Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed

Content Warning: This section discusses antisemitism, racism, and the Holocaust.

The Holocaust was the intentional and brutal attempt by the Nazi government to enact genocide on the Jewish people of Europe and beyond. Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazis murdered more than six million Jews via mass shootings, gas chambers, and death due to disease and privation in the harsh conditions of concentration camps and ghettos. In addition to Jews, the Nazis targeted people whose political or religious beliefs conflicted with the regime’s racist worldview. Anyone in Germany or Eastern Europe who openly criticized the Nazi regime was among the first actively placed in concentration camps. Later, the Nazis actively targeted communists, Catholics, atheists, people with disabilities, gay men, Polish people, the Roma people, anyone who potentially had a mental illness, the unhoused, and Soviets as well. The exact number of people the Nazis targeted, tortured, and murdered is unknown because they practiced mass cremation and used mass graves. The Holocaust refers not only to the mass murder perpetrated by Hitler and the Nazis but also to the antisemitic propaganda and general dehumanization of the Jewish people in Germany and Eastern Europe in particular.

As Hallie makes clear in Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, the Nazis’ fascist authoritarianism was not unique in Europe at the time. The Axis was initially an alliance between Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and Japan; later in the war, Hitler used bribes and threats to convince Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Croatia to aid in his campaign against the Soviet Union. Initially, France actively resisted the Axis, but in 1940, the French government capitulated to Hitler, and the Nazis occupied northern France. In the south, the Vichy government, led by Marshal Pétain, actively aided the Nazis in the capture and deportation of German, Eastern European, and French Jews to the concentration camps in Germany and Poland. It was against these forces that André Trocmé and his parishioners resisted from 1940 to 1945, when the war ended and the Allies liberated the death camps.

In the wake of this global tragedy, many survivors turned to literature and philosophy as a vehicle to tell the story of the horrors they experienced. As a result, an entire genre of fiction and nonfiction is dedicated to honoring those who died, identifying the causes of the Holocaust, and processing the grief of an entire culture. For more context and information on the Holocaust, see Doris Bergen’s War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust. Other nonfiction historical accounts of Holocaust hiding and rescue that relate to Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed are Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl and Irene Gut Opdyke’s In My Hands: Memories of a Holocaust Rescuer. Primo Levi, an Italian Jewish chemist, wrote several essays and a memoir, If This Is a Man, about his experience surviving the Polish work camps and Auschwitz. Levi, like Hallie, blends philosophy and narrative in his account of Nazi brutality. Prolific author Elie Wiesel is a well-known Holocaust survivor whose experiences informed his works of both fiction and nonfiction to raise awareness of the underlying causes of the Holocaust, the continuing threats, and inspiring lessons of human kindness. His most notable work is Night, a memoir describing his escape from the Buchenwald concentration camp.