Why did 6 million Jews--1.5 million of them children--perish in Hitler's gas chambers and concentration camps during World War II? They were killed because Hitler devised a plan to eliminate Jews(as well as gypsies and a few other minorities) as a part of his plan for the "Final Solution to the Jewish Problem", for the "purifying" of his "Aryan" race. The atrocity that has become known as the Holocaust happened because of deadly racism and discrimination.

Many of those who survived did so because of the kindness and help of strangers--because people of conscience(many of them not Jews themselves)could not sit by and watch the annihilation of innocent men, women and children whose only "crime" was that they were born into a particular group.

In this web-based book quest you will be studying the stories of children who became the youngest and smallest victims, (and reading a fictional account in Number the Stars) of the Holocaust--and also of rescuers who put their own lives at risk, or opened their homes to try and save them. You will see the terror of those who were arrested and sent to the camps, the horrible and tearing decisions of parents who had to send their children away to try and save their lives....You will see man at his worst--and some men at their best...