1. A citizen of the German Reich. Under the Nazis’ Nuremberg race laws, this status was reserved for “racially pure” Germans.

2. Hans Albin Rauter was the highest-ranking SS and police leader in the occupied Netherlands.

3. Brand name of a hand-pumped insecticide spray used widely between 1928 and the mid-1950s.

4. A concentration camp in Brandenburg, Germany. One of the first the Nazis established when they gained power in 1933.

5. The Nazis established brothels in concentration camps to encourage prisoners to cooperate, though no Jewish male prisoners were allowed to use them. Female prisoners were forced into prostitution. In Auschwitz the brothel was located in Block 24.

6. A concentration camp/ghetto in occupied Czechoslovakia that was used partly for elderly and prominent Jews and was also presented to foreign visitors as a model camp.

7. Dachau, established in 1933, was the first Nazi concentration camp and became a model for all others. Initially described as being for political prisoners, it was developed on the site of an abandoned munitions factory ten miles northwest of Munich.

8. A German chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate, once the largest company in Europe, which from 1933 worked closely with the Nazis.

9. Jawischowitz was an Auschwitz sub-camp between 1942 and 1945.

10. The Geuzen was a Dutch anti-German resistance group.

11. Erwin Von Witzleben, a German officer, was a lead conspirator in the failed plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944. He was tried and sentenced to death on August 7 by the Nazi “People’s Court,” known as the Volksgerichtshof, which had jurisdiction over so-called political offenses.

12. Gdansk (Danzig in German), on the Baltic coast of Poland.

13. A subcamp, which was part of a village, where vegetables, fruit, and flowers were grown by prisoners.

14. The river running south of Auschwitz.

15. Otherwise known as “the Shema,” this prayer is a centerpiece of daily morning and evening prayer and considered by some to be the most essential prayer in Judaism. It is also usual to recite it before bedtime and when death is imminent.

1. Translated by Eva Martin. Italics, Eddy de Wind.

2. Translated by Eva Martin. Italics, Eddy de Wind.

3. It is not known exactly how many people were sent to Auschwitz or how many died there. Historians tend to estimate that around 1.3 million people were sent to the camp and that 1.1 million people were murdered there.

4. Eugène Carp (1895-1983) was a prominent professor of psychology in the Netherlands.

5. Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov is the fictional protagonist of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1866 novel Crime and Punishment.

6. “Why shouldn’t the SS earn anything?”

7. The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German concentration camps and the system behind them by Eugen Kogon (New York: Berkley Books, 1950).

8. It is generally estimated by historians that between 5 and 6 million people died in the Holocaust, in camps, and also by execution and as a result of disease.