February 13, 1943:
- February 12: " Three French Jews escape an Auschwitz-bound train at the French frontier, but are recaptured and forced to continue the journey.
- February 13: " A Jewish partisan group active near Bialystok, Poland, and led by Eli Baumats attacks a German police detachment at Lipowy Most, Poland.
- "Russian-born artist Aizik Feder, a onetime student of Matisse, is one of 1,000 Jews deported from Drancy, France, to the Auschwitz death camp. He is among the approximately 690 who are gassed upon arrival at the camp.
- "Amon Leopold Goeth becomes commandant of the Plaszów concentration camp.
- "The Jews of Djerba, Tunisia, are forced to pay ten million francs to the German authorities.
- "The New York Times reports that the Romanian government is offering the Allies Romanian ships to transport 70,000 Jews anywhere the Allies wish.
A departure tax to cover the transportation costs is all that is required.
The U.S. State Department dismisses the offer.
The British Foreign Office rejects the offer, fearing that it is a piece of blackmail that marks the start of Germany and her satellites in Southeastern Europe unloading all of their unwanted nationals (read Jews) on other countries (read the Allies).
To Britain, Palestine is out of the question as a destination.
The only way to help the Jews, the Allies maintain, is by an Allied victory; See February 16, 1943."***
"Shlomo Perel, a German Jew by birth, assumed the name Josef Perjell while a student at the Adolf Hitler school in Braunschweig.
Hiding one's Jewish identity was a precarious proposition, especially for males living in a residential facility.
Perel went to great lengths to hide his Jewishness, including an effort to reverse his circumcision, which was at the time clear physical evidence of Jewishness.
Perel's exploits are brilliantly portrayed in the movie Europa, Europa."
"This note, written by Christian woman Maria Dawelec, reads: "Baptized, Mania and Wanda. Please take care of them."
Dawelec left the note along with two Jewish children in the backyard of a monastery.
The real name of one of the children was Tamy Lavee.
Lavee eventually would be sent to an orphanage in Lódz, Poland, where she would survive the war."
"SS General Theodor Eicke was commandant of the Dachau concentration camp.
Before his death in a plane crash on the Eastern Front on February 16, 1943, he founded and trained the SS Death's Head units and served as inspector general of concentration camps.
Second only to Heinrich Himmler in his influence over the concentration-camp system, he ordered that the ironic phrase Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Will Set You Free) be posted in the concentration camps.
He sought to make SS men hard and merciless; those who did not fit such criteria were to be sent off 'to live in a monastery.' "
"This document calculates the value of work done by prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp.
Detailed records weighed the cost of 'maintaining' human life against the wealth produced by each individual, which suggests that the concentration camps were principally run as slave-labor operations.
Yet, the Nazis' desire to exterminate all Jews often overrode even the most brute sort of economic practicality."
"Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook) led a dissident group of Zionists known in the United States as the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe.
During the war the Bergson group placed ads in newspapers and staged theatrical presentations to educate Americans about the 'Final Solution.'
Their willingness to employ sensationalist tactics to rouse sympathy for Europe's Jews was deplored by the conservative leaders of the American Jewish community."
*** This was also President Roosevelt's policy.