The word "Holocaust” comes from the Greek word "holókaustus”, which means "burnt whole”. It is used to refer to the systematic extermination of whole sections of a population (genocide). In Hebrew, genocide is "Shoah” ("great catastrophe”). This means the extermination of the European Jews.

When the Nazis took over power in Germany in 1933, they began discriminating against particular sections of the population. The Nazis saw themselves as a "master race”. For them, the Jews were an inferior race and were blamed for many problems in the country. They were attacked and many of them were not allowed to work. The Jews were not allowed to decide anything for themselves. They were unable to defend themselves because they had been stripped of civil rights. From 1941, they even had to wear a special sign, the "Star of David”. This was a yellow star with six points. Jews had their property, their apartments and their houses taken away from them. The Jews were driven (deported) from Germany and made to live in occupied countries in Eastern Europe in parts of the city that were barricaded off from the rest. These areas were named "ghettos”. One of the biggest ghettos was in Warsaw, the capital of Poland. As the Nazis carried their war of conquest to the whole of Europe, the Jews were persecuted everywhere. A systematic process of genocide began. The Nazis took the Jews, as well as members of the Sinti and Roma peoples, homeless and handicapped people, victims of political persecution, so-called "anti-social elements” and prisoners of war, to so-called "concentration camps”. Some camps were set up especially to kill Jews in gas chambers. The largest of these extermination camps was Auschwitz-Birkenau. Over six million Jewish people were killed between 1933 and 1945. Only a few of those persecuted survived this inhuman campaign of terror.