1936 – Remilitarisation of the Rhineland and thus gradual departure from the world order set after the First World War.
1938 – March – Anschluss of Austria and creation of the Greater German Reich
1938 – August – Decree ordering the administrative designation of all Jews and Jewish women in the Reich by forcing the use of a second name – Sara or Israel.
Discrimination
It is a situation in which a person (or a group of people) is treated less favorably than others in the same situation, is marginalized because of a given characteristic (or several characteristics) gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, creed, worldview, disability, age or sexual orientation or other characteristics. The ideology of the dominant group is often based on existing prejudices, stereotypes, and fears to help win public favor and maintain power.
Discrimination can be countered by granting equal rights to all groups in society, prohibiting discrimination based on race, religion, nationality or other grounds, and allowing people to assert their rights in the courts.
“The 1930’s was a period of Antisemitic persecution at the universities. There was a ‘bench ghetto.’ I saw a stamp on my fellow student’s book: ‘May sit only on the left side of the room.’ The National Democrats were rioting, a student was killed in Lviv. If you wanted to spare your children this kind of humiliation, you sent them to study abroad, where it wasn’t that expensive, for example Italy or Belgium. These young people would later return to Lublin after their studies.” Krystyna Modrzewska
“The secret classes comprised grades one to six of elementary school. My first pupils were Halina, Władysław and Leszek Budziło. […] I was also teaching some Jewish children: Anna Lehrhaft, fifth grade, and Henryk Enoch, first grade. They were both deported to Sosnowiec and killed there. […] I don’t remember all of the names. I had 37 pupils in total, but I never wrote down their names anywhere. As you know, it was forbidden to teach Polish children and if you didn’t comply with that, the punishment was very harsh – the teachers, the children and even their parents could lose their lives. For this reason, all the children I was teaching always had some manual job at hand just in case.”