The Night of Elie Wiesel and Alicia by Alicia Appleman-JurmanWars between groups of people over race, religion and beliefs have taken place throughout human history. Millions of people have been killed simply because of the way they look, the people they love, the way they live, and their beliefs in general. However, it was not until after Hitler's Holocaust that the terms "genocide" and "ethnic cleansing" – the systematic destruction of entire groups of people for trivial and irrational reasons – came into use. Hitler's Holocaust was unlike any war fought for cultural reasons before the Holocaust. The Nazis did not simply want to subjugate the Jews, oppress them and try to impose their beliefs on them. Instead, Hitler and the Nazis wanted nothing less than the complete annihilation of the Jews and everything related to Judaism. Hitler's campaign against the Jews was hardly a war. The killers rarely encountered large, armed and organized groups of Jewish soldiers. Rather, the Nazis faced largely defenseless ordinary people: women, businessmen, farmers, and the elderly. Among all the victims, the most vulnerable were children. Towards the weakest members of society, the Nazis perhaps showed the slightest mercy. Children are always less capable of physical challenges than all adults, except the most fragile. Children cannot walk long distances, go without food, or resist disease as well as adults. Obviously, this made them extremely vulnerable to the will of the Nazis during World War II. They could not bear the long death marches, starvation and disease inflicted on them by the Nazis as well as the adults. Therefore, from a purely physical point of view, the Holocaust must have been far more torturous for children than for adults. Often, the Nazis specifically targeted children. Upon arrival at Auschwitz, ElieWiesel was told to lie about his age by a Jew already imprisoned there. If he had given his real age, fifteen, he probably would have been immediately sent to the gas chambers. Instead, by saying he was eighteen, he avoided immediate death in order to be put to work (Wiesel 28). Shortly afterward, Wiesel saw "a truck... at the pit and [delivering] its load - little children.