committed in their name. But the power of Himmler and the SS within the German Reich was too great to resist, and Himmler could always evoke Hitler's authority for his demands.
In October 1943, Himmler gave a speech to senior Nazi Party officials gathered in Posen (Poznan in western Poland). Here he came closer than ever before to stating explicitly that he was intent on exterminating the Jews of Europe:
I may here in this closest of circles allude to a question which you, my party comrades, have all taken for granted, but which has become for me the most difficult question of my life, the Jewish question … I ask of you that what I say in this circle you really only hear and never speak of … We come to the question: how is it with the women and children? I have resolved even here on a completely clear solution. I do not consider myself justified in eradicating the men—so to speak killing them or ordering them to be killed—and allowing the avengers in the shape of the children to grow up … The difficult decision had to be taken, to cause this people to disappear from the earth.
The audience for this speech included Admiral Karl Dönitz and Armaments Minister Albert Speer, both of whom successfully claimed at the Nuremberg trials that they had had no knowledge of the Final Solution. The text of this speech was not known at the time of their trials.
The scale of extermination slackened somewhat at the beginning of 1944 once the ghettos in occupied Poland were emptied, but in March 1944, Hitler ordered the military occupation of Hungary, and Eichmann was dispatched to Budapest to supervise the deportation of Hungary's 800,000 Jews. More than half of them were shipped to Auschwitz in the course of the year. The commandant, Rudolf Höß, said at his trial that he killed 400,000 Hungarian Jews in three months. This operation met strong opposition within the Nazi hierarchy, and there were some suggestions that Hitler should offer the Allies a deal under which the Hungarian Jews would be spared in exchange for a favorable peace settlement. There were unofficial negotiations in Istanbul between Himmler's agents, British agents, and representatives of Jewish organizations, and at one point an attempt by Eichmann to exchange one million Jews for 10,000 trucks—the so-called "blood for goods" proposal—but there was no real possibility of such a deal being struck (see Joel Brand and Rudolf Kastner).

Escapes, publication of news of the death camps (April–June 1944)

Bratislava, June–July 1944. Rudolf Vrba (right) escaped from Auschwitz on April 7, 1944, bringing the first credible news to the world of the mass murder that was taking place there. Arnost Rosin (left), escaped on May 27, 1944.[167]
Escapes from the camps were few, but not unknown. The few Auschwitz escapes that succeeded were made possible by the Polish underground inside the camp and local people outside.[168] In 1940, the Auschwitz commandant reported that "the local population is fanatically Polish and … prepared to take any action against the hated SS camp personnel. Every prisoner who managed to escape can count on help the moment he reaches the wall of a first Polish farmstead."[169]
In February 1942, an escaped inmate from the Chelmno extermination camp, Jacob Grojanowski, reached the Warsaw Ghetto, where he gave detailed information about the Chelmno camp to the Oneg Shabbat group. His report, which became known as the Grojanowski Report, was smuggled out of the ghetto through the channels of the Polish underground to the Delegatura, and reached London by June 1942. It is unclear what was done with the report at that point. [43][170][171][172]
In 1943 the news about gassing Jews was at least broadcasted from London to The Netherlands. It was also published in illegal newspapers of Dutch resistance (for example in Het Parool of September 27th 1943). However, the news was so unbelievable that many assumed it was merely war propaganda. The publications were halted because they were counter-productive for the Dutch resistance. Nevertheless, many Jews were warned that they would be murdered, but as escape was impossible for most of them, they preferred to believe that the warnings were false. [173][174]
In April 1943, Witold Pilecki, a member of the Polish underground, escaped from Auschwitz with information that became the basis of a two-part report in August 1943 that was sent to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in London. The report included details about the gas chambers, about "selection," and about the sterilization experiments. It stated that there were three crematoria in Birkenau able to burn 10,000 people daily, and that 30,000 people had been gassed in one day. The author wrote: "History knows no parallel of such destruction of human life." Raul Hilberg writes that the report was filed away with a note that there was no indication as to the reliability of the source.[175]
Rudolf Vrba and Alfred Wetzler, Jewish inmates, escaped from Auschwitz in April 1944, eventually reaching Slovakia. The 32-page document they dictated to Jewish officials about the mass murder at Auschwitz became known as the Vrba-Wetzler report. Vrba had a photographic memory and had worked on the Judenrampe, where Jews disembarked from the trains to be "selected" either for the gas chamber or slave labor. The level of detail with which he described the transports allowed Slovakian officials to compare his account with their own deportation records, and the corroboration convinced the Allies to take the report seriously.[176][167]
Two other Auschwitz inmates, Arnost Rosin and Czesław Mordowicz escaped on May 27, 1944, arriving in Slovakia on June 6, the day of the Normandy landing (D-Day). Hearing about Normandy, they believed the war was over and got drunk to celebrate, using dollars they'd smuggled out of the camp. They were arrested for violating currency laws, and spent eight days in prison, before the Judenrat paid their fines. The additional information they offered the Judenrat was added to Vrba and Wetzler's report and became known as the Auschwitz Protocols. They reported that, between May 15 and May 27, 1944, 100,000 Hungarian Jews had arrived at Birkenau, and had been killed at an unprecedented rate, with human fat being used to accelerate the burning.[177]
The BBC and The New York Times published material from the Vrba-Wetzler report on June 15[178] and June 20, 1944. The subsequent pressure from world leaders persuaded Miklos Horthy to bring the mass deportations of Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz to a halt on July 9, saving up to 200,000 Jews from the extermination camps.[177]

Death marches (1944–1945)
Main article: Death marches (Holocaust)

Dachau inmates on a death march through a German village, April 1945. As the Soviets approached, the Germans marched inmates away from camps in the east and back into Germany in an effort to hide the evidence.
By mid 1944, the Final Solution had largely run its course. Those Jewish communities within easy reach of the Nazi regime had been largely exterminated, in proportions ranging from more than 90 percent in Poland to about 25 percent in France. In May, Himmler claimed in a speech that "The Jewish question in Germany and the occupied countries has been solved."[179] During 1944, in any case, the task became steadily more difficult. German armies were evicted from the Soviet Union, the Balkans and Italy, and Germany's allies defected or were defeated. In June, the western Allies landed in France. Allied air attacks and the operations of partisans made rail transport increasingly difficult, and the objections of the military to the diversion of rail transport for carrying Jews to Poland more urgent and harder to ignore.
At this time, as the Soviet armed forces approached, the camps in eastern Poland were closed down, any surviving inmates being shipped west to camps closer to Germany, first to Auschwitz and later to Gross Rosen in Silesia. Auschwitz itself was closed as the Soviets advanced through Poland. The last 13 prisoners, all women, were killed in Auschwitz II on November 25, 1944; records show they were "unmittelbar getötet" ("killed"), leaving open whether they were gassed or otherwise disposed of.[180]
Despite the desperate military situation, great efforts were made to conceal evidence of what had happened in the camps. The gas chambers were dismantled, the crematoria dynamited, mass graves dug up and the corpses cremated, and Polish farmers were induced to plant crops on the sites to give the impression that they had never existed. In October 1944, Himmler, who is believed to have been negotiating a secret deal with the Allies behind Hitler's back, ordered an end to the Final Solution. But the hatred of the Jews in the ranks of the SS was so strong that Himmler's order was generally ignored. Local commanders continued to kill Jews, and to shuttle them from camp to camp by forced "death marches" until the last weeks of the war.[181]
Already sick after months or years of violence and starvation, prisoners were forced to march for tens of miles in the snow to train stations; then transported for days at a time without food or shelter in freight trains with open carriages; and forced to march again at the other end to the new camp. Those who lagged behind or fell were shot. Around 100,000 Jews died during these marches.[182]
The largest and best-known of the death marches took place in January 1945, when the Soviet army advanced on Poland. Nine days before the Soviets arrived at Auschwitz, the SS marched 60,000 prisoners out of the camp toward Wodzislaw, 56 km (35 miles) away, where they were put on freight trains to other camps. Around 15,000 died on the way. Elie Wiesel and his father, Shlomo, were among the marchers:
An icy wind blew in violent gusts. But we marched without faltering.Pitch darkness. Every now and then, an explosion in the night. They had orders to fire on any who could not keep up. Their fingers on the triggers, they did not deprive themselves of this pleasure. If one of us had stopped for a second, a sharp shot finished off another filthy son of a bitch.Near me, men were collapsing in the dirty snow. Shots.[183]

Liberation

Starving prisoners in Mauthausen camp, Ebensee, Austria, liberated by the U.S. 80th Infantry Division on May 5, 1945.

A grave inside Bergen-Belsen, liberated by the British on April 15, 1945.
Invasion of Germany: Battle of Berlin, Death of Adolf Hitler, Prague Offensive, Victory in Europe Day
The first major camp, Majdanek, was discovered by the advancing Soviets on July 23, 1944. Auschwitz was liberated, also by the Soviets, on January 27, 1945; Buchenwald by the Americans on April 11; Bergen-Belsen by the British on April 15; Dachau by the Americans on April 29; Ravensbrück by the Soviets on the same day; Mauthausen by the Americans on May 5; and Theresienstadt by the Soviets on May 8.[184] Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec were never liberated, but were destroyed by the Nazis in 1943. Colonel William W. Quinn of the U.S. 7th Army said of Dachau: "There our troops found sights, sounds, and stenches horrible beyond belief, cruelties so enormous as to be incomprehensible to the normal mind."[185][186]
“
We heard a loud voice repeating the same words in English and in German: "Hello, hello. You are free. We are British soldiers and have come to liberate you." These words still resound in my ears.
”
—Hadassah Rosensaft, inmate of Bergen-Belsen.[187]
In most of the camps discovered by the Soviets, almost all the prisoners had already been removed, leaving only a few thousand alive—7,000 inmates were found in Auschwitz, including 180 children who had been experimented on by doctors.[188] Some 60,000 prisoners were discovered at Bergen-Belsen by the British 11th Armoured Division,[189] 13,000 corpses lay unburied, and another 10,000 died from typhus or malnutrition over the following weeks.[190] The British forced the remaining SS guards to gather up the corpses and place them in mass graves.[191]
The BBC's Richard Dimbleby famously described the scenes that greeted him and the British Army at Belsen:
Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which ... The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them ... Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live ... A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms ... He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days.
This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life.[192]

---i got this from Wikipedia....we learned in our Lit class when we write essays and papers neever to use website likes this because the source can be untrustworthy..although, this information seems pretty ligitimate to me :)

ENJOY!!!!!!!

Lyrics to my favorite song

2008-05-08T10:34:00.001-05:00

These are the Lyrics to my Favorite Song:

Correction..

2008-05-07T19:33:00.000-05:00

Just to clear things up,

i was informed tha mothers day was on SUNDAY..NOT WEDNESDAY THE 14TH....so it is on SUNDAY...and i still don't know what i wanna get my awesome mother, maybe i'll get her a flower or something, they can't be that expensive can they?????

Well..

I'll write in a couple days

SEE YA'LL LATER!!!!!!!!!!1

My Thoughts from the past few days

2008-05-05T20:52:00.002-05:00

Today was really interesting in wellness, we are learning about addictive behavior, and we found out that we can be addicted to not only drugs but, facebook, TV, computer games, xbox, WII, music, or anything else, but we were basically learning about the addictions to drugs such as methamphetamine, dope, ecstasy, pot, and we learned that addictions are bad and that you can die from them if they get to out of control and you become so addicted that you need to take it so that you will always feel happy.

In my LAR class, we had class outside because it was like 75 degrees outside, and how can you NOT go outside when it is that warm outside? We had to write on the quote that says "Only the Educated are free" we had to write on why we agreed or disagreed with this quote. i wrote that i did not like the quote becaue the educated are NOT the only ones who are free, in fact, in my mind, we are considered free if we believe in God and strive to live for him all the days of our lives. I also think this quote is wrong because i'm pretty sure that many people may be in bad situations, but they can be considered to be free in many aspects.

At work today, i walked in and my boss was so excited to see me, i take that as a good thing because i work hard, and i try to make my little kiddies into the best little kids that they could ever be in the rest of their lives. I hate to really disipline them but i know that it is a part of life and they have to learn what NOT to do and what is the right thing to do. One of our kids is really wierd because he never seems to listen to what we say because we tell him NOT to stand on the chair, and he does anyway, and then, one time we told him he would fall, and guess what happened....he fell down, smacked his head on the floor and had a big red mark, and he wouldn't stop crying till his mom got their to pick him up..i hope that he learned his lesson. Even though i adore the kid, i wish he would actually LISTEN to what i have to tell him instead of ignoring him.

I love the show SCRUBS, i especially think the JD is thie hotest guy on their, and that Dr. Cox is stuck up and that Dr. Kelso is just a little messed up because he does not seem to appreciate the doctors who take care of the sick people..

Well,

i gotta go and edit the rest of my awesome Capstone project that is due the day after we get back from Chicago/...so i'd better get crackin on that

TTYL

BON VOYAGE

May 2008 plan

2008-05-02T08:48:00.002-05:00

Here is what May is going to look like for me:

Today: School till 11:30 then work till 5:30

Tomorrow (may 3) Clean the house, bum around, do whatever i wanna do

May 4. Go to Church, sit around, try not to break down into my version of song

May 5 School and Work

May 6 Bum around day, cuz i don't have school or work

Mat 7 School and work again

May 8, Day off, maybe i'll get my haircut

May 9 Sarah's Graduation, i' will be maybe be learing and helping kids behave, but i really don't want to

May 10, Clean the house and bum around

May 11, Church, bum around, and do whatever

May 12 School and Work

May 13 Off from school and work, don't know what i'm going to do

May 14. MOTHERS DAY...make mom a cool card and stuff and go to school and work

May 15. No School or work..possibly pack up all my stuff for out trip to Chicago

May 16..Go to school, go to work, get off work at 4, leave at 4:30 and go to Chicago for our weekend vacation with friends

May 17 Get to Chicago in the afternoon, go to Danae's house, hang out with her for a coupld hours, and bum around the rest of the night

May 18, Church, hear dad preach at our old church where we haven ot been for 4 yesars...LONG TIME Leave for home possibly early afternoon and get back late

May 19 Last real day of school before we take exams, then go to work and help little kids behave themselves

May 2o, STUDY STUDY STUDY!!!! even though i will study on the way to Chi-Town, i'm gonna study some mor

May 21 EXAMS?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I have both on the same day, Then go to work, and work all day

May 22 till the end of the month..Work my tail off so i can make enough money so i can actually pay for college next year..

Well

that's the rest of my month in a nutshell, i may change some things, or i may not, i'm going to see if i can stick to this schedule as much as possible

WELL/...

Until next time...

Write another update Really soon

Last day of April thoughts

2008-04-30T10:31:00.002-05:00

Here are my thoughts on the Last day of April 2008..

1. I hate how the majority of the month was freezing cold

2. April is supposed to be the month where it warms up so much that it NEVER gets cold at the end of the month.

3. April showers are supposed to bring May Flowers, but sometimes that isn't always true

4. I am convinced that we are approaching another iceage because the weather never stays warm for more then a couple weeks, it's warm constantly for like a week, and then it snows

5. This month has been my least favorite because of all the wind, snow, rain, coldness...April is supposed to be warm and cozy, but all it has been so far is gross, yucky, and full of snow that should not be around in April.

6. April is a month in which we should start to see more people with tshirts on, and no sweatshirts on because it is cold outside.

NOW, here are some of my hopes and dreams for the month of May 2008..

1. I hope May is the warm month so that we can all say HELLO to summer and GOODBYE to winter.

2. May flowers should start to appear on May 16, the day that i go on my mini vacation with my parents and sister (Sarah will b at camp working so she will not be able to go with us)

3. This month, i hope to get my mom the best mothers day present that a mom could ever get (any suggestions)

4. I hope to get more hours at work this month after i end my first year of college on May 21. because i have both my exams on the SAME DAY...YIPEE!!!

5. I hope to meet someone special and be with that person for many years (God is the only one who knows what is going to happen at this point)

6. This month i also hope that i can grow closer in my relationship with God, I really want to read the Bible more, pray more, reflect on the Bible passages that i read more, and just let other people know how AWESOME God is!!!

7. I hope to make plans with my friend Luke VL to go out for lunch with him one day and tell him all the exciting things that have been going on in my life since the last time we went out for lunch together.

8. I hope that i get a good financial aid package for Dordt, and i get a scholorship, but i have NO idea if that will come to pass, i also hope that if i do have to take out a loan, i can pay them back soon after graduation so i don't have to have the thought of paying back student loans on my mind.

And last but not least...

9. I hope to remain friends with the people that i have met at USF!!!!

Well, that's all for now, I have no idea what i'll write about in my next post, but i'm sure that it will be a very fun blog post to read and you will all enjoy it very much!!!

Until next time

BON VOYAGE!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Circus..and other stuff i wanna write about..

2008-04-27T15:01:00.003-05:00

Friday, we went to the circus with the preschoolers. It was SOOOO Fun, i rode their and back with my boss Brandi, in order to understand how fun she is, you kind of have to meet her, she has jam sessions in her car. The 3 kids that were with us thought it was funny...

The circus was AWESOME it was a three ring circus which made it even cooler, my favorite part was the part where the trapeez people do their thing, i was so scared that they were going to fall, The kids were asking me "How did they do that" i had to keep telling them that it took them a really long time to learn how to do that. The kids were amazed that it took them a long time to learn the tricks.

The other cool part was the part where the motorcycle people ride on their motorcycles in that cage thing, that was scary to watch because i was bound to helieve that somehow, they would mess up, and crash into eachother. They didn't crash, which made me happy. One of my kids asked me why they didn't crash, and that is another moment when i said that they learned how to do that with practice, and that they probably had to practice everyday like two times so they could get it right.

Their were Lions at the circus, one of my little boys was like "do they get to have snack when they are done" i told him Yea, they get a treat if they do a really good job. He was Happy about that. He is one of those kids who seems concerned that animals don't get snack if they do a good job at something. BUT, they do, and that made him the happiest kid in the world. I believe that someday when i have kids of my own, i am going to hope that they turn out just like the kids that i take care of at daycare. The kids their are just so much fun, they have so much energy sometimes it is hard to keep up with them.

Enough about the circus, Even though it was fun, i might bore you out of your minds with all the details SO, on to something else....Next week my older sister graduates College..WOW!!! i dont know if i can go yet, but, it might be really boring, because their are like over 200 people graduating i think, so it will take FOREVER...so yea....

The week after Sarah's Graduation, we are going to Chicago to hear my dad preach for our old churches 50th birthday party..LOL at least, that' s what i'm calling it...I hope the hotel we stay in has a pool, because i LOVE swimming... I really hope i get to go to my frend Danae's house 2, i haven' seen her since i moved out in 2004 so it has been a really long time SO, i hope with all my heart i can spend a couple hours with her, and all my other friends that live their..

On a sad note, A lady in our church is dying, of cancer, The mom is my sisters friends mother. She is just getting ready to meet Jesus right now, i am pretty sure that she is ready, but even if she is, i'm sure that she is scared about her family not taking it well... Altho, they are pretty strong in their faith, and God will help them with what they need so that is a HAPPY thing...

I can honestly say that i HATE when people die, Ever since my friend Aaron died, i haven't taken death very well, even if i have no clue in the world who the person is i just can't handle it. But, i do know that one day, death will be no more and that makes me happy. I am ready to go meet Jesus when God wants me to, he knows exactly what is going to happen to me, and knows on what day, month and year it will happen on. I am so glad, i don't have to map out my life, it's already mapped ouf for me..YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I AM going to leave this blog with a bible passage, the passage is Romans 12:2. it says ...

"DO not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is-His good, pleasing and perfect will"

These are the words that were spoken at our graduation last year, and they have always stuck with me, and i hope that they encourage you to be your own person and not conform to the person that the world says that you need to be.

BON VOYAGE!!!

April 25, 2008--The best post EVER (maybe...)

2008-04-25T08:50:00.003-05:00

The past week has been full of surprises. They started road construction on the road by my house, now part of the road is like destroyed and is just a bunch of sand and gravel, it looks cool but it is NOT fun to drive on because since my back has been like really sore the past couple days, it hurts a lot to drive over bumps in the road.
Today, i am going to the Circus with the preschoolers that i work with, it is going to be a really good time because i havent' been to the circus in like, a really long time. i am excited to see the clouns, ,elephants, and cool people doing their thing that makes the circus so enjoyable for ladies, gentlemen and children of all ages.
Tonight is Mal's Prom, she is going with Matt Vande Kamp, Matt is my Mom's friends son, so in a way, we are all friends, Mal considers Matt to be a member of our family because our families always seem to do really fun things with eachother such as, play volleyball, go to the fireworks on the Fourth of July, and have barbeques whenever the men go golfing, it is always a fun time with the families that my parents hang out with. Personally, Matt and Mal are really good friends and i hope that they have a really good time dancing on the dance floor together.
I remember that when i went to prom, i went by myself, but Senior Prom, my friends Steven and Chris and I went down grand march together. I had kept it a big secret for like a month, which is surprising because i usually don't keep secrets for a long time, and sometimes, they just wiggle out of me. My parents were shocked that i had kept it a secret for so long. I have a really great picture of us on Grand March, maybe when i do a picture post i'll put that one up here.
Tomorrow, Mal and I are babysitting Kiera, well, Mal might not be up to it, but i'm more then willing to do it by myself, because i seem to babysit better when i am by myself. I absolutely LOVE babysitting, if i could, i'd open my own all day babysitting job, where i would watch 2 kids all day while their parents went on a date, went to work, or if they just need a break from taking care of their kid, i'd be more then willing to do that.
When i mentioned that past week was full or surprises, i meant that it was full of TWO surpises, one was that i got an email from my friend Danae Lyzenga saying that when i go out their in three weeks she has a HUGE surprise for me, which i am really excitted about. The second is that one of my kids at work made me a card. Now, you wouldn't think that a 4 year old can really write yet, but after i left, she had one of the other teachers make it, and she gave it to me on Wednesday. It was SOOOO CUTE i am going to keep it forever and ever. Maybe, i'll even hang it on my wall at home LOL
Well, it is time to close, i will post about the circus and other fun things at a later date
Until then
Bon Voyage!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

At school...

2008-04-18T08:45:00.002-05:00

Well, as of right now, i am livin it up at school, and having a GREAT time.....OK, you caught me, i'm NOT living it up at school...in fact...i'm getting started on our end of the semester project...it's a reflective autobiography....very interesting eh? i think so!!! some people would not think so,, but since i do, i hope everyone else in the world will agree with me ethat writing about your own life absolutely ROCKS!!!!!!!!! Well.....i have to go, i'll write more about school later, and maybe for a post, i'll post an essay i wrote...HA HA HA.........................TTYL

April 15, 2008

2008-04-15T09:46:00.002-05:00

GOOD MORNING WORLD!!!!!!!!!!! today they started road construction by my house, so part of the sky is blue, and part is grey because of all the smoke and stuff flying around. Right now i'm watching "Walker Texas Ranger" with Church Norris. i have never seen it before and iti s really interesting. they just took out like 6 guys who shot a bunch of people just to get three million dollors. Pretty dumb idea just to get money, if i wanted money, i'd earn it by working my tail off until i had enough to buy what i want :) i say that working for money is the old fasioned way of doing it. My Job right now, ROCKS my world..i work with 3 year olds and preschoolers, the preschoolers and more behaved then the three year olds are. BUT, we have a preschool kid who is a bad influence on everybody else so we are constantly having him sit in time out, i keep telling him that when he goes to kindergarten next year, he won't sit in time out, they will send him right to the principal's office, He sometimes changes his atitude, but other times he doesn't, if it gets really bad, we send him to our boss. She does a good job of putting them back where they should be before they go off in the world of being in kindergarten next year.......IN other news, Friday night i'm babysitting for a family from church, they have one daugther named Mikayla, she is really cute, i have taken care of her in nursery before and she is really good, so i don't expect to be rushing around all night with her, i don't know how old she is but, i'm thinking that she is almost a year old, but i am just not sure. OH WELL, i guess i'll find out on Friday :) Well, i'm out....TTYL

Confession..

2008-04-14T20:39:00.002-05:00

I have a confession to make...
The part in my last post about me dating this guy for 5 months..COMPLETELY FALSE....i was just seeing if you guys were awake...BUT, someday i hope to be dating a guy..weather it be a hockey player, Canadian (which i would want to marry) or someguy who thinks i'm pretty and finds out that he truly does like me..so yea, all in all, i hope someday to meet a great guy who loves me for who i am and does not, i repeat DOES NOT take advantage of me!!!!!! One thing that i forgot to put in my last post was that this coming fall, at Dordt College, i will be studying Elementary Education, i really love kids, and to teach kindergarten or first grade would be the coolest thing in the entire world!!!!! I think i'll get a new template for my blog, i don't really like the one i have right now, so yea, i'm going to change it...so, for those of you who read my blog a few weeks ago, it will have a different look next time you read it!!!!!

Until NEXT TIME

My Update thingy

2008-04-12T20:37:00.002-05:00

Why Hello Everybody who reads this blog...
Lots of exciting stuff has happened since the last time i posted..here are a few of those very exciting things...

1. i started dating this guy named Zach, he is AWESOME, he and i are getting along very well, he lives about 7 hours from here, which isn't that bad, i started dating him on November six 2007. So we have been dating for 5 months already :) it is quite exciting. Someday i hope to be married to him. He has a younger sister, and no other brothers, so it is him, and his little sister :) I like him so much.

2. Sarah (my oldest sister, got a job at some clothing store, she liked it for a while, then she quit so her last day was Yesterday. This summer. she is working at the camp that she worked at for two summers a couple of years ago. Camp to me would be a little wierd to work at, altho, i guess that working in daycare is a little like working at a camp, altho, i do not think that you are allowed to go to camp when you are three years old.

3. This coming school year, i am going to be attending Dordt College. I am so so so so so so so so so so so very excited to go. i have many friends who go their, and they have friends who i was introduced to when i was visiting their a few months ago, So now, i am even more excited to go and take my college career to the next level. It is just right now, i do not fit in at the University of Sioux Falls, i don't really hang out with anybody, altho, i do have a friend named Jeff, who is really cool, and everytime i see him i get a really big smile on my face, he is just soo cool, and I LOVE IT!!!!!!!!!!!

4. My old small group leaders found out in December they were expecting their SECOND baby..I am soooo excited, Lily, their olderst child is a year and a half, and she is so cute. I saw an 4-D ultrasound of their new child on their blog, and from the looks of the image, the baby to be looks like Lily. I can't wait until August when the newest additon comes so i can meet him or her..i personally hope they have another daugther.

5. The people that i babysit for are awesome, The parents, Brian and Denae, are going to Las Vegas for a week, the kids, Mitchell and Max, are at grandma's house, Denaes Parents live in Pollock South Dakota, Where in the world is that?? Well, i do not know, that is the same question a few of my friends asked me when i told them i was moving to South Dakota. One of them actually looked it up and informed me that i was moving to the middle of a huge cornfield with cities located every now and again throughout the state. Now, i think they know where it is, so their is no more question of "Where in tbe world is that"!

6. Before i leave, i am going to mention this...MY COUSIN JUSTINE IS GETTING MARRIED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! she is getting marred on January 2, 2009. I am really excited because we are planning to her wedding...her fiancees name is IWAN, i have no idea how to pronounce it, but i'm going to work in the right pronunciation until the day that i actually get to meet him face to face..i am soooo ecited they are in love. and i can't wait to have a new cousin :)

Well,
that's it for this post
Until next time

BON VOYAGE!!

Sunday September 23, 2007

2007-09-23T21:52:00.000-05:00

Hey it's 9/23/07 and i haven't posted in a while, prolly cuz no one comments here anymore. but oh well, i'll keep posting

I just need to think about what to write, i just might copy and paste a paper i wrote for school on here, hmmmmmmmmm not sure

Well
better go

C YA!

July 2 2007

2007-07-02T15:10:00.000-05:00

I just realized that i haven't posted in a very long time and i haven't even been that terribly busy, but yet again, my life is NOT updating my blog everysingle day, so maybe from now on...my posts will surprise you when they appear...So, a lot has happened so far this past few months..oh, and there may be a few surprises of my own in this blog post as well...you never know!!!!!

for one thing: i found out one of my sisters friends is getting married in August...i thought that was really cool especially since i had to find this out from my mother and not directly from my sister, Not that my sister forgets to tell us things, i'm just taking it as my sister was so in shock that she forgot to tell us and she couldn't work up the guts to tell me so my mom had to tell me herself.

And for a second thing: My older sister (the one whos friends getting married) also aquired a boyfriend,.,OOOOHHHHHH....and i'm pretty sure they are going to get married, because if you know thier history, you'd better believe that they will NEVER break up again LOL

JULY 4

So i realized the other day that when i went to the bathroom my buttmunch sister surpised me by "ending" my blog post, and i really wasn't done...i really couldn't finish it yesterday because was to tired because i was awakened at eight in the morning by hammers and drills and saws because we are getting our new porch built so, it woke me up. But, now i'm going to finish up this post in the correct way so i don't just end the post and leave you hanging on what i was going to say after the other lil tidbits of information that i fed you 2 days ago

SO i ended 2 days ago saying that my sister and her boyfriend are NEVER going 2 break up again...this is soooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo true...you do not realize how true it actually is,...and get this..on our way home from CANADA..we are picking him up at the airport in Omaha Nebraska, so he can stay with us for a couple days...i am not going to be surprised if he asks the BIG QUESTION...the one i've been looking forward to ever since i met one of my best friends for the very first time...LOL...i know i'm crazy!!!!!!!!!!!

One thing that is totally amazing is that Tina, one of my managers at work, is going to have a baby...as of now she is six and a half months pregnant with a........BOY!!!!!! I'M SOOO HAPPY FOR HER.....i'm excitted to see her baby to.....she already has one other son, he is about a year old i think and he is sooooooooo cute, and i am soooooo excitecd to see the new baby because he is going to be a cute lil baby...Tinas husband is really cool too but sometimes he gets a lil impatient for Tina 2 get off from work....being six and a half months pregnant she is still a silly girl, and we are all excited for the day when her mom, (one of our other managers) tells us that Tina had a healthy baby boy...

Well now,

I am going to close now//

O WAIT.....I leave for SERVE on Friday and won't be home for 2 weeks cuz the first week i'm on SERVE and the second week i'm in CANADA.....SO......... i'll post about my SERVE and CANADA experiences when i return.....

See ya'll later!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

PICTURE TIME!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2007-05-07T18:41:00.000-05:00

Ok so these are all pics from Prom...and Jeff and Candy, i think my camera is in Lilly's diaper bag because it so totally was not in my purse when i got home on Wednesday night...so i'm guessing it's in Lilly's bag, i kind of need it before Thursday.......

Welll

PEACE OUT YA'LL!!!!!!!!!!

Thursday april 19

2007-04-19T19:06:00.000-05:00

Today i'm posting an obituary for my friend Aaron Curtis Dewitt.....i just can not let him go...i hope you enjoy reading this because every time i see it, i start to tear up and i just want to be held.... Enjoy!!!

AARON C. DeWITT~ 25854 478th Avenue, Brandon, SD; Died: Saturday, July 15, 2006, Rural Brandon, SD; Age: 17 years, 9 months, 5 days VISITATION~ Visitation begins at 6:00 PM Tuesday, July 18, 2006 at Linwood Wesleyan Church, Sioux Falls, where the family will greet friends from 7:00 PM to 8:00 PM FUNERAL SERVICE~ 2:00 PM Wednesday, July 19, 2006; Linwood Wesleyan Church, Sioux Falls, SD; Pastor Bill Kinnan, Pastor Jeff Heron and Pastor Steve Selfridge, Officiating, Jerry VandePol and Sheila Swanson, Speakers, Jenny Groen Kooima, Missy Groen and Kim Groen, Vocal Trio, Eric Kooima and Kim Groen, Vocal Duet; Special Music~ "Voice of Truth", "In Christ Alone" INTERMENT~ 7:00 PM Wednesday, July 19, 2006; Swedona Covenant Cemetery, Rural Brandon, SD PALLBEARERS~ Jeff DeWitt, Daryl DeWitt, Randy DeWitt, Mike DeWitt, Mark DeWitt, Sherwin DeWitt Aaron Curtis DeWitt, son of Curtis and Jody (Van Essen) DeWitt, was born October 10, 1988 in Sioux Falls, SD. He lived with his family in Sioux Falls before moving to the current family home northeast of Sioux Falls. Aaron received his elementary education at Calvin Christian School in Sioux Falls. He would have been a senior at Sioux Falls Christian School this coming fall. It is hard to begin to describe Aaron's life and all that his life encompassed. He was dearly loved by so many. Aaron started his journey as an energetic, excited and fun-loving kid with a great zest for life. He put his talents to use on the basketball court, track field and soccer field. He earned honors in track and basketball. In addition he was honored as a member of the 1st team for All-State soccer and was a member of Sioux Falls Christian's state champion soccer team in 2005. Aaron also loved the outdoors and spent any available time hunting (especially bow hunting), fishing and snowmobiling. Aaron's devotion to excel in all areas of his life was evident in the way he lived. All of us who were touched by his countenance and were fortunate to spend time with Aaron will ever be grateful to God� especially Aaron's dad and his brother for the wonderful adventures they shared together. Aaron's compassion and heart for others were experienced by so many. His love of life, love for his brother and sister and love for his parents and friends will be sorely missed. There are times we cannot understand the hows and whys of life, but we must simply trust God. Sometimes life doesn't seem fair and none of us knows when our time on earth is over and the door to our eternal life will be opened. Because Aaron fully believed in the saving blood of his Savior and the free gift of salvation, he is now enjoying all that heaven has to offer. Grateful for having shared his life are his parents, Curt and Jody DeWitt, Brandon, SD; a brother and sister, Joshua and Hannah DeWitt, Brandon, SD; his grandparents, Wes and Jean Van Essen, Pipestone, MN, John and Greta DeWitt, Brandon, SD; many beloved aunts, uncles and cousins; and a host of other relatives and friends. Aaron was preceded in death by a cousin, J. Allen DeWitt. In lieu of flowers, Aaron's family requests that memorials be directed to Sioux Falls Christian School.

I really miss Aaron....i can not wait to see him in heaven someday...i wonder what heaven is like.....Speaking of missing people, i'm going to post some of my favorite song lyrics as well, i know you will enjoy those....HERE THEY ARE!...

Two months is too little. They let him go. They had no sudden healing. To think that providence would Take a child from his mother while she prays Is appalling. Who told us we’d be rescued? What has changed and why should we be saved from nightmares? We’re asking why this happens To us who have died to live? It’s unfair. Chorus: This is what it means to be held. How it feels when the sacred is torn from your life And you survive. This is what it is to be loved. And to know that the promise was When everything fell we’d be held. This hand is bitterness. We want to taste it, let the hatred NUMB our sorrow. The wise hands opens slowly to lilies of the valley and tomorrow. (Chorus) This is what it means to be held. How it feels when the sacred is torn from your life And you survive. This is what it is to be loved. And to know that the promise was When everything fell we’d be held. Bridge: If hope is born of suffering. If this is only the beginning. Can we not wait for one hour watching for our Savior? (Chorus) This is what it means to be held. How it feels when the sacred is torn from your life And you survive. This is what it is to be loved. And to know that the promise was When everything fell we’d be held.

They are just in a long line cuz for some reason they won't go into the things but the lyrics are online, i just type in NATALIE GRANT HELD LYRICS and it takes me to the results...the music video is also wonderful, the link is on my post from 2 days ago

Well i'd better get going..

See ya'll later

PEACE OUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

April 16 2007

2007-04-16T22:12:00.000-05:00

Today i got my braces off...it felt wierd, now i have to wear this retainer type thing that is just a mold of my top teeth, it takes me a few seconds to get it out and when i finally do, it feels glorious, but then when i put it back in, it is like my mouth doesn't want me to put it back it, it is some crazy fun stuff...so i go back to Doc H in 3 months to see how it is going and then in nine months i just have to wear my retainer thing at night, pretty crazy...AND today i found out i had 3 out of the 4 wisdom teeth so this summer i'm having oral surgery to have those taken out, i'm NOT excited, but oh well, it's gotta be done, and i'm not complaining, i knew this was gonna happen because my gums sometimes hurt for a while so i know that it's probably my wisdom teeth growing in....Why do they even bother calling them WISDOM TEETH, they don't give you wisdom...or do they????? Hmmmmmm I CAN ONLY IMAGINE!!!

Anyway....

Everyone NEEDS to go to this website and watch this music video, it is probably the best music video EVER CREATED...LOL.,or not....hmmm YOU be the judge!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOufqWodFNo&mode=related&search=

OH, and i'm excited because well, i'm painting a collage with the theme being this song

WELL
until next time
PEACE OUT

April 14 2007

2007-04-15T21:48:00.000-05:00

today i'm posting a picture just cuz i wanna know what you think about it so here goes nothing

This is the tree in our back yard, last fall, i really like this piicture because the colors of the leaves just take my breath away i really want to paint a picture of a tree during the fall season in my painting class but i am not sure if my teacher would allow me to do that, i might just go to her tomorrow during class time and ask her if i can do that, and if she lets me, when i'm done, i'lll take a picture with my digital camera and then post it on here so you can see how cool my painting is.

What did you think? i gave you my take on the subject.
Well that's all for today, i have to get ready to go to bed now but soon i will write another post, and make it 3000000000 times better than this one.

Until next time

PEACE OUT!!!

OH, and i'm excited because tomorrow i get my braces off...YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

C YA'LL LATER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Letters to God...very cute!!!

2007-04-08T18:04:00.000-05:00

Dear God:
How come my brother has a pee pee and I don't? Did you run out of them?
Dear God:
My Mommy is sad a lot since Daddy went away. We can't find him. Can you?
Dear God:
My turtle died. We buried her in our yard. Is she there with your now? If so, she really likes lettuce.
Dear God:
I have scary dreams at night. Mommy says I can't come in with them anymore 'cuz I'm too big for that. Where do scary dreams come from, or should I ask the devil that?
Dear God:
Did you invent skateboards? Do you have them up in Heaven too? I love mine a lot and can do lots of tricks already. Do you like watching me?
Dear God:
I'm sorry I forgot the words to your songs yesterday in Sunday School. I don't sing that good anyway so sometimes I just hum along. Is that o.k. with you?
Dear God:
Could you please make my legs be strong? I want to play like the other kids. They tease me so please make them stop.
Dear God:
Do you throw the lightening down at us? It scares me a lot when it goes BOOM. Please stop it.
Dear God:
I love Jesse a lot. When I told him, he pushed me down and made me cry. Mommy says he must like me too. What do you think?
Dear God:
Molly got new pink shoes, and I want them. Is that bad? I won't steal them or anything, but would you send me some too?
Dear God:
I hate it when Daddy drinks his beer. He smells awful. Then he sleeps. He gets mean and yells at me a lot. Did you make up beer? Why?
Dear God:
When I get big I want to play basketball. Maybe you could make my skin black so I can play better. Also, make me really tall, too.
Dear God:
Do you like it when I pray to you? I do, too.
Dear God:
My Sunday School teacher says you always love me. Is that true? Even after what I did to Sara yesterday - or do you know about that? I really am sorry so I wish you would still love me.
Dear God:
My grandma is dying. She says you want her back with you, but I want her to stay here with me. You can have anyone you want. She's all I have, so please let her get better and stay.
Dear God:
Did baby Jesus cry all the time? My new brother does, and I don't like it. Mommy says all babies do, and I did when I was little. I'm six now. I don't think baby Jesus ever cried. He's your son, so you must know the answer. We have a bet on it, so please write back.
Dear God:
Why did you make snakes and spiders? I'm afraid of them.
Dear God:
Could you send me a horse? Caitlan has one, and she's always bragging about how fun he is. I want a bigger and smarter horse than hers. My horses' name will be Bullet so make him the fastest too, please.
Dear God:
My teacher is mean. She always yells at us. She's old and ugly. Why did you make bad and mean people?
Dear God:
Help me to not wet my bed anymore. I keep getting whippings, but I still can't stop.
Dear God:
Why do old people smell funny?
Dear God:
I saw a kangaroo and a buffalo today at the zoo. I like the lion best. What is your favorite? I think the ostrich is funny looking - did you do that on purpose?
Dear God:
I don't like brussel sprouts. Do I still have to eat them? I don't like milk, either. Mostly I like pizza.
Dear God:
I love you, God.
Dear God:
Would you make me a little brother? I want to have someone to boss around like my brother does me.
Dear God:
Why didn't you make me special? Cloe is specially pretty and Janine is specially smart. Ryan can run faster than anyone and wins all the races. Tina has perfect teeth. And Carmen can speak two languages. Did you forget to give me something special to be?
Dear God:
My dog, Bowser is getting really old now. He gets up slowly and doesn't keep up with me anymore when we run. Mommy says he's going to die one day. Could you just make him a puppy again instead?
Dear God:
I have no best friend. Everyone at school seems to have a best friend but me. Could you send me one, please? And hurry.
Dear God:
I have a spelling test on Tuesday. I never get all the words right. Maybe you could help me this time. Or is that cheating?
Dear God:
I have a lizard named Ernie. He only has three feet 'cuz one of them got caught in the door. I didn't mean to do it though. Would you fix it back again?
Dear God:
In Sunday School we learned that You are everywhere. How big are You? As big as Shaq? He plays basketball and is the biggest I've ever seen.
Dear God:
Do you know when I'm bad or good? Or is that just Santa Claus?
Dear God:
I play worse than anyone on my soccer team. I'm the smallest one, too. That doesn't seem very fair. Did you play a dirty trick on me?
Dear God:
Please make me pretty. Because I think I'm not very smart.
Dear God:
Do you listen to my prayers every night? Do you really know when I only pretend to brush my teeth? Don't tell Mommy, O.K.?

Cute eh? well i thought they were funny as well

OH, and i'm excited cuz i get my braces off on April 16...PARTY!!!!!!!!!!!!!

well

PEACE OUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

NEW EMAIL

2007-03-28T11:44:00.000-05:00

hey dudes

i changed email addresses so now i have 2..

1 that i never really use
and now this one
so the address is
kahoogendoorn@gmail.com

i think i'm going to check this one way more often cuz i'm on google search a lot anyway!!!