Imagine: It is January 1933. Adolf Hitler has been appointed Chancellor of Germany. A few months later, Hitler opens the first concentration camp, Dachau, to imprison all those branded as "enemies of the people." He then enforces the boycott of Jewish shops, bans Jews from teaching in universities or working in the public service. It will take only two years for the Nazi government to finally strip all German Jews of their citizenship with the passing of the controversial Nuremberg Laws.

Nazi Germany took advantage of the political instability in Europe to extend its territorial ambitions. In March 1938, it annexed neighbouring Austria. In October 1938, with the approval of Britain and France, the Germans invaded the Czechoslovak part of the Sudetenland. Five months later, Germany annexed the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia, including the Czech capital, Prague.

Bolstered by powerful propaganda with racist and anti-Semitic ideology, Germany and its neighbouring countries became the scene of one of the darkest periods in the history of the twentieth century: the segregation and systematic killing of European Jews (later known as the “Holocaust” or “Shoah”).

This activity aims to teach you about the lives of Jews in Nazi Germany, and to put these lives in historical perspective. It seeks to understand how the ghettos and the camps were a manifestation of Nazi ideology.

As a Canadian reporter in this tumultuous period of world history, you have been mandated to go covertly to Eastern Europe to write a secret story about the life of Jews in the ghettos and camps established by the Nazis.