Yellow Star

Part of Hitler’s plan for German expansion and domination was the extermination of European Jewish people. Hitler conceived of Judaism as a race and believed that Jewish people were a lesser, subhuman species—untermenschen—who were determined to achieve world domination at the detriment of all other races, especially the Aryan race (which white, non-Jewish Germans were thought to belong to).

Initially, murders of Jewish people took the form of close-range shooting into mass graves. This was carried out by a specialized sub-group of the Nazi army called the Einsatzgruppen. Tens of thousands of Jewish people in Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, and Lithuania lost their lives in this way. However, this was not considered an expedient solution, and the physical and psychological strain on German troops from this method of killing was considered problematic. Furthermore, by October 1939, the Nazis had control of over 2 million Jewish people between Germany, Poland, Austria, and the Czech Republic (known at the time as the territories of Sudetenland, Moravia, and Bohemia), and this number continued to grow with German expansion.

The Nazi party developed the “final solution” to the Jewish “problem”: an intentional, mass extermination of European Jews. Purpose-built killing centers were established in German-controlled Poland: Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, and—most notorious of all—Auschwitz. Mobile gas vans were initially used at these centers. Later, permanent gas chambers were built attached to crematoriums. To minimize the psychological cost to German personnel, enslaved Jewish prisoners or prisoners of war were often used as the sonderkommandos, the workers in the gas chambers and crematoria.

In Yellow Star, the deportations noted by Syvia in early 1942 were destined for Chelmno extermination camp. By mid-1944, people designated for mass deportations (which Syvia and her family are selected for when they are allocated to the line on the left) were destined for Auschwitz-Birkenau. Over 250,000 people were detained in the Lodz Ghetto, many of whom were Jewish. Of this number, only 800 people were liberated from the ghetto in 1945.

Over 6 million European Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, which only ceased when extermination camps were liberated by Allied soldiers (Berenbaum, Michael. “Holocaust.” Britannica, 2023).