Concentration Camps and Refugees
In the last months of the war and immediately afterwards, Allied soldiers discovered a number of concentration camps that had been used by the Nazis to imprison and exterminate an estimated 11 million people, 6 million of whom were Jews. Romanis, Slavs, homosexuals, Roman Catholics, and various minorities and disabled persons, as well as political enemies of the Nazi regime (particularly communists) formed the remaining 5 million. The best-known of these camps is the death camp at Auschwitz in which about 1.1–1.6 million Jews and political prisoners were killed.
Read more about this topic: End Of World War II In Europe
Famous quotes containing the words concentration camps and, concentration camps and/or refugees:
“We have our difficulties, true; but we are a wiser and a tougher nation than we were in 1932. Never have there been six years of such far flung internal preparedness in all of history. And this has been done without any dictator’s power to command, without conscription of labor or confiscation of capital, without concentration camps and without a scratch on freedom of speech, freedom of the press or the rest of the Bill of Rights.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist; since what happened to them was beyond the imagination, it was therefore also beyond art and all those human values on which art is traditionally based.”
—A. Alvarez (b. 1929)
“The exile is a singular, whereas refugees tend to be thought of in the mass. Armenian refugees, Jewish refugees, refugees from Franco Spain. But a political leader or artistic figure is an exile. Thomas Mann yesterday, Theodorakis today. Exile is the noble and dignified term, while a refugee is more hapless.... What is implied in these nuances of social standing is the respect we pay to choice. The exile appears to have made a decision, while the refugee is the very image of helplessness.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)