Five Chimneys: The Story of Auschwitz

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses antisemitism, the Holocaust, murder, and physical and sexual violence.

World War II broke out when Germany (as well as Russia) invaded Poland on September 1st, 1939. Overwhelmed by the German invasion, Poland was defeated in October of 1939 and then partitioned between Germany and the Soviet Union.

Germany’s invasion of Hungary (where the Lengyel family lived) in March of 1944 allowed them to institute their program of state-sanctioned antisemitism, which enabled them to find the identity of Jewish individuals and forcibly transport them to extermination camps, as happened to Miklos Lengyel and his family (Hughs, Thomas A. & Rhoyde-Smith, John Graham. “WWII.” Britannica, 1998).

Part of Hitler’s plan for German expansion and domination was the extermination of European Jewry; Hitler conceived of Judaism as a race and believed that Jews were a lesser, subhuman species called Untermenschen, who were determined to achieve world domination at the detriment of all other races. Most notably, these Untermenschen were allegedly taking wealth and power from the Aryan race, an obsolete racial concept used by Nazis to refer to a “pure race” of Germans that excluded Jews, Roma, and people of African descent.