Adolf Hitler, the dictator of the Nazi Party, created a plan called the Final Solution. The plan was to get rid of all of the nine million European Jews. He was very close in achieving their goal. The Final Solution took place during World War II. The Holocaust began in 1933 when Hitler came to power in Germany and ended in 1945 when the Nazis were defeated by the allied powers. Eleven million people were killed during the Holocaust. Six million of these were Jews. The Nazis killed approximately two-thirds of the Jews who lived in Europe. North America, Europe, and some of Asia and Africa were involved with the Holocaust. This event will never be forgotten. Jews were either sent to concentration camps, death camps, or to the ghettos. A ghetto was a special section of a city in which Jews were forced to live. The conditions of the Nazi created ghettos were horrible and unhealthy. They were usually cramped, dirty, and had little food. Some ghettos were the Amsterdam Ghetto, the Lodz Ghetto, and the Minsk Ghetto. However, the largest was the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland, with about 400,000 people crammed into an area of about 2.5 square miles.
Rita Hilton is a survivor of the Holocaust. She was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1926. Rita Hilton grew up near a city called Lodz. Her life before the war was happy. She was an only child. Rita lived in a comfortable neighborhood with her mother, grandmother, and grandfather. Rita's mother and grandfather were dentists who opened a practice together. Little did she know what was coming up. During the war, when the Germans occupied Rita's town, they put a bunch of restrictions on Jews. Rita Hilton and her family did not go into hiding. She had been told that Jews weren't allowed to have any money with them. Rita and her family were allowed to take their personal clothing. The concentration camps that Rita Hilton was sent to were Auschwitz I (Poland), Auschwitz II, Birkenau (Poland).
