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Cause And Effect Of The Holocaust

Decent Essays

How atrocious is an act, when society doesn’t even have a word to describe it? The word “genocide” was completely non-existent before 1944 when Polish-German lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, coined the term by combining the Greek word for race or tribe (‘geno-”) with the Latin word for killing (“-cide”). It wasn’t until after the despicable act of killing two-thirds of all European Jews, people realized the whispers about this great killing were true. The act has changed our society irrevocably because now, we don’t doubt what we, as human beings are capable doing. The Holocaust has had many effects on our lives, our environment, and our American culture because of the horrendous genocide that was committed against the Jews. As a result of the Holocaust, millions of Jews were killed. This begs the question, how big would their population be if those who were killed had lived? They would’ve continued to have children and their children would have children, but somewhere in the middle we are missing those generations. Before the Holocaust, the world had eight Jews per one-thousand people in the world, now, we are left with a mere two Jews per one-thousand. If the Holocaust would not have occurred, it is estimated that the population of the Jewish race could be as many as 32 million people today. Today only 13 million Jews are present. The war was raging in Europe and pushed many people out of their homes, which led them to move to other countries. Many Jewish families moved to

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