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Quiz about Pages from the Holocaust
Quiz about Pages from the Holocaust

Pages from the Holocaust Trivia Quiz


From anti-semitism in America, to life in the Warsaw Ghetto, to the horrors of the concentration camps, to the starving Jews after the war, this quiz takes you on a literary tour of writings by Jews and non-Jews on the perilous years of World War II.

A multiple-choice quiz by alliefarrell. Estimated time: 8 mins.
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Author
alliefarrell
Time
8 mins
Type
Multiple Choice
Quiz #
248,662
Updated
Dec 03 21
# Qns
10
Difficulty
Tough
Avg Score
5 / 10
Plays
736
Awards
Top 10% Quiz
Last 3 plays: Guest 24 (9/10), matthewpokemon (8/10), Guest 120 (5/10).
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Question 1 of 10
1. "At all events, Vichy did what the Germans commanded. On 2 October [1940], a German edict had been promulgated ordering all Jews to declare themselves as such, and all Jewish firms to notify the authorities of their nationality. On 19 October Vichy published its own 'Jewish statute', debarring all Jews from public office or the liberal professions."
Which French writer and philosopher wrote about these details in his/her memoirs?
Hint


Question 2 of 10
2. "I could not, of course, miss such a rare spectacle as the deportation of the Jews from Kiev. As soon as it was light I was out on the street. They started arriving while it was still dark, to be in good time to get seats in the train. With their howling children, their old and their sick, some of them weeping, others swearing at each other, the Jews who lived and worked on the vegetable farm emerged out onto the street..."
Anatoly Kuznetsov's autobiographical novel "Babi Yar" tells the story of the expulsion of the Jewish people from Kiev in 1941. Who or what is Babi Yar?
Hint


Question 3 of 10
3. "May 23, 1942. 'Were the skies parchment, were all the reeds quills', we would be unable to count the deeds of the beloved Judenrat. All its ramifications and all that accompanies it (and its branches are many and its entourage vast, because its functions in the ghetto are those of a government) are ugliness and destructiveness. After the Nazi leech comes the Judenrat leech. There is no difference between the one and the other but that of race."
Chaim Kaplan wrote these words in his "Warsaw Diaries", also known as the "Scrolls of Agony", published in 1972. What was the Judenrat?
Hint


Question 4 of 10
4. "One reason my father so admired the Jewish manager of his own district, Sam Peterfreund....was that Peterfreund had climbed to the leadership of such a large, productive office despite the company's deep-rooted reluctance to allow a Jew to rise too high."
What award-winning American author wrote about American anti-semitism during World War II in his autobiography?
Hint


Question 5 of 10
5. At question 5, we pause for some positive news. In her memoirs, "All Our Yesterdays", Natalia Ginzburg describes the arrival of two Jews in her little Sicilian village in 1940, and the villagers' reaction to them. She writes: "Gradually the Turk and the little old woman became village faces, everyone had grown accustomed to seeing them and had found out all about them, and now everyone said that Jews were just the same as other people, and why in the world did the police authorities not want them in the towns, what sort of harm could they possibly do?"
What profession did Natalia Ginzburg take up at the age of 67?
Hint


Question 6 of 10
6. Which author of the book "Night" once wrote that "to remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all"? Hint


Question 7 of 10
7. "Among the many devilish torments devised by the S.S. men at the Janowska Road camp was a ceremony at dusk at the camp's gate. The S.S. men formed two lines at the entrance to 'welcome' the inmates upon their return from a day's slave labor....The Germans would shout gleefully: 'Who is the most respected race on the face of the earth?' The inmates, exhausted from their labor, would respond hoarsely, 'The Third Reich!' 'And who is the most accursed race on earth?' the S.S. men would continue the diabolic dialogue. Prisoner's caps would fly in the air and above them once more the Jewish voices would rise in unison: 'The Jewish people'."
Yaffa Eliach collected this and many other tales told by Hasidic Jews, who have a tradition of storytelling. For what institution did Yaffa Eliach create her "Tower of Life"?
Hint


Question 8 of 10
8. "We fought with all our strength to prevent the arrival of winter....we know what it means because we were here last winter; and the others will soon learn. It means that in the course of these months, from October to April, seven out of ten of us will die. Whoever does not die will suffer minute by minute, all day, every day: from the morning before dawn until the distribution of the evening soup we will have to keep our muscles continually tensed, dance from foot to foot, beat our arms under our shoulders against the cold."
Which Holocaust survivor wrote these words in "If this is a Man", or as it is known in the United States, "Survival in Auschwitz"?
Hint


Question 9 of 10
9. In Marguerite Duras' "The War: A Memoir", she writes in great detail of nursing a starving survivor of Dachau back to health. One paragraph reads: "If he had eaten when he got back from the camp his stomach would have been lacerated by the weight of the food, or else the weight would have pressed on the heart, which had grown huge in the cave of his emaciation. It was beating so fast you couldn't have counted its beats, you couldn't really say it was beating - it was trembling, rather, as if from terror. No, he couldn't eat without dying. But he couldn't go on not eating without dying. That was the problem. The fight with death started very soon."
What did the caregivers feed their patient in small amounts to keep him alive?
Hint


Question 10 of 10
10. Martha Gellhorn writes about European denial after the war in her report "The Face of War":
"No one is a Nazi. No one ever was. There may have been some Nazis in the next village, and as a matter of fact, that town about 20 kilometers away was a veritable hotbed of Nazidom. To tell you the truth, confidentially there were a lot of Communists here. We were always known as very Red. Oh, the Jews? Well, there weren't really many Jews in this neighbourhood. Two maybe, maybe six. They were taken away. I hid a Jew for 6 weeks. I hid a Jew for 8 weeks. (I hid a Jew, he hid a Jew, all God's chillun hid Jews.)"
To which famous novelist was Margaret Gellhorn once married?
Hint



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Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts
1. "At all events, Vichy did what the Germans commanded. On 2 October [1940], a German edict had been promulgated ordering all Jews to declare themselves as such, and all Jewish firms to notify the authorities of their nationality. On 19 October Vichy published its own 'Jewish statute', debarring all Jews from public office or the liberal professions." Which French writer and philosopher wrote about these details in his/her memoirs?

Answer: Simone de Beauvoir

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) spent the war years in France, teaching in Paris. The section of her autobiography covering those years has as much to say regarding the treatment of Jews as she was able to see from her Parisian vantage-point. A daughter of the Parisian bourgeoisie, de Beauvoir was born to an agnostic father and a devoutly Catholic mother.

She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, where she met Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom she had a life-long, if exceedingly complex relationship. de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" is a crucial work on the oppression of women, and "The Ethics of Ambiguity" is considered by many to be the clearest study of existentialism.

Her dependence on drugs and alcohol hastened her physical and mental collapse at the end of her life; when she died, she was buried in the same grave as Sartre.
2. "I could not, of course, miss such a rare spectacle as the deportation of the Jews from Kiev. As soon as it was light I was out on the street. They started arriving while it was still dark, to be in good time to get seats in the train. With their howling children, their old and their sick, some of them weeping, others swearing at each other, the Jews who lived and worked on the vegetable farm emerged out onto the street..." Anatoly Kuznetsov's autobiographical novel "Babi Yar" tells the story of the expulsion of the Jewish people from Kiev in 1941. Who or what is Babi Yar?

Answer: a ravine near the town where Jewish people were killed

Babi Yar was a ravine near Kiev where Jewish people hid themselves. On September 29 and 30, 1941, it turned out that the Nazis did not intend to expel the Jews from Kiev but to kill them. At least 33,771 Jews were killed in those two days, and another 60,000 Kiev residents and prisoners of war were killed by the Nazis over the next few months. Little is known about Anatoly Kuznetsov.

He was born in 1929 in Kiev. Before he defected to the west in 1969, he photographed every page of his book, "Babi Yar", onto microfilm, and hid it in the lining of his coat.

His book was published in London shortly after he arrived there, and described his experiences in Nazi-occupied Kiev. The book received international acclaim. Anatoly Kuznetsov died in 1979 in London, England.
3. "May 23, 1942. 'Were the skies parchment, were all the reeds quills', we would be unable to count the deeds of the beloved Judenrat. All its ramifications and all that accompanies it (and its branches are many and its entourage vast, because its functions in the ghetto are those of a government) are ugliness and destructiveness. After the Nazi leech comes the Judenrat leech. There is no difference between the one and the other but that of race." Chaim Kaplan wrote these words in his "Warsaw Diaries", also known as the "Scrolls of Agony", published in 1972. What was the Judenrat?

Answer: an administrative body that the Germans forced Jews to form in each Polish ghetto

'Judenrat' is German for 'Jewish council'. They were usually composed of leaders of the Jewish community, and were forced by the Nazis to provide Jews for slave labour and to assist in the deportation of Jews to extermination camps. Judenrat members who did not fully cooperate were beaten, shot, or sent to the death camps themselves. Chaim Kaplan was born in 1880 in present-day Belarus, and trained to be a teacher.

In 1902 he moved to Warsaw and founded a Hebrew school of which he was principal for 40 years. Kaplan began his first diary in 1933, and his last diary entry is 4 August 1942.

He was able to smuggle all the volumes of his diary out of the Warsaw Ghetto before he and his wife were sent to Treblinka and perished there. Eventually, his diaries made their way to Israel and the U.S. and were published in 1972.

They paint a vivid and horrific portrait of life in the Warsaw Ghetto.
4. "One reason my father so admired the Jewish manager of his own district, Sam Peterfreund....was that Peterfreund had climbed to the leadership of such a large, productive office despite the company's deep-rooted reluctance to allow a Jew to rise too high." What award-winning American author wrote about American anti-semitism during World War II in his autobiography?

Answer: Philip Roth

Philip Roth published "The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography" in 1988. Born to a non-observant Jewish family in New Jersey in 1933, Roth has more awards for his writing than any other American author. He holds a graduate degree in English from the University of Chicago, and taught at many different American universities until his retirement in 1992.

There is now a Journal of Philip Roth Studies, published by Heldref Press.
5. At question 5, we pause for some positive news. In her memoirs, "All Our Yesterdays", Natalia Ginzburg describes the arrival of two Jews in her little Sicilian village in 1940, and the villagers' reaction to them. She writes: "Gradually the Turk and the little old woman became village faces, everyone had grown accustomed to seeing them and had found out all about them, and now everyone said that Jews were just the same as other people, and why in the world did the police authorities not want them in the towns, what sort of harm could they possibly do?" What profession did Natalia Ginzburg take up at the age of 67?

Answer: politics

Natalia Ginzburg was elected to Italian parliament in 1983 as an Independent. She held her seat until her death in 1991 of cancer. She was born Natalia Levi in 1916 in Palermo, Sicily, and raised as an atheist. In 1938, Natalia married Leone Ginzburg, with whom she ran an anti-fascist newspaper in Rome.

Her husband was arrested for his work, and tortured and murdered in prison. Natalia went to work for a leading Italian publisher. Her first novel was published under the pseudonym Alessandra Tornimparte due to Fascist anti-semitism in Italy.

In her novels, essays, and dramas, her main theme was the war's effect on families.
6. Which author of the book "Night" once wrote that "to remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all"?

Answer: Elie Wiesel

Elie Wiesel's "Night", published in 1958, recounts his experiences in Auschwitz. Born in Romania in 1928, Wiesel has written over 40 books, mainly non-fiction, and has spent his life ensuring that no one ever forget what happened to the Jews in the concentration camps. In 1986 Elie Wiesel was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for speaking out against violence, repression, and racism.
7. "Among the many devilish torments devised by the S.S. men at the Janowska Road camp was a ceremony at dusk at the camp's gate. The S.S. men formed two lines at the entrance to 'welcome' the inmates upon their return from a day's slave labor....The Germans would shout gleefully: 'Who is the most respected race on the face of the earth?' The inmates, exhausted from their labor, would respond hoarsely, 'The Third Reich!' 'And who is the most accursed race on earth?' the S.S. men would continue the diabolic dialogue. Prisoner's caps would fly in the air and above them once more the Jewish voices would rise in unison: 'The Jewish people'." Yaffa Eliach collected this and many other tales told by Hasidic Jews, who have a tradition of storytelling. For what institution did Yaffa Eliach create her "Tower of Life"?

Answer: The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

Yaffa Eliach was professor of history and literature in the Department of Judaic Studies at Brooklyn College for many years. Born in 1937 in Russia, Yaffa Eliach was only 4 years old when the Nazis occupied her shtetl (village) in June 1941. She survived the Holocaust; her parents and siblings did not. Nevertheless, Prof. Eliach came away with a commitment to celebrate the Jewish people in a positive way rather than to sink into cynicism and depression.

Her life, her studies, her teaching, and her honours have fulfilled that commitment.
8. "We fought with all our strength to prevent the arrival of winter....we know what it means because we were here last winter; and the others will soon learn. It means that in the course of these months, from October to April, seven out of ten of us will die. Whoever does not die will suffer minute by minute, all day, every day: from the morning before dawn until the distribution of the evening soup we will have to keep our muscles continually tensed, dance from foot to foot, beat our arms under our shoulders against the cold." Which Holocaust survivor wrote these words in "If this is a Man", or as it is known in the United States, "Survival in Auschwitz"?

Answer: Primo Levi

Primo Levi (1919-1987), a Turin-born chemist, was sent to an internment camp in Fossoli, near Modena, in 1943. All 650 Jews at the Italian camp were sent to Auschwitz, where Levi spent 11 months before being liberated by the Red Army. Only 24 of the 650 Jews from the Italian camp survived Auschwitz.
Abram Korn (1923-1972) is an Auschwitz survivor and author of "Abe's Story: A Holocaust Memoir".
Jan Komski is a Polish artist and Auschwitz survivor whose grim, must-see paintings and drawings of life in Auschwitz can be viewed at www.remember.org/komski/index.html
9. In Marguerite Duras' "The War: A Memoir", she writes in great detail of nursing a starving survivor of Dachau back to health. One paragraph reads: "If he had eaten when he got back from the camp his stomach would have been lacerated by the weight of the food, or else the weight would have pressed on the heart, which had grown huge in the cave of his emaciation. It was beating so fast you couldn't have counted its beats, you couldn't really say it was beating - it was trembling, rather, as if from terror. No, he couldn't eat without dying. But he couldn't go on not eating without dying. That was the problem. The fight with death started very soon." What did the caregivers feed their patient in small amounts to keep him alive?

Answer: gruel

For 17 days, their patient received one teaspoonful of gruel 6 or 7 times a day. That was all he could manage to eat at one time. The man, whom Duras calls Robert L., survived his ordeal, but I know nothing more of him. The excerpt I read from her memoir is the most difficult piece of writing I have ever read; I did not know that forced starvation was like that, and it haunts my dreams. Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) was born in Indochine [now Vietnam], but moved to France to study law when she was 17.

She graduated from the Sorbonne in 1935. During WWII, she was a member of the French Resistance and of the Communist Party. During her lifetime she wrote many plays, novels, films, and short narratives, and made her name as a successful screenwriter and director in the French film industry.
10. Martha Gellhorn writes about European denial after the war in her report "The Face of War": "No one is a Nazi. No one ever was. There may have been some Nazis in the next village, and as a matter of fact, that town about 20 kilometers away was a veritable hotbed of Nazidom. To tell you the truth, confidentially there were a lot of Communists here. We were always known as very Red. Oh, the Jews? Well, there weren't really many Jews in this neighbourhood. Two maybe, maybe six. They were taken away. I hid a Jew for 6 weeks. I hid a Jew for 8 weeks. (I hid a Jew, he hid a Jew, all God's chillun hid Jews.)" To which famous novelist was Margaret Gellhorn once married?

Answer: Ernest Hemingway

Martha Gellhorn was the third wife of novelist Ernest Hemingway. He quickly tired of her running around the globe to report on wars, and delivered her an ultimatum, at which point Martha divorced him, and moved to London. Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998), born in St. Louis, Missouri, was one of the greatest war correspondents of the twentieth century. During WWII, she worked for Collier's Magazine, and went wherever the war did, even pretending to be a stretcher-bearer so that she could be up close on the D-Day landings. She was the first person to report on the horrors of the Dachau concentration camp after it had been liberated. Martha Gellhorn was still reporting when she was 81 years old; at that age she went to Panama to cover the U.S. invasion. At age 89, terminally ill and nearly blind, she took a cyanide pill and ended her own life in her London home.

Sources:
most author biographies come from the following sources:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ or www.kirjasto.sci.fi
and all the quotations come from this anthology:
Richler, Mordecai, ed. "Writers on World War II". Toronto: Viking Press, 1991.
Source: Author alliefarrell

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