Holocaust Memorial Historical Marker (2024)

Manhattan Beach inBrooklyn in Kings County, New York — TheAmericanNortheast (Mid-Atlantic)

As the Nazi Tyrrany under Adolph Hilter spread across Europe from 1933 to 1945, millions of innocent non-Jewish people were persecuted and murdered as well. Caught up in the Nazi slaughter were more than 200,000 Gypsies (Roma and Sinti) and about 200,000 mentally or physically disabled persons. More than three million Soviet prisoners of war were killed because of their nationality. Poles as well as other Slavs were

The concentration camp is the most enduring symbol of the Holocaust. The first camps opened soon after the Nazis took power in January 1933, and continued to operate until May 8, 1945, when World War II, and the Nazi regime, ended.

During the war, ghettos, transit camps, and forced-labor camps, in addition to concentration camps, were created by the Germans and their collaborators to imprison Jews, Gypsies, and other victims of racial and ethnic hatred as well as political opponents and resistance fighters. Following the invasion of Poland, three million Polish Jews were forced into ghettos.

After Hitler launched an attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, the methodical murder process began with the machine-gunning of Jews by four Einsatzgruppen squads. Between 1942 and 1944, the Germans moved to eliminate the ghettos in occupied Poland and elsewhere, deporting ghetto residents to “extermination camps,” death centers equipped with gassing facilities. In Poland,

Six killing sites were chosen in Poland because of their proximity to railway lines and their location in semi-rural areas: Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Chelmno was the first camp in which mass executions were carried out by gas between December 1941 and July 1944. More than 320,000 people were killed at Chelmno. The death tolls for the other killing centers: Belzec -- 600,000; Sobibor -- 200,000; Treblinka -- 850,000; Majdanek -- 275,000; and Auschwitz-Birkenau -- 1,250,000.

The largest single mass deportation during the Holocaust occurred between May 14 and July 8, 1944, when 437,402 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 147 transports consisting of hundreds of sealed freight cars. In that center, after an experimental gassing in September 1941, mass murder had become a daily routine. Nine out of ten people killed at Auschwitz were Jews.

To

To the heroes of the ghettos and the Jewish armed resistance;

To the partisans and allied soldiers who fought for freedom;

To those who survived the horrors and degradation of the Nazis;

To the few righteous among the nations who risked their lives to shield those targeted for death;

And to all those who wage battle for freedom and human dignity.

Humanity must learn, understand, and remember so that it will never happen again.

Until March 1944 conditions were relatively good in comparison with those in other concentration camps. However the Germans soon began housing at Bergen-Belsen those deemed unfit for work. The influx of those tens of thousands of ill and starving prisoners joined by evacuees ondeath marches led to the rapid deterioration of condition. This resulted in the deaths of 17,000 more victims from January 1945 onward.

In April 1945 British armed forces arrived at the camp of the 60,000 freed prisoners most of whom were Jews. 14,000 died within five days of liberation. 14,000 more died in the following weeks.

Presided over by Reinhard Heydrich, Deputy to SS Chief Heinrich Himmler, and Adolf Eichman, the Wannsee Conference authorized the most important German ministries to take an active roll in the methodical murder of the Jewish people.

Heydrich’s thinly-veiled references to the mass killing of Jews, begun with Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, included euphemisms

When mass deportations from the Bialystok Ghetto began in February 1943, Tennenbaum-Tamaroff advised against revolt because of the lack of available weapons. By July he had united all the resistance movements and in August ordered an unsuccessful escape to the forest. Tennenbaum-Tamaroff fell although some groups held out for as long as a month and a few reached the partisans.

In the months

As part of the German plan to phase out the camp, bodies were exhumed from mass graves and cremated with trees planted over the plowed site. The remaining 600 Jewish captives were murdered. Rudolf Reder was one of the few prisoners to escape death and gave testimony to the horrors of Belzec.

The Danes under King Christian X, who had initially reached an agreement with the Nazis to maintain the country’s democratic administration, began a show of resistance to the Reich in mid-1943. The German commander in turn declared a state of emergency and started arresting Jews in October of that year.

When reports of plans for a mass deportation were made known, Danes worked to hide Jews and ferry them to safety in Sweden in three weeks, 7,200 Jews, 700 half Jews and Gentiles married to Jews were rescued.

On July 23, 1942, Czerniakow committed suicide rather than comply with Nazi orders to sign the second mass deportation order. The transports to Treblinka continued unhalted until October, taking a toll of 310,000 innocent lives.

The heels are tapping
Where to, where to, what in?
From the old Vilna streets
They ship us to Berlin
I need not ask whose
But my heart is rent
Oh tell me shoes the truth
Where were the feet sent?
The feet of those boots
With buttons like dew,
The child of those slippers
The woman of that shoe?
And children’s shoes everywhere,
Why don’t I see a child?
Why are the bridal shoes there
Not worn by the bride?
Among the children’s worn out boots
My mother’s shoes so fair!
Sabbath was the only day
She donned the footwear

The Butterfly
(Theresienstadt Ghetto June 4, 1942)The last, the very last, so richly, brightly, dazzingly yellow perhaps if the sun’s tears would sing against a white stone.

Such, such a yellow is carried lightly, way up high. It went away I’m sure because it wished to kiss the world goodbye.

For seven weeks I’ve lived in here, penned up inside this ghetto but I have found my people here. The dandelions call to me and the white chestnut candles in the court. Only I never saw another butterfly.

That butterfly was the last one. Butterflies don’t live here in the ghetto.

Pavel Friedmann, died at Auschwitz-Birkenau on September 27, 1944 at the age of 23.

In the Fall of 1943 under Action 1005 the Germans secretly began to burn the buried corpses. Many Jews who were forced to do this work managed to escape to the Rudniki Forest where they fought with partisan units until the arrival of the Red Army.

Zygelbojm served in London as the Bund representative on the National Council of the Polish Government-in-Exile from mid-1942 on. He played a major role in alerting the free world to the Nazi persecution of Jews and to the need for rescue and retaliatory measures against the Third Reich.

In a desperate gesture to shake Allied apathy, Zygelbojm committed suicide on May 12, 1943, one day after an underground Polish radio station announced the massacre of the last Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, among whom were his wife and son. He left behind two letters -- one sent to the Polish President, the other to the Polish Prime Minister -- which articulated his protest against the Allies. Neither letter received official acknowledgement from the democratic government.

Located north of the German city of Weimar, Buchenwald was used as a prison for approximately 10,000 Jews after Kristallnacht. Though most were eventually released on condition of emigration, beginning in 1942 Jewish prisoners and Gypsies were sent to Auschwitz in 1944. Hungarian Jews from Auschwitz were distributed among Buchenwald’s branch camps, where they joined thousands of other prisoners to work in nearby armament factories.

The Germans began clearing out Buchenwald in April 1945, which in turn resulted in the death of one quarter of the 28,000 evacuees. American armed forces reached the cam during the same month.

Approximately 240,000 prisoners from 30 countries passed through Buchenwald and its satellites, more than 65,000 perished.

I BelieveI believe in the sun even when
It is not shining
I believe in love when feeling it
Not
I believe in God even when he is
Silent

--Inscription on the walls of a cellar in Cologne, Germany where Jews hid from Nazis

Beginning in the Winter of 1939-1940, people with disabilities were victims of carbon monoxide gassings in transport vehicles and later in chambers.

Instituted in hospitals the program “T-4” systematically sent adults with disabilities to their deaths in gas chambers under the “euthanasia” programs. German doctors authorized the murder of their own patients by lethal injection, overdose of medication and starvation.

Rabbi Weissmandel jumped from a train bound for Auschwitz and reached safety in Switzerland near the war’s end.

Of the numerous killing grounds, Babi Yar occupies a distinctive place in history. In this ravine northwest of Kiev, an Einsatzgruppen unit commanded by Paul Blobel machine-gunned 33,771 Jews on September 29 and 30, 1941.

In subsequent months, many more thousands of Jews were captured and taken to Babi Yar to be shot. Some Ukrainians helped Jews go into hiding. A significant number betrayed them. Blobel oversaw the cremation of the bodies in 1943. One hundred thousand victims, the majority of whom were Jews in addition to the Soviet POWs and Gypies died here.

I pray you believe what I have said about Buchenwald. I have reported what I saw and heard, but only one part of it, for most of it have no words. Dead men are plentiful in war, but not the living dead. More than twenty thousand of them in one camp, and the country round about was pleasing to the eye, and the Germans were well fed and well dressed. American trucks were rolling toward the rear filled with prisoners. Soon they would be eating American rations as much for a meal as the men at Buchenwald receive in four days.”

If I offended you by this rather mild account of Buchenwald, I’m not in the least sorry.

--Edward Murrow, war correspondent, 1945

When her older sister was summoned to register for forced German labor, the family took up residence in a secret annex to Otto Frank’s office for two years. Aided by a few of Mr. Frank’s Gentile workers, the family and four others lived in the cramped rooms until they were denounced and arrested.

The Franks were sent to Auschwitz on September 3, 1944. Mother Edith perished in Berkenau. Margot and Anne died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen in March 1945. Otto Frank was the lone survivor.

Anne’s wartime diary, salvaged by her father’s business associate Miep Gies has been translated into fifty languages with nearly 20 million copies published to date. The continued interest in this brave, sensitive, young woman is a tribute to her irrepressible spirit in the face of the Holocaust.

Janusz Korczak wrote numerous pioneering books on pedagogy and children’s literature, many of which were later translated into several languages. Korczak rescued many youngsters after the Nazi invasion of Poland and when the orphanage’s entire population was deported to Treblinka in August 1942, insisted on accompanying his charges.

Viewing the orderly three-mile procession of 200 well-dressed children led by Korczak to the train, a witness told historian Emmanuel Ringelblum this was not a march to the railway cars. This was an organized wordless protest against the murder!

On September 1, 1939, Wielun was among the first towns to be bombed by the German Luftwaffe. Nearly one-third of the population of Wielun was Jewish. The main synagogue was destroyed. And for us, the destruction never ended our promise to our murdered families is to keep their memory alive and to do all we can to create a more humane civilization with compassion for all people.

Chosen as commander of a small partisan group, Bielski invited the Jews remaining remaining in the region’s ghettos to join him the Bielski Brigade sought to avenge the murder of Jews by Belorussian police and local farmers operating from deep within the Naliboki Forest. Bielski made his camp a maintenance, base for Soviet fighters.

In the Summer of 1943, the Nazis began a massive crackdown on partisan groups. Bielski courageously disobeyed a Soviet command to pare down his unit to unmarried men of fighting age to allow the groups to better resist the Nazi assaults. Following the order would have meant abandoning the large number of civilians, including family members of the partisans who camped with the band and lived under its protection. Retreating to the thickest part of the forest, the Bielski Brigade guarded a family camp of more than 1,200 Jews until the area’s liberation a year later. This was the largest such rescue effort of the war.

His writings lauded Jewish heroism, called for punishment of the German nation, and indicted apathetic Western Christian civilization.

In April 1944 Katenelson and his son Zvi were sent from the Vittel Transit Camp to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they were killed. Left behind were his Vittel diary and the 15-canto elegy, the Song of the Murdered Jewish People.

Daniel Trocmé, a cousin of André, was director of a children’s home in Le Chambon -- Maison De Roches -- where Jews were hidden. He perished in Buchenwald for his efforts to save Jewish children. Some 3,000 to 5,000 Jews found unique shelter in Le Chambon and its environs between 1941 and 1944.

I BelieveI believe with complete faith in the coming of the Messiah, and even though he may delay, nevertheless I anticipate every day that he will come.

-- A traditional prayer that was chanted by many Jews as they were led to their deaths during the years of the Holocaust

Many Jews in occupied Europe adopted this stance. They were determined to not fall victim to the Nazi plan for dehumanization and death. Rabbi Nissenbaum perished in the ghetto.

Forced labor at the quarry entailed carrying stones weighing 110 pounds or more up 186 narrow steps to the camp. The arduous work as well as execution by shooting hanging and phenol injection claimed the lives of nearly 20,000 of the 200,000 prisoners who passed through the Mauthausen complex of the dead more than 38,000 were Jews.

These camps were the precursor to the much larger Jasenovac Camp complex to which the surviving prisoners of this complex were sent in August 1941 as part of the Ustashe regime’s overall plan to exterminate all Jews, Serbs, Romas, and political opponents within their territory.

And the Lord said to Cain “Where is your brother?” And he said, “I know not. Am I my brother’s keeper?” And he said, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood cries unto me from the ground.”

Genesis, Chapter V, Verses 9-10

Gebirtig was deported along with his wife, their two daughters, and 5,000 other Jews in the first transports from that ghetto to Belzec in June 1942.

You who read these words remember.

Remember that in the years of darnkess from 1933 to 1945 in German-occupied Europe six million men, women, and children were murdered with unprecedented brutality only because they were Jewish.

Remember that thousands upon thousands of Jewish communities were uprooted, schools and synagogues destroyed, and the hopes of an entire generation reduced to ashes.

Remember that all this happened at a time when evil was triumphant because the world remained silent.

Elie Wiesel, survivor and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace, 1986

First they came for the Socialists,
And I did not speak up because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists,
And I did not speak up because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak up because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me
And there was no one left to speak for me.

Reverend Martin Niemoller, Germany, 1937

At first the camp received political opponents of the Nazi Party, then Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gypsies, hom*osexuals, and clergy, the systematic persecution of Jews in November 1938 brought more than 10,000 Jews to Dachau, from where many were initially released with proof of intent to leave the country during World War II. Jewish prisoners were either transported to death centers or remained at Dachau subject to pseudo-medical experiments and the brutality of SS officers.

By the time U.S. troops reached the inmates of Dachau on April 25, 1945, more than 40,000 people had been killed, 60 to 90 percent of them Jews.

The Reich Citizenship Law Classified Jews as state subjects thereby excluding them from some (the right to vote and hold public office), but not all protections and rights as a result of the law and its corollaries. The law for the protection of German blood and honor outlawed marriages and extramarital relations between the non-Aryan Jews and Germans, prohibited Jews from raising the German flag, and forbade them from employing Aryan females under age 45 for work in their households.

Believing that the Nuremberg Laws, however unfair, were in some way meant to guarantee their safety in the wake of recent Antisemitic violence, many Jews accepted their second-class status. Three years later, Kristallnacht shattered such hopes forever.

One of a group of 32 Palestinian Jews who parachuted into occupied Europe, Hanna Szenes spent three months in German-occupied Yugoslavia with Tito’s Partisans. Certain that their example of personal sacrifice would inspire other Jews a relief reflected in her Hebrew poem “Blessed is the Match.”

Szenes crossed into Hungary in June 1944 but was captured immediately. She refused to break her silence even when subjected to torture and death threats to her mother, then living in Budapest. Brought to trial after five months of imprisonment, she was shot as a traitor to Hungary. Six other parachutists were executed by the Germans in 1950. Szenes’ remains were transferred to Har Herzl in Jerusalem.

American Jewish funds ultimately enabled the group to enter Great Britain, Belgium, France and the Netherlands, but most would die in the Holocaust.

Whoever sheltered or even simply assisted a Jew risked terrifying punishment. In this regard it is only right to remember that a few thousand Jews survived through the entire Hitlerian period. Hidden in Germany and Poland in convents, cellars, and attics by citizens who were courageous, compassionate, and above all sufficiently intelligent to observe for years the strictest discretion.

-- Primo Levi from

The Drowned and the Saved, 1988

Chernevtsy • Moevka • Borovka • Babchentsy

Zaenchik Family: Zyama, Gala, Sarah & Lazar • Glusk, Belarus December 1941

Boris and Sonya Kalantyrsky • Babi Yar

The Anthem of the Jewish PartisansOh, never say that you have reached the endThat clouds block out your very light of dayFor the hour we longed for yet will appearOur marching feet will thunder. We are here.

Hirsh Glik in the Vilna Ghetto 1943

Jasenovac was a complex of five major and three smaller camps in south central Croatia along the Sava River. Today most of the Jasenovac complex lies within contemporary Croatia. The main killing and burial ground of Gradina lies across the Sava in present day Bosnia.

The State Department urged President Franklin D. Roosevelt to convene the meeting to relieve public pressure for a more liberal U.S. immigration policy following the rise of Nazi assaults on Jews. Roosevelt announced before the conference that no country would be expected to alter its laws. The British and all others followed suit stating that political and economic concerns ruled out a large-scale admission of refugees. Only the Dominican Republic volunteered to contribute large-scale areas for agricultural colonization. The Sosua settlement ultimately took in 645 Jews.

The Western democracies generally indicated that they would remain closed to the stateless Jews of Europe. Euphemistically referred to as refugees, Evian’s Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees was equally ineffectual during the Holocaust.

Mortch Posniak • Nesshi Posniak • Cakey Posniak • Marsha Posniak • Ethel Posniak • Rochel Posniak • Feivel Posniak • Shepsel Posniak • Sruilie Posniak

Pessil Faust Kleinman • Miriam Kleinamn • David Kleinman • Moshe Jacob Kleinman • Pina Kleinman • Simcha Kleinman • Esther Kleinman • Rachel Kleinman

David Katz • Sheindel Marcovic • Jentu Yosef Marcovic • Rachel Gitel Zvi Markovic • Shmuel Zvi Shwarcz • Esther Avraham Shwartz • Moshe Hence Shwarcz • David Zeev Shwarcz • Yosef Haul

Moshe & Chawa Oksenhendler • Naftula Miriam Yosel • Rachel Oksenhendler • Malka Motel Itcher • Mania Rosencwaig • Avram & Hynda Iwanowicz • Yacov & Malka Iwanowicz • Getel & Chil Gutman • Meschulim & Berta Landman

After arriving in Budapest in July 1944 as a government appointee, Wallenberg, a Gentile, soon drew up protective passports for 5,000 Jews slated for deportation to Nazi death camps. Funds from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee abroad also enabled him to open hostels for 15,000 as part of an international ghetto.

When death marches to the Austrian border began, Wallenberg pursued the convoy and brought hundreds of Jews back to Budapest. He even helped foil a Nazi-Hungarian arrow cross plan to blow up two ghettos with 115,000 Jews just before the city’s liberation.

The highly suspicious Soviets arrested him in the capital on January 17, 1945. Soviet authorities asserted in 1956 that Wallenberg had died in Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison in 1947 though the claim has never been verified. In 1981 the U.S. Congress made him an honorary American citizen in recognition of his heroic rescue efforts (the only person besides Winston Churchill to be so honored).

He also ran a network of soup kitchens and helped establish a society to promote Yiddish culture. Two of three parts of the Ringenblum archive buried in milk cans survived the war.

In March 1944 he, his wife, and son as well as the Polish family with whom they and other Jews hid in Aryan Warsaw were informed upon. Arrested by the Nazi Gestapo (Secret State Police) and shot.

Earlier that summer tens of thousands of Ukrainian Jews from annexed territories of the Ukraine had been murdered by invading German and Romanian army units. Another 90,000 would die in the newly formed Transnistria. A total of about 150,000 Jews were detained there including tens of thousands from old Romania who fell victim to starvation, cold, and disease. Dictator Ion Antonescu’s intervention by Jewish community leader Wilhelm Filderman and others worked to alleviate conditions in September 1942. Anonescu halted a Nazi plan to subject Romanian Jewry to “special handling,” a euphemism for murder.

Soviet advances witnessed the first repatriation of Jews to Romania in December 1943. Of the deportees to Transnistria, some 90,000 perished by the time the Red Army arrived three months later.

It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet, I keep them because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness. I hear the ever-approaching thunder which will destroy us too. I can feel the suffering of millions. And yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end and that peace and tranquility will return again.

--Anne Frank,

The Diary of Anne Frank, July 15, 1944

Around 50,000 men were convicted under Paragraph 175. Thousands of male hom*osexuals were incarcerated in concentration camps where many died. Victims of harsh conditions, hard labor, medical experimentation, beatings or murder. Some had to wear pink triangles for identification.

After the war, hom*osexuals continued to be arrested and prosecuted under Paragraph 175 until its repeal in 1969.

I thought I had become inured to atrocities, but here at Majdanek is a point of new and clinical interest. It is the diabolical system and efficiency, the comprehensive centrally directed planning that for the first time made a totalitarian modern industry out of the reduction of the human being from an upright ambulatory animal to a kilogram of gray ashes.

--Edgar Snow
War Correspondent, 1944

Captives were crammed 50 to 70 at a time into stationary gas vans. Carbon monoxide was then pumped in, Jewish prisoners were ordered to bury the bodies in large pits. Western European Jews, together with 5,000 Gypsies from the Lodz Ghetto. Poles, Soviet PoWs, and 88 Czech children from the village of Lidice were subsequently sent to the camp for extermination.

The camp closed in March 1943 but was reopened months later to kill 7,000 more Jews from Lodz in late June 1944. Deportations from the Lodz Ghetto to Chelmno began anew by the end of August. These transports were diverted to Auschwitz to accelerate the pace of the Lodz Ghetto’s liquidation from September 1944 on. Efforts were made to destroy all traces of the installation when the Nazis abandoned Chelmno in January 1945. The remaining 50 camp-laborers resisted execution. Only three managed to survive more than 320,000 people were murdered at Chelmno.

Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame

Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart

Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honor’s sake

Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame

--Hannah Szenes, 1944

More than 900 synagogues were set ablaze and some 7,500 homes and businesses were vandalized. 91 Jews were murdered, countless numbers injured and approximately 30,000 subsequently deported to Dachau, Buchanwald, and Sachsenhausen soon thereafter. A fine of one billion Reichmarks was levied on the Jewish community, and a General Office for Jewish Emigration was created.

Blaszki • Kolo • Konin • Kozminek • Opatowiec • Kychwal • Sieradz • Stawszyn • Turek • Zagorow • Pysdry

I believe in God and in the world to come. When each of us comes before the six million we will be asked what we did with our lives. One will say he became a watchmaker and another will say that he became a tailor. But I will be able to say I did not forget you.

-- Simon Wiesenthal, pursuer of Nazi criminals (1908 - )

She along with a group of young Jewish women helped smuggle small quantities of explosives from the Weichsel-Union munitions factory (a Krupp slave-labor factory in Auschwitz) to the underground in Auschwitz and to the Jewish Sonderkommando who worked in the Birkenau crematoria.

Following an investigation of the Sonderkommando Revolt in October 1944 in which one of the crematoria was destroyed and another damaged with these explosives. Robata and three other female workers in the union factory were arrested despite severe torture at the hands of Nazi soldiers. Robata never yielded the names and communication channels of the core underground group. On January 6, 1945, she and her three comrades ala Gertner, Regina Safirsztajn and Esther Wajcblum were hanged before the assembled female prisoners of Auschwitz I. Robata’s last message to her associates concluded with the words “Chazak v ematz!” -- Be strong and be brave!

Wainman Family: Berl & Dina, children & grandchildren • Petr Lagunchik

In memory of our father Armin Klein, who perished in Auschwitz and is remembered by his children and grandchildren

I have never felt able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency.

I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at firsthand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the the belief or assumption that the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda. I not only did so but as soon as I returned I sent communications to both Washington and London urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt.

-- General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Commander - Allied Forces in Europe after entering Buchenwald 1945

No recognized representative of the Jewish community was permitted to attend. The two delegations ultimately thwarted any measures to aid European Jews including the idea of rescue negotiations with the Nazis and the prospect of opening up Palestine as a haven for Jews.

One small refugee camp was eventually created in North Africa. This saved a few hundred lives.

With great difficulty, the

British High Commissioner Harold MacMichael opposed granting immigration visas for the continuation of the trip despite the Jewish agency for Palestine’s appeal that the group be deducted from the May 1939 white paper quotas which greatly limited the entry of Jews to Palestine. Turkish police towed the

Klistorner Family: Sima, Ruchal, Frida, Perla and children: Izya Fira

Moishe & Taube Kaplonski • Libby, Abe & Rivke Batkovski • Belka, Alter, Marsha & Eli Schitnitski • Bishki, Sara, Leah, Frieda Kaplonski

Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto were its first victims in July 1942, followed by Jews from the Radom Bialystok and Lublin Districts. Some 29,000 Jews from Central Eruope and the Balkans were gassed there as well as 2,000 Gypsies.

Ukrainian units were common at most death-camp sites and at many concentration and forced-labor camps. A Ukrainian company served as camp guards helping the SS shoot sick Jews and sometimes operating the gas chambers. In August 1943, 650 prisoners revolted, setting fire to camp buildings and attacking guards. 70 of the escapees survived to celebrate V-E Day. About 850,000 Jews died in Treblinka II before the buildings were razed in October 1943 to obliterate all traces of the crime.

In October 1943 Soviet-Jewish POW Aleksandr Pechersky and former Zolkiew Judenrat chairman Leon Feldhendler led 300 Prisoners in an escape attempt after killing several camp guards. Most who fled were quickly recaptured and killed as were 200 inmates who had not taken part in the revolt after the incident. The Nazis decided to liquidate Sobibor and make it into a farm for Ukranian Guard.

Units of the Red Army and the Polish people’s units of the Red Army liberated the area near the former Sobibor Camp in the Summer of 1944.

SS officers and German police assisted by Lithuanian collaborators machine-gunned 70,000 to 100,000 people (the majority of whom were Jews along with Soviet POWs) at the edge of large open pits in September 1943, the burning of the corpses began. Some 80 Jews who were forced to do this task later escaped. 15 survived and joined Soviet partisans in the Rudniki Forest.

In Birkenau (Auschwitz II) Zyklon B. hydrogen cyanide gas was used in the gas chambers. Beginning in January 1942 barbarous medical experiments were also conducted. During an uprising on October 7, 1944, Jewish Sonderkommando prisoners (who were required to cremate the bodies) destroyed one of the four crematoria and damaged another, killed several SS guards and actually managed to escape. Few of these prisoners ultimately survived the revolt.

On November 2, 1944, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler ordered a halt to the gassing of Jews followed by the destruction of the gas chambers and crematoria. Forced marches into Germany’s interior began in January 1945. The Red Army liberated history’s greatest slaughterhouse on January 27, 1945. Approximately 1.25 million people were murdered at Auschwitz -- 90 percent of them Jews along with thousands of Gypsies, Soviet POWs and Polish politician prisoners.

An estimated 275,000 prisoners were killed there beginning in the Summer of 1942 including 125,000 Jews from Poland as well as the rest of occupied Europe. Sixty percent of the victims died form starvation, exhaustion, disease, and torture. Forty percent, mostly Jews, were gassed in death chambers and vans or otherwise executed. Ten thousand Jews deemed fit for labor were transferred to Auschwitz and elsewhere in the Summer of 1943.

The Red Army in which a half-million Jews served liberated the camp in July 1944. The BBC refused to use an eyewitness account by its own correspondent, incredulous that the horrors detailed could be other than Soviet propaganda.

Art, music, poetry, and secret classes for children flourished at Theresienstadt. There was once a choral performance of Verdi’s “Requiem.” These were all eloquent efforts to resist the Nazi effort at dehumanization.

In July 1944 in order to deceive a delegation from the International Red Cross and Denmark, Theresienstadt was transformed into a model ghetto. Soon thereafter the Germans made a propaganda film about their fine treatment of Jews. Camp residents were subsequently deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The deportation from Theresienstadt to death camps in the East (mainly Auschwitz and Treblinka) began in September 1942. By October 1942 the transports went exclusively to Auschwitz-Birkenau and continued at intervals with the final phase of deportation occurring in the Fall of 1944.

Of the 140,000 Jews who arrived at Theresienstadt from its opening until the arrival of the Red army in May 1945, 33,000 died there. Of the 88,000 who were sent to other ghettos and death camps, 3,000 survived the war. Of the 15,000 children sent to Terezin, fewer than 1,000 survived.

On January 18, 1943, the ill-prepared Jewish combat organization commonly known by its Polish acronym ZOB engaged in four days of fighting thus halting the section Action on April 19, 1943. As the final German assault began against the ghetto’s remaining 60,000 Jews, 24-year-old Mrdecai Anielewicz led a revolt to avenge murdered Jewry. “My life’s dream has been realized,” read his last message to associate Yitzhak Zuckerman, “Greatness and glory.”

Despite scant help from Polish forces and none from the Allies, the fighting lasted nearly a month until the Germans burned down the ghetto. The few survivors escaped through sewers to Aryan Warsaw.

Lesbians, alcoholics, homeless people, and others were deemed “Asocials” and were forced to wear black triangles in the concentration camps. They were subjected to forced manual labor justified by the Nazis as reeducation to instill proper social habits and personal discipline.

Pinya Leya • Nina Vaysman

Erected 1997 by NYC Parks.

Topics and series. This memorial is listed in these topic lists: • Civil Rights • Law Enforcement • War, World II. In addition, it is included in the Former U.S. Presidents: #34 Dwight D. Eisenhower, the NYC Parks, and the The Holocaust series lists. A significant historical date for this entry is May 8, 1945.

Location. 40°34.952′N, 73°57.215′W. Marker is in Brooklyn, New York, in Kings County. It is in Manhattan Beach. Memorial is on Shore Boulevard south of Emmons Avenue, on the right when traveling north. Touch for map. Marker is at or near this postal address: West End Ave, Brooklyn NY 11235, United States of America. Touch for directions.

There are over 200 stones featured in the memorial. Some of the stones feature narratives. Others feature lists of names. Yet others are general memorials. Some of the stones are blank except for the rock's circled number. This symbolism isn't lost on me -- we may not ever know every name of the millions who perished in the Holocaust.

My intent is to respectfully share the text on this memorial. If someone in the future wishes to share the Cyrillic and Hebrew scripts, I welcome this. If there are any transcription errors, feel invited to submit updates.

Additionally, to be transparent -- I made the decision to put the entire memorial on one profile because it was the best way to include as a many of the stones as possible, particularly those that include only small lists of names.

— Submitted August 15, 2024, by Devry Becker Jones of Washington, District of Columbia.