Written by zachor_foundation on May 7, 2014
The “great Aktion” in Kovno took place on October 28, 1941. The Jews of the ghetto were assembled in Democrats Square, SS Master Sergeant Helmut Raucke separated those fit for labor from the others. Workers were referred to the left, and non-workers – more than 9,000 men, women, and children – to the right. At dusk, when the sorting was completed, everyone on the right was sent to the “small ghetto”; those to the left were allowed to return to
Read More
Written by zachor_foundation on May 7, 2014
Anti-Jewish legislation in Slovakia, Germany’s ally and patron state, gathered much momentum in 1941. Jews were required to wear the Jewish Badge and perform forced labor. Construction of labor camps for Jews began in the autumn. An order for the banishment of 10,000 of the 15,000 Jews in Bratislava to several peripheral towns and labor camps was issued in September and implemented in October. In a statement to the German Foreign Office of October 22, 1941, concerning the deportations to
Read More
Written by zachor_foundation on May 7, 2014
In May 1940, the Germans built a labor camp for Jews in Belzec, a small town in the southeastern part of the Lublin district in Poland. The Jewish inmates were put to work at building fortifications and anti-tank trenches on the German-Soviet frontier. The camp was closed in late 1940. In late October, 1941, construction of an extermination camp at Belzec began as part of Operation Reinhard. The camp was built along a railroad siding half a kilometer from the
Read More
