By Keyword:   Chapter PROLOGUE 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 EPILOGUE Or, Page Number: Click on an image to see a larger, more detailed picture.		1943: Death and Resistance  pg. 483    While some 4000 Belgian-Jewish children were kept safe in hiding throughout the war, others were not so fortunate. An estimated 65,000 Jews were living in Belgium at the time of the Nazi invasion. The first deportation of Jews began in July 1942; they were sent via Malines to Auschwitz. Eventually, some 25,000 Jews were deported to their deaths, including all of these children. Photo: Serge Klarsfeld / United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive A Belgian priest proudly stands between two girls at their First Communion. The girl on the right, Marie-Rose, is a Jewish girl in hiding during the war. Belgians protested the deportation of Jews. While some Belgians, especially those in the police forces, collaborated in the deportations, others, including priests and nuns, protected and hid Jews. The facts that Belgium was a democracy, and that Jews, by and large, had been assimilated into the nation's economic and even political mainstreams, helped to encourage the sort of assistance received by young Marie-Rose. Photo: Samson Lerner / United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive  September 29, 1943: More than 320 Jews and Soviet POWs on work detail at the Babi Yar, Ukraine, mass-murder site attempt a mass escape. Nearly all are shot down almost immediately, but about 14 find hiding places; See November 6, 1943.  September 30, 1943: The Krupp arms factory at Mariupol, Ukraine, is dismantled and relocated west to Fünfteichen, Silesia, Poland, where it is staffed by Jewish slave laborers.  September 1943-April 1944: Jewish slave laborers exhume at least 68,000 corpses of murdered Jews and Soviet POWs at the Ponary, Lithuania, killing ground, near Vilna; See April 15, 1944.  Autumn 1943: Technicians representing Topf and Sons, the German manufacturer/installer of crematoria furnaces at Auschwitz-Birkenau, study the combustibility of corpses mated to various grades of coke.  Autumn 1943: British and American bombing of Germany, most notably the heavily industrialized Ruhr region, increases in intensity.   1943: Death and Resistance  pg. 483  The Holocaust Chronicle © 2009 Publications International, Ltd.