Fire Sacrifice. Pleading children, debilitated elderly people and cynical women all have the same look of fear when they hear the word “Holocaust”. Approximately six million brave Jews were brutally murdered during the terrible Holocaust era. These Jews were ordinary human beings who had committed no crimes, encouraged no riots, and made no threats. They were citizens of their home countries who had the ability to contribute to the world with diverse intellectual achievements. In the concentration camps they were tortured, both physically and psychologically, starved, beaten, forced to live like animals and literally worked to death. Perhaps the most famous personal interpretation of the Holocaust, The Diary of Anne Frank, was written in Amsterdam in 1942 and 1944. The story is based on a Jewish family, originally from Germany, forced to move to the Netherlands to escape the Nazi massacre . The Franks family lived in relative peace until 1940, when Germany occupied the Netherlands and enforced strict anti-Semitic laws. These extreme measures prohibited Jews from riding streetcars, forced Jews to attend segregated schools, enforced boycotts of Jewish-owned businesses, and required Jews to wear yellow stars to identify themselves as Jews. The essence of life even of highly intellectual Jews, such as the Franks, became ambiguous. Two years after these anti-Semitic laws went into effect, the Nazis harassed, arrested, and sent many Jews in the Netherlands to concentration camps where they were rounded up and murdered. The Franks immediately went into hiding and Anne Frank kept a diary with all the events that happened during the war. He recorded every page in gruesome detail about...... half the paper ......or we were brutally tortured because we want to, not because we think we have to. Bibliography Bergen, Doris. War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003Dawidowicz, Lucy S. The War on the Jews, 1933-1945. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975. Gilbert, Martin. The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During World War II. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1986. Gutman, Israel, editor. Holocaust Encyclopedia. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1990.Hilberg, Raul. The destruction of European Jews. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003.Spark Notes Editors. "Sparkling Note in a Young Girl's Diary." SparkNotes.com. Spark Notes LLC. 2003. Web. March 17, 2011. Yahil, Leni. The Holocaust: The Fate of Europe's Jews, 1932-1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.