Radio Selection: Interview with Senator Harry S. Truman
http://ia701200.us.archive.org/0/items/1942RadioNews/1942-09-04-KMBC-Senator-Truman-Interview.mp3
"This flyer, issued by the chief of the SS and police in the Kraków district of Poland, announced that the deportation of the Jews in and around Sanok would begin on September 5, 1942.
Lack of cooperation in any way would be punished by summary execution by firing squad.
The deportation was a success from the point of view of the Nazis, as 8,000 Jews from the Sanok region died in the Belzec death camp from September 5 to 10."
"The story of the Holocaust in the Balkans is complex as well as tragic.
While more than 550,000 Jews from Romania, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Bulgaria were killed, the circumstances surrounding their deaths and chances for individual survival varied from country to country.
"The killing operations in Romania were particularly barbarous.
German, Romanian, and Ukrainian forces swept through the Romanian territories of Bukovina and Bessarabia, slaughtering every Jew within their grasp.
The city of Odessa in Transnistria (a Ukrainian territory acquired by Germany and Romania in 1941) was home to 180,000 Jews.
In February 1942, however, it was proclaimed "cleansed of Jews."
"In the traditional Romanian territories known as the Regat, the campaigns against the Jews followed a typical pattern: anti-Jewish violence, property seizures, and the creation of ghettos.
A conflict between the Romanian government and the Germans, however, limited the number of Jews deported to Belzec.
All told, upwards of 420,000 Romanian Jews perished during the Holocaust.
"With the division of Yugoslavia in April 1941, Jews in the territory became governed by Hungary, Italy, Germany, Bulgaria, and the independent state of Croatia, led by the Fascist Ante Pavelic.
After Pavelic's Ustasa movement gained power with the help of Hitler, the Croats slaughtered more than a half-million Serbs (including the child pictured) and moved against the Jews as well.
More than 80 percent of Yugoslavia's 80,000 Jews were murdered by the Nazis and the Ustasa.
"The fate of Greek Jewry hinged on the Italians.
When Italy capitulated to the Allies in September 1943, German troops occupied Greece.
Although deportations to Auschwitz were delayed until March 1943, 80 percent of Greece's Jewish population was killed.
"The only Balkan-Jewish communities that sidestepped the Nazi whirlwind were located in Bulgaria. Bulgarian government officials were generally antisemitic but opposed the murder of Jews, and thus resisted German demands to initiate deportation procedures.
Ultimately, however, the Bulgarian government agreed to deport the approximately 9000 foreign Jews who lived in areas acquired from the division of Greece.
However, aggressively public, pro-Jewish campaigns mounted by physicians, writers, attorneys, and members of the Orthodox clergy were effective in persuading the Bulgarian citizenry that the antisemitic, collaborationist plans of the Bogdan Filov government were wrong.
Bulgarian officials confiscated the possessions of the nation's Jews, but 78 percent of Bulgaria's 65,000 Jews survived the war."
"Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski (left), head of the Lódz Jewish Council, confers with Hans Biebow, the German head of the ghetto administration.
Rumkowski sought vainly throughout 1942 to limit deportations and to turn the ghetto into an irreplaceable factory.
Unaware that deportees were sent directly to their deaths at Chelmno, Rumkowski prepared his deportation list, hoping to buy time for those remaining.
By the end of September, over 70,000 people had been deported.
The chronicler of the ghetto wrote on September 25: 'There is [almost] no one in the ghetto over the age of 65 or under the age of 10.' "
"On September 4, 1942, fears of a renewed deportation from Lódz came to pass when Jewish Council leader Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski announced that 25,000 Jews under the age of ten and over 65 must be resettled outside the ghetto.
From September 5 to 12 alone, at least 14,000 Jews were deported in the infamous Gehsperre (ban on movement) action.
The ghetto chronicle called this period "eight days that seem an eternity!"
This photograph shows a woman and child--probably mother and daughter--kissing through the fence in the ghetto's prison."
"In the 1930s and 1940s, in order to keep Jews out of Palestine and because of the high degree of antisemitism in the Foreign and Colonial Offices, the British government ordered all aliens to register with the police.
After France fell to the Germans, the British government ordered the internment of about 30,000 "enemy aliens" on British soil, most of whom were Jewish. About 8000 of them were deported to Canada and Australia.
No matter that they were officially classified as the least dangerous of refugees; governments and native peoples treated the "enemy aliens" like pariahs.
"Internment and deportations ceased only after several hundred deportees were killed when their ship, the Arandora Star, was torpedoed and sunk in July 1940.
Jews on another ship, the Dunera, were abused by the crew.
"The few Jews who arrived in Australia had to report to the police.
They could not travel without police permission and could not own radios."