![]() By spring 1945, when the Nazi regime lay in ruins, these informers had turned in as many as 2,000 Jews. ![]() Beginning in March 1943, the Gestapo (the German secret state police) granted some Jews in Germany reprieve from deportation in exchange for tracking down their co-religionists who had gone underground. German officials and their collaborators harshly penalized those who aided Jews and offered rewards to individuals willing to turn in Jews. Throughout German-occupied Europe, the Nazis made a concerted effort to locate Jews in hiding. The Nazis further discouraged rescue by threatening severe penalties for those caught helping Jews. The Nazis portrayed the Jews as carriers of contagion, as criminals, or as “Bolshevik” agents anxious to subvert European society. ![]() Even in countries where hatred for the German occupiers ran deep, anti-Nazism did not necessarily generate aid for Jews. Sadly, the willingness or ability of the non-Jewish populations to rescue Jewish lives never matched the Nazis' vehement desire to destroy them. Many Jews, no doubt, held out the hope that the threat of death would pass or that they could survive until the Allied victory. Hiding meant leaving behind relatives, risking immediate and severe punishment, and finding an individual or family willing to provide refuge. The vast majority of Jews in German-occupied Europe never went into hiding, for many reasons. Theirs was a life in shadows, where a careless remark, a denunciation, or the murmurings of inquisitive neighbors could lead to discovery and death. With identities disguised, and often physically concealed from the outside world, these youngsters faced constant fear, dilemmas, and danger. Thousands of Jewish children survived this brutal carnage, however, many because they were hidden. All of Europe's Jews were slated for destruction: the sick and the healthy, the rich and the poor, the religiously orthodox and converts to Christianity, the aged and the young, even infants. More than one million of the victims were children.ĭriven by a racist ideology that viewed Jews as “parasitic vermin” worthy only of eradication, the Nazis implemented genocide on an unprecedented scale. It is part utopian vision, part promotion of their own agenda, and part homage to their influences.When World War II ended in 1945, six million European Jews were dead, killed in the Holocaust. An anti-colonial diatribe, the Surrealists’s map removes colonial powers to create a world dominated by cultures untouched by western influence and participants in the Communist experiment. The only other city clearly indicated is Constantinople, pointedly not called by its modern name Istanbul. France is reduced to the city of Paris, and Ireland appears without the rest of Great Britain. The United States and the rest of Canada are removed entirely. The Americas are comprised of Alaska (perhaps another sly reference to Russia’s former control of this territory), Labrador, and Mexico, with a very small South America attached beneath. Africa and China are far too small, but Greenland is huge. Shifts in scale are evident, as Russia dominates (likely a nod to the importance of the Russian Revolution). ![]() Returning to The Surrealist Map of the World, let’s reconsider what it tells us about the movement.
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