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Click on an image to see a larger, more detailed picture.
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| 1944: Desperate Acts |
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pg. 564 |
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A smiling Petr Ginz is pictured with his parents and sister. A teenager when he was sent to the Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia, camp/ghetto, Petr joined with other talented boys, led by Professor Valter Eisinger, to publish a secret "magazine" called Vedem (In the Lead). Risking their lives, they painstakingly copied drawings, poetry, and stories by hand at night in their barracks. They then distributed the magazine throughout the ghetto. In September 1944 Petr was one of 2499 prisoners deported to the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
Photo: Yad Vashem
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Unshakable in his opposition to the Nazis, Wilhelm Leuschner paid with his life for the failure of the July 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler. Along with Julius Leber, Leuschner led the Socialist opposition to the Nazis and later joined the Kreisau Circle of resistance. His fellow resisters nominated him to serve as vice-chancellor in the government they would establish after Hitler's removal from power. Following the botched plot, he was subjected to a rigged trial in the People's Court and sentenced to death by hanging, which occurred on September 29, 1944.
Photo: Bilderdienst Suddeutscher Verlag
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Slovak National Uprising After the Germans seized Czechoslovakia in 1938, they created a conquered territory called the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and a rump state allied to Germany called Slovakia. Slovakia's government was a totalitarian dictatorship led by Dr. Jozef Tiso, a Catholic priest. Tiso collaborated in the German campaign to deport two-thirds of Slovakia's 90,000 Jews to Auschwitz. In August 1944 several groups, including the Czech government-in-exile and the Communist Party, called for a national revolt. Sixteen thousand members of the Slovak national army responded--as did large numbers of partisans and Jews from labor camps. In one bloody battle, a Jewish unit from the Nováky labor camp fought gallantly against the Nazis before being overrun. The revolt was put down by the Nazis on October 27, 1944. More than 1500 Jews had participated in the uprising.
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October 9, 1944: The SS arrests three Jewish women at the Auschwitz munitions factory for complicity in the smuggling of explosives used in the uprising of October 6-7; See October 10, 1944.
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October 10, 1944: Four additional women involved in smuggling explosives used in the October 6-7 uprising at Auschwitz are arrested, including an inmate named Roza Robota. Fourteen men from the camp's Sonderkommando unit also are arrested. The sole surviving conspirator, a Greek Jew named Isaac Venezia, will later die of starvation after Auschwitz inmates are evacuated by their captors to Ebensee, Austria; See January 6, 1945.
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| 1944: Desperate Acts |
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pg. 564 |
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The Holocaust Chronicle
© 2009 Publications International, Ltd.
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