Andrew Salamon: Surviving as a Child During the Holocaust.
The Holocaust is easily known to be one of greatest tragedies of the 20th century. Never had the world seen such devastation to not only land but to culture and people. The Nazi movement, not started but encouraged by the strong and hateful words of Adolf Hitler, sent Europe into a frenzy of violence and destruction. Tearing families and their lives apart, they tried to destroy all aspects of Jewish life. The cries most often heard during this time were those of the children. They wept for their fathers and brothers who were sent to labor camps and their mothers who had been shot in the street. The Holocaust immensely affected the lives of the Jewish community in World II, but more so impacted the lives of their children, including Andrew Salamon, as the build up from before, the development, the peak, and the decline of the war changed their lives forever.
Andrew Salamon was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1932 to a world of brewing turmoil as the Nazi party achieved it first success at the polls in Germany. Andrew grew up the son of a warehouse manager, in a prosperous metropolis full of museums, theaters, expensive apartments, and elegant restaurants. His Jewish heritage was established when his father converted to a Conservative Jew from orthodoxy, becoming part of the 10% of the Jewish population in Budapest. Andrew was raised to be an intelligent child as his mother taught him to read and count by the first grade, which led to respect not only from teachers but also from peers. He performed special tasks such as distributing books and taking charge of the class in a teachers" absence, all of which seemed like such remarkable achievements at the time. In school, Andrew could only think of one other Jewish boy that had been in his classes, Arpad, whose looks replicated those shown in the anti-Semitic papers, leading to degrading and foul remarks from his gentile classmates.
