There wasn’t exactly a historical precedent for a country attempting to systematically wipe an entire race off the face of the earth and successfully building the infrastructure to make it possible. History is full of atrocities like massacres and forced population transfers but nobody had ever truly done what the Nazis were planning. 

It was just another round of persecution for the Jews. At least, that’s what it seemed like. Big deal, they endured that for 5000 years, they can endure it again. 

That’s basically what my grandparents’ families were saying in 1939 when my grandparents pleaded with them to come with them and leave Warsaw and Łódź and sneak in to the Soviet-occupied part of Poland. My grandparents each had an idea of what was coming but for most of the community it was just another chapter in the same story that was going for centuries.