Achtung! (ach toong) German for "Attention!"
Aden a seaport of Yemen on the Arabian peninsula.
Aryan (ayr ee uhn) Hitler believed that there was an Aryan race, which included Germans — and all other races, including the Jews, were inferior. According to Hitler, "Aryans" were statuesque, blond, and blue-eyed. Ironically, Hitler had none of these traits. In addition, he was wrong about the word "Aryan." The word refers to a group of languages. There is no such thing as an Aryan race. Race, in the nineteenth century, was used in all sorts of contexts. Yet it was linked, so the argument went, with one's "blood," something we would call genetics today. Hitler picked up on this misunderstanding and argued that there was something intrinsically inferior in the Jews' blood which rendered their whole person inferior. Hitler's ideas were wrong. How could the Nazis have called the Jews a race when people of all kinds can convert to Judaism. Jews are members of both a religious and an ethnic group — not a race.
Auschwitz (owsh vihtz) the death camp complex built in May 1940, south of the Vistula River a mile from the town of Oswiecim, Poland. Auschwitz I, the original concentration camp, annihilated two million victims with Zyklon B, a hydrocyanic vapor spread through shower heads on unsuspecting victims, then disposed of their remains in crematories. Added to the original buildings was Birkenau, or Auschwitz II, a selection and disposal center at the Auschwitz depot, and the Monowitz labor camp, or Auschwitz III, which lay south of the I. G. Farben synthetic oil and rubber factory, called Buna.
Austerlitz (ow stuhr lihtz) currently Brno, the Czech Republic, in the south-central portion of the country.
beadle a minor parish official or caretaker.
Beethoven Ludwig von Beethoven; a native of Bonn, Germany, produced dramatic romantic music for piano, strings, orchestra, and ballet. Because of the immediacy and emotional intensity of his works, Nazi laws ban Jewish instrumentalists from playing Beethoven's music. Even more identifiable with the myth of the "master race" were the works of Wagner, which devout Jews are still reluctant to perform.
Blockaelteste (blah kyl tehs tuh) German for "block official."
boches (bohsh uz) a derogatory name for Germans. The word is a shortened form of caboche, or hardhead.
Buchenwald Germany's model concentration camp, which was built outside Weimar in July 1937 to house homosexuals, political dissidents, Russian prisoners of war, Gypsies, and criminals, and to supply armaments factories with twelve-hour shifts of camp laborers, who died at the rate of 6,000 per month. Between January and April 1945, the inmate population more than doubled from 40,000 to 81,000. Fifty thousand died from overwork, starvation, and fatal medical experimentation designed to study patient response to bacteria, burns, and lethal injection. The prison staff earned the world's abhorrence for saving tattooed skins.
cabbala (kuh bah luh) a medieval system of interpreting scripture by the application of meditation, emotion, mysticism, insight, intuition, communion with God, and numerology.
Calvary a hill in Jerusalem where Christ was crucified. Metaphorically, the term applies to any torture, ordeal, or test of faith.
captivity of Babylon In 586 B.C., Nebuchadnezzar put down a Jewish revolt and placed the most prominent Jews in captivity in Babylon, leaving behind the poorest and least troublesome. Although Cyrus of Persia freed the captives in 516 B.C., most chose to remain in their new homeland.
charnel houses mortuaries, or makeshift repositories of the dead.
