August 2, 1942:
- August 1-12: "81,000 Polish Jews from Warsaw are deported to the Treblinka death camp.
- August 2, 1942: "Lota Hirszberg, 56, kills herself with sleeping powder in the Lódz Ghetto."
"Parisian Jew Paulette Zelasneg, pictured at age six, wears her Yellow Star.
On July 16, 1942, La Grande Rafle ("The Big Sweep") began in Paris, as foreign Jews living in the city were rounded up."
August 3, 1942:
- "Twelve thousand Jews from Przemysl, Poland, are deported to the Belzec death camp.
- "The first portion of Emanuel Ringelblum's Warsaw diary, hidden in ten tin boxes and milk cans, is secretly buried for safekeeping by a Warsaw schoolteacher named Israel Lichtenstein."
"With trains bringing thousands of fresh laborers to replace those who dropped from exhaustion and malnutrition, Monowitz-Buna developed into a vast industrial machine, with the huge chemical firm I.G. Farben at its hub.
In the midst of industrialized inhumanity, prisoners struggled to remain human rather than to become animals.
Primo Levi recounted that precisely 'because the Lager (camp) was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness.' "
August 4, 1942:
- "The first deportations of Jews from Belgium to Auschwitz begin; the first day's deportees number 998.
Throughout Belgium, non-Jewish Belgian households hide 25,000 Jews. - August 4-31, 1942: "More than 5,600 Jews are deported from Belgium to Auschwitz."
"SS chief Heinrich Himmler wipes sweat from his forehead during an inspection of Auschwitz III, or Monowitz-Buna.
The camp was named after the village of Monowice and the word for synthetic rubber, Buna, which the I.G. Farben company sought to produce by using thousands of concentration-camp workers.
Accompanying Himmler was Bauleiter (chief engineer) Faust of I.G. Farben.
Due in part to Allied air attacks, no synthetic rubber was ever produced at Monowitz-Buna."