The Eastern Front

The battles on the eastern front contained the largest military confrontation in history. It was central to the Holocaust,  it was the site of nearly all extermination camps, death marches, ghettos and pogroms. 30 million out of the 70 million deaths from WWII occurred on the eastern front. The two main powers of the eastern front were Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union along with their allies. Both powers disliked the outcome of WWI. 

After WWII, German soldiers said that they had nothing to do with the horrors that the Nazi's did. However, Sonke Nietzer discovered transcripts of recorded conversations from Germany officers talking about their experiences. The recording were made from Allies to listen to conversations between German prisoners of war in their cells. Nietzer and social physchologist Harald Welzer ended up finding 150,000 pages of transcripts. All the information ended up in a book called "Soldaten" ("Soldiers").

 

There was also a brutal mass rape of German women during and after the war. Victims were repeatedly raped. An estimated 2,000,000 women and girls were believed to be raped by the end of WWII by Red Army Soldiers. If they ended up pregnant, they couldn't abort and had to follow along with an unwanted child as a humiliation. 90% of raped women in Berlin had diseases. 

Who were the two main powers of the eastern front?

Why do you think women were being raped at the time of war?

          Eliezer "Elie" Wiesel was born on September 30, 1928 in Sighet, Transylvania. He is a Jewish-American professor and political activist. Eliezer's spouse was Marion Erster Rose. His parents were Sarah Feig and Shlomo Wiesel. Eliezer had three siblings, two older sisters names Hilda and Beatrice and one younger sister Tzipora. They spoke Yiddish most of the time but also German, Hungarian and Romanian. 

          Eliezer is the author of 57 books including Night, a work based on his experiences as a prisoner in the Auschwitz, Buna, and Buchenwald concentration camps. During World War II his family and him were deported by the German Army to Auschwitz-Birkenau. There he got separated from his family except his father. Wiesel and his father had to work at Buna, a subcamp of Auschwitz III-Monowitz. Eliezer managed to stay next to his father for 8 months. They were forced to work under appalling conditions and shuffled among three concentration camps in the closing days of the war.

Where did Eliezer get separated from his family? 

How would you feel if you ever got separated from your family during a tough time?