Written by zachor_foundation on May 7, 2014
On July 8, as the Red Army approached the city, the German authorities began to remove Jews to concentration camps in Germany. Many attempted to find refuge in underground hideouts that they had prepared; the Germans flushed them out with the help of dogs, smoke grenades, and firebombs. Approximately 2,000 Jews died of asphyxiation as the ghetto went up in flames and its buildings collapsed. About 4,000 Jews were transported to the Reich and territory that was annexed to the
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Written by zachor_foundation on May 7, 2014
The Red Army liberated Vilna on July 13, 1944, a year after the final liquidation of the ghetto. Jewish prisoners who had been kept in labor camps to exhume and cremate the bodies of earlier murder victims in Ponary were now taken to Ponary and murdered. Some 150-200 managed to flee before this liquidation and survived. Jewish partisan units that had fled from the Vilna Ghetto into the forest now helped the Red Army forces liberate the town.
Written by zachor_foundation on May 7, 2014
The British Foreign Secretary, Lord Arthur James Balfour, proclaimed Britain’s support of the creation of a national home for the Jews in Palestine. This declaration, given after British forces had already taken control of the southern part of Palestine and were about to occupy its north, transformed the Zionist vision into a political program that seemed attainable.
