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Visiting Info
Opening Hours:

Sunday to Thursday: ‬09:00-17:00

Fridays and Holiday eves: ‬09:00-14:00

Yad Vashem is closed on Saturdays and all Jewish Holidays.

Entrance to the Holocaust History Museum is not permitted for children under the age of 10. Babies in strollers or carriers will not be permitted to enter.

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The Fate of the Jews Across Europe

“In the meantime, I continued as usual going to school, to the Jewish school; and every night children would disappear. Every morning the teacher would open her attendance book, count the children, and as there were fewer children, she would ask: ‘Does anyone know if he’s sick, or has he been taken away?’ Mostly, they were taken away. So the teacher would erase the name from the list of students and continue teaching.”

Elisheva Weiss

Only about 10% of Polish Jewry survived the Holocaust, the majority in the Soviet Union. The fate of the Jews of Western Europe varied depending upon the country. In some of the countries most of the Jews survived (in Italy and France about 25% of the Jews perished), in other countries the Jewish population was partially destroyed (in Belgium 45% of the Jews were murdered), while in others most of the Jews were killed (in Holland, about 80% of the Jews perished during the Holocaust). Most of the Jews of Slovakia, Hungary, Greece and Yugoslavia were murdered by the Germans and their collaborators, while almost 75% of the Jews living under Bulgarian rule survived.

Murder of the Jews of Poland

Murder of the Jews of Poland

Jews lived in Poland for 800 years before the Nazi occupation. On the eve of the occupation 3.3 million Jews lived in Poland – more than any other country in Europe. Their percentage among the general population – about 10% – was also the highest in Europe.After the conquest of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union in September 1939, most of the Jews remaining within the area occupied by Germany – approximately 1.8 million – were imprisoned in ghettos. In June 1941, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Germans began to imprison the rest of Polish Jewry...
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Murder of the Jews of Western Europe

Murder of the Jews of Western Europe

In spring 1942, the Nazis began to deport the Jews of Central and Western Europe to the extermination camps. The deportation operations were run by the Jewish Affairs Department of the SS, commanded by Adolf Eichmann. The procedure was similar in most locations, geared to misleading the victims. Under German command, the local police, such as the Dutch, French and Belgian forces, carried out the deportations.As they set out to implement their anti-Jewish policy in Western Europe, the Germans acted cautiously, resorting to deceptions and ruses. It was not easy to identify Jews in this part of the...
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Murder of the Jews of the Balkans and Slovakia

Murder of the Jews of the Balkans and Slovakia

BulgariaOn March 4, 1943, the Bulgarian government, which had annexed Thrace from Greece and Macedonia from Yugoslavia, arrested all the Jews in these districts and sent them to two detention camps. Shortly afterwards, the Thracian Jews were transported in cattle cars with a Bulgarian police escort to the port town of Lom on the Danube River and handed over to the Germans. The Jews were loaded onto four small boats and arrived in Vienna ten days later. From there, they were sent to Treblinka to be murdered. The Jews of Macedonia were deported to Treblinka by land. In all, 11,370 Jews were deported.Concurrently,...
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Murder of Hungarian Jewry

Murder of Hungarian Jewry

The Fascist elements in Hungary enjoyed broad popular support and Miklos Horthy’s dictatorial government concluded an alliance with Nazi Germany. Antisemitic legislation was passed and more than 100,000 Jewish men were mobilized for forced labor, in which approximately 40,000 perished.When Hungary joined the war against the Allies, nearly 20,000 Jews from Kamenetz-Podolsk who held Polish or Soviet citizenship were turned over to the Germans and murdered. However, the extermination phase in Hungary only began later, after the Nazi invasion in March 1944. Until then Horthy refused to succumb...
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