Potato Peels
– Do you remember anything from the ghetto?
– Hunger, hunger and … we ate potato peels. That’s what I remember.
Roma Byczuk / Warsaw Ghetto
Source: Visual History Archive of the Shoah Foundation Institute
The Holocaust is a catastrophe known to all. Six million lives were simply erased. From the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933 through the war years, various methods were employed to try to annihilate an entire people. Systematic and almost industrial-scale killing on an unimaginable level, carried out primarily on Polish lands occupied by the Third Reich, involved many types of weapons, often using hunger as a tool. This was a planned, bureaucratized process of murder, funded by the state apparatus, based on pseudoscientific, eugenic ideas of a “superior race.” Death by starvation was deliberate, targeted at specific groups, but ultimately affected nearly everyone—those imprisoned in camps and ghettos, the occupied population, and even the soldiers themselves.