Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts
1. "At all events, Vichy did what the Germans commanded. On 2 October [1940], a German edict had been promulgated ordering all Jews to declare themselves as such, and all Jewish firms to notify the authorities of their nationality. On 19 October Vichy published its own 'Jewish statute', debarring all Jews from public office or the liberal professions."
Which French writer and philosopher wrote about these details in his/her memoirs?
2. "I could not, of course, miss such a rare spectacle as the deportation of the Jews from Kiev. As soon as it was light I was out on the street. They started arriving while it was still dark, to be in good time to get seats in the train. With their howling children, their old and their sick, some of them weeping, others swearing at each other, the Jews who lived and worked on the vegetable farm emerged out onto the street..."
Anatoly Kuznetsov's autobiographical novel "Babi Yar" tells the story of the expulsion of the Jewish people from Kiev in 1941. Who or what is Babi Yar?
3. "May 23, 1942. 'Were the skies parchment, were all the reeds quills', we would be unable to count the deeds of the beloved Judenrat. All its ramifications and all that accompanies it (and its branches are many and its entourage vast, because its functions in the ghetto are those of a government) are ugliness and destructiveness. After the Nazi leech comes the Judenrat leech. There is no difference between the one and the other but that of race."
Chaim Kaplan wrote these words in his "Warsaw Diaries", also known as the "Scrolls of Agony", published in 1972. What was the Judenrat?
4. "One reason my father so admired the Jewish manager of his own district, Sam Peterfreund....was that Peterfreund had climbed to the leadership of such a large, productive office despite the company's deep-rooted reluctance to allow a Jew to rise too high."
What award-winning American author wrote about American anti-semitism during World War II in his autobiography?
5. At question 5, we pause for some positive news. In her memoirs, "All Our Yesterdays", Natalia Ginzburg describes the arrival of two Jews in her little Sicilian village in 1940, and the villagers' reaction to them. She writes: "Gradually the Turk and the little old woman became village faces, everyone had grown accustomed to seeing them and had found out all about them, and now everyone said that Jews were just the same as other people, and why in the world did the police authorities not want them in the towns, what sort of harm could they possibly do?"
What profession did Natalia Ginzburg take up at the age of 67?
6. Which author of the book "Night" once wrote that "to remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all"?
7. "Among the many devilish torments devised by the S.S. men at the Janowska Road camp was a ceremony at dusk at the camp's gate. The S.S. men formed two lines at the entrance to 'welcome' the inmates upon their return from a day's slave labor....The Germans would shout gleefully: 'Who is the most respected race on the face of the earth?' The inmates, exhausted from their labor, would respond hoarsely, 'The Third Reich!' 'And who is the most accursed race on earth?' the S.S. men would continue the diabolic dialogue. Prisoner's caps would fly in the air and above them once more the Jewish voices would rise in unison: 'The Jewish people'."
Yaffa Eliach collected this and many other tales told by Hasidic Jews, who have a tradition of storytelling. For what institution did Yaffa Eliach create her "Tower of Life"?
8. "We fought with all our strength to prevent the arrival of winter....we know what it means because we were here last winter; and the others will soon learn. It means that in the course of these months, from October to April, seven out of ten of us will die. Whoever does not die will suffer minute by minute, all day, every day: from the morning before dawn until the distribution of the evening soup we will have to keep our muscles continually tensed, dance from foot to foot, beat our arms under our shoulders against the cold."
Which Holocaust survivor wrote these words in "If this is a Man", or as it is known in the United States, "Survival in Auschwitz"?
9. In Marguerite Duras' "The War: A Memoir", she writes in great detail of nursing a starving survivor of Dachau back to health. One paragraph reads: "If he had eaten when he got back from the camp his stomach would have been lacerated by the weight of the food, or else the weight would have pressed on the heart, which had grown huge in the cave of his emaciation. It was beating so fast you couldn't have counted its beats, you couldn't really say it was beating - it was trembling, rather, as if from terror. No, he couldn't eat without dying. But he couldn't go on not eating without dying. That was the problem. The fight with death started very soon."
What did the caregivers feed their patient in small amounts to keep him alive?
10. Martha Gellhorn writes about European denial after the war in her report "The Face of War":
"No one is a Nazi. No one ever was. There may have been some Nazis in the next village, and as a matter of fact, that town about 20 kilometers away was a veritable hotbed of Nazidom. To tell you the truth, confidentially there were a lot of Communists here. We were always known as very Red. Oh, the Jews? Well, there weren't really many Jews in this neighbourhood. Two maybe, maybe six. They were taken away. I hid a Jew for 6 weeks. I hid a Jew for 8 weeks. (I hid a Jew, he hid a Jew, all God's chillun hid Jews.)"
To which famous novelist was Margaret Gellhorn once married?
Source: Author
alliefarrell
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agony before going online.
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