A special project created with the support of the Jewish news portal · In memory of the six million — that each may keep a name
Yom HaShoahHolocaust Remembrance
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What was the Shoah

The Holocaust

How Europe, in twelve years, traveled from laws of hatred to the factories of death.

What was the Shoah

Extermination organized by a state

The Hebrew word 'Shoah' means 'catastrophe.' It is the name given to the systematic, state-organized persecution and murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators from 1933 to 1945. About six million people — two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe — perished.

The Holocaust was not an outburst but a machine: bureaucratic, methodical, industrial. It began with propaganda and laws, continued through ghettos and mass shootings, and ended in the death camps.

Timeline

Twelve years

1933
The Nazis in power
Hitler comes to power. A boycott of Jewish shops, dismissals, the first anti-Jewish laws, and the opening of the Dachau camp.
1935
The Nuremberg Laws
Racial legislation strips Jews of citizenship and rights and forbids marriages — the state divides people by 'blood.'
1938
Kristallnacht
A pogrom across Germany and Austria: hundreds of synagogues burned, thousands of shops and homes destroyed, tens of thousands sent to camps.
1939–41
War and ghettos
With the war, the Jews of Poland and occupied Europe are herded into ghettos — Warsaw, Lodz and others — amid hunger and overcrowding.
1941
The Einsatzgruppen
After the invasion of the USSR, killing squads shoot hundreds of thousands of Jews. At Babi Yar near Kyiv, nearly 34,000 are murdered in two days.
1942
The 'Final Solution'
At the Wannsee Conference the murder of all European Jewry is planned. The death camps — Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec — go into operation.
1943
Resistance
The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and revolts in the camps. Jews take up arms, knowing they are doomed — to die with dignity.
1945
Liberation
The Allies liberate the camps; on 27 January, Auschwitz. The world sees the scale of what was done. About six million Jews had perished.
Behind the number

A figure behind which there are people

About six million — two-thirds of European Jewry, and among them about one and a half million children. Entire communities, towns and shtetls that had lived for centuries vanished without a trace.

The Holocaust did not end with liberation. There remained the survivors, the orphaned, those stripped of family and home — and there remained the duty of memory we call 'Never Again.'