May 8, 1943:
- May 4 - 25: "Four deportations of Jews from Holland to the death camps at Auschwitz and Sobibór total 8,000 people.
- May 6: "Hajj Amin al-Husseini, grand mufti of Jerusalem, suggests to the Bulgarian foreign minister that Bulgarian-Jewish children should be sent to Poland rather than to Palestine.
- "In Tunisia, Allied forces launch a final offensive against Axis positions.
- May 7: "Nearly 7,000 Jews are killed in Novogrudok, Belorussia.
- "A group of Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto, led by Pawel Bruskin, is ambushed by German troops while traveling through the city's sewer system; See May 8, 1943.
- "Sephardic-Jewish homes in Tunisia are ransacked and looted by departing German troops.
- May 8: "German troops in the Warsaw Ghetto reach the headquarters of the Resistance.
Leader Mordecai Anielewicz and about 100 of his followers are crushed, are suffocated, or die by their own hands during a Nazi bombardment and gassing; See May 12, 1943."
- Yitzhak Zuckerman
"Born in Vilna, Lithuania, Yitzhak Zuckerman joined a Zionist youth movement, devoting himself to educating Jewish youth in Hebrew and Yiddish.
Following the German invasion of Poland, he left for the Soviet-occupied area, but Zionist leaders later ordered him to return to continue his teaching and to develop a Jewish underground organization.
"Zuckerman argued that educating the young was 'meaningless...unless...an armed Jewish self-defense force would come into being.'
However, his pleas for armed resistance were initially rejected by the Warsaw Ghetto leaders.
He became one of the founders of Zydowska Organizacaja Bojowa (ZOB; Jewish Fighting Organization) and was one of the heroic commanders of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt.
Ordered to leave the ghetto to serve as a liaison to the Polish underground and to procure weapons, he returned through the sewers in the ghetto's last days to rescue survivors.
Zuckerman died in 1981."
"Rubble from the Tlomacka Street synagogue in Warsaw, the so-called 'Great Synagogue,' is all that remained after Jürgen Stroop ordered its demolition in May 1943.
The synagogue was located within the confines of the ghetto until November 1942, when the ghetto's size was greatly reduced.
Even though the synagogue stood in the Aryan part of Warsaw when the ghetto was razed, Stroop ordered it destroyed in reprisal for the ghetto uprising."
"On May 2, 1943, 3000 Jews of Miedzyrzec Podlaski, Poland--a transit ghetto--were deported to their deaths at Treblinka.
Only 200 Jews, needed for forced labor, remained.
Here, Jewish women, many carrying children, are brutally hustled into a waiting cattle car.
During the previous August, thousands of Miedzyrzec Podlaski's Jews were sent to the death camp; 10,000 more were deported in October.
Finally, in July 1943 the last 200 Jews were shot to death, making the town 'judenrein' (cleansed of Jews)."
"Although Sonderkommandos assisted the Nazis in order to spare their own lives (at least temporarily), they were often hated by those Jews doomed to die.
Reportedly, a child of seven or eight told a Birkenau Sonderkommando: 'Why, you are a Jew and you lead dear children to the gas--only in order to live?
Is your life among the band of murderers really dearer to you than the lives of so many Jewish victims?' "
