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.		1944: Desperate Acts  pg. 560    Two women in Strasbourg, France, read the first French newspaper they have seen since the German occupation began. The sign on the wall behind them, stenciled in German, reads: "Jews, Democrats, and Bolsheviks are the gravediggers of humanity. Therefore, we will fight on to the final victory." Photo: Hulton Getty Images Marion Kaufmann (background, center) stands in the midst of the Gypsy family that concealed and protected her in September 1944. Marion endured years of fear, hiding, and escape beginning in 1942, when she and her mother fled to southern Germany. They were helped by Christians to escape into the Netherlands, only to discover that the Nazis had occupied that country. Separated from her mother, who hid for over a year in a haystack, Marion was sheltered by the underground until liberated by Canadian troops. Photo: Marion I. Cassirer/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Photo Archive American soldiers enjoy a song as they ride the merry-go-round in Verviers, Belgium. For Belgian Jews, life was not so joyful, and liberation from the Nazis was only the first step in a long reconstruction of their lives. Survivors struggled to locate family members and to regain confiscated property. In the months after liberation, Jewish chaplains in the Allied armies and members of the Jewish Brigade helped survivors to secure the basics of life and search for lost loved ones. Photo: Corbis-Bettmann  September 18, 1944: Fourteen hundred Jewish boys at Auschwitz are taken from their barracks to the children's block and are later gassed.  September 19-23, 1944: The SS murders 2400 Jews and 100 Soviet POWs at the Klooga, Estonia, labor camp as Soviet forces draw closer. Only 85 inmates survive.  September 22, 1944: Arad, Romania, is liberated by Soviet troops.  September 24, 1944: As deportations to Auschwitz slow, Nazis gas 200 inmate Sonderkommandos. The bodies are cremated later in the day. Total number of Sonderkommandos now remaining at the camp: 661.   1944: Desperate Acts  pg. 560  The Holocaust Chronicle © 2009 Publications International, Ltd.