After the outbreak of World War II, Hitler established death camps to secretly implement what he called the final solution of the Jewish question. 450,000 Jews were sent to death camps from the Warsaw Ghetto 60,000 rebelled, fighting until they were killed, captured, or escaped to join the resistance. By the end of the war six million Jews had been systematically murdered. After the war Nazi leaders were tried for war crimes at Nuremburg, and West Germany later adopted the Federal Compensation Law, under which billions of dollars were paid to those who survived Nazi persecution. .
The destruction of European Jewry has demanded a reevaluation by Jews the world over. The renascent Jewish community in the state of Israel, itself largely a byproduct of the Holocaust, now serves as a focal point for much of this energy. A vast literature consisting of histories, diaries, memoirs, poetry, novels, and prayers has emerged in an effort to understand the Holocaust in terms of its religious and secular implications. The secular materials attempt to explain how it happened and the reactions of the victims; some have suggested that a deep and complete despair combined with a corrosive and unacknowleged sense of worthlessness that had been created by crushing and humiliating hardships and the disintegration of the Weimar Republic fueled an underlying and pervasive anti-Semitism in Germany. The religious materials focus on the problem of whether one can still speak in traditional Jewish terms of a God, active in history, who rewards the righteous and who maintains a unique relationship with the Jewish people. Museums and memorials have been established in a number of cities worldwide to preserve the memory of the Holocaust. .
A Survivor from Warsaw is often described as "the power of belief, of whatever you believe in, in the hour of need. It represents the finest in the symphonic tradition, which I see as entertainment on the highest possible level, with human values and uplifting spiritual qualities other forms of entertainment cannot achieve.
