The Holocaust in 1943

Industrial-scale mass murder reaches new heights across Europe - but there are several occasions when the Jews manage to fight back

Official recognition by the international community of what was to become known as the Holocaust came at the end of 1942. However, the Allies were incapable of offering the Jews across Europe any significant material assistance.

None of those taken away are ever heard of again. The able-bodied are slowly worked to death in labour camps. The infirm are left to die of exposure and starvation or are deliberately massacred in mass executions. The number of victims of these bloody cruelties is reckoned in many hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent men, women and children.

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In Warsaw the largest Jewish community in the world faced extermination. They had been walled into a tiny enclave since 1940. As the Nazis sealed them off from the outside world, the Jews dug tunnels to try to bring in supplies. The Germans took potshots at children trying to smuggle food in.

Then, a small, poorly armed resistance movement mounted an uprising. It was a suicidal gesture against the might of the German military machine. Yet it was an important symbolic gesture of defiance against those who persecuted and oppressed them. As the Germans systematically blew up and destroyed the ghetto around them, the women and children who were not part of the resistance movement suffered.

The ‘Warsaw Ghetto boy’, an image that has become widely recognised as representative of the Holocaust, not just the Warsaw Ghetto uprising.

25th April 1943: An iconic image illustrates the terror that the Jews face in the Warsaw ghetto as the uprising continues

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30th June 1943: Galicia, Poland - "Judenfrei" - An SS report describes how they have hunted down and murdered over 400,000 people in the past two years

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2nd August 1943: Treblinka revolt - The slave workers in the death camp stage a desperate, suicidal attempt to escape before they are themselves murdered

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Selected to Work - in Auschwitz

Hauptsturmführer Josef Mengele - ‘The Angel of Death’ who decided whether people lived to work or died in the gas chambers. He also conducted ‘medical experiments’ on prisoners.

The Auschwitz veterans looked upon us as greenhorns. They answered all of our questions with questions of their own. When I asked a Kapo's aide where I could wash some of my clothes, he answered, "Where do you think you are, in a sanitorium?"

14th September 1943: Concentration camp prisoners are 'selected' by Josef Mengele - and a route to survival opens up

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7th October 1943: As the Red Army reoccupies the Ukraine the enormity of Nazi crimes against the Jewish people is difficult to comprehend

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The millions who were destined for the gas chambers remain largely anonymous. It is easier to relate to the few cases where an individual escaped the maws of the Nazi death machine. Yet even this tiny fraction of ‘survivors’ were to suffer lifelong trauma…

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